Jiang Yuxu tapped his fingers on his leg. He had just rehearsed in his mind and found it not difficult.
So when Ji Yanyi played like that, he was actually a bit shocked.
Tapping on the piano's back panel, Jiang Yuxu looked at Ji Yanyi's big, watery eyes, momentarily stunned, then remembered why he was there.
"Get down first. Let me play."
Ji Yanyi glanced below, then back at him. "There's no need."
Jiang Yuxu found that he didn't have her patience. If she had a minute, he probably had three seconds.
"Get down."
Ji Yanyi instinctively moved the stool away. When he realized what he had done, his mind went blank.
Jiang Yuxu's hands were incredibly steady. The score seemed already in his mind; he didn't look up once.
His fingers were long, only the calluses from years of labor affecting their aesthetic, but if well cared for, they could be hands suitable for piano competitions.
The piano teacher felt that Mrs. Bo had brought a genius into their class.
After the piece ended, he couldn't help asking, "I thought your mother said you didn't even know what a scale was?"
"But I remembered every finger movement you made."
He still didn't understand scales, but he figured that didn't matter.
As long as he remembered every movement of the teacher's fingers, playing a piece wasn't a problem.
Jiang Yuxu glanced at the three people below. "Intelligence is relative. For example, right now, you all are far inferior to me."
Ji Yanyi looked at Jiang Yuxu with sparkling eyes.
Jiang Yuxu looked away, then back, and found that the warmth in the other's eyes hadn't diminished at all.
He seemed completely unaware that Jiang Yuxu had also insulted him.
And even more harshly than the other three.
Jiang Yuxu moved an unused stool closer to Ji Yanyi. "She's been paying for your piano lessons for so long, and this is all you've learned?"
Ji Yanyi wiped his cold sweat on his clothes, looking up as if confused why someone who had just defended him was now saying this.
He pointed at himself. "Are you making fun of me too?"
Jiang Yuxu paused, then replied.
"...Not really."
Now they were very close. The teacher was giving a lecture above, seemingly a rare chance for Jiang Yuxu to ask the question he most wanted to ask.
He wanted to ask about the man—what had he contributed to the family?
"Your father is now mine too. I want to ask, what's his attitude towards you on a daily basis?"
Ji Yanyi was taken aback. Indeed, Jiang Yuxu had never seen what their father was like.
He probably wouldn't get to see him either, after that day at the hospital.
But if Jiang Yuxu only asked about his father's attitude towards him, that was easy to answer.
He thought for a moment. "He despises me."
Despises you?
Jiang Yuxu frowned. If he had no goodwill towards the man before, now that dislike intensified into an underlying resentment.
He thought, no wonder she seemed to already have the idea of raising them both on her own.
He had countless questions, but as he sifted through them, he found the one he most wanted to ask was, "What exactly caused the rift between the two of them?"
The bell rang, his voice mingling with the chime.
For some reason, he felt that Ji Yanyi had heard, so he didn't repeat himself.
Time passed, second by second. The classroom door suddenly opened, and a completely unfamiliar face poked in. "Yanyi, come over for a moment."