Fastest update of the latest chapters of Hello, Old Times!

Later on, Zoe Young would always unconsciously hum that erhu tune, which was indeed quite unpleasant. But that erhu tune seemed to be entangled in her memory, impossible to pull out, leaving only a loose thread that reminded her of that embarrassing noon.

On a morning at the very start of December, it suddenly began to snow heavily. During PE class, the teacher made an exception and said they didn’t have to run, and changed it to a free activity period. Zoe Young was bundled up in thick clothes, and after much effort, managed to climb onto the horizontal bar by herself, carefully sitting down and watching her classmates running around the playground.

“Zoe, come down and have a snowball fight!” Claire Daniels ran over, waving a snowball and shouting at her menacingly. Zoe Young shook her head. Claire Daniels looked at her, muttered a couple of words, and ran off. She really couldn’t understand why Zoe Young had been so quiet lately.

In this world, there are few friends but many playmates. As long as you shout, there will be plenty of people holding snowballs, ready to run with you.

Zoe Young saw not far away, Daniel Hughes and a few other boys were seriously building a snowman, with shovels and buckets beside them. After piling up some snow, they would pour water over it to make it freeze more solid.

Once the snowman started to take shape, everyone stopped having snowball fights and gathered around the snowman. Daniel Hughes and his group became even more proud, but deliberately put on stern faces, directing the girls watching: “Back up, all of you, back up a bit. If you knock it over, you’ll be in big trouble!”

Zoe Young breathed out a puff of white air, not even realizing that her smile had, at some point, become subtly different from those of her peers.

She liked sitting up high, looking down at all the happy children with a kind of self-important aloofness that kids her age often have. Even though, years later, she would look back on this attitude and find it funny, at this moment, she truly felt a kind of loneliness—a loneliness that had once been hidden by the glow of her “halo,” but now, having returned to the low point, had begun to grow and cling to her.

Is falling just for the sake of climbing, or is climbing just for the sake of falling? Zoe Young looked up at the sky. There were so many things she couldn’t figure out, but she no longer fantasized with the simple passion of childhood that as long as she worked hard, she would one day climb back to the top—because she had started to doubt the meaning of that pattern.

Seiya gets knocked down, stands up again, gets knocked down, and stands up again. Was Seiya’s existence just to be knocked down or to stand up? Or did he have more missions? Maribel exists for the beauty of the world and eternal harmony with nature; Seiya exists to protect Athena; the Sailor Moon warriors fight for justice in the name of the moon and to maintain world peace; Uesugi Kazuya trains for Koshien; Shohoku fights to dominate the national tournament—so, what is the purpose of Zoe Young the heroine’s life?

This question grew out of the melancholy brought on by math olympiad and moving up to middle school, making her anxious. Was it to become famous in the world?

Zoe Young’s world was too deep, too deep. The mood of graduation had infected many people. This year’s Christmas cards and New Year’s wishes were being prepared early, and in all the well-wishes, everyone mentioned “we’ll still be good friends after graduation,” “we’ll always be good friends,” and “I wish you a bright future”—yes, a bright future, a word that was mysterious and yet meaningless to elementary school students.

What is a future? Do kids who can’t learn math olympiad also have a future? Zoe Young realized that even though the sky is much vaster than the earth, from her tiny place on the ground, all she could see was the small, irregular patch of sky cut out by the buildings above her. That was everyone’s future—just that small patch, so small that even math olympiad could cover more than half of it.

Zoe Young sat motionless on the horizontal bar.

Andrew Lane walked out of the school building, and the first thing he saw was a quiet snowman sitting on the horizontal bar. He stood at the door for a long time, until a classmate pushed him from behind: “What are you doing? Why aren’t you going out?

Come play soccer with us, we’ve been saying we’d play snow soccer for ages. Last time, there wasn’t even enough snow to fill the gaps in your teeth!” A girl laughed from the side: “You can just drink the northwest wind, why are you stuffing snow in your teeth!” As they joked and played, Andrew Lane finally snapped out of it, awkwardly walking toward Zoe Young. But when he got to the horizontal bar, he didn’t know if he should break the silence. “Zoe?” He hadn’t spoken in so long that even saying her name felt awkward.

