**(This novel contains dark themes. Readers under the age of 18 are prohibited from reading this work. All characters depicted within this novel are adults.)**
**(The core themes of the novel are growth, self-identity, and the frailties of human nature. All other content serves these central themes.)**
In his childhood, Xiao Wen believed he could live out his life like an ordinary person.
The blueprint seemed straightforward: finish high school, gain admission to a decent but unremarkable university, secure a stable, unassuming office job, meet and marry a woman of pleasant but unspectacular looks, purchase a modest house in the suburbs, raise a perfectly average child with her, work until retirement, grow old gracefully, and watch that child blossom into adulthood. Then, on some utterly ordinary afternoon, he would recline in the creaking rocking chair by his front gate, close his eyes, and pass away peacefully, wrapped in the quiet satisfaction of a life well-lived, if utterly conventional.
That was the dream, meticulously constructed brick by brick throughout his formative years. It was a safe dream, a predictable dream, the kind of dream sold in bulk to millions. Until the gaokao results arrived.
The meticulously drawn blueprint dissolved like smoke. The failure wasn't catastrophic, but it was decisive enough. The respectable university slipped through his fingers. The ordinary path fractured beneath his feet. The future, once a clear, straight road, vanished into a disorienting fog.
**Tokyo Haruto University, Preparatory Class 4-1.**
The classroom buzzed with the low hum of post-lunch lethargy. Sunlight streamed weakly through the high windows, dust motes dancing in the beams. Xiao Wen had his head buried in a thick textbook, attempting to wrestle complex kanji into his memory for the upcoming Japanese Literature quiz. Concentration was a fragile thing.
"Man, fuck yeah! College life is the absolute best! Seriously, you guys have no fucking clue!" The voice, loud, brash, and gratingly cheerful, sliced through the quiet like a rusty saw. It belonged to Yuetsu Yuusuke, the guy sitting directly behind Xiao Wen. Yuusuke whistled tunelessly, slouched back in his chair with an air of supreme self-satisfaction. "You wouldn't believe how hard she sucked! I swear, felt like she was gonna peel the damn skin right off!"
Xiao Wen flinched. The kanji he'd been trying to memorize dissolved into meaningless squiggles. The vulgar boast, delivered with such casual crudeness, shattered his focus. A familiar mix of irritation and morbid curiosity pricked at him. Against his better judgment, he turned slightly, just enough to see over his shoulder.
Yuusuke Yuetsu – self-proclaimed delinquent, undeniable punk. He cultivated the image: bleached-blond hair artfully messy, perpetually clad in a tank top even in mild weather, a smirk permanently etched onto his handsome face. His primary pastime, besides skipping class and causing minor chaos, seemed to be regaling his two perpetual hangers-on with graphic, undoubtedly exaggerated tales of his sexual conquests. The conquests themselves were less important than the telling; it was performance art, a badge of honor, a way to assert dominance in his tiny, grubby kingdom.
Xiao Wen turned just as Yuusuke launched into the latest installment for his captive audience: "Skinny Bamboo Pole" and "Plump Sea." Skinny Bamboo Pole (real name lost to obscurity) lived up to his nickname – gaunt, hunched, with shifty, close-set eyes and a prominent hooked nose that gave him a perpetually scheming look. Plump Sea was his physical opposite: doughy face, thick neck spilling over his collar, a sweaty, eager expression permanently fixed on his features.
Yuusuke was mid-gripe, one hand theatrically cupping his crotch, his face contorted in a grimace of exaggerated discomfort. "Fuck me, my dragon's all fiery… burns like hell. Stupid bitch… played the innocent card at first, acting all shy and demure. Turns out? Total fucking freak." He spat the words with contempt. "Hmph. Seriously thinking about ditching her."
Plump Sea's eyes lit up with a predatory gleam. His jowls wobbled as he leaned forward excitedly. "Whoa! Boss, for real? You gonna dump her? Sweet! Hand her over to me, yeah? Let's set something up! When? Huh?" The eagerness was palpable, almost grotesque.
Skinny Bamboo Pole, never one to be outdone, elbowed Plump Sea aside, his sharp features twisting into a wheedling grin. "Nah, nah, Boss, give her to *me*! My old man's going fishing all day Sunday. Whole house to ourselves! We can go at it all damn day, no interruptions. My place, my rules – just lemme go second!" He winked conspiratorially.
Plump Sea puffed up, affronted. "Hey! I called dibs first, asshole! There's a line! First come, first served! You know the rules!"
