Chapter 39: "Boys’ Mate Selection Standards

Chapter 39: Chapter 39: "Boys’ Mate Selection Standards

Fresh from his run, Chen Jingle let out two sneezes in a row.

"Damn, who’s talking behind my back?"

He wondered if he had caught a chill from the morning wind. He might be skinny, but he wasn’t fragile. A thin person’s body could still maintain a delicate balance and wouldn’t get sick easily. It was what people called being "weak but balanced."

Completing a five-kilometer run in forty-five minutes today was a slight improvement over his previous records. Naturally, he was still a complete beginner and couldn’t be compared to professionals or soldiers. But he was already doing much better than the white-haired, bespectacled old lady on the track!

[Great job, baby! Exercise task successfully completed. Reward: Removal of one scar on the inner thigh.]

He grimaced. "Another scar."

Chen Jingle didn’t know how he had ended up with so many scars. He didn’t have any major ones, but there were plenty of little marks. Most were souvenirs from his childhood, from running wild all over the mountains and getting bumped and scraped. The rest were from mosquito and insect bites. Over the years, they had accumulated. Some had faded into his natural skin tone, while others stubbornly refused to disappear.

Take the one on his inner thigh, for example. When he was a mischievous kid, he had used a carrying pole as a makeshift slide, only to get a bamboo splinter deeply embedded in his flesh. In the end, he had to go to the local clinic and get it surgically removed.

He remembered it so clearly because the town clinic hadn’t had any anesthetics or professional anesthesiologists back then. Several doctors and nurses had pinned him down by force—like butchers holding down a pig for slaughter—just to make the incision. He had cried until his voice went hoarse. Honestly, it was a fate worse than a New Year’s sacrificial pig.

But he was lucky! He was lucky the bamboo splinter had pierced his thigh and not a few inches over. Otherwise, he would have become a one-ball wonder.

Upon hearing the system notification, Chen Jingle rushed into the men’s restroom at the sports field. When he came out, he was beaming. That scar, which had accompanied him for twenty-five years, was finally gone.

"Let’s go, let’s go, time for breakfast!"

Since it was the weekend, only a few breakfast windows were open in the Teacher College cafeteria. Chen Jingle employed his usual tactic: offering a carton of milk as a reward to randomly recruit a naive, honest student to swipe their meal card for him.

Today, he bought a meat bun and soy milk. He had watched the cafeteria staff make the buns on the spot. The meat quality was decent—at the very least, it wasn’t cheap lymph meat, and it had a good balance of fat and lean cuts. Taking a bite, he found it wasn’t quite as delicious as the soy-braised meat buns he made himself, but it won points for being freshly steamed. It wasn’t bad. Definitely much better than those overpriced dim sum chain restaurants.

Paired with a cup of freshly ground soy milk, this breakfast was more than enough to satisfy most students. It might not be a gourmet feast, but getting a filling meal for just three or five yuan was perfectly acceptable.

Yet, the moment he stepped out of the cafeteria, someone blocked his path.

"Hello there! Can we interview you for a few questions?"

Staring at the microphone that was practically shoved in his face, Chen Jingle let out a bewildered, "Huh?" He wondered what was going on. He still had half a bun in his mouth, for heaven’s sake. Did this person have no manners?

"Can we interview you for a few questions?" The speaker was a girl with glasses and a somewhat round face. Next to her was a guy holding a camera gimbal, his expression looking a bit spaced out.

Chen Jingle chewed his bun. "And you are...?" Both of them were wearing red volunteer vests, but neither had any ID badges or name tags to indicate their identities. For a moment, he couldn’t figure out what they were doing.

The girl quickly explained, "We’re students from the Teacher College running a social media Video Channel. Our account on Doushou is called *Master’s Words*. Have you ever scrolled past our videos?" She pointed to the microphone in her hand, which had a logo on it.

Chen Jingle blinked. "No. How many followers do you have?"

"Uh, not many. Only about fifty thousand."

