Dragon Clan: My Dad is Ange

Ye Weiwei sat down beside his bed, her fingers unconsciously curling the ends of his hair. "Why don't you remember? It's no different from now, just a little more immature. But you've made a lot of friends in the past few years."

She paused, a sly glint in her eyes. "Especially that kid named Lu Mingfei."

The corners of Ye Fan's mouth rose unconsciously.

He remembered the first time he met Lu Mingfei. The boy was trapped in the toilet by several senior students. He was soaking wet but still stubbornly pursed his lips.

At that time, he only thought that this junior was like a puppy that fell into the water. Who would have thought that he has now grown into an existence that can be on par with C-level hybrids?

"He's making rapid progress," Ye Fan said softly, "even faster than I thought."

Ye Weiwei looked at her son meaningfully: "You care about him very much." This was not a question.

The milk was no longer steaming.

Ye Fan drank it in one breath, and the sweet taste spread on the tip of his tongue.

He remembered how Lu Mingfei had fallen on the training ground, his face bruised and swollen, yet he still insisted on trying again...

"He is a good seedling." This is all Ye Fan said in the end.

Ye Weiwei stood up and took the empty cup. At the door, she suddenly turned around and said, "The college entrance examination is just a formality for you, right? After all, my precious son is so outstanding."

"And are you really going to that foreign school called Kassel? Although it's also an aristocratic school, studying reptiles doesn't seem like your style."

Ye Fan looked at the gold-plated envelope on the desk. The half-decayed world tree on the wax seal was glowing under the light.

"I want to take this seriously," he said softly. "As a...farewell."

"As for reptiles, just think of them as my hobby. I'm not short of money anyway. Some foreign nobles just like these weird and wonderful things."

"It doesn't matter if you don't have enough money to earn, Mom can support you for the rest of your life."

Ye Weiwei's eyes softened. She walked back and gently kissed her son on the forehead: "Good night, my little dragon king."

The lights went out.

Ye Fan lay on the bed, listening to the occasional sound of cars passing by outside the window.

This time tomorrow, everything will be different. He closed his eyes and let sleep wash over him.

The sun was too bright on the day of the college entrance examination.

Ye Fan stood outside the examination room, looking at the bustling crowd of candidates and parents.

Some people were muttering to themselves while holding their final review materials, some were saying goodbye to their parents with red eyes, and some young couples were secretly holding hands in the corner - as if they could draw courage from each other in this way.

"Brother Fan!"

Lu Mingfei squeezed through the crowd with beads of sweat on his forehead.

He was wearing a simple white T-shirt and jeans today, and looked no different from an ordinary high school student - if you didn't consider the body lines that were strengthened by dragon blood.

"Why are you here?" Ye Fan raised his eyebrows, "Don't you have class today?"

Lu Mingfei scratched his head and smiled a bit foolishly: "I ran away. Wang Defu is definitely going to use me again today, so why not come and see you."

He pulled a bottle of iced cola from his backpack. "Here, some sugar before the exam."

The water droplets on the Coke can rolled down, looking like small diamonds in the sunlight. Ye Fan took it, and the cool touch reminded him of the snowy plains of Northern Europe.

"Thanks."

He pulled the ring, and the sound of bubbles gushing out was crisp and pleasant.

Lu Mingfei suddenly said seriously, "Although this is just a formality for you, Brother Fan...you still have to keep trying."

Ye Fan looked at the once timid boy, and now there was a determined light in his eyes.

He reached out and ruffled Lu Mingfei's hair - this action had become a habit without him knowing when.

"I will."

The bell rang, it was time to enter.

Ye Fan found his seat. The sunlight shone through the gap in the curtains, casting a golden line on the floor.

The sound of the invigilator opening the test papers was particularly clear in the silent classroom.

When the answer sheet was handed to him, Ye Fan suddenly felt a strange sense of calm.

The pencil twirled between his fingers as he recalled every detail of the past three years—Chu Zihang sweating profusely in the kendo hall, Su Xiaoqiang's carefree laughter, Lu Mingfei's transformation from timidity to confidence...

The stem of the first question unfolded before his eyes. Ye Fan took a deep breath and began to write carefully.

His handwriting is neat and powerful, and each stroke is like a devout prayer.

Yes, it's just a ceremony.

But for him, who is about to enter another world, this is his last chance to say goodbye to his ordinary youth. Although his life in the past few years has not been ordinary.

Outside the window, the cicadas chirped as if singing a elegy for summer.

Chapter 49 Youth is bustling

The sunlight at five o'clock in the afternoon was like melted honey, sticky and smeared on the glass of the teaching building.

Ye Fan was the last one to walk out of the examination room, squinting his eyes to adapt to the sudden brightness.

In the distance, many students had gathered around the bus of Shilan Middle School, and their shadows in groups of three or two were stretched long on the asphalt road.

As Ye Fan walked over, he heard a few girls whispering. Their eyes flitted across his face like butterflies and then quickly flew away, with the kind of light-hearted indifference that only comes after the college entrance examination.

He nodded at them, receiving an unexpected blush.

