After Dreaming That the Top Student in My Grade Was My Wife - Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Moment of Waking

The air, which was supposed to be damp and cold in her memory, had become somewhat sweltering, and from time to time, bursts of warm breath hit her body.

It was amidst this strange sensation that Tao Shuran woke up.

Her mind, just turning over from a state of chaos, became increasingly drowsy due to the cozy atmosphere. Her body felt a bit heavy, carrying a faint, lingering sensation of soreness and weakness. “I probably caught a cold from the chilly wind after watching the gala last night,” Tao Shuran thought fuzzily.

She turned her head slightly. Her eyes weren’t open yet, but she could sense that the lamp by the bedside hadn’t been turned off. “I slept after finishing a set of test papers once I got home, I guess I forgot to turn it off. No big deal.”

Thinking this, Tao Shuran intended to change her posture and keep sleeping.

Just as she was about to turn over, she suddenly felt something wasn’t right.

Why was there someone else in her room?

“Is Mom running in here to tidy something up?”

Tao Shuran opened her eyes in a daze, only to see a person sitting on a sofa not far away, with only a dim, yellowish lamp lit beside them.

A head of long hair drooped slightly as the person looked down, cradling a book on their lap.

It wasn’t her mother.

Wait, since when did her room have this kind of interior design?

Hearing the movement from the bed, the person on the sofa immediately stood up, walked to the bedside, and crouched down.

“Baby, you’re awake.” The voice was gentle, the corners of the lips carrying a hint of a smile. Under the warm-colored light, it felt like mist and dreams. “It’s already eleven o’clock. Tongcheng’s breakfast stalls close early, so I bought some in advance and kept it warm. Do you want to eat?”

What Tongcheng? Finals haven’t even ended yet; how could she have ended up in Tongcheng?

Tao Shuran was dumbfounded. Using the warm yellow lamplight, she carefully examined the other person’s face.

Long, dark brown wavy hair was brushed aside next to her. The extremely close distance allowed Tao Shuran to even see the other’s eyelashes—not dense, but exceptionally long—and a pair of fine, coal-black eyebrows with slightly upturned ends, making the originally somewhat sharp facial features appear much softer.

It was Jiang Hanqi.

Yet it wasn’t Jiang Hanqi.

Tao Shuran’s mind, which had managed to clear with great difficulty, began to feel muddled again.

The other’s facial features were indeed identical to Jiang Hanqi’s, yet everything about her felt wrong.

The goddess of the tenth grade at No. 5 High School, Jiang Hanqi, was famous for her cold face. It was said that since primary school, she had been taciturn and solitary. Her scores in all subjects surpassed the second-place student by a wide margin, yet she refused all student leadership roles. Tao Shuran had been in the same class with her for a semester and hadn’t spoken to her once.

“When did I go on a trip to Tongcheng with Jiang Hanqi??”

The Jiang Hanqi before her now was far removed from the one in her memory. There wasn’t a trace of coldness on her face; her eyes shimmered with light, and her words were very down-to-earth: “Should I go get some water and squeeze the toothpaste for you now?”

“Please don’t.” If the campus goddess ended up squeezing toothpaste for her and word got out, she would be hated to death by Jiang Hanqi’s many pursuers.

“Student Jiang, there’s no need for the hospitality, I’ll do it myself.” Tao Shuran hurriedly stopped her, not forgetting to issue a subtle guest expulsion order at the end. “Um, you can go do your own things first; you don’t have to wait for me specifically.”

She needed some private space right now to figure out what was happening, and Jiang Hanqi’s presence here was too much of a hindrance.

Unexpectedly, the person who was about to stand up crouched down again upon hearing this, her face written with unease: “Baby, are you angry with me?”

“No, I just hope you can leave quickly.”

Before Tao Shuran could deliberate on how to explain, Jiang Hanqi lowered her head slightly and continued: “I know you like Tongcheng very much and value this annual leave highly. But it suddenly rained heavily today, making it inconvenient for sightseeing, which is why I didn’t wake you up. Don’t be angry, okay? During the New Year, we’ll send Rui-rui to your parents’ place and then go abroad for a nice trip to make up for our tenth anniversary.”