In fact, this time the distance between them was even more painful than the “cutting ties” they’d done as kids four years ago. Andrew Lane couldn’t explain why. All he knew was that day, when his mom was so angry she was shaking, pointing at him and saying, “Can’t you listen to me? Can’t you stop causing trouble? Can’t you let me have a couple of peaceful days? Can’t you…”

He nodded through his tears, saying “I can.” The adult world was far more complicated than he could see. He didn’t like seeing his mom put on such a fake, ingratiating smile in front of Ryan Johnson’s parents, but he couldn’t dislike his own gentle, beautiful mom either. He couldn’t figure it out, really couldn’t. Ever since third grade, when Ryan Johnson skipped a grade and joined Andrew Lane’s class, he’d felt something was off with his parents. Maybe he was used to seeing his mom respond to others’ flattery with calm indifference, so when he saw that same cautious look on her face, it made him feel bad, made him sad. So he said, “Mom, I was wrong.”

Zoe Young lowered her head. “It’s Andrew Lane. What is it?” Andrew Lane looked down. “Nothing.”

He scratched the back of his head, feeling stupid for doing so. More than half the class had gone to get vaccinated, so only a few of them who’d already had their shots were let out for PE, which was why he thought talking to Zoe Young now wouldn’t get noticed by the teacher or tattled on by Charlotte Lee and the others.

He had to just find something to say. “Zoe, your test last week… how did it go?” “Not well, I couldn’t do any of it.” Andrew Lane was stunned, tilting his face up as stray snowflakes landed on it, cold and tingly.

“Then…” He didn’t know how to comfort Zoe Young, and honestly didn’t understand what was so hard about math olympiad. Zoe Young was so smart, why couldn’t she ever get it?

“Actually, I remember my math olympiad teacher said it’s okay if you don’t learn it, math olympiad is totally useless…”

“Then why do you study it?” Zoe Young tilted her head at him. Andrew Lane was completely unprepared for this strange conversation and was left speechless. He looked at Zoe Young in embarrassment, only to find that Zoe Young was just staring intently at the group building the snowman in the distance, not paying him any attention at all. He fell silent. Zoe Young was looking at someone else’s snowman, but he was looking at his own. Suddenly, the snowman smiled, and five crescent moons bloomed on her face. “Andrew Lane, last time, I didn’t get a chance to thank you.”

“…For what?” “You know I don’t have a dad, right?”

The question came out of nowhere, and Andrew Lane was so surprised he almost jumped. He stared nervously at his snow-covered shoes, trying to figure out how to answer. Unexpectedly, Zoe Young suddenly jumped down from the horizontal bar, sending up a spray of snow, and the snowflakes on her shoulders fluttered down.

“Andrew Lane, what do you want to do in the future? Why do you study math olympiad? Why do you want to be the class leader? You’ll go to the affiliated high school, right, and then get into a good school—I heard the best high school in the province is Brightstar High School, and the best university in the country is in Beijing. Are you going to Beijing? And then what do you want to do?”

Zoe Young had never fired off so many questions at him so quickly. Before Andrew Lane could even think about one, Zoe Young was already standing in front of him, smiling as she patted his head—even having to stand on tiptoe, which made him realize he was already taller than her.

“I was just asking.” He breathed a sigh of relief.

“So, maybe we’ll never see each other again.” She kept smiling as she said it.

Andrew Lane stood there dumbly, watching his snowman with its hands behind its back, walking step by step toward the crowd. “Zoe!” Andrew Lane called out anxiously, “Are you okay? What’s wrong?” Zoe Young didn’t look back.

As she approached the crowd, Zoe Young realized that the classmates building the snowman were a bit agitated. “I told you it wasn’t me!” Fiona James was almost shouting herself hoarse, but on the freshly snowed playground, her voice seemed to be sucked away by some unknown monster, leaving her sounding exhausted and lacking confidence. “So you didn’t get to help build the snowman, is that such a big deal?” Daniel Hughes snorted, throwing the shovel hard onto the ground.

“What’s going on?” Zoe Young nudged Zachary Lewis beside her. Zachary Lewis looked a bit troubled as she glanced at the people at the center of the dispute: “The snowman is almost finished, and it’s frozen really solid, but someone found a footprint on the back of the snowman. No one knows who stepped on it. At first, no one noticed, and they poured water on it, but now it can’t be smoothed out.” “So what does that have to do with Fiona James?”