The next morning, Ning Sui woke up and immediately reached for her phone, finding the Huai’an group chat had lit up with a flood of new messages.

She scrolled up quickly. The two that stood out most were from Lin Shuyu and Zhang Yuge.

Kuge Lin: 【How’d it go? How’d it go?!】

Jin Ge: 【Ha, Xie-master just added another achievement to his Qinghua campus legend record 【grin】】

— The “Qinghua campus legend record” was their affectionate way of joking about it.

The forum and the anonymous notice board were the epicenter of all campus gossip. Xie Yichen got mentioned on them from time to time, though the school was so large that each time he came up, there were always people asking who he was, whether he was impressive — and then someone below would patiently rattle off a list of credentials: provincial top scorer on the college entrance exam, perfect score at the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad, national team-level math competition results, Computer Science Yao Program…

And now, to that list: ACM International Gold Medal.

Xie Yichen and his team had carved their way through a field of the world’s finest competing teams and taken global runner-up.

This was not only a point of honor for the team, but a tremendous result for the university as well — in some ways exceeding even Xie Yichen’s own expectations. He’d gone in hoping to at least defend Qinghua’s result from the year before, which had been sixth place worldwide. Runner-up was beyond what he’d anticipated. Credit went to the whole team’s coordination throughout — the final problem had come together through a stroke of luck, making it out just under the wire.

Ning Sui had always genuinely admired this quality in him: that steadiness, that refusal to let victory make him arrogant or defeat make him lose heart. Grounded. Humble. Without a need to perform his accomplishments. She couldn’t call it a bias — she had always felt the person she liked was simply talented, intelligent, and mature beyond his years, with a depth of thought that reached far.

She remembered asking him once whether he’d been nervous the night before his college entrance exams. She certainly had been — too anxious to sleep well, her heart hammering away. Xie Yichen had said he was nervous too, but that once the exam papers were in front of him and he started writing, he couldn’t remember feeling anything at all.

Because he’d been so fully absorbed. Completely immersed.

After returning to school, the team accompanied their faculty advisor for a round of press interviews.

In the weeks that followed, quite a few people added Xie Yichen on WeChat after hearing about him — curious what this supposedly extraordinary person was actually like up close. He was almost unsettlingly low-profile. Search his name alongside “provincial top scorer” and not a single proper interview with a clear photo of his face came up.

Paradoxically, this only seemed to fuel the forum’s interest further.

【Original post: Li Tao, is ACM runner-up actually that impressive? It’s not even first place — why is everyone losing their minds over it?】

【…Anyone asking that question clearly isn’t from their department.】

【Go check whether Qinghua has ever won gold in the past twenty years 【laughing-crying】】

【Haha, and it’s not just Qinghua — Stanford, MIT, Harvard and their neighbor institution haven’t taken gold either.】

【Just looked it up — the prize money is over forty thousand. Wow.】

【Wow, that much?!】

【So XYC’s team is genuinely incredible — they’re only freshmen competing against graduate students.】

【So this is what Yao Program top students look like… terrifying…】

【Is it any surprise? That’s just how the Yao Program works — just a while ago they got a best paper award at some conference. Extremely prestigious, difficult to get — looked at the author list and there wasn’t a single faculty member. Just three undergraduates.】

【No way, that good??】

【I was considering transferring into that program… after reading this, I think I’d rather not subject myself to that…】

【You’re welcome to transfer!! Fully English instruction, whether you understand it or not — if you can’t keep up, you get a withdrawal warning 【doghead】】

【Kneeling in awe of the greats… 【kneel】】

The conversation drifted for a moment before circling back to a particular person.

Xie Yichen’s thread count on the forum was by now considerable. Not only had the doctored sunset-and-cigarette photo from his first semester been dug up and recirculated, but the earlier thread about his girlfriend — sparked by the basketball game — had also been bumped back to the top.

【Has Chen-god gotten himself a girlfriend?】

【Original post: At today’s basketball match between the Yao Program and Math Department, the split in his lip was super obvious 【tsk tsk】】

Most recent reply: 【It does seem like he has one.】

56L: 【Word is she’s a girl from across the way — reportedly drop-dead gorgeous.】

Due to the forum’s high traffic, threads were constantly being pushed down by newer posts, so replies here came more slowly: 【?】

58L: 【Wait, say more?!】

Ning Sui’s coursework kept her busy, and Xie Yichen was even more so — on top of classes, he was also working on the FlashMap project and beginning to approach faculty about research. In their spare time, he would go to Jingda to see her. When he couldn’t get away, Ning Sui would go to Qinghua instead, and sometimes they studied together.