Skinny Bamboo Pole spread his hands in mock innocence. "Yeah, but *my* house, my turf! Gotta have some advantage!"
Yuusuke watched the squabble unfold from his throne at the very back row. He had one boot propped insolently on his desk, using it to lever himself back against the wall, radiating an aura of lazy amusement. The petty argument over precedence seemed to entertain him immensely. A cruel little smile played on his lips.
"Shut the fuck up, both of ya!" he finally drawled, cutting through their bickering. He waved a dismissive hand. "Who gives a rat's ass who goes first or second? Seriously?" He leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial, yet utterly callous, murmur. "Listen up. Doesn't matter if you use it fresh out the wrapper or after it's been through the wringer. A rag's still just a rag."
Xiao Wen couldn't help it. He rolled his eyes so hard he momentarily saw the back of his own skull. *God, these guys.* He turned back around, pressing his forehead against the cool surface of his textbook. *Just shut up already.* The familiar internal scoff echoed in his mind. *Hah! Such fucking posers.* The boasts were a daily ritual, the details growing increasingly ludicrous with each telling. First it was lolitas, then innocent schoolgirls… lately, it had descended into the realms of the utterly absurd – middle-aged women, strict teachers… Yuusuke's fictional harem knew no bounds or reason.
Plump Sea, ever the sycophant, nodded vigorously, his earlier indignation forgotten. "Yeah… yeah, Boss is right! Just a rag!"
Skinny Bamboo Pole bobbed his head in agreement, though his eyes retained a greedy glint. "True, true… but I still wanna be second."
Xiao Wen stifled another internal *Hah!* *As if any of this is real! They probably pay some desperate girl off with convenience store snacks.* The cynicism was a shield against the uncomfortable prurience their conversations always stirred.
***Thwack!***
A sharp slap landed between Xiao Wen's shoulder blades, jolting him upright. He whipped around.
Yuusuke was leaning over his desk, a wide, predatory grin splitting his face. He made a crude, groping gesture with both hands towards his own chest, miming enormous breasts. "Hey, studious boy! Wanna join in? Huh?" His voice was thick with false camaraderie. "Come on! She's a real looker, I swear. And *these*?" He jiggled his imaginary bounty again. "Top fuckin' shelf!"
Xiao Wen froze. His brain short-circuited. "Uh… uh… wha?" Words failed him utterly. A wave of heat surged up his neck, flooding his cheeks with crimson. He felt like his face was on fire. "N-no… no thanks… I…" It was pure instinct, the ingrained response of the rule-follower, the quiet kid. He stammered, his voice emerging thin, reedy, and embarrassingly high-pitched – a sound he barely recognized as his own. He hadn't intended that squeak.
Despite the overwhelming probability (ninety-nine percent, he estimated) that Yuusuke was spinning pure, unadulterated bullshit, a treacherous little worm of *what if?* wriggled in the pit of his stomach. *What if, just this once, it wasn't a lie? What if there really was a girl…?*
Skinny Bamboo Pole snickered, a nasty, nasal sound. "Ah, forget him, Boss!" He jerked a thumb dismissively at Xiao Wen. "This model student type? You could drop a naked chick right in his lap, he'd probably just faint. Or run screaming." He leered. "Even if he *did* try to take a bite? Bet he'd choke on it and puke."
Yuusuke chuckled, picking up the thread smoothly. He leaned even closer, his voice dropping to a stage whisper, dripping with faux concern. "Hey, listen kid," he said, his eyes boring into Xiao Wen's. "Offer's open. If you ever… y'know… *snap*," he clicked his fingers sharply near Xiao Wen's ear, making him flinch, "decide you're tired of cramming your brain full of useless crap and wanna experience something *real*, you come find me, alright? Too much studying, it'll fry your circuits. Give you a killer headache." He winked.
Inside Xiao Wen's head, chaos erupted. *What if? What if? What if?* The worm of curiosity gnawed harder. Images, hazy and forbidden, flickered at the edge of his consciousness. The sheer, terrifying *possibility* of it, however remote, was intoxicating. His sheltered existence offered no counterpoint to this crude proposition.
But the ingrained habits of a lifetime, the weight of his introverted nature, clamped down like a vise. His mouth felt glued shut. The words 'Okay, tell me more' died before they could reach his tongue. Shame warred with a desperate yearning he couldn't articulate.