The car was filled with the mixed smell of sunscreen and sweat. Ye Fan found a seat by the window and sat down. The glass was a little hot on his arm.

Ye Fan took out the Coke that Lu Mingfei had secretly stuffed into his schoolbag. The cool touch reminded him of the afternoons on the training ground that were scorched by the sun.

He looked at the flowing scenery outside the window - the milk tea shop with always long queues, the stall selling sugar-roasted chestnuts at the intersection, and the Internet cafe where they secretly climbed over the wall.

These ordinary street scenes are now coated with a strange golden halo, as if they will disappear in the torrent of time at any time.

"Yeah, it's over."

He said suddenly, his voice so soft that it was almost inaudible.

When the bus entered the campus, the sun was already setting.

The sycamore trees beside the playground cast mottled shadows on the ground. Several lower grade students hurried past with textbooks in their arms, looking at them curiously.

Ye Fan suddenly realized that starting from tomorrow, they would become the "previous class" of this campus, and would become what the teachers would call "a class of students I taught."

The classroom is more lively than I imagined.

Someone tore the review materials into pieces and threw them out of the window. The scraps of paper fluttered in the wind like an untimely snowfall. Several boys put their desks together to play cards, their laughter making the fluorescent tubes tremble slightly. The girls signed each other's school uniforms, leaving crooked marks with black marker on the white fabric.

Ye Fan walked to his seat.

On the desk was a small sword-shaped mark drawn with correction fluid, a masterpiece he had made when he was absent-minded during class. He gently stroked the uneven pattern when he heard a light cough behind him.

"Do you need help, classmate?" Lin Xia stood beside him holding a cardboard box.

As the class monitor, she had tied her hair into a high ponytail, a rare sight today, revealing her graceful neck. The sun shone from behind her, casting a long shadow on the floor.

The girl is very tall, 1 meters tall, and she manages to make the loose school uniform look slimming.

Only with this height can one suppress the group of thug-like boys in the class.

"No need, desk mate, I don't have anything."

Ye Fan shook his head and began to take out the things in the drawer one by one: several reference books full of annotations, a black hardcover book given by Lu Mingfei, and the fountain pen given by Chu Zihang that always produced uneven ink.

These things piled up into a small mountain on his desk, each one carrying the memory of a certain moment.

"It's hard to imagine not being late for morning reading every day." Lin Xia said suddenly.

She leaned against the windowsill, the setting sun casting a soft orange hue on her profile.

In the distance, someone was playing Jay Chou's "Sunny Day". The intermittent melody floated into the classroom, like a string of notes blown away by the wind.

Ye Fan stopped what he was doing.

He recalled that during the past three years, Lin Xia was always the first one to arrive in the classroom and turn on the lights, deliberately slowing down the pace of collecting his homework when he was doing it, and handing him a bottle of mineral water after he ran 800 meters in physical education class.

These tiny moments of tenderness are like a string of pearls, sparkling in my memory at this moment.

"Ye Fan, look here!"

He looked up and saw Lin Xia standing in the middle of the classroom holding a cell phone.

Her fingers kept adjusting on the screen, her brows slightly furrowed.

"Everyone, please stop standing so deliberately. I want to take the most natural picture." She shouted, her voice carrying the unquestionable tone that only a squad leader could muster.

But the picture is always blurry.

The boys who were playing around moved too quickly, the girls who were signing autographs had their heads too close together, and the falling confetti looked like a group of disobedient fireflies.

Lin Xia bit her lower lip and kept changing the angle, her hair stuck to her forehead due to sweat.

"so."

Ye Fan had stood behind her without her noticing. His fingers gently held her wrist, adjusting it to a delicate angle—just enough to encompass the entire class.

The boy scattering confetti was frozen in mid-air, the girls signing autographs showed half of their smiling faces, and even the cloud outside the window dyed red by the setting sun appeared perfectly in the composition.

"But..." Lin Xia stared at the still blurry preview image, her voice a little frustrated.

Ye Fan's breath brushed past her ears, carrying the slightly sweet scent of cola: "You are waiting for the camera to be clear, but you forget that youth is inherently blurry."

The shutter sounds.

At the same time, the mobile phone that Ye Fan quietly set up on the locker at the back door of the classroom also completed the ten-second countdown.

In the camera, the young boys and girls standing in the sun were completely unaware that they were being recorded from another perspective - including Ye Fan himself, who was guiding others to take pictures with a smile on his face.

"It's a great shot." Lin Xia looked at the finished film, her eyes sparkling. "Thank you."

Ye Fan withdrew his hand and put it in his pocket.

His fingertips still felt the cool touch of the phone case and the subtle pulse on another person's wrist.

At this moment, he suddenly realized very clearly that he would never sit in this classroom again, listen to the creaking sound of the fan above his head, and watch the sycamore trees outside the window turn from tender green to golden yellow.

Memories of past lives flooded back like a tide. That soul, now twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, having learned to protect itself with indifference, now watched all this through eighteen-year-old eyes, with a double dose of nostalgia and sorrow.