Qian Wei hadn’t expected that the moment she got back to school, Qian Chuan would come knocking.
“Qian Wei, do you know what Liu Shiyun likes to eat?”
“Huh? What’s this about?”
Qian Chuan cleared his throat. “Well, after the anniversary event when you and Lu Xun left, Liu Shiyun treated me to a nice meal. I figure, us Qians can’t just take a free meal like that — I ought to return the favor. Reciprocity and all that, you know?”
“Then just ask her directly.” Qian Wei was baffled. “It’s not like you don’t have her number.”
Qian Chuan scoffed at the suggestion. “Where’s your emotional intelligence? If I just ask her outright, there’s no element of surprise at all.”
“Fair enough.” Qian Wei thought for a moment. “She likes Thai food, that sweet-sour-spicy kind of flavor. Her favorite is tom yum soup.”
Satisfied with the answer, Qian Chuan finally left. Only after he’d gone did it occur to Qian Wei — why did it need to be a surprise at all? It was just a meal. Why not simply ask Liu Shiyun directly?
But she didn’t have time to dwell on it, because she had her own serious matters to attend to.
Although the confidential-materials excuse Lu Xun had improvised earlier that day to keep his mother out of the bedroom had been a lie, the fact that he was working on a merger case was real. University law faculty were permitted by the bar association to hold a law license and practice part-time while remaining full-time academics, so the law professors at A University’s law school had set up their own firm outside the school. It recruited a number of outstanding students upon graduation, and competition to join was fierce — the firm rarely brought in current students to work on its cases. That Lu Xun had been selected said a great deal about just how formidable his abilities really were. To stay profitable, the firm naturally took on commercial cases, but out of a sense of academic idealism, once operations were comfortably in the black, it also regularly took on pro bono legal aid cases. Qian Wei knew that alongside the merger case, Lu Xun was also handling several legal aid matters, and doing so exceptionally well — she’d even heard from Liu Shiyun that a migrant worker he’d helped recover unpaid wages for had gone so far as to have a banner made especially to thank him.
Qian Wei hadn’t been selected by the firm, but she wanted to do something of her own too. Lu Xun was so accomplished, and she wanted to become better too — to be able to stand beside him with her head held high.
She opened her email and began drafting a business plan.
This idea had been taking root in her mind ever since the community legal-outreach event. During that event, Qian Wei had also fielded dozens of consultations, and while the other students hadn’t paid it much mind, she’d noticed something: the legal questions people brought to community outreach clustered heavily around just a few categories — marriage-related issues, private lending disputes, and rental housing matters. Though every case had its own specific facts, the final legal solutions people actually needed tended to share a common thread. What most consultees ultimately needed was a contract template: those preparing for divorce needed a divorce agreement, especially a property division plan; private lending cases needed a loan agreement specifying amount, term, interest, and default terms; rental cases needed a lease agreement that clearly and fairly set out both parties’ rights and obligations. If there were a set of contract templates covering the essential terms, providing legal services could become far more efficient — just adjusting and adding to a base template according to each person’s situation.
Working at the firm, since the services were one-on-one, Qian Wei could naturally customize contracts to each client’s specific needs. But in legal aid and outreach work, she was dealing with ordinary people who simply couldn’t afford a law firm’s fees. Through those conversations, she’d realized these people weren’t unaware that they needed professional help with the tangled legal problems of daily life — they just couldn’t afford anything beyond budget-level service.