Ning Sui had always heard that Qinghua’s psychology courses were excellent. This semester, a course on intimate relationships had opened up, and it happened to fall during a free slot in her schedule — so she would come over for the class and then have dinner with Xie Yichen afterward.

59L: 【Today in the sixth teaching building — psychology class — I just saw XYC bring his girlfriend to sit in. They were right in the front rows.】

60L: 【She’s the bright, luminous type — really genuinely beautiful. Word is she’s the most sought-after girl in the Math Department at the university across the way, fairly well known on their campus too.】

61L: 【No way, seriously?!】

62L: 【What is this insane TP-Link situation… 【crying】【crying】【crying】】

63L: 【She studies math? And at Jingda at that… incredible!! 【crying】】

64L: 【What, something wrong with Qinghua’s Math Department? 【grin】】

65L: 【I just want to know how beautiful we’re talking 【doghead】】

66L: 【You can borrow an account and search the notice board across the way.】

67L: 【Are we sure she’s the girlfriend? Any chance she’s just a regular friend? 【crying】】

68L: 【Do regular friends press their faces close together and whisper to each other, and do regular friends brush hair out of each other’s faces? 【grin】】

69L: 【【crying】【crying】【crying】】

……

Ning Sui didn’t pay much attention to the forum. That evening she and Xie Yichen studied until past ten before he rode her home on his motorbike.

She was thinking of finally telling her roommates tonight that she’d started seeing someone. During the previous stretch of time, Yu Qin had been in low spirits and the girls had hardly been around at the same time — everyone was out early and back late, barely crossing paths in a day. So Ning Sui had let it go unmentioned.

Yu Qin really was chronically unlucky when it came to romance. She kept landing on awful guys, and this time it had been a senior from a student club — emotionally perceptive, though not particularly good-looking, which meant Yu Qin hadn’t initially thought of him that way. Casual, witty conversations had gradually turned into something more, and she’d started to feel something.

He clearly noticed, and asked her out — movies, dinner, the usual, two or three times. Then, at what he’d apparently judged to be the precise emotional turning point, while they were in the theater he suddenly grabbed her hand and went in for a kiss. Yu Qin had been so startled she’d shoved him away by reflex and ran.

She spent a long time afterward regretting her reaction, but their chat window had grown a little quiet after that. He, however, said nothing about the incident and kept messaging her each day with lighthearted little things he’d found online. Yu Qin was left completely in the dark about what he actually felt.

She’d been working herself up to asking him out again when, not many days later, she saw him post an official relationship announcement on his Moments.

The real heartbreak was that this was exactly when she realized she’d actually caught feelings for the awful guy — and there was nothing she could do about it.

Yu Qin had spent nearly a month at rock bottom before she bounced back, and now the dormitory atmosphere was as lively as it had always been.

All three of them should be in the room tonight. Ning Sui climbed the stairs with her bag, moving at an easy pace. Past the stairwell was a short walk to their dormitory. The corridor had a few girls trickling by in pajamas, carrying laundry basins.

Ning Sui noticed Sun Xiaozhen also walking out of the communal bathroom. She found it odd — Sun Xiaozhen’s room was far from this area — but within a hair’s breadth, their gazes briefly crossed. Sun Xiaozhen clearly saw her, yet turned her head away and walked on in the same direction without breaking stride.

Ning Sui watched her retreating back, briefly taken aback.

At the start of the previous semester, the department had begun planning a student arts festival. The head of the Arts Department that year was a direct-year senior Ning Sui got along well with, who, having noticed Ning Sui had a good singing voice, invited her to help assess the performances different classes had put together for the festival.

Sun Xiaozhen was also in the Arts Department. They’d run into each other just two weeks ago at a meeting, and she’d seemed perfectly normal at the time.

Ning Sui figured she’d probably found out about her and Xie Yichen. The two of them hadn’t gone out of their way to hide things recently, and it wouldn’t be strange for her to have heard through some channel.