*No. Stop it,* a cooler, more cynical voice cut through the internal storm. *This is a setup. He saw me roll my eyes. He knows I think he's full of shit. This is pure mockery. He's trying to make me squirm, to humiliate me for daring to judge him, even silently. He wants to see the straight-laced kid blush and stammer. That's all this is.*
Relief, cold and sharp, washed over him, followed immediately by a pang of self-recrimination for almost falling for it. *Stupid. Almost walked right into it. Thank god I caught myself.*
Yuusuke wasn't finished. He adopted a sage expression, nodding sagely. "Seriously, kid," he intoned, like a street-corner philosopher peddling snake oil. "This here?" He made the breast-groping gesture again. "This is the *best* damn medicine for a study headache. Cures what ails ya. Guaranteed."
Xiao Wen saw right through the act. The faux-concern, the tempting bait. It was transparent. Yuusuke wasn't offering enlightenment; he was dangling cheap thrills, the same way he undoubtedly controlled Skinny Bamboo Pole and Plump Sea – with promises of access to his mythical sexual playground. *Control.* That's what this was about. Maybe he wanted Xiao Wen to do his homework? Or just to break him, to pull another seemingly upright kid down into his grubby orbit? To prove that everyone had a price, that even the quiet ones were just repressed perverts? *Hmph! Pathetic. Such a cheap trick. Like I wouldn't see it coming.*
Summoning every ounce of his mediocre acting skills, Xiao Wen forced his blush to deepen, ducking his head and stammering with renewed awkwardness, playing the flustered innocent to the hilt. "I… I really don't need it… thanks…"
The response landed with a thud. The noisy bravado from Yuusuke's corner ceased abruptly. An unnatural, heavy silence descended over their corner of the classroom. It felt thick, charged, amplifying the distant sounds of other students packing up or chatting. Xiao Wen looked up, meeting Yuusuke's gaze.
Yuusuke wasn't smirking anymore. He wasn't leering. He was just… looking. His expression was unnervingly flat, unreadable. His eyes, usually dancing with mockery or boredom, held a strange, assessing intensity as they locked onto Xiao Wen's. It wasn't anger, exactly. It was… scrutiny. As if Xiao Wen was a mildly puzzling insect under a magnifying glass. The silence stretched, becoming profoundly uncomfortable. Seconds felt like minutes.
Then, just as suddenly, the intensity vanished. Yuusuke's face twisted into a scowl of pure annoyance. "Tch." With a sudden, rough movement, he lunged forward and violently ruffled Xiao Wen's hair, knuckles grinding against his scalp. "Fuckin' *model student*," Yuusuke spat the title like a curse, his voice dripping with contempt. He released Xiao Wen's hair with a shove.
***Ding-ding-ding! Ding-ding-ding!***
The shrill, electronic chime of the dismissal bell sliced through the lingering tension with perfect, almost comedic, timing. Yuusuke threw his head back and laughed, the sound harsh and devoid of real humor. "Ha! Haha! Later, losers!" He slung his jacket over one shoulder with practiced nonchalance, gave Skinny Bamboo Pole and Plump Sea a jerk of his head, and swaggered out of the classroom, his two acolytes scrambling in his wake, already resuming their chatter. The door swung shut behind them with a bang.
Xiao Wen sat frozen for a moment, his scalp tingling from the rough treatment, his cheeks still burning. He slowly became aware of the other students around him. Those seated towards the front were deliberately not looking back. They were putting away their books with careful precision, exchanging hushed whispers, their faces etched with expressions of profound distaste, undisguised disgust, and cold contempt. Their sidelong glances towards the back rows, towards the space Yuusuke and his crew had just vacated – and implicitly, towards Xiao Wen, who remained there – were like physical blows.
A familiar chill seeped into Xiao Wen's chest. Isolation. Judgment. There was nothing new here; it was the usual reaction to Yuusuke's antics. Yet, the silent condemnation, the way they lumped him in by proximity, still stung. He was used to it, but it never stopped hurting. He hunched his shoulders, trying to make himself smaller.
But his mind wasn't on the disdain of the front-row students. It was fixated on that moment of silence, on Yuusuke's unnervingly flat stare. *What was that?* The question hammered inside his skull, louder than the bell's echo. *Why did he look at me like that? It wasn't anger… it wasn't mockery… it was… different. Calculating? Assessing? Why?*
He shook his head, trying to dislodge the unsettling memory. *Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Just be glad it's over.* He clung to that thought. *I escaped. He backed off. I didn't get dragged into whatever sick game he was playing.* A wave of shaky relief washed over him, a near miss acknowledged.