After starting work, since her focus was commercial law, Qian Wei hadn’t had much direct contact with individual clients — her work was mostly with corporate clients. But because Lu Xun had set the firm’s rates toward the higher end of the range allowed by the bar association, Qian Wei had turned away plenty of small businesses that simply couldn’t afford it. Through those conversations, though, she’d come to realize that it was precisely these early-stage small businesses that needed professional legal services the most. With the right legal guidance at the startup stage, many legal risks down the road could be avoided entirely, and these small businesses might well grow into mid-sized companies within a few years. But unfortunately, because startups were already strapped for cash, they inevitably chose to put their money where it mattered most immediately — production and development — rarely willing to spend heavily on quality legal support. Meanwhile, top-tier firms weren’t willing to lower their rates to take on these small clients. The end result was that these businesses either skipped legal services altogether, or settled for cut-rate firms within their budget — but you get what you pay for, and cheaper firms often couldn’t actually provide comprehensive legal protection. More often than not, despite spending the money, the legal risks that should have been avoided went unaddressed, planting landmines for the company’s future.
In her past life, Qian Wei had been too consumed with work to think deeply about any of this. But given this second chance at life, watching Lu Xun work so hard, she found herself swept up in the same drive.
This was a feeling she’d never had before. When she’d first studied law, she’d thought of it purely as a future career skill, and at work she’d found satisfaction in helping clients solve their problems. But it was only after truly encountering the people who needed legal help the most and had the least access to it — and after being falsely accused of stealing a necklace herself — that Qian Wei realized how many people, even those in respectable positions like school faculty, didn’t genuinely understand concepts like legal literacy, procedural justice, or the presumption of innocence.
She still remembered clearly, even now, the words Lu Xun had spoken at the anniversary celebration — about how every university student should possess an independent, sound character and a clear, rational mind, and how law students in particular carried the weight of the future progress of the legal system, and so should hold in their hearts both fairness and compassion, insight and understanding, and a deep respect and reverence for the law. She admired Lu Xun’s formidable skill and professional command of the law, but what moved her far more deeply was the genuine passion and conviction he held for it. This was the first and only time she had ever admired someone so completely — a person who had once been her boss, and was now the man she loved.
Perhaps, in this second life, none of these experiences had happened by accident. Perhaps fate had been quietly nudging her all along, toward noticing what she’d once overlooked, toward experiencing a kind of love she’d never known, toward understanding the real meaning behind studying and practicing law.
So this time, Qian Wei decided to do something.
She checked her bank balance. Having once dreamed of buying property and reaching the top as quickly as possible, she’d been deliberate about working and saving — and although it paled next to Lu Xun’s part-time earnings, by 2009 standards it was still a fairly substantial sum.
What to do with that money — where before it had only been a vague notion, the idea had now begun to take real shape in her mind.
She wanted to help more people: those who needed legal services and advice but didn’t have the money for them.
This time, Qian Wei decided to build an online legal consultation platform. She would draft standard legal contract templates and upload them all — the templates ordinary people were most likely to need in daily life, along with the ones startups used most frequently. Members would pay a modest fee for unlimited access to every template on the platform. She’d also add a legal education section, regularly breaking down cases of public interest in accessible terms for users to reference. It was a massive undertaking, and she’d need to find an IT contractor just to get the site off the ground — a genuine money pit in the early stages — but she wanted to try anyway, on the chance it might actually work.
If someone as accomplished as Lu Xun was still working this hard, how could she just sit idle and accomplish nothing?
Once she decided, Qian Wei got straight to work — gathering data, running preliminary research, immersed in it for hours, still hunched over her computer when Liu Shiyun came back.
“Qian Wei? Where were you last night?” Liu Shiyun clapped her cheerfully on the shoulder. “You didn’t even come back to the dorm?”
Qian Wei answered smoothly, “There was a huge storm, I couldn’t make it back in time, so I stayed somewhere overnight.”
Liu Shiyun’s eyes lit up. “Did you stay at my family’s hotel? Did you use the VVIP card I gave you?”
“No… the rain was too heavy, I couldn’t find one of your family’s locations nearby, so I just found somewhere random to stay…”
Liu Shiyun looked disappointed. “I was going to ask how the experience was.” She looked Qian Wei over, then suddenly pointed at her neck, suspicious. “Look at you, what kind of place did you stay at last night? Bet the sheets weren’t clean. Look at the back of your neck, there’s a little red patch — looks like an allergic reaction. Doesn’t it itch?”
