The next day, Zhu Yun moved all of her belongings to Li Xun’s place.

Fang Shumiao stood and watched the entire process.

At this point, Zhu Yun had decided she was done concealing anything. Whoever wanted to know could know. She was not turning back, under any circumstances.

Ren Di and the band’s drummer, Xiao Liuzi, came to help. Zhu Yun was deep in the early heat of the relationship and her instincts were running at full sensitivity — she pulled Ren Di aside in the commotion and pressed for information. Ren Di smiled in that way that gave away nothing and everything at once.

Zhu Yun later extracted confirmation from Li Xun: Xiao Liuzi was pursuing Ren Di.

Xiao Liuzi was four years younger than Ren Di, had left high school without finishing to work at a bar, and had the kind of face that was gentle and fine-featured in a way that read young and soft regardless of the year. True to his nickname, he was slender and wore his hair long, so that standing next to Ren Di, seen from a distance, they looked less like a potential couple and more like an older sister with a younger one.

Before Li Xun had his own place, he used to spend a lot of time at Ren Di’s studio and had gotten to know the whole band. He never called Xiao Liuzi by name — he’d taken one look at him and started calling him “little miss,” and the habit had spread through the entire band until it stuck. Xiao Liuzi had never forgiven him for it and greeted Li Xun with a barely concealed scowl every time they met.

Zhu Yun, having been brought together with Li Xun largely through Ren Di’s intervention, now felt a reciprocal urge to meddle in Ren Di’s affairs. Ren Di was not impressed.

“You barely know what you’re doing yourself, and you want to help me? I’ve crossed more bridges than you’ve walked roads.”

“That’s not really a fair comparison anymore,” Zhu Yun said, “because I’m currently on a bridge, and I’d like to point out my success rate is one hundred percent.”

Ren Di regarded her with complete, unpitying contempt. “Keep that between yourself and your walls. Don’t embarrass yourself outside.”

Zhu Yun officially moved in with Li Xun. In practice, however, life didn’t change all that dramatically.

They already knew each other better than most people know anyone. The more Zhu Yun integrated herself into Li Xun’s daily existence, the more clearly she saw that he was, at the core, a genuinely unvaried person — outside of work, he had almost no hobbies or diversions to speak of.

The greatest practical benefit of living together showed up in the base’s operations: Li Xun handed the accounts over to Zhu Yun and threw himself entirely into the project work.

It was only when she actually held the ledger that Zhu Yun understood, for the first time, how much he had actually been doing all this time.

She tried to introduce some structure to his daily habits — after dinner, she would drag him out to walk a few laps of the athletic track. He resisted at first, calling it a waste of time, but gradually it became something he accepted without complaint.

Conversations about the future came inevitably, though the content was never what people might typically imagine — not love, not domestic plans.

One night, both of them washed up and lying in bed, neither sleepy. Li Xun didn’t bother with curtains, and the room was on a high floor — moonlight fell across the blanket in a wide, still stripe.

Zhu Yun lay in the curve of his arm. “Have you decided what you want to do? Specifically?”

Li Xun was quiet for so long she thought he had fallen asleep. Then: “Do you remember the first project you worked on after joining the base?”

She remembered perfectly.

“The Blue Crown company — were you thinking food, or e-commerce?”

“Not that one,” Li Xun said. “The idea you came up with yourself.”

Came up with herself… Zhu Yun cast back through her memory. “The human body one? The pathology guidance system?”

“Yes.” Li Xun’s voice was level. “I don’t know why, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since we finished that project.”

Zhu Yun turned the thought over. “You want to develop it further? Are you thinking about building a product, or refining the core functionality?”

“I haven’t pushed the thinking that far yet — it’s still just a rough idea, which is why I’m talking to you now.” He turned his head to look at her. “What do you think about healthcare?”

Zhu Yun paused. “But neither of us knows medicine. Surface-level health guidance, maybe — you could get by with books — but anything more detailed than that…”

“We don’t know medicine,” Li Xun said. “But we know computers. We know networks and data.”

“Say more.”

“When I was sitting in on Professor Peng Guorui’s lectures, I ran into others who were interested in internet-based healthcare. Their vision was connecting the network to medicine to let people get diagnosed at home without leaving their doors. I think they have it wrong. They’re too focused on serving patients — but healthcare is a classic supplier-dominated market. The world will never run short of sick people. What it’s short on is quality medical resources. And the way patients and doctors communicate is fundamental — unless there’s some kind of revolutionary breakthrough in medical imaging, remote diagnosis over the internet alone is deeply unreliable.”

