Qu Xiaowan and Situ Jie had a brief exchange over the phone afterward. It was the same night the “negotiation” had ended in such dramatic fashion—strictly speaking, it was already the small hours of the next morning. Situ Jie herself couldn’t quite believe that, amid all that anxiety, unease, fear, and confusion, she had still managed to fall into a deep sleep. Perhaps she simply hadn’t fully absorbed what had happened; some part of her kept insisting it couldn’t be real.
The call came from an unfamiliar number, and the caller didn’t identify herself, but Situ Jie recognized Qu Xiaowan’s voice all the same.
Qu Xiaowan told her that if her attitude that afternoon toward Tan Shaocheng and Liu Zhisu had ended up dragging Situ Jie into trouble, that was her fault, and she was sorry—but only for that. She wasn’t asking for forgiveness; she didn’t need anyone’s forgiveness. Those photographs had been taken with her consent, by Zou Jin; no one had forced anyone into anything. She had loved him at the time, and had been willing to do anything, and she felt no need to regret it now.
Situ Jie wasn’t in the mood to offer any gracious words in return. She genuinely couldn’t understand Qu Xiaowan’s choices, nor could she guess what regrets everyone dragged into this mess would eventually have to bear. And yet, at the same time, she found she couldn’t hate Qu Xiaowan either—much less forgive her. In truth, she could no longer tell who was right and who was wrong. Even though she had always been a person who saw things in black and white, this was the first time she felt the line between good and evil blur into something murky and uncertain.
Was Liu Zhisu—who had spent four years humbling himself before his advisor only to strike back in such a twisted, devastating way—truly the villain?
Wasn’t Tan Shaocheng, whom she had always disliked, simply defending, as a victim, what should rightfully have been hers?
And Zou Jin… she wanted to hurl every word of loathing she could summon at his shamelessness and vileness. He had dragged her into a disaster that had nothing to do with her—and yet his original motive had, in fact, been a selfish desire to protect her. It was tragic and absurd all at once.
If she condemned Qu Xiaowan’s recklessness and self-indulgence, then was her own capitulation really the right choice?
“I only want to ask you one thing—what are you going to do about Wu Jiang?” That was the only thing Situ Jie could think to say to her.
“I won’t leave him,” Qu Xiaowan said. “He told me just yesterday that he’s decided to take me home to meet his parents. No matter what his parents think, no matter what happens, he wants to be with me. I’ve always said he’s a fool, and even if that’s a foolish thing to say, it’s enough for me. He can leave me if he wants—but I won’t be the one to leave first.”
She went on to share a number of small, ordinary things from her time with Wu Jiang. Like the time they went to see a movie she liked, and he got bored and fell asleep, spilling the popcorn he’d been holding all over the floor, then insisted he’d been awake the whole time and that the movie was great and he wanted to see it again. Or the time she’d gone home for a few days, and when they met again, he’d asked if she’d missed him—and she’d said yes, which had startled him more than she expected. It was only then that she realized she was capable of missing someone only for him, when she’d once believed she would love, until the day she died, a man she could apparently never have.
Situ Jie could never understand why Qu Xiaowan had chosen three in the morning to say all this to someone she wasn’t even particularly close to. Did she really have no better person to confide in? And yet, more than once afterward, Situ Jie found herself doubting whether that phone call had ever happened at all—whether the whole thing was simply something she had imagined, or some disjointed dream. She would later even dream of Qu Xiaowan singing softly in her ear an old song, its melody drifting through fragments in the dream, so vivid that upon waking she could still hum a few of its lines—and yet she knew it could not possibly have been real.
Part of why she came to doubt her own memory was that she’d taken that midnight call in a half-asleep daze, and the content of the conversation defied all reason, giving her every reason to suspect that the unfamiliar number left in her call log was nothing more than a single ring from some prank caller. It was possible, too, that all those details Qu Xiaowan had supposedly described had actually come from Wu Jiang, and that her mind, in some fevered state, had simply grafted them onto Qu Xiaowan—perhaps she had never actually woken in the middle of that night at all. More importantly, the period that followed—not particularly long, but not brief either—was one of the strangest stretches of her entire life. So much happened during that time that should have been carved into her memory like an inscription on stone, immune to the erosion of years, right up until the day she died. And yet the exact opposite happened. She was never able to piece together a complete picture of that period, not even many years later. Every time she tried with all her might to trace its shape truthfully, she was met with a hollow sense of futility. Anyone who has had a vivid dream understands the feeling—the way the scenery in a dream is always a murky yellow, veiled as if by fog; you know something is there, but you can never quite make it out clearly. Whether this was some instinct of self-protection, or simply because she had revisited that period, and dreamed of it, so many times over the seven years that followed—so many recollections and dreams, tangled and overbearing, some true and some invented, taking turns to fill her, clinging to her more closely than the truth itself—the real details had, in the end, been swallowed up by an ever-receding past, until they no longer seemed to matter.
