Why did Jiang Yubai look so handsome when he smiled?

Lin Zhixia gazed at him without blinking, suddenly recalling a line of poetry Tagore wrote in “The Gardener”: My heart is like a bird of the wilderness, finding its sky in your eyes.

The deep and vast sky was still waiting for her exploration. Driven by an unknown force, she couldn’t help but draw closer to him again, like positive and negative charges attracting each other, the distance between them growing smaller and smaller.

The only problem was that they were still lying on the same bed.

Reason told Jiang Yubai that he should get up and leave. But he couldn’t maintain his usual calm state. This narrow single bed was his utopia, where the absurd thoughts rooted in his heart grew wild.

Jiang Yubai happened to grab a corner of the blanket. He pulled it up with one hand, covering his face. He wanted to regain his composure as quickly as possible.

However, Lin Zhixia also crawled under the blanket and started playing with Jiang Yubai. She pounced on him under the blanket, like a cat pouncing on a mouse, leaving him nowhere to retreat. She asked him: “Are you hiding from me?”

He hastily denied: “No, I’m…”

The pure white blanket formed a closed encirclement on the bed. In such an airtight, hidden world, Jiang Yubai’s words were rather obscure: “Need to adjust.”

“Adjust?” Lin Zhixia half-understood.

Jiang Yubai was cryptic, answering briefly: “Yes.”

Lin Zhixia was concerned about him: “How do you adjust? Using the meditation method I taught you?”

Jiang Yubai falsely claimed: “The method you taught me is indeed useful.” A faint, subtle fragrance surrounded him as he lay on the side closest to the edge of the bed. Lin Zhixia carefully extended an index finger and placed it on the first button of his shirt.

He inexplicably reached out his hand and directly unbuttoned it.

Lin Zhixia’s eyes widened in surprise.

In Lin Zhixia’s view, Jiang Yubai had always been someone who could be “admired from afar but not approached.” Even when kissing her, he needed several minutes to work up to it, and his clothing style was conservative. She hadn’t expected him to take this step on his initiative.

To show her respect for him, Lin Zhixia politely asked for his opinion: “I… I’m curious, can you let me see?”

Jiang Yubai resignedly unbuttoned the second button of his shirt: “Only for a little while.”

“How long is a little while?” Lin Zhixia asked him quietly.

Jiang Yubai undid the third button: “Ten seconds.”

His clothes were disheveled, his collar open, revealing a large expanse of chest, with firm, smooth muscle lines, as if meticulously carved by the hand of God.

Lin Zhixia was both shy and excited, unable to hold back her admiration: “Wonderful, you must work very hard at the gym.”

Jiang Yubai’s fingertips rested on the fourth button, and this position soon fell as well, exposing his well-defined, solid abdominal muscles. He still wanted to maintain a last bit of dignity in front of Lin Zhixia, absolutely refusing to let her think of him as a frivolous person.

This exhibition began at the collarbone and ended at the abs.

Lin Zhixia lay on her side near the wall. Her eyes sparkled with scrutiny as she savored the view, commenting: “Absolutely perfect.”

But Jiang Yubai was counting down: “Ten, nine, eight, seven…”

Only then did Lin Zhixia remember that he had said he would only let her look for ten seconds.

Lin Zhixia’s gaze was pure and clear as she negotiated with Jiang Yubai in a gentle voice: “We’ve grown up together like childhood sweethearts, our feelings couldn’t be deeper. Our bodies are constructed differently, so I can’t help being a little curious about you. Let me study you a bit, I won’t do anything to you.”

Jiang Yubai stopped counting. His expression darkened as he asked in a low, hoarse voice: “You want to see me… just out of curiosity?”

There was another question he didn’t ask aloud: Like flipping through an unfamiliar book?

Lin Zhixia hurriedly explained: “No, curiosity only accounts for forty percent of it, the other sixty percent… is because you’re Jiang Yubai, my boyfriend, and I’ll be responsible for you in the future.”

Lin Zhixia’s voice was soft and sweet, making Jiang Yubai so happy that he forgot that “curiosity” played a forty percent role.

Inside the fluffy blanket, the temperature seemed to be rising. Jiang Yubai’s breathing was uneven, his chest hot, allowing Lin Zhixia’s fingertips to trace over his body without making the same request of her, much less saying “let me see you too.”

He willingly became the subject of her research.

*

This long morning was not easy for Jiang Yubai, while Lin Zhixia’s mood was extremely joyful.

After breakfast, Lin Zhixia held Jiang Yubai’s hand as they went out for a walk. They walked a long stretch along the street and turned into a nearby park, where, by coincidence, they ran into Wen Qi.

Wen Qi was wearing a waterproof black coat, sitting alone on a bench. Around his feet gathered a flock of gray pigeons. The pigeons’ feathers gleamed as they huddled together, cooing “goo goo goo,” and no matter how much bird food Wen Qi scattered, the pigeons never seemed to get enough.

Lin Zhixia greeted him: “Wen Qi?”

Wen Qi burst into laughter: “Ha!”

Lin Zhixia found this somewhat strange. She could sense that Wen Qi had no malice. But his various expressions, gestures, and speech were particularly unusual.