Although Ning Sui had indirectly denied the relationship at the class reunion, right in front of Sun Xiaozhen — which left her a little guilty — she reasoned that she didn’t owe Sun Xiaozhen any explanation, and let it go.

But as she approached the door, the dormitory inside was uncharacteristically quiet, with none of the usual animated chatter rising through the walls. Ning Sui was still puzzling over the silence when she pushed open the door — and three pairs of keenly alert eyes snapped to her all at once.

She startled: “What — what is it?”

The three of them maintained a charged, peculiar silence. They looked at each other, then Bi Jiaxi turned to Yu Qin: “You go first.”

Yu Qin hesitated, then looked at Liang Xinyue: “Babe, you say it.”

Liang Xinyue sat perfectly upright on her top bunk, gazing down at Ning Sui with the serene, bestowing look of someone about to impart a profound truth. For a moment she almost seemed to have a glow radiating from her.

Liang Xinyue spoke gently: “Sweetheart, you’re going to be completely honest with us, and we’ll do our best to guarantee—”

“?”

The mood took an abrupt, ominous turn. She enunciated with deliberate, measured slowness: “That we won’t turn you into a little cake and eat you.”

“…”

She could mostly guess what this was about. Her roommates had clearly seen some of the forum discussion — Liang Xinyue was always hopping over to browse the Qinghua forum for gossip. Ning Sui had planned to come clean about the relationship sooner or later, but apparently they’d been beaten to it.

Ning Sui did her best to look meek and composed. She caved, closed the door, sat down with her feet together in the chair, hands placed neatly on her knees in her best well-behaved student posture: “Actually… I was going to tell you all today.”

“A convenient afterthought!” Liang Xinyue clutched her chest in theatrical agony and began climbing down from the top bunk. “You shameless thing! You went off and got yourself the campus idol across the street without breathing a word, Ning Sui, you’ve got some serious nerve!”

The moment Liang Xinyue’s voice rose, Yu Qin could no longer hold back either. “Right?! Babe, that was so not okay — the students at the school next door knew before I did?!”

Bi Jiaxi: “We’re sobbing, do you not consider us your friends?!”

Ning Sui had assumed they’d gone browsing the forum themselves, and had been wondering how much was already out there. Instead it turned out to have been word of mouth from Qinghua friends who’d connected the dots and come asking.

When she thought about it that way, she really had handled things quite poorly.

Before, the secrecy had been out of fear that Xia Fanghui might find out. So she’d kept it from everyone, sealed tight. Then it just became habit — this keeping things sealed. And even though there was no longer any real need to hide it, she’d grown accustomed to the feeling. By then it felt too late to say anything, she knew her roommates would be upset, and so she kept finding excuses and avoiding the right moment to come clean.

She always overthought things. She’d worried, for instance, that bringing up her own good news while Yu Qin was in a dark place might unsettle her further. Or that if her roommates questioned her about why she hadn’t said anything from the start, she wouldn’t know how to explain what was happening at home — whether they would understand.

These things hadn’t even happened yet, but in her head she’d already rehearsed a dozen versions of how they might go.

Ning Sui let out an honest sigh. “Okay. I’ll acknowledge the mistake first. The main thing was that I didn’t want my mom to find out too early, so I didn’t tell anyone. I should have told you all sooner.”

She licked her lips, and under the intensity of three pairs of eyes fixed on her, dutifully began her quiet confession: “So… Xie Yichen really is my boyfriend. We both went to high school in Huai’an, and we met through the math competition circuit. After graduation, summer started, and we got back in touch. We had a lot of overlap last semester.”

Ning Sui paused, then gave a brief account of the Nanjing training camp and the Yunnan trip.

All three stared at each other in shock, holding back with great effort so as not to scream, instead channeling the energy into frantic pounding of the desk and floor.

So there had been a whole backstory. They’d known what province Xie Yichen was from but had completely forgotten he too was from Huai’an. And the fact that they’d first met through mathematics — the romantic devastation of that detail on a girl who’d chosen to study math could not be overstated.

“You were doing competitive math and just—”

“Keeping it all quietly loaded and waiting to fire?!”

Xie Yichen was a genuinely prominent figure at Qinghua, and their own beloved roommate was quite the renowned figure at Jingda. Both of them the kind of people who received constant attention. To have connected them together felt less likely than winning the lottery.