“So what would you do instead?”

Li Xun was quiet for a moment. Then, calmly: “My mother died of cancer. The hospital she went to was inadequate — different doctors gave completely contradictory diagnoses, and it took several months of delay before they finally reached a conclusion. She didn’t last long after that.”

Zhu Yun lay in his arms and said nothing. She found his hand and turned it over slowly in hers, her fingers moving between his.

“The doctors weren’t indifferent,” Li Xun said. “It was a rural area. The resources available to them were almost nothing. They were working almost entirely on instinct and accumulated experience. The real problem with accessing healthcare has never been a shortage of doctors. It’s a shortage of good doctors. So I think — rather than focusing on how to make things more convenient for patients, we should be asking how to maximize the reach of good doctors’ experience. How to replicate the judgment of a good doctor into more people. That’s the problem worth solving first.”

It was a framing Zhu Yun had never heard before. She sat up. “Tell me more.”

Li Xun thought for a moment. Then, instead of answering her directly, he asked: “Princess — why did you choose this field of study?”

“My mother told me to.”

“…”

Li Xun stared at her. Zhu Yun said: “She gave me two options — computer science or finance. I had zero interest in finance. Do you remember the person who drove me back to campus during the winter break? He studied finance. He was a perfectly normal person before he started, but after a while he walked around every day looking extremely pleased with himself in a way that didn’t quite seem right.”

Li Xun gave a short, cold laugh. “Befitting of a princess. Even the household driver is an educated man.”

“What can I do,” Zhu Yun said. “The palace has strict standards.”

Li Xun watched her with that certain self-satisfied little expression, and felt something rise in him that required addressing. He turned over and pressed her flat.

Zhu Yun tucked her chin. “The topic — the topic — can we finish the topic first!”

Li Xun held her and breathed against her ear. “We can still talk like this.”

Zhu Yun had adapted well to almost everything about being with Li Xun. Almost everything. The one thing she had never been able to build any immunity to was his voice.

She had heard it before she ever saw his face — on the very first day of term. She had told him this once, adding that the person she’d pictured to go with it had been nothing like the reality. Li Xun had given her his worst smile and asked: “What did you want me to look like?” She’d been about to answer when he took her chin in his hand and said: “Whatever you imagined, the real thing is better.” Then why ask, she’d thought. You’ve already written your own lines.

But it was undeniably true. In the landscape of Zhu Yun’s mind, Li Xun’s voice had an entirely singular quality. A hundred years from now, she was certain, it would still make her face go warm.

And now, in the most absurdly unfair way possible, he was using that voice — in the most unhelpful of postures — to say the most serious of things:

“Princess — the development of computers and networks has transformed the way people live. What do you think the underlying reason for that is? What’s at the core of it?”

Zhu Yun’s ear felt like it was going to catch fire. She pressed herself closer into his chest.

“I don’t know…”

You’re talking like this and you expect me to think?

“It’s the integration and circulation of information,” Li Xun said.

Yes, yes. Whatever you say.

His fingers moved, quiet and slow.

“The human body is itself an enormous model — the systems inside it interact in structured, patterned ways. But I looked into it, and more than ninety percent of the data sitting in medical institutions right now is just gathering dust in back-end storage. If we could scientifically consolidate all that wasted clinical data, and design some method of feeding it back to less experienced doctors to help guide their diagnostic decisions — that would be worth incomparably more than building some kind of medical chat application. Don’t you think?”

He was asking for her opinion. Zhu Yun did her best to respond coherently. “…I can’t speak to other people’s human bodies, but I think yours is fairly remarkable.”

“Be specific.”

“You seem to be running two separate operating systems in one body.”

One governing the mind. One governing everything else. One rigorous, one entirely otherwise. Each attending to its own domain without interference.

Li Xun laughed soundlessly.

In the midst of all this, Zhu Yun somehow found enough of her mind to actually think — and after a few minutes, she asked: “The data — where would we get it? Can hospitals share across institutions? Their data formats probably aren’t standardized either. And what method would we use to consolidate it — numerical, something else — and on top of that—”

“Alright, alright, settle down.” Li Xun cut her off. “It’s just a concept. Think about all that and neither of us is sleeping tonight.”

If you’d move your hand, I’d settle down immediately.

But the sleepiness was gone entirely from Zhu Yun’s mind. She directed everything she had toward what Li Xun had just laid out.

As he’d said himself — this was still only a concept. Even raising it loosely produced an immediate flood of questions.