It wasn’t only Qu Xiaowan’s phone call that felt this way; even the timing of when the scandal actually broke, exactly how long after that failed negotiation, was something Situ Jie could no longer pin down. She vaguely recalled it being just before graduation—she had just seen, in the June issue of the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and another leading domestic pharmacology journal, a paper bearing both Zou Jin’s and Liu Zhisu’s names, and then, overnight, it seemed the entire pharmacy school—no, the entire university, or perhaps the entire pharmaceutical industry in the city—was engulfed in scandal. It had everything to draw attention: academic fraud, backroom dealings over graduate school recommendations, the unwritten rules of academia, a tangle of grudges between teacher and students, and salacious secrets besides. Long after the initial uproar died down, people still couldn’t stop talking about it.
The absurd part was how oblivious Situ Jie, the supposed protagonist of this whole drama, had been to it all. It was only after a call from Wu Jiang that she’d frantically opened the campus BBS. And only then did she understand why he hadn’t wanted to say another word on the phone—because in his position, she wouldn’t have had any words left either.
The BBS was already in an uproar, post after post crowded with exclamation points filling a page usually known for its blandness. But those posts all inevitably circled back to two threads, both pinned to the top, both with page after page of replies.
The first was titled: “My Conscience and My Anger Won’t Let Me Stay Silent Any Longer.”
The second was even more jarring: “I Was Denied the Fairness That Was Rightfully Mine—Just Because I Wouldn’t Climb Into My Advisor’s Bed?”
Judging by the timestamps, the second post had gone up several hours after the first, reading almost like a response to it—each echoing the other, together shaping a single sensational story into something whole. In this story, a young doctoral student had endured four years of silence beneath an overbearing, morally bankrupt advisor, and yet had, somehow, retained one last shred of conscience and passion. He recounted his experience in a heavy, measured narrative—how, as an ordinary student who had once dreamed of studying under an advisor he deeply admired, he had, over the following years, been rudely awakened to reality, discovering that the academic world he’d naively believed to be a kind of sanctuary was in fact riddled with dark corners. His advisor, a well-known scholar with an impressive body of research and publications to his name, had spent years exploiting his students’ cheap labor, even claiming credit for their work as his own—much of his so-called achievement, in truth, resting entirely on others’ efforts. Worse still was the man’s greed, and the brutal, degrading way he treated his students.
Even as it laid bare these facts, the post tried to present itself as objective and self-reflective, with the author admitting that his advisor genuinely possessed formidable academic ability, and offering his own analysis of why he had endured so much unfair treatment in silence for so long—nothing more than the old mindset that “once a teacher, forever a father,” and the belief that “no parent is ever truly in the wrong,” leaving him with no choice but to endure, a kind of endurance he now recognized as pedantic and cowardly. It was only when another innocent girl was dragged into it that his sympathy for her, and his fury at the injustice, finally became too much to keep silent about. This girl, he wrote, had suffered repeated setbacks simply for refusing to submit to the professor’s unspoken rules—denied a fair shot at scholarships, and very nearly stripped of her graduate school recommendation as well. His most basic sense of justice had compelled him to tell her the truth, only to be met with his advisor’s retaliation, to the point that even graduating on schedule had become a luxury he could no longer count on—until, finally pushed past his limit, he’d resolved to make everything public. He hinted, delicately, that his advisor’s private life was far from clean, that he maintained improper relationships with more than one female student. He did not name the advisor outright, but the details he let slip left little room for imagination; the truth all but announced itself.
