Ruan Yu nearly dropped her phone. She typed back hesitantly: May I ask — is a video call strictly necessary for this case?
Mm.
Her heart sank. Just last night she’d been thinking how wonderful it was that they wouldn’t need to speak face to face — and today, that notion had collapsed before she’d even had time to enjoy it.
Ruan Yu looked down at her pajamas and quickly replied: I’m sorry, it’s not very convenient for me right now.
How long?
That blunt, economical question carried a certain force to it. Unable to read his tone precisely through a screen, Ruan Yu found herself half-convinced he was already losing patience.
She thought about how she’d only missed their appointment by an hour, and here she was fussing about whether to do a video call — it really was indefensible. She had no choice but to overclaim: Ten minutes.
She waited for Xu Huaisong to respond with some kind of acknowledgment, and it was a long moment before she realized — the silence meant the countdown had already started?
Ruan Yu flung her phone down, tore off her pajama top, grabbed the first thing she touched — a chiffon blouse with ruffle sleeves — and yanked it over her head. Once it was on, she felt it was a bit sheer, so she pulled it back off to add an undershirt.
No time to change the pajama pants. Since the camera would only capture the upper half anyway, she turned and sprinted to the vanity.
The face looking back at her in the mirror was exhausted and wan from days of accumulated fatigue.
Not acceptable.
They say you can’t afford to look defeated in front of a former flame — and what was a “former idol” but a former flame with one character’s difference? She couldn’t show up looking like this.
Ruan Yu smoothed on a brightening primer, dabbed a little concealer under her eyes, and finished with a thin layer of rosy lip tint. She was about to declare victory when she glanced at her fringe — and alarm bells went off in her head.
The fringe was too oily. No time to wash her hair, and the volumizing powder she kept for emergencies had run out two months ago.
Two minutes left.
She rifled frantically through every drawer and cabinet, and could only twist open her loose face powder and dust it into her roots.
Final thirty seconds. She ran to the living room and opened her laptop, breathing hard and willing herself to calm down, while typing: Lawyer Xu, I’m ready.
The other side was still for fifteen seconds before a video call invitation appeared.
Ruan Yu adjusted the camera angle with one hand and tried to unknot her face with the other, attempting a smile — then pressed accept.
Xu Huaisong appeared on the screen.
He was wearing a simple, proper white dress shirt, all buttons done up — even the two at the cuffs — and he had his head lowered over a stack of materials. His whole presence radiated a taut, high-achieving professional energy.
He wasn’t looking at her, fully absorbed in work. Ruan Yu let out a quiet breath.
If at all possible, she hoped to avoid any direct eye contact with him.
But as though he’d somehow heard that small, wishful thought, Xu Huaisong looked up in the very next second. She immediately sat up straight and greeted him: “Hello, Lawyer Xu.”
The words came out with all the crispness of a soldier saluting a commanding officer.
Xu Huaisong’s gaze swept briefly across the screen — equally commander-like — and gave her a small nod of acknowledgment before dropping his head again and flipping through the materials. “Miss Ruan’s original manuscript is quite lengthy.”
Only then did Ruan Yu notice — he had printed out everything she’d sent him last night. Two thick stacks of paper.
Her heart tightened, but she kept her voice even: “That’s all right, take your time.”
And Xu Huaisong did, quite literally, take his time reading through the manuscript.
In contrast to his composed ease, Ruan Yu sat with her arms folded across her chest, as tense as a primary school student sitting through a lesson, eyes fixed on the screen, watching his expression with careful attention.
She was afraid that at some passage, something might suddenly register as familiar.
But Xu Huaisong did nothing beyond turning pages — he appeared entirely as someone reading someone else’s story.
Ruan Yu gradually relaxed.
Once relaxed, she began to take in her surroundings on his end.
It looked like a study. The furnishings were simple, the desk and chairs all in cool tones, and the dark bookshelves behind him were neatly packed with books — several of them astonishingly thick.