Tao Shuran’s chaotic brain became even more muddled.

The information density in this paragraph was too high. If it weren’t for the fact that the person in front of her looked exactly like the Jiang Hanqi she knew, Tao Shuran would have suspected she had transmigrated.

Annual leave, traveling to a neighboring province with Jiang Hanqi—who was Rui-rui, and what was the tenth anniversary?!

She had known Jiang Hanqi for less than half a year, where did a tenth anniversary come from!

Hearing Jiang Hanqi’s familiar tone, Tao Shuran had ten thousand question marks in her heart. She issued the ultimate expulsion order: “I’m not angry, just sleepy. I’m going back to sleep.”

After saying that, she lay back down in the blankets, covered her head, and ignored everything else.

They say ‘what you think about during the day, you dream about at night.’

It must be because Jiang Hanqi was too beautiful at yesterday’s New Year’s Eve gala, causing her to fall asleep with a restless mind and subsequently have a restless dream.

“It’s just a dream; it’ll be fine once I wake up.”

When she woke up again, the alarm hadn’t gone off yet.

Last night had been filled with wind and rain, but she had unexpectedly slept well.

In the darkness, a hand reached out from the warm covers to feel for the digital clock standing on the bedside table.

Lighting up the screen, she saw it was only five o’clock.

Tao Shuran sat up. She turned on the light and surveyed her surroundings: light blue bookshelf, pure white wardrobe, light blue chair, pure white desk, cartoon duvet cover and sheets, light brown wooden floor.

This was her room, no doubt about it, and she had turned off the light before sleeping last night.

In other words, that really was a dream just now.

She actually dreamed that she and Jiang Hanqi were celebrating their tenth anniversary, and even fantasized that they had a daughter?

Tao Shuran, who had never even imagined that “early love” would happen to her, was shocked by this dream.

The image of her parents and teachers looking distressed flashed through her mind, along with the image of herself failing the college entrance exam and living a life of regret. She couldn’t help but indignantly thump her own head—

“This is the golden period for studying; what kind of nonsense are you fantasizing about!”

After tossing and turning for five minutes to no avail, Tao Shuran stood up with an expressionless face. She tried hard to suppress the stormy waves in her heart and decided to stay away from that sinful bed.

Her mind was still in a daze while washing up, until she heard a sound and her mother, coming out to check, knocked on the bathroom door. Tao Shuran, mouth full of foam and biting her toothbrush, turned back to look, only to see Mother Tao with a deep frown: “You didn’t tell us you had an extra class added?”

Tao Shuran attended the city’s top experimental class in the district. Although it claimed to be “quality education,” the pace of each class followed the teacher. With exams approaching, it was common to have an extra class before morning reading or after school. They had a week of extra morning classes before the midterm exam, which is why her mother misunderstood.

Tao Shuran turned back to the sink, lowering her head to continue brushing her teeth, murmuring indistinctly.

Mother Tao watched her for a moment, took her silence as confirmation, and turned to the kitchen to make breakfast.

During breakfast, as expected, it was another lecture. Mother Tao yawned, scolding her while scrolling through the “Xuexi Qiangguo” app on her phone: “Since you have extra class today, you shouldn’t have done the Chinese test paper yesterday. You should have picked a minor subject to finish early and gone to sleep. At critical moments, you must avoid losing the big picture for the sake of the small.”

“I didn’t write the long essay anyway,” Tao Shuran casually agreed, taking a chopstick-full of pickles and shoveling a few mouthfuls of porridge.

Tao Shuran had heard various teachings since she was a child until her ears had grown calloused.

Mother Tao was a deputy director of the district education bureau and came from a background in educational research. She thought she had a set of insights into studying, yet it didn’t seem like she had taught her daughter to be particularly outstanding.

Usually, Tao Shuran would talk back, but today she truly wasn’t in the mood.

Seeing her dispirited look, Mother Tao assumed she was just low on energy. She fished a bottle of Wind Medicated Oil out of a cabinet, put it in the side pocket of the backpack, and continued somewhat unhappily: “Your homeroom teacher told me that based on your midterm exam results, things are looking shaky. Even if you stay in the experimental class after the science/arts split, you’ll be at the bottom. If you mess up this final exam again, how will others look at us? Tao Shuran, be more alert. Don’t just give people the chance to poke at our spines!”