Liang Xinyue was equal parts excited and overwhelmed. She sat down and let herself savor the whole picture slowly.

As she savored, she suddenly remembered the Qinghua basketball game from a couple months back, and was just about to demand to know why Ning Sui had pretended not to know him — when something else slammed back into her memory first.

During that game, she’d been right there pointing and commenting on the man.

A sweeping, freewheeling commentary. Emotionally unavailable. Big. Devastating in bed.

Oh no.

Liang Xinyue was broadly experienced in many things, but even she found this particular situation a touch mortifying. Fortunately her skin was thick enough. With a light, imperceptible clearing of a cold sweat from her temple, she swallowed it all back, let it die, and kept her expression perfectly composed.

— No wonder, she thought. Ning Sui’s face had been red enough to drip blood.

She privately thought: the gymnasium hadn’t even been that warm!

Liang Xinyue went quiet. Yu Qin and Bi Jiaxi had not caught wind of any of this, and were both too deeply submerged in their own overwhelmed delight to notice.

A chance meeting in the snow. Sitting together on the teaching building steps to work through a math problem. The kind of details that were simply too achingly romantic.

Bi Jiaxi murmured: “So you two had lost contact, but still ran into each other again during the graduation trip?”

She and Yu Qin grabbed each other’s hands and shrieked: “What kind of fate is this?!”

They’d always sensed that Ning Sui was the kind of person who had her own quiet, firm convictions — yet with a warmth and gentleness that made people instinctively want to look after her.

And standing beside Xie Yichen, her height put her perfectly in small-bird-leaning-into-his-arms territory. Looks-wise, they were an absolute match. An almost irresistible pairing.

Over the days that followed, all three roommates were on a sustained sugar high. Since learning about the relationship, Liang Xinyue enthusiastically led the other two on a deep excavation of the Qinghua forum and anonymous notice board, leaving no trace unturned.

By some feat of detective instinct, they managed to unearth a nearly buried thread with barely two comments, suppressed from the main feed — a candid photo of Xie Yichen facing down Fang Muzhu at the intersection outside Building Six. It had been taken by a passerby who happened to witness it and quietly posted to the forum, but the lighting had been poor that night, and few people had replied.

Yu Qin was hearing about the whole incident for the first time. Her truly awful ex-boyfriend had actually been beat up by Xie Yichen — she nearly laughed herself into the floor.

She knew Fang Muzhu’s temperament — a bully who preyed on the soft-spoken and buckled the moment he met resistance. And it had been his idea to try something on Ning Sui first, so there was nothing he could do but swallow the humiliation and keep his mouth shut.

That evening she ordered fried chicken to celebrate. “Justice served. Too satisfying! Sui babe, pass on my gratitude to Chen-master!”

The semester days in class always seemed to fly by in a blur. Spring melted into late May and early June before anyone had registered the change.

During that time, Ning Sui had been preparing for the College English Level Six exam and keeping up with ongoing rehearsals for the musical. Their entire cast had been rehearsing for nearly eight months, and the formal performances were finally approaching.

It was to be held at Jingda’s Centennial Auditorium — a large venue, with ticketed entry open to the public, though cast members could reserve a small number of seats for family and friends. On the day of the performance, the entire Huai’an crew was invited to come and watch.

Lin Shuyu and Zhang Yuge arrived together, spent a hopeless stretch of time unable to find the entrance, and finally managed to get through after reaching out to Hu Ke’er for help. Zhang Yuge turned to Lin Shuyu, incredulous: “Are you sure you actually go to this school?”

“I just always study properly and don’t go to events much, okay?” Lin Shuyu gave an awkward laugh, then looked at the empty seat nearby. “Hey, where’s Yichen?”

Zhang Yuge gave him the kind of look that said why are you even asking: “He’s backstage. He’s with her while she gets her makeup done and gets ready.”

Lin Shuyu: “…”

By his count, his brother had been in a relationship for nearly half a year. And yet somehow, they still couldn’t quite wrap their heads around it — any one of them would regularly say something and then immediately want to hit themselves, muttering how dare I be so nosy, why can’t I keep quiet.

