The next day in Old Professor Lin’s class, the spiky-haired young lord shuffled in yawning, and dropped himself into a seat.

“Water.”

Am I your housemaid?

“Water.”

Zhu Yun dutifully passed him a bottle of mineral water. Li Xun drank, summoned what little energy he had, and opened his laptop.

“I need to take a few days off,” Zhu Yun said.

“For what?”

“Something came up.”

“What something?”

“Why do you need to know?”

Li Xun ran his eyes over her once, top to bottom.

“Your period?”

“………………”

Li Xun said magnanimously: “Fine. Paid leave.”

The conversation seemed to go smoothly enough.

But that same evening, as Zhu Yun was in her dorm room studying the Baoke project brief, her phone rang. It was Li Xun.

She had noticed this habit of his back at the base — the top-scoring Li almost never sent text messages, and practically never used any chat applications. He considered them too inefficient. If he wanted to reach someone, he called directly. If you didn’t pick up, that was your problem.

Zhu Yun took a sip of water first to clear her throat. “Hello?”

“Come outside.” His voice was low and flat.

“Now?” Zhu Yun glanced toward the window. “It’s pretty late.”

“I’m downstairs at your dormitory. You have one minute.” He hung up.

I still need to change. One minute — what am I supposed to do, jump out the window?

Zhu Yun weighed her options — clothes versus Li Xun — for approximately three seconds, then headed downstairs exactly as she was, in her pajamas.

Li Xun was waiting beside the milk tea shop at the entrance of the dormitory building.

The sky had gone fully dark. The faint glow of the milk tea shop was nowhere near enough to dispel the low-pressure front radiating off Li Xun. Zhu Yun walked over, and while she was still five meters away, the proprietor opened his mouth —

“Did you get your brain caught in a door?”

“……”

Would it kill you to speak like a human being.

The combination of wild-haired delinquent and pajama-clad girl was drawing far too many glances from passing students. Unable to bear the stares, Zhu Yun went over and said quietly, “Come on, let’s move somewhere else.”

Li Xun followed her to a spot beside the shrubbery.

No lights here. Only moonlight.

And firelight — Li Xun lit a cigarette; the amber ember glowed and dimmed in turns.

“Tell me what exactly is going through your head,” he said again.

There was a moon overhead, silver and beautiful.

…But not quite illuminating enough for the moment.

“You’re laughing?” Li Xun stared at her.

Zhu Yun quickly shook her head and arranged her expression into something serious.

Li Xun had said his piece. Now he got to the point. “Zhang Xiaobei found you for a project?”

Zhu Yun nodded. She hadn’t even opened her mouth before Li Xun cut her off —

“Turn it down.”

“…I’ve already agreed.”

“I’m telling you to turn it down!”

He was losing patience. Zhu Yun held her ground.

“No.”

“You dare disobey me?”

“……”

Zhu Yun paused, then said: “Li Xun.”

“What?”

“I think you might be under a slight misapprehension…”

“What misapprehension?”

She explained it to him out of the goodness of her heart.

“You and I… are classmates. There is no hierarchical relationship between us.” Zhu Yun laid this out for him in a calm, measured tone. “While I have a great deal of respect for your leadership role at the base, we have no verbal agreement between us, and we have no employment contract. Honestly, I don’t believe you have sufficient grounds —” she looked at him steadily — “to tell me what to do.”

Silence.

Quiet.

More silence.

More quiet.

In the middle of all this stillness, Li Xun rested a hand on his hip and said lightly: “So we’re equals, then.”

Zhu Yun nodded.

Yes, that’s right. Equals. Men and women are equal. Long live equality.

…But could you please stop walking toward me.

Li Xun was wearing a fitted black athletic set — a mandarin collar, sharp as a blade — the whole effect stark and unnerving against the dark. Zhu Yun’s soft pale-yellow pajamas had absolutely no offensive power in the face of all that. He advanced with a seemingly casual step, yet somehow backed her into a position where retreat was impossible. She found herself pressed against the roadside shrubbery, branches poking into her back from every angle like a squadron of soldiers holding her at spear-point, while he looked down and said again:

“We’re equals.”