But the real storm was still to come. In the replies that followed, someone posted, anonymously, a large batch of photographs—photographs that could only be described as obscene. Anyone at the university with functioning eyesight could tell, from the reasonably clear scans, that the man in them bore a striking resemblance to the pharmacy school’s associate dean, though gone was his usual polished elegance; his no-longer-youthful body was laid bare for all to see. As for the woman in the photographs—beautiful, youthful—who else could she be but Qu Xiaowan, Associate Dean Zou’s star pupil? So many people on campus had seen her at various university events, always taken her for someone untouchably composed and aloof; in these photographs, all that remained was her seductive, unguarded self.
As if to prove the photographs were genuine, alongside the ones set in a bedroom were several taken outside Zou Jin’s private residence—some blurry, some sharp, the subjects in every one of them oblivious to the camera, apparently unaware they were being caught on film. Qu Xiaowan moved through her middle-aged advisor’s home as though it were entirely her own domain, and the accompanying captions took pains to point out that she was not the only one with that privilege. Because, in another set of these photographs, there was yet another lovely face—one that belonged to a woman sitting close beside Zou Jin in the small courtyard at night, his hand resting gently over hers, his expression tender. Then, in the photographs that followed, Qu Xiaowan appeared on the verge of tears, forming, together with the other two, a scene rich with implied drama. Further down, another girl was seen walking along the path outside the Zou family’s gate, the streetlight rendering her figure sharp and clear. This photo, too, carried its own caption: Leaving late at night.
The faintly rustling grass, the small, scattered sounds—the long-standing puzzle finally had an answer. So that was how it had been. The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind it—except here, a foolish spider had simply blundered in, an unexpected windfall, killing two birds with one stone.
Situ Jie stared at the photograph of herself, and the feeling was deeply surreal. How could she possibly hope that others’ eyes were poor enough to miss it—one glance and the “evidence” seemed damning enough. Plenty of sharp-eyed people would recognize her; that alone was hardly the worst of it. Somewhere further down, someone even sharper had connected the earlier, faceless woman in the indecent photos to her as well—who was to say that woman couldn’t be Qu Xiaowan?
By the time she’d read this far, Situ Jie had gone strangely calm. Things had already reached this point; there was nothing left that could frighten her further. So when she scrolled down to the second post, she read it with far more composure, her grip on the mouse no longer trembling. Unlike the first post, this one’s author began by laying out her own circumstances in some detail. Once again, in those plain, unadorned words, Situ Jie found herself confronted with Tan Shaocheng’s poverty, and the arduous road she’d walked just to stay in school. She read every word carefully, missing not a single line of the accusations, along with the photographic evidence relating to the scholarship and the graduate recommendation. At the end was an audio recording—Zou Jin’s own voice, admitting fault and promising some form of compensation, and, unsurprisingly, an apology from Situ Jie as well. Hearing that part, she let out a short, involuntary laugh.
Anyone who read this post would surely understand the first author’s passion and impulsiveness—anyone would feel that same righteous anger, surely, at a girl so fragile and yet so resilient, holding fast to herself in her most desperate circumstances, hoping only that her own hard work could change her fate. She hadn’t realized that a person with nothing but a clean conscience is always at a disadvantage in this world—so when she refused to yield to the professor’s abuse of power, she was punished again and again by the machinery working against her behind the scenes. Had she not encountered that conscientious fellow student, and that other, more benevolent senior figure, she might still be in the dark now, believing that her repeated disappointments, despite all her effort, were simply bad luck, never suspecting that a pair of shameless hands had been pulling the strings behind it all. Most remarkable of all, she had refused the professor’s offer of compensation, in money or in academic favor, after everything came to light. Her father, who had just passed away, had often told her while he was alive that no matter how poor you were, you must never lose your dignity. She wanted nothing—only justice—even if it meant facing retaliation all over again.
By the time Situ Jie finished reading, she was starting to understand. She wasn’t the only fool here; even Qu Xiaowan had been naive, believing that her own recklessness had brought all this about. In truth, this was a flawlessly laid trap, and every one of them had fallen into it without realizing. The most skillful hunter never rushes, never shows mercy—he simply knows exactly when to spring the trigger, and no prey ever escapes. It made no difference how many times she apologized, what kind of compensation was offered, or whether a teacup shattered on the floor or not—the result would always be the same. Every struggle only drove them deeper into the trap, one step at a time.