At law school, students were mostly female. As a new arrival, Gu Yan, unsurprisingly, found the experience picking up right where it had left off in middle and high school — within a week, he’d already been approached, subtly or directly, by no shortage of female classmates. Some of the bolder ones asked outright whether he was single, whether he’d consider dating them. Gu Yan turned each one down politely but firmly, every time.

He actually had no plans to date during his university years. It wasn’t because he already had a clear plan for the future — quite the opposite, in fact. He still hadn’t decided whether he’d study abroad or go straight into his sister’s firm. That uncertainty was precisely why he didn’t want to date: once you’re in a relationship, you become responsible for another person’s life too, and Gu Yan didn’t want a situation where, once graduation came and their paths diverged, one of them would have to sacrifice something or settle for less. He didn’t want to be forced into parting ways over practical circumstances either. To him, a relationship that couldn’t go the distance held no meaning at all — it was simply a waste of time.

The first time Gu Yan ever noticed Qi Xi was in the school library.

His roommates liked to gather friends and play games together, and Gu Yan found it a bit noisy. He liked to sleep — he believed he needed a full twelve hours a day to function properly — so he simply went to the quiet library instead, found a comfortable window seat, and put his head down to nap.

Except he found that even hiding out in the library, he couldn’t get any peace — because of a girl sitting not too far from him.

This girl had genuinely come to the library to study, and she wasn’t making any noise or drawing attention to herself. But it was as if some invisible field surrounded her — like a famous tourist attraction, a constant stream of boys kept coming by to “check in”—

“Hey, sorry, my phone’s dead — could I borrow your charging cable?”

“Hey, are you in the law school? I noticed you’re doing law practice problems — I’ve been thinking about switching to law myself, mind if I add you on WeChat? I could sit in on your classes sometime.”

“I just went out and bought an extra milk tea by accident — want it?”

“I see you’ve still got your freshman orientation handbook, so you must be a new student this year? I’m already a junior, I know the campus really well — want me to show you around?”

…

Gu Yan, who’d been resting with his eyes closed, was jolted awake by the constant chatter nearby, and finally had to lift his head to trace the source — which was when he first spotted this “tourist attraction.”

Honestly, one glance was enough for Gu Yan to understand exactly why she’d become such a popular “destination” for so many eager boys.

The girl was strikingly beautiful — long hair like a waterfall, no makeup, luminous fair skin, and eyes that were just as lovely, the corners tilted slightly upward in the classic understated peach-blossom-eye shape. Even when her gaze seemed distracted, it looked almost soft with unspoken feeling — a very classic kind of beauty. But what struck Gu Yan most was the faint, unmistakable strength in her eyes. When she lowered her head, she looked like a still figure out of an oil painting, the kind that made you want to simply admire her — but the moment her lively eyes moved, that soft, alluring quality in her features sharpened into something more spirited, no longer merely delicate or fragile, but almost combative.

Was she a law student too? Or a new freshman in his own year?

Gu Yan thought about it and drew a blank — if there’d been a classmate who looked like this, he was sure he wouldn’t have forgotten her after just one glance.

So he sent a message in his dorm’s group chat—

“Did anyone from our law school register recently that I might not know about?”

Zhang Jialiang replied almost instantly. “Yeah, yeah, there’s a total knockout — Qi Xi. I heard she was sick and had to take leave the first week of school, just got back. I already checked — local to Rong City, single!”

Gu Yan glanced through the rest of the group chat discussion, then turned off his phone screen, uninterested.

This Qi Xi was pretty, sure — but a girl that pretty wouldn’t stay single for long, given that there was clearly no shortage of decent-looking guys already lining up to “visit” her little “attraction.”

Gu Yan figured he should probably find a different spot to nap.

But before he could even stand up, he saw Qi Xi rise from her seat not far off, her expression looking distinctly unhappy. She stepped away briefly, then returned holding a piece of cardstock and a marker. Gu Yan watched her bend over and write something on it, then quickly prop it up on the desk beside her seat, lips pressed thin.

“Please don’t disturb my friend’s studying. Anyone who bothers her without reason will get beaten up when she gets back.”

Sure enough, once the sign went up, the approaches slowed considerably, though a few boys still came by, only to spot the sign and sheepishly rub their noses and walk off.

A few persistent souls, undeterred, kept approaching, some even resorting to slipping her notes or letters. But Qi Xi, apparently genuinely fed up with being bothered, turned even colder about it — she dragged over a trash can from a distance, and from then on, any note or letter she received went straight into it without a second glance, making it perfectly clear: nobody was going to interrupt her studying.

After a few rounds of this, this “5A-rated tourist attraction” had, through her own sheer effort, successfully driven away every last “visitor.”

Gu Yan found the whole thing rather amusing.

After that little episode, Gu Yan wasn’t sleepy anymore. He gave up on napping entirely, resting his head on his arms on the desk, staring blankly across at Qi Xi’s face instead.