He was close enough to block out the moon entirely.

Fine…

Fine, fine, fine.

I’ll concede that you may be… just slightly… marginally… a fraction… taller than me…

Having surrendered the point, Zhu Yun proceeded to silently condemn, with great feeling, anyone who exploited advantages of gender and height. Truly shameless.

Li Xun was about to say something more — but in that instant, Zhu Yun caught sight of someone passing on the other side of the path. She gave him no chance to speak. With the speed of thunder before the ears can hear it, she called out toward the retreating figure at the top of her lungs:

“JULIET —!”

Everyone in the vicinity: “…………”

Zhu Yun gave Li Xun a nudge. “Look, look — Juliet. Your Juliet just got out of class.” She pointed vigorously behind them. Li Xun looked at her without expression.

Zhu Yun didn’t actually know Li Xun’s new girlfriend’s name. The impression the girl had left on her was almost entirely defined by that day’s script-reading session.

But the girl had a remarkable quality about her — she heard “Juliet” and instantly knew it was meant for her, and came trotting over with cheerful little steps.

“Li Xun!”

Taking advantage of the moment Li Xun turned his head, Zhu Yun slipped out from behind him like smoke.

“Will you help me run lines again?” Juliet hooked her arm through Li Xun’s with a pout. “The Romeo they cast me with is so short, I can’t feel anything — all my emotions just die.”

Zhu Yun said from the side, “Right, well — you two go practice. I’ll head back too.”

Li Xun turned a smile on her that didn’t reach his eyes.

Juliet hugged Li Xun’s arm. “Come on, let’s go.”

Li Xun: “Sure.”

Juliet waved cheerfully at Zhu Yun. “We’re off then!”

Zhu Yun gave a small bow. “Have fun.”

Li Xun departed with his girlfriend.

Zhu Yun stopped at the milk tea shop and looked back.

Their silhouettes dissolved into the deep night, soft and weightless as a breath.

What was the line again?

Forgive me — it was the night that revealed my heart’s secret. Do not think my vow to be a shameless act of wantonness.

The first time Zhu Yun went to Zhang Xiaobei’s laboratory, it felt like a factory floor.

Han Jiakang and the others were required to be present in the laboratory at all times unless they had a specific errand — fetching something for Zhang Xiaobei, collecting a delivery, and so on. Eight in the morning until… no one seemed to know exactly when. A fixed routine, more regimented than any nine-to-five.

The “excellent opportunity for future development” that Zhang Xiaobei had spoken of turned out to be a project to develop a fixed-asset reporting system for the Municipal Bureau of Finance.

When Zhang Xiaobei was out of the room, Han Jiakang quietly confided to Zhu Yun that the project was, in truth, thoroughly unremarkable. The system was already halfway built; a programmer from Baoke had been abruptly pulled off it when something came up on their end, and no one else had been willing to take over the remaining work.

Han Jiakang said with thinly veiled contempt: “These government projects are basically just a way to drain public funds. Whether or not the thing works in the end comes down entirely to how well the officials overseeing the review have been taken care of.”

He told Zhu Yun: “And that Baoke programmer didn’t really have something come up either. They just needed to get through the first round of inspection. Once the funding was disbursed, Baoke lost interest. Zhang Xiaobei has been clinging to Baoke’s coattails for so long that the moment they opened their mouth, she had no choice but to take on their mess.”

Zhu Yun looked over the code the previous programmer had written. She thought it was decent enough. Not as clean or assured as Li Xun’s code — nothing was — but clear and readable, quality more than adequate.

Wait… Zhu Yun interrupted her own train of thought.

Had his standard quietly become the benchmark in her mind?

She spent two days working through the existing codebase and attempting to build on what the previous programmer had laid down.