From rough to precise. From the broad vision down through layer after layer of detail. It would involve algorithms, data architecture, medical knowledge frameworks — any single element picked at random would require endless testing, enormous time, enormous effort. And yet…

Zhu Yun felt that this was something worth doing. This direction had a quality that made you want to follow it further. She thought of a line from the classical essay she’d memorized in middle school, Record of the Peach Blossom Spring —

The mountain had a small opening, and through it filtered what seemed to be light.

That was what his words gave her. Exactly that.

It was still only a beginning. But Zhu Yun had always been a strong student, and she had a sensitivity for things within her field. She had long since noticed how intently Li Xun paid attention to information and data.

As the network age progressed, the speed at which information expanded was becoming staggering — everyone could feel it. But very few people had paused to ask what it actually meant: all that data, scattered in fragments across countless corners of the world — what was the significance of it? What changes might it bring to how people lived?

Two years later, a major international management consulting firm, having recognized the latent value buried in the ocean of information accumulating across the internet, would invest enormous resources in a research effort that concluded with the publication of what became known as one of the landmark reports in the history of the internet — the famous “Big Data Report.”

The concept of big data was not new, but that was the moment it entered mainstream attention — first in finance, then gradually spreading across industry after industry.

But none of that mattered yet. Zhu Yun was nowhere near thinking on that scale. In that small rented room, in that small bed, her mind was full of one thing only: how to help him take the first step.

While she was still deep in thought, Li Xun, on his end, drifted off and fell asleep against her.

So Zhu Yun let her thinking go too, and her attention shifted.

She loved watching him sleep. She had her own private comparison for the process — she called it “warming the shrimp,” after the way shrimp curl slowly when they hit heat. He always fell asleep gradually, his body drawing inward by degrees, until before long his face would slide from the pillow and that long frame would be curved like a crescent moon, as guileless and unguarded as anyone she had ever seen.

With a direction in hand, life grew busier still.

Zhu Yun had a long conversation with Gao Jianhong and asked him what he was planning for his future. He said he was still thinking it through.

Two years as classmates had given Zhu Yun a reasonable sense of his family’s situation — his parents were both ordinary salaried workers, comfortable enough but nothing remarkable.

Gao Jianhong said he was torn. Continuing academically meant either a postgraduate recommendation or going abroad, but he also wanted to step into the working world and start earning properly.

Li Xun wasn’t present for the conversation. Gao Jianhong asked: “Do you think practical experience matters more in our field, or theory?”

“Both, I’d say.”

“Then why are you following Li Xun’s path?”

Zhu Yun gave a dry laugh. “My situation probably shouldn’t count as part of this discussion.”

Gao Jianhong smiled too. “Fair enough.” Then he said: “Since we’re already talking about post-campus life, let’s set aside the classmate relationship for a moment. Give it to me straight — what is he actually planning to do?”

Zhu Yun told him honestly: “He won’t be pursuing postgraduate study. He’s been laying groundwork for a while. He’ll probably start moving toward setting up a company next year.”

“Next year?” Gao Jianhong blinked. “Not waiting until after graduation?”

“Depends on how things develop.”

“Has he found investors? Does he have startup capital?”

“He does.”

And quite a bit of it, too.

There are real advantages to having a friend with money.

Gao Jianhong frowned, thinking hard. Zhu Yun understood his dilemma — if he committed to following Li Xun’s path, what came next would consume him so completely that the options of studying abroad or pursuing a postgraduate recommendation would simply cease to exist as realistic possibilities.

She looked toward the window. Winter had arrived. The cold seemed to have sealed everything in a precise, unsentimental shell, and the atmosphere felt oddly suited to conversations like this one.

“I know he’s exceptionally capable,” Gao Jianhong said at last, quietly. “But he can also be reckless. I’ll be honest — he can be arrogant about it. Working with the few of us has been manageable, but the bigger the team gets, the more likely that becomes a problem.” He glanced at Zhu Yun. “He’s been better about it since you two got together, but if you weren’t there someday, he might—”

Zhu Yun interrupted without thinking twice. “That’s not going to happen.”

Gao Jianhong said nothing.

Zhu Yun looked at him steadily. “Gao Jianhong, this affects your future and I’m not in a position to push you in either direction. But there’s one thing I want to say.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m not only his girlfriend. I’m also the person with the highest grade point average in this class.”

He looked at her. Zhu Yun held his gaze, her expression composed and unhurried.

“My choice to follow him isn’t based on love alone.”