Plenty of people came to the library with less than pure motives, but Qi Xi genuinely seemed to be there to study. She was working through some kind of case analysis, completely absorbed in it. Apparently she’d hit a problem she couldn’t crack — her pretty eyebrows knitted together in obvious frustration. After a few failed attempts, still unable to figure out the right approach, she even puffed out her cheeks in irritation, looking exactly like a squirrel who’d just had its carefully hoarded winter nuts stolen away.

Sunlight streamed in through the library’s window glass, casting a long strip of light across the table. As the sun shifted, a sliver of it fell across Qi Xi’s profile, making her already luminously fair skin glow even brighter.

Still unable to find the answer to that problem, her brows remained stubbornly furrowed, the fine, downy hair along her hairline catching the light and standing out — like tiny unyielding little souls, each strand bristling, giving her whole head a soft, fuzzy halo in the sunlight. Her fair face gradually flushed slightly under the direct sunlight, and soon, faint beads of sweat began to bead on her forehead — the spot she’d chosen had grown a little too warm under the direct sun.

Yet Qi Xi seemed entirely unaware of it. She kept frowning at her case book, completely absorbed in working through the problem, as if oblivious to everything else around her, entirely lost in her own private world — like a squirrel who’d discovered its stash of nuts had been stolen, earnestly trying to work out whether the culprit had been an occasional visiting woodpecker or the neighboring monkey, unable to solve the mystery yet still stubbornly persisting in trying to recover its nuts.

It was just… adorable.

Gu Yan’s heart began beating faster in that moment — a strange, sudden quickening, like a melody abruptly picking up tempo mid-phrase, almost jarring, catching Gu Yan off guard.

Even though the sunlight was falling on him too, Gu Yan felt himself growing warm in a different way. He’d been able to stare at Qi Xi’s pretty face without a second thought before, but after this moment, he found he no longer could — he seemed to have lost the ability to look at her so openly, so guilelessly, anymore.

And he found himself growing curious about the case problem she was working on — what exactly was frustrating her so much.

Gu Yan knew he shouldn’t meddle, but he couldn’t help himself.

When Qi Xi got up to use the restroom, he stood, and for the first time in his life, heart pounding with a strange, furtive thrill like he was up to something illicit, he walked over to her seat as casually as he could manage and looked down at the case book she’d left open on the table.

He didn’t even need to search — it was obvious which problem had been giving her trouble, since the margins around it were covered in little angry-face doodles and frustrated scribbles, punctuated with a string of exclamation points.

Gu Yan couldn’t help a small laugh. He glanced over the problem, thought for a moment, then quickly jotted down a brief outline of the solution approach and a likely pitfall to avoid on her scratch paper.

Worried about being caught, Gu Yan did all this in a rush, his handwriting turning out far messier than usual, nothing like his normal script. Once he’d finished scrawling it down, he drew a small smiling stick figure with hands on its hips beside one of Qi Xi’s angry doodles, then hurried away from her seat.

A moment later, Qi Xi returned, still frowning unhappily, apparently ready to keep grinding away at the problem. She sat down, glanced at her scratch paper, then at the problem itself — and suddenly froze.

Gu Yan had assumed that at this point, Qi Xi would look around trying to figure out which Good Samaritan had solved the problem for her while she was away — but her mind apparently worked in ways Gu Yan could never quite predict. She simply frowned at the notes Gu Yan had scrawled down, thought it over for a moment, and then, as if something had suddenly clicked, her frown finally eased.

She smiled.

In that moment, Gu Yan felt that no sunlight in the entire library could compare to the brightness of her smile.

His heart pounded even harder. In the quiet library, he half worried the sound of it might actually catch Qi Xi’s attention.

But Qi Xi didn’t even glance his way. She didn’t so much as pause to wonder who had helped her solve the problem — she simply flipped to the next page and moved straight on to the next question, like some cold, unfeeling problem-solving machine.

For the first time, Gu Yan felt a small pang of disappointment — he even found himself vaguely irritated at that case book.

Was it really that captivating?

Gu Yan found it a little unbelievable.

That day, he made a dozen or so trips past her desk under the guise of buying snacks, refilling his water bottle, using the restroom. But only once did Qi Xi glance up at him — her gaze didn’t even linger, quickly dropping back down as she frowned her way through another case.

She hadn’t even properly looked at him once.

That wasn’t so bad in itself, since Qi Xi likely didn’t even know who he was yet. What was worse was that Gu Yan realized that every single time he walked past her, he found himself hoping she’d look up at him.

If it was this girl, then Gu Yan decided he probably wasn’t above breaking his own no-dating-in-school rule after all — because, honestly, there weren’t many guys in the entire Rong University law school who could out-analyze him on a legal case. He’d simply have to step up, if only to spare that little squirrel from having to frown like she’d lost her nuts every single time.

After all, Gu Yan happened to be quite fond of squirrels. He couldn’t bear to see one frown like that.