Zhang Xiaobei found a moment between her many obligations and came to check on progress.

“Run it for me.”

Right now?

Zhu Yun hadn’t quite gathered herself before Zhang Xiaobei, decisive as ever, hit the run key herself. Her expression grew noticeably more severe. “Why are there more than ten errors and over thirty warnings?”

Zhu Yun was just about to respond when she caught Han Jiakang behind Zhang Xiaobei making urgent, wide-eyed signals at her. She closed her mouth.

“The progress is not acceptable. Move faster. Fix every error and warning first, and get the code running before anything else.”

With that, Zhang Xiaobei swept out of the room like a gust of wind.

That afternoon there was an English class. Before it started, Zhu Yun was sitting idle, doodling on a piece of paper.

“That looks absolutely terrible.”

Zhu Yun startled, looked up, and found that the great lord had somehow settled himself into the seat beside her without her noticing.

Ordinarily they only sat together in Old Professor Lin’s class. What was the occasion today?

Zhu Yun closed her sketchpad, just as the teacher walked in to begin the lesson.

Li Xun showed zero intention of actually attending. This Zhu Yun could understand perfectly — on her very first day at the base, she had seen his desk stacked high with dog-eared, brick-thick English programming references in the original.

In mathematics and English, whenever he sat an exam, he walked away with full marks.

Zhu Yun was still inwardly lamenting the unfairness of the universe when Li Xun said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Would it kill you to stop playing dumb?”

“……”

Zhu Yun pressed her lips together. Li Xun asked again, quietly:

“Well?”

“It’s fine.”

His brow was furrowed. She had the distinct sense that something was irritating him — if this weren’t a classroom, he would probably have had a cigarette out by now.

“Speak up if something’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Do you need help?”

“No.”

Li Xun glanced at her. Zhu Yun raised an eyebrow back at him. He seemed to think of something, gave a soft snort, and said with a half-laugh: “You’re really something, you know that…”

You don’t look any less preoccupied than I am, Zhu Yun thought privately.

She was not being stubborn — in fact, she genuinely didn’t need any help, because she had never had the slightest intention of doing that wretched system properly in the first place.

Especially after asking Zhang Xiaobei several clarifying questions and confirming that the woman understood absolutely nothing about the project. After that, Zhu Yun let herself off the leash entirely, and wrote with wild, gleeful abandon.

Han Jiakang had told her: Zhang Xiaobei hated laziness above all else, and so her one reliable indicator when reviewing code was — the more lines, the happier she was.

Music to my ears.

And so Zhu Yun’s output took off like a rocket. She was submitting files at a staggering pace each day, pouring every last ounce of effort into dragging the system’s stability as far down as it could go.

She wrote with the most convoluted logic imaginable. She applied the most nauseating templates she could devise. Within three days, the entire system had come to resemble a minefield — appearing functional on the surface, riddled with hidden pitfalls underneath, utterly unreadable and completely incapable of being extended or built upon.

Looking it over herself, Zhu Yun almost felt ill.

But Zhang Xiaobei was delighted.

Fast progress, high line count, and it runs. Practically perfect.

And so it was perfect — for a few days. Then came the disaster.

One afternoon Zhu Yun arrived at the laboratory and immediately sensed that something was off. Every person in the room was bent lower than usual, heads buried deeper than usual, the whole space as silent as a morgue.

Han Jiakang passed by her and murmured under his breath: “Zhang Xiaobei got an earful from Baoke. You should —”

The sharp, purposeful rhythm of high heels rang out in the corridor. Han Jiakang’s face went white. He didn’t finish the sentence and retreated to his station.

Zhang Xiaobei pushed the door open, crossed the room directly to where Zhu Yun sat, and slammed a thick sheaf of materials — from God only knew which other project — down on the desk in front of her.

She leveled a finger at Zhu Yun’s face and, in front of every single person in the laboratory, said in a high, sharp voice:

“You tell me — what exactly do you call that thing you wrote!”