But relief was quickly drowned by a familiar tide of bitterness, failure, and crushing inadequacy. It rose from his gut, thick and suffocating.
*Model student?*
The words echoed bitterly in his mind. *If only.* The label was a cruel joke. He wasn't a model student. He wasn't even close. The character for 'model' (模) felt utterly alien to him. His grades? Firmly, resolutely, stuck in the mushy middle of the class rankings. He was the definition of average, the epitome of unremarkable.
To the *real* model students, the ones who aced every test and whose futures gleamed with prestigious university acceptances, he *was* Yuusuke Yuetsu. Or at least, he belonged in the same category: a slacker, a time-waster, someone polluting the academic atmosphere. A nuisance. An embarrassment. One of *them*.
But to the *real* delinquents, like Yuusuke and his crew? To them, he *was* the model student. The bookworm. The rule-follower. The timid little mouse who blushed at dirty jokes and buried his head in textbooks. Too scared to cut class, too weak to fight back, too boring to be worth anything but mockery or, occasionally, a weird, probing glance.
Xiao Wen despised this limbo. This agonizing, perpetual state of *in-between*. He felt like… like a bat. The old fable slammed into his consciousness with painful clarity. Too much like a bird to be accepted by the beasts. Too much like a beast to be welcomed by the birds. Rejected by both kingdoms, condemned to dwell in the dark, damp cracks of the world, clinging to the shadows, forever struggling just to exist. An outcast by nature, belonging nowhere.
And even if, by some rare chance, a beam of the light of dawn *did* find its way into his gloomy crevice? What then? Instinct would take over. He'd flinch. He'd curl his leathery wings tighter around himself, retreating deeper into the familiar, suffocating darkness. The light wasn't warmth; it was exposure. It was danger. Better the known shadows than the terrifying glare of the sun.
Xiao Wen stared blankly at the door through which Yuusuke and his cronies had vanished, the echo of their crude conversation still hanging faintly in the air. He hadn't moved. The textbook lay forgotten before him.
He could still hear Skinny Bamboo Pole's receding voice, already planning for the mythical Sunday: "…gotta grab a few bottles of shochu beforehand, right Boss? Gotta get her nice and loose if we wanna…"
Plump Sea's eager reply, fading down the hall: "Yeah, yeah! Got it covered! Leave it to me!"
And Yuusuke's final, dismissive, utterly confident retort: "Nah, won't need that shit. Just trust me."
A strange, sharp pang cut through Xiao Wen's numbness. Envy. It shocked him with its intensity. He envied them. Envied Yuusuke, Skinny Bamboo Pole, even Plump Sea. Not for the girls, real or imagined. Not for the crude boasts. He envied their *certainty*. However warped, however vile, they seemed to know exactly who they were and where they stood. Delinquents. Outcasts. Proud of it, even. They inhabited their chosen world, however sordid, with a kind of brutal conviction.
He envied the real model students too. Their path was clear, their destination assured. They belonged.
He was stuck. Perpetually standing between two revolving doors. One labeled "Diligence, Conformity, Acceptance." The other labeled "Rebellion, Freedom, Notoriety." Both doors spun tantalizingly. Pushing through *either* one seemed infinitely preferable to this agonizing hallway of indecision. But he couldn't muster the force for either. His feet felt glued to the scuffed linoleum floor of mediocrity. He was caught in the draft, buffeted by the spinning doors but never stepping through.
Academics? Middling. Social life? Non-existent. Sense of self? A yawning void. Life itself? A monotonous, unsatisfying slog through the mud of his own inadequacy.
The evidence of his stuckness, his failure to commit to *any* path, was waiting for him. As it did every weekday afternoon.
**3:17 PM, Haruto Convenience Store.**
The automatic glass doors hissed open with a weary mechanical groan, instantly assaulted by the sterile chill of conditioned air and the overwhelming smell of fried chicken and stale coffee. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, casting a harsh, unforgiving glow on the rows of brightly packaged snacks, magazines, and cheap household goods..
Behind the counter, Manager Higashino Genpei glanced up from his phone. He didn't look at the clock on the wall; he looked at the time displayed on his cracked screen. His gaze, when it finally slid towards Xiao Wen, was heavy with disinterest and a practiced, weary disapproval. He raised one bushy eyebrow, his voice flat, devoid of warmth.
"You're here?" A statement, not a greeting. He tapped his phone screen meaningfully. "Six minutes late."
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