Hu Ke’er, for her part, was lounging beside them scrolling her phone with complete indifference. Zhang Yuge caught a glimpse from the corner of his eye — she seemed to be watching a video interview of someone on Weibo. A man, fairly handsome, lean and tall, in a fitted suit. He’d just started craning over with interest when Hu Ke’er noticed, immediately backed out of the app: “What?”

That was a bit of an unusual reaction. Zhang Yuge raised his eyebrows: “Who was that just now?”

Hu Ke’er licked her lip. For a split second she looked slightly off, but her voice came back to its usual tone quickly: “Nobody. Just randomly browsing gossip.”

She glanced at Zhang Yuge, seeming to remember something. Her tone turned meaningful: “Didn’t you say you were seeing someone over winter break? You were so confident about it I thought you were about to ascend — how come there’s still no sign of this person?”

Of course, that lead had gone nowhere. And then, for no clear reason, it had fizzled out entirely.

Zhang Yuge had been stepped on squarely in the sore spot and immediately stopped talking to her.

The performance got underway shortly. Xie Yichen made it back to his reserved seat just before the lights went down, and spent the whole show taking photos.

Ning Sui’s performance was a success. She’d been nervous right before stepping onto the stage — the venue was enormous and the audience was large — but eight months of rehearsal had given her every line by heart. Beyond that, Xia Fanghui had spent years putting her through on-stage practice of all kinds: speeches, hosting, recitations. So once she actually stepped up, Ning Sui threw herself entirely into the performance.

Her English was strong, so the acting came naturally. Her singing included one particularly high note, which she landed cleanly and beautifully.

That evening Ning Sui was in high spirits. The cast went out for a celebratory dinner, and she didn’t ask Xie Yichen to come along — she told him to just wait and come pick her up when they were finished. During the meal she found a spare moment to edit the official performance photos, and posted a nine-panel collection from the musical to her Moments.

SuiSuiSui: 【Centennial Auditorium: mission accomplished! 【peace sign】】

A flurry of WeChat comments and likes came in almost immediately. With the laughter and clinking glasses of Zhong Lu and the president around her, Ning Sui scrolled and replied while noticing a new private message.

Xie Yichen sent a voice message, his voice unhurried: “When are you done? I’ll come pick you up.”

SuiSuiSui: 【Still a little bit longer】

SuiSuiSui: 【I’ll hurry 【cat-snuggling.jpg】】

He replied with characteristic patience: “It’s fine, just message me when you’re ready.”

SuiSuiSui: 【Okay~】

Ning Sui blinked, then typed: 【You haven’t actually commented on anything yet.】

Since they’d started dating, Xie Yichen had avoided commenting on her Moments to keep things low-profile — he only ever liked posts. It had almost become habit by now. Besides, she hadn’t posted this kind of thing in a long time. He’d only just opened the photos and was still looking through them carefully — he hadn’t had time to comment yet.

Xie Yichen was about to say something, when he saw another message from her come through: 【I’ve read online that only players keep liking posts without commenting — makes it easier to keep fish on the line.】

Oreo: 【?】

Ning Sui saw his question mark come through and went quiet, maintaining a perfectly composed expression as she licked her lips.

— Well. Turning the tables certainly wasn’t a new development. And she didn’t feel particularly guilty about it.

Ning Sui leisurely backed out of the chat and returned to her Moments to check the latest comments, where she unexpectedly spotted a familiar profile picture.

Shen Qing: 【Wow, the lighting and stage design look amazing, especially the eighth photo 【clever】】

“…”

Ning Sui wasn’t sure whether she should respond or not. She was still hovering indecisively when she noticed a new comment appear below it.

Oreo: 【The person in it is more beautiful.】

Her phone went still for a moment — and then suddenly, it began vibrating rapidly in a burst.

New Moments comment notifications flooded in and multiplied at visible speed.

For some reason Ning Sui felt a strange premonitory flutter behind her eyelids.

With a particular, powerful sense of what was coming, she reached out and tentatively tapped to open them.

— Xie Yichen had left a comment on every single one of her public Moments posts.

Oreo: 【Love it.】

Oreo: 【Love it.】

Oreo: 【Love this one.】

Oreo: 【Beautiful.】

Oreo: 【Cute.】

Oreo: 【Princess.】

……

Oreo replying to Shen Qing: 【Thank you, I took that one.】

Ning Sui: “…”

HELP!

Can I take back everything I just said?!