To his right, the edge of a large dark floor-to-ceiling window was just barely visible.
In the UTC+8 timezone, the sun was already blazing. In UTC-8, the world was still submerged in darkness.
She stared for a while, and then her already-troublesome neck began to stiffen. She tilted her head to stretch it — and the motion was immediately caught by the person across from her.
Xu Huaisong looked up, and suddenly they were looking directly at each other.
She froze mid-stretch — her neck locked halfway through the movement — and ended up wrenched into something that resembled an accidental head tilt.
Whether it landed on Xu Huaisong, she couldn’t say — but it landed on herself.
Her neck gave a sharp, audible crack. She winced and closed her eyes briefly against the pain — and so missed the fact that on the other side of the screen, the person’s usually impassive eyes flickered, just slightly.
By the time she opened her eyes, Xu Huaisong had already lowered his head again.
A quarter of an hour later, Ruan Yu could see he seemed to have tired for now — he gathered the pages together, presumably to continue later, and looked up at her. “Tell me your thoughts on the reverse color palette analysis.”
She cleared her throat, opened her mouth — and stopped. She looked down and realized she had completely forgotten to bring the relevant materials to the table from start to finish.
What was she doing? Could she be even slightly more professional?
Ruan Yu paused; Xu Huaisong seemed to understand immediately and gestured for her to go ahead. She said “one moment,” stood to go fetch the documents from the study — and the instant she was fully upright, her entire body seized as though struck by lightning.
Right, well… her Minion-print pajama pants — she hadn’t had time to change those, had she.
She slowly lowered her gaze to check. But it was far too late to do anything about it. She didn’t have the heart to look back and confirm the camera angle, so she simply squared her shoulders, let her left and right feet have a brief argument, steadied herself with one hand on the edge of the desk, and turned slowly to walk away.
On the other end, Xu Huaisong covered his mouth with his fist and suppressed a laugh. Two minutes later, she came back wearing a skirt, entirely as though nothing had happened.
He, too, returned to a neutral expression.
To cover her embarrassment, Ruan Yu sat down and launched straight in at speed: “A friend in the industry has already done part of the reverse color palette analysis — I pulled a few of the more representative examples, which I think could serve as angles for our counter-argument.”
Xu Huaisong nodded for her to continue.
She opened the materials and made herself focus. “The first angle is the category of detail construction. For instance, the ‘canned flowers’ mentioned in the opposing side’s color palette analysis — although that section of my writing was indeed published after the other author’s, if you turn to You’re My Belated Happiness – Chapter Seven you’ll see——”
Xu Huaisong turned to the relevant chapter.
She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, circled the passage in highlighter, then held the document up toward the camera. “Right here — I laid the groundwork earlier, establishing that the female lead is fond of sunflowers and lavender. And this groundwork was published before the other author mentioned those two flowers. In other words, the surface-level chronology doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story.”
Xu Huaisong gave one nod, signaling this direction was sound.
Encouraged, Ruan Yu continued: “The second angle is the category of plot construction. For instance, the scene I wrote in You’re My Belated Happiness – Chapter Ten — the male lead and several supporting characters.”
Xu Huaisong turned to the corresponding page again.
But Ruan Yu had gone quiet, feeling a touch of self-consciousness — because this scene was drawn entirely from real experience.
In the first year of high school, when the academic pressure was still relatively light, Class Ten had a cluster of particularly rowdy, troublemaking boys. Fed up with the school canteen, they regularly climbed the wall to sneak out for fried chicken.
Once, she’d spotted Xu Huaisong walking with them. One of the boys had his arm slung over his shoulder, murmuring: “After class, get a ladder, leave it at the base of the back wall.”
She’d been genuinely surprised. Xu Huaisong — that coolly elegant creature, untouched and transcendent, someone who seemed like he should have been raised on morning dew — was actually conspiring with this lot to satisfy a craving for fried chicken?