Qian Wei’s face flushed instantly. She fumbled, touching her neck. “Maybe…”
Liu Shiyun, none the wiser, lectured her earnestly. “Don’t ever stay at some random cheap motel like that again. A lot of those places don’t even change the towels and sheets. Think about it — who knows what kind of person stayed there before you, could be anything, even something like genital warts, you know that condition, right? Cauliflower-like growths and everything…”
“…”
Liu Shiyun’s mind wandered a bit further before she suddenly seemed to remember something and looked over at Qian Wei. “Oh right, you’re more into meat dishes, right? Like Northwestern Chinese food, Korean food, that kind of thing?”
Qian Wei was a little surprised but nodded instinctively. “Yeah, why?”
Liu Shiyun’s eyes shifted, feigning nonchalance. “I see. They say twins usually have pretty similar tastes — does that mean Qian Chuan likes meat too?” She tucked her hair back, a little too casually. “I just read this book recently about how twins have this telepathic connection and share a lot of the same preferences, got curious, that’s all…”
“Um, yeah, Qian Chuan likes meat too.”
“And you like quiet environments — does he too?”
“Not really.” Qian Wei thought about it. “Twins don’t necessarily share the same tastes. Like, I have zero interest in sports, I watch idol dramas, but Qian Chuan only wants to watch sports channels. I like soft music, but he’s into rock…”
“What’s his favorite rock band?”
“The Rolling Stones.” Qian Wei answered, then looked at her, surprised. “Why are you suddenly asking so much about Qian Chuan?”
“Am I?” Liu Shiyun coughed. “Just making conversation.” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, I’ve got some student council stuff to deal with. I’ll head out first.”
Qian Wei didn’t think much of it — her mind was entirely occupied with her online legal aid platform, and it wasn’t until Lu Xun called that she realized four hours had already passed.
“Qian Wei.” Lu Xun’s voice on the phone was as even as ever, though Qian Wei sensed a faint note of accusation underneath. “It’s been four hours and thirteen minutes since we parted, and you haven’t contacted me once.”
Qian Wei cleverly shot back, “You haven’t contacted me either!” Going on the offensive, she added, “So why haven’t you reached out first?”
Lu Xun paused, then said, sounding a little awkward, “I was deliberately holding off on contacting you.”
“Huh? Why?”
There was a faint note of embarrassment in his voice. “I was worried I’d hurt you, and that you might not want to hear from me, so I wanted to give you space and time. They say girls tend to be more sensitive emotionally after their first time…”
Qian Wei blinked, then caught his meaning, her face burning red. “Don’t say any more.”
“I don’t know how you feel, but I think I like you more and more, and I feel like I can’t be without you more and more — like I want to see you every single minute. I don’t even need to be doing anything, just having you nearby is enough to make me feel at peace. I used to be a very disciplined person, always able to focus on whatever I needed to do, but today I couldn’t manage it at all. I’d open a book, open my laptop, and all I could think about was you. I used to be able to go a whole night without contacting you, but not anymore. Four hours, apparently, is my limit.” His voice had gone a little husky. “I’m outside your dorm right now.”
They’d agreed before parting that they wouldn’t see each other again tonight — and yet here Lu Xun was, breaking the agreement anyway.
As if he’d read her mind, he spoke before she could. “I know we agreed not to see each other tonight. You don’t have to come down.”
“Then why are you standing outside my dorm?”
“I just wanted to be a little closer to you.” His voice was low.
Qian Wei knew perfectly well he was doing this on purpose — and yet she found herself utterly unable to resist. This was a man who approached everything, every goal, with careful calculation and a sharp understanding of human nature, and who happened to have been born with a face like that. When he said something like this in that wounded, faintly defeated tone, no woman alive could possibly turn him down.