“Argh, argh, argh, okay, okay, I’m done eating.” Tao Shuran’s heart was already a mess, and now she was extremely irritated. She quickly slammed the bowl on the table, grabbed her backpack from the chair next to her, and rushed to the entrance to change shoes.

Mother Tao looked at the small half-bowl of porridge left and felt another surge of anger. She took a bottle of yogurt from the fridge and stuffed it into Tao Shuran’s backpack before letting her out the door.

Even though Shencheng’s geographic location is quite far east, at five-thirty on a winter day, the horizon was still a heavy, deep black.

Buses had started running, and vehicles occasionally traversed the streets. The scattered pedestrians were so few you couldn’t spot two at a single glance.

This was her first time walking on the streets in the early morning hours. There were three days left until the final exams; to avoid the trouble of explaining, Tao Shuran would have to walk this path for two more days.

The biting chill in the air scraped her face painfully. Tao Shuran silently pulled up the hood of her coat.

The background noise of traffic gradually faded away, giving her an illusion of silence all around. Only the streetlights continued to advance toward the front of the road. She watched her own shadow on the ground stretch and shorten, much like her fluctuating and uneasy mood.

Probably because her parents were both in the education sector, Tao Shuran, who had lived a step-by-step life since childhood, had never done anything out of line. She couldn’t understand why she would have such a dream, and such a realistic one at that.

She didn’t really have any connection with Jiang Hanqi.

Jiang Hanqi’s name had begun to spread among the various schools in the district as early as the first district-wide standardized exam in middle school. It wasn’t just that she dominated the rankings with high scores and never failed; she also came from a wealthy background. Her parents were both returned PhDs from the last century and highly respected, well-known doctors in the industry. Her exquisite looks combined with an aloof temperament sent Jiang Hanqi directly to the altar of the middle school era, becoming a legend passed from mouth to mouth among students and teachers.

A person like that would be directly filtered out of Tao Shuran’s standards for a partner, let alone harboring any secret fantasies.

The sky had already begun to turn white when Tao Shuran stepped onto the campus.

She instinctively turned her gaze toward the gymnasium at the other end of the campus, which was connected to the playground and offered a wide field of vision.

The red carpet laid on the road outside the gym hadn’t been rolled up yet, and the new ornaments hanging on the roadside lamps swayed slightly in the morning breeze.

Yesterday’s New Year’s Eve gala was held right there.

At that time, before the opening intro music had even finished, she saw Jiang Hanqi, dressed in a light blue gown, walking gracefully onto the stage. Long gauze swept the floor, her face lightly made up. Standing under the spotlights, she looked down at the audience with indifference and composure—or perhaps she was just quietly looking at her, the affection in her eyes blurred by distance and intense light.

That was probably when the young girl’s heart suddenly skipped a beat.

Feeling guilty like a thief, Tao Shuran hurriedly withdrew her gaze. Suspecting her face had turned red again, she had no choice but to pull her hood tighter, covering herself more securely.

As she reached the classroom door, Tao Shuran suddenly realized that leaving early seemed to have been a mistake.

The door wasn’t open.

How was the door usually opened? Was the key with the homeroom teacher or a classmate? Tao Shuran scratched her head in frustration.

Tao Shuran, who hadn’t woken up early in a long time and consistently stepped into the classroom just on time, clearly lacked experience in this regard. After thinking for a bit, she opened her backpack and decided to memorize some classical Chinese vocabulary for a while.

After aimlessly passing an unknown amount of time, Tao Shuran finally heard the sound of footsteps approaching from the end of the corridor.

Not knowing if it was someone from her class, Tao Shuran didn’t even lift her eyelids.

The footsteps stopped a short distance away, paused for two seconds, and then continued to approach. Then, she heard a greeting. The tone was as cold as last night’s water; it was a single word, yet the intonation seemed a bit stiff: “Morning.”

Tao Shuran snapped her head up. She saw a familiar face, which seemed a bit softer under the silhouette of the morning light, perfectly overlapping with her dream.

It’s over. It really was a mistake.

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