Sure enough, just as she’d expected, he pushed the other boy’s arm away, his voice flat: “Not interested.”
But the other boy was practically a tyrant and hooked his arm right back. “You won’t help? Then I’m telling Old Ruan about your phone!”
“Old Ruan” was Ruan Yu’s father. She knew her father’s temper well — hearing this, she panicked, wanting to hear how Xu Huaisong was going to handle it. But the group had already turned into the classroom.
She had no way of finding out how it ended. To save Xu Huaisong from a potential crisis, she had spent the time after class pulling every string her father’s position afforded, hauling a ladder out of the maintenance storage through sheer exhausting effort, sneaking it into the grass beside the back wall — and then, having done her good deed, walked away without leaving her name.
Ruan Yu had transplanted this scene into her novel exactly as it had happened, and worried the whole time that it might be recognized.
After watching her drift into a daze for quite a while, Xu Huaisong asked: “Something wrong?”
She snapped back instantly and carried on: “This plot appears in the other work as well, but if you look closely, the way it develops and what it’s meant to convey are completely different. My version is written from the female lead’s perspective — what follows is the scene where she secretly plants the ladder, and the purpose is to illustrate her hidden feelings.”
“The other author’s version, however, is written from the male lead’s perspective. What follows is a passage of internal monologue in which he admits he actually loves fried chicken — but at the time, knowing the female lead was nearby, he felt that climbing the wall would embarrass him, so he deliberately acted like someone above earthly pleasures. The intent in that version is to reveal the gap between the male lead’s public and private self.”
Xu Huaisong gave a soft, brief cough at the end of this, reached casually for the cup beside him, and took a sip of water. Then he said: “This direction works too.”
Seeing no particular reaction from him, Ruan Yu relaxed and nodded, moving on to the next angle. “The third angle is the category of character construction. Although there are multiple overlapping tropes between the two books, as the previous example shows, the actual character designs differ — especially the male lead. In my version, he’s more of an introverted type, but in the other author’s version——”
She couldn’t quite land on the right word and was turning it over in her mind when she heard a soft ping — probably a WeChat notification coming in on Xu Huaisong’s end.
He ignored it, gesturing with his eyes for her to continue.
But before Ruan Yu could say anything further, another notification sounded — and then messages began flooding in, one after another without pause.
Xu Huaisong frowned and was compelled to look.
Poem Gremlin: Ge, I just re-read Senior Ruan’s novel.
Poem Gremlin: Oh my god, I’m dying — how did she end up making you THAT kind of person??
Poem Gremlin: Were you performing for her every single day back then?
Poem Gremlin: Ge, you were so ahead of your time — putting on a whole act before the concept even had a name!
Poem Gremlin: Ah, but looking at it this way, that’s apparently Senior Ruan’s type — you’d better not let your image slip!
Xu Huaisong: “……”
He was well aware of that, thank you very much.
Poem Gremlin: Sigh, that said, Ge, I actually feel a bit sorry for you. Let’s say Senior Ruan doesn’t even like you anymore — but even if she did, the person in her heart isn’t really you!
Xu Huaisong, at his limit, typed back: Too much free time?
Ruan Yu could see that he seemed to be grinding his teeth slightly, the energy around him slightly off. She asked carefully: “If you have something to take care of——”
“No.” Xu Huaisong looked up, instantly reverting to his cool, detached manner. “Continue.”
As he said this, he privately acknowledged that unwelcome truths are unwelcome for a reason — Xu Huaishi’s reminder warranted some attention. So he split his focus, and idly opened a search engine.
In the interest of cultural relevance, he used Baidu, and typed: how to become a cold and aloof person.
He pressed search. The first result was a Baidu Knows post.
Someone had actually asked the exact same question.
He was about to click through for details when his eye caught the first line of the top reply, visible in the preview:
Keep dreaming, buddy. The fact that you’re asking this question means you’ve already guaranteed yourself a lifetime of never pulling it off.
“……”