For instance, now, with sparse pedestrians in the park, Wen Qi shrank into the corner of the bench, glancing sideways at Lin Zhixia and Jiang Yubai. He wrapped his coat tightly around himself, as if making a tremendous decision, before finally saying: “Hello.”

Today was Saturday.

For Wen Qi, this was his time.

He strictly followed one rule—no socializing during personal time.

But Lin Zhixia had already greeted him. If he didn’t respond, his issues would become too obvious.

Wen Qi stood up from his seat and heard Lin Zhixia say, “Jiang Yubai and I are taking a walk. What about you? Did you come to the park specifically to feed the pigeons?”

“Yes,” Wen Qi agreed. He put his hands in his pockets, his gaze wandering among the verdant bushes.

“By the way,” Lin Zhixia suddenly remembered something, “I’m going to be a teaching assistant next semester. You once told me that the senior student had been complained about by undergraduates. Could you tell me why she was complained about?”

This was an important matter.

It is related to Lin Zhixia’s preparation work as a teaching assistant.

After all, the Indian senior student and Lin Zhixia were in the same research group. The mistakes made by the senior student might also be made by Lin Zhixia.

Lin Zhixia was still waiting for Wen Qi’s answer, but Wen Qi remained tight-lipped. He mechanically repeated the motion of feeding the pigeons until Jiang Yubai sat down beside him. He grabbed a handful of bird food, scattered it, and finally said: “The senior student undermined the students’ self-confidence.”

During his master’s studies, Wen Qi had minimal interaction with classmates. But he often eavesdropped on others’ conversations in places like the laundry room and common kitchen.

Student dormitories in British universities generally don’t have balconies or places to hang clothes. The dormitory provides shared washing machines, dryers, and other equipment, located in a laundry room on the first floor.

One night, Wen Qi was gathering his clothes in the laundry room when, coincidentally, two undergraduate students sat nearby, looking particularly dejected. They held cans of beer and quietly complained about an Indian teaching assistant named “Aishwarya” who had severely undermined their confidence during class.

This teaching assistant named “Aishwarya” was precisely the Indian senior student Lin Zhixia had just mentioned.

Aishwarya was born in Mumbai, India, and had completed her undergraduate studies at the most difficult university to get into in all of India—the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai campus. To get into this school, she had worked extremely hard throughout her entire secondary education, with an average of less than six hours of sleep per day.

After graduating, Aishwarya went to the United States for a master’s degree. She accumulated enough papers and secured a scholarship, which finally led to her decision to pursue a PhD at Cambridge. Her academic credentials were excellent, and she became a teaching assistant in her second year of doctoral studies.

However, those two undergraduate students said that Aishwarya deliberately created severe academic pressure, frequently making students feel that “their ignorance stemmed from incompetence.” She never used profanity or criticized anyone, but whenever students asked her questions, she would display an expression that said, “How could you not understand even this?”

On another occasion, Aishwarya was doing an operation on the blackboard, initially quite patient. Later, after a certain undergraduate student answered two consecutive questions incorrectly, her expression suddenly became particularly gloomy and terrifying, continuously muttering: “You must read more mathematics books.”

That undergraduate student was almost scared to tears on the spot.

“She’s like a fierce witch”—this was how the student described her.

This was how Wen Qi heard the cause and effect of the “Aishwarya complaint incident.”

But Wen Qi couldn’t fully express it verbally; face-to-face communication made him nervous.

He had heard that Lin Zhixia and Aishwarya were collaborating on a paper.

He initially didn’t want to get involved in this mess, but then he thought that Lin Zhixia was highly intelligent and might unintentionally hurt a group of undergraduates, resulting in the same consequences as Aishwarya. With this consideration, after returning home, Wen Qi wrote a long email to Lin Zhixia.

The email detailed the time, place, people involved, and the cause and course of the incident, even including the school’s handling of the result.

The school committee had received complaints from undergraduates, but they did not investigate Aishwarya, nor did they issue any punishment.

Because, according to the school’s “student complaint procedure” regulations, students must submit a complaint report within 28 days of the unpleasant incident—Aishwarya’s students had overlooked this provision. They endured for several months, and only after advancing to their third year did they think to complain about Aishwarya’s severe impact on them, which meant their complaints were never accepted by the school.

Wen Qi carefully recalled the undergraduates’ conversations, including everything he could remember in the email.

This lengthy email totaled over two thousand words. The body of the email was in Chinese, with some English words included.

After writing it, Wen Qi carefully checked it once more.

He picked up a cup of coffee, took a silent sip, and was about to hit send when his email suddenly made a sound.

It turned out his supervisor had sent a group email inviting all the teammates to dinner.

Every year, whenever a new person joined the group, the supervisor would invite everyone for dinner—this had been an unchanging tradition in their research group for many years.

Wen Qi nodded. After reading his supervisor’s email, he scrolled up and down, and when he returned to the previous email, he accidentally copied a string of recipients in the CC field—he didn’t notice this and directly pressed send.

Subsequently, Wen Qi broke out in a cold sweat.

His email titled “The Aishwarya Complaint Incident” had not only been sent to Lin Zhixia but also to his entire research group, including his supervisor and Aishwarya herself.

For someone with social anxiety disorder, this was almost a microcosm of the end of the world.

He profoundly knew that he was finished.

If the Indian senior student was a witch, then he was about to become the witch’s sacrifice.