Chen Jingle nodded in realization. "That is a bit low. Keep it up, things will get better." With that, he turned and walked away.

"Hey, hey, wait, handsome! I haven’t even asked you my questions yet!" The girl was stunned. Wouldn’t a normal person just accept the interview? Or at the very least, flat-out refuse? What was with the "keep it up"? Snapping back to reality, she hurriedly chased after him.

In truth, their program had been running for over four years. However, limited by the Teacher College’s student population and their own amateur interviewing skills, the show’s impact was minimal, and their follower count had fallen far short of expectations.

Later on, the team discovered that featuring highly attractive students caused their views and engagement to skyrocket. Their biggest viral hit—a video with over seven hundred thousand likes—came from an interview with a very cute girl. The topic for that episode happened to be highly engaging, and her answers were even more so. It blew up instantly. Even the girl’s personal Doushou account gained nearly ten thousand followers. It truly was an era governed by looks!

Ever since then, the program’s founder had given them a strict mandate: target the good-looking students for interviews!

As a member of the production team, Qiu Xinyi spent her spare time prowling every corner of the campus. After her major relocated to the new campus, she was put entirely in charge of conducting the daily interviews here.

The problem was that genuinely attractive people were in the minority. She had assumed that a weekend morning would yield no results, so she was thrilled to spot a target the moment she reached the cafeteria. Her eyes lit up. She thought excitedly, "I’ve finally caught a top-tier handsome guy!"

Previously, Team 2 had interviewed a good-looking guy, and that episode raked in over five hundred thousand likes. Qiu Xinyi naturally refused to be outdone.

However, Chen Jingle, the interviewee in question, felt a bit awkward. For one thing, he had never liked being in front of a camera. For another...

"I’m actually not a student at the Teacher College," he finally confessed.

Qiu Xinyi looked taken aback. "But... didn’t you just come out of the school cafeteria?"

"I just went in to buy food."

Buy food? How could he buy food without a student meal card? As a representative of naive college students everywhere, Qiu Xinyi’s brain short-circuited for a moment. "Well, that... that’s fine too. Can I still ask you a few questions?"

Seeing her persistence, Chen Jingle relented. "What do you want to ask?"

"Um, what kind of girls do you like?" Qiu Xinyi stared at the handsome face in front of her. In reality, their interviews were all scripted, but facing those features, the scripts seemed to lose all meaning. Instead, she blurted out the question she personally cared about the most.

"Someone who makes a million a year, owns a house and a car, is beautiful, and has a gentle personality." Chen Jingle waved dismissively, straddled his electric scooter, snapped on his helmet, and sped off, leaving the bewildered duo eating his dust.

After riding his scooter a fair distance, Chen Jingle glanced at his rearview mirror. Seeing the two still standing there in a daze, he let out a sigh. He thought, "I hope the Teacher College doesn’t introduce a rule banning outsiders from entering the campus." He had finally gotten used to the college’s sports field and really didn’t want to find a new place to run.

It wasn’t until the electric scooter completely disappeared from view that Qiu Xinyi finally snapped out of her daze. She hurriedly asked her partner, "Did you record all of that just now?"

"I got it all!"

"I feel like we can edit this footage into two separate episodes."

"I think so too. With a little post-production magic, this is going to be incredibly entertaining!"

"Right? Right? Team 3 needs to produce a viral hit too!" Qiu Xinyi jumped up and down excitedly. "And the best part is, he’s so handsome!"

"Seeing how drenched in sweat he was, do you think he actually just came to our school to work out?"

"..."

The two of them muttered back and forth before finally deciding to return to the clubroom. They needed to edit and post this interview as quickly as possible. They couldn’t wait to see the results!

As for the title of this episode...

"Let’s just call it *A Guy’s Standards for Choosing a Mate*!"

As a social media manager with two and a half years of experience, Qiu Xinyi had a strong premonition: this interview of hers was going to go viral!