“Four sixes!”
“Open it!”
The private room was bathed in neon lights, glasses clinking as drinks flowed freely.
Kick anything near your feet and you’d hit a beer bottle; the dice were flying through the air.
Tonight was the Math Department of the School of Science’s graduation party.
No matter how high a person’s IQ, when they want to have fun, they’ll always resort to the same foolish methods — karaoke and drinking.
Lin Qing curled up in a corner, her ears flooded with all manner of saccharine pop songs, the fruit platter in front of her already in a state of complete ruin.
There were far too many things to sort out before graduation, and she’d been dragged here by her roommate.
Even primitive humans only danced and celebrated after they’d secured food and shelter.
For a fresh graduate with no connections and an uncertain future, Lin Qing currently sat at the very bottom of the jungle’s food chain.
Where was the mood for revelry and indulgence?
She watched the department beauty — the “mic monopolizer” — holding court on the main singing platform, her voice a flirtatious lilt, her gaze languid and suggestive.
To call what she was doing “singing” would be generous; she was more accurately “flirting” with Zeng Rui, the department’s most eligible bachelor, seated in one of the booths.
A man’s failure to refuse is, in itself, a form of consent.
“Those two are made for each other.”
Someone who’d had a few too many blurted it out mindlessly. The comment was immediately met with a volley of withering glances from the onlookers around them.
They were all in the same department. There wasn’t a soul who didn’t know.
Deliberately or not, glances of sympathy and pity drifted toward Lin Qing’s impassive face.
Lin Qing and Zeng Rui had just broken up — about a week ago.
Zeng Rui was going abroad to continue his studies in Applied Mathematics at an Ivy League school.
As the son of a wealthy family, his parents had long since paved his road to Wall Street.
The department beauty was in the same category.
With one slight difference: Zeng Rui’s family had laid him a grand boulevard and rolled out the red carpet, while the department beauty’s family could only scrape together a dirt path.
Which was precisely why the department beauty was seizing this last opportunity, working as hard as she could to ingratiate herself with him.
Lin Qing found it all pointless. Once you’d seen through the logic of human nature, you’d realize that the petty dramas between men and women didn’t even qualify as seasoning.
In truth, from the moment she’d agreed to date Zeng Rui in her freshman year, Lin Qing had known a day like this would come.
Birds and fish don’t share the same path.
Small-town girl Lin Qing and rich-kid Zeng Rui were like two intersecting straight lines on a Euclidean plane.
Past the point of intersection, there was no further overlap — each extending infinitely in two completely opposite directions.
From this point on, their worlds would never meet again.
Lin Qing tipped her head back and drained the last bit of beer from the bottle she was holding, then set it down on her knee and prepared to quietly slip away.
If time couldn’t be spent on something worthwhile, then it was best spent resting.
Twenty minutes left — just enough to catch the last subway.
“I’m heading out!”
Lin Qing only leaned close to her roommate’s ear to announce her departure, but at that very moment, the entire KTV inexplicably fell into a collective silence.
It was as if a rollicking comedy film had been playing at full tilt and someone had suddenly hit pause.
The shout that tore from Lin Qing’s throat made her, against all her will, the biggest mood-killer in the room.
Everyone stared at each other.
Zeng Rui said nothing, his face darkening as he downed the drink in front of him in one silent gulp.
The department beauty sat perched on the edge of the main singing platform, her long legs dangling, the microphone hanging loosely in front of her abdomen, doing nothing to conceal the trace of smugness at the corner of her eyes.
In fact, she’d been keeping an eye on Lin Qing ever since she’d walked in. The moment she saw Lin Qing get up, she deliberately pressed the song-skip button with her freshly manicured nail!
“Lin Qing, stay a little longer. It’s barely past ten.”
Her roommate, sensing the awkward atmosphere, tried to smooth things over.
Lin Qing thought it over. Getting a car from here in the city center back to campus would run at least seventy or eighty yuan. Even split four ways, that was still twenty or thirty each.
The subway was only five yuan. The subway it was.
“No, I’ve got things to do tomorrow. I can’t stay up late. I’ll head back first. Everyone have fun!”
Under the heated gazes of the whole room, Lin Qing resolutely picked up her canvas bag and grabbed her coat.
“It’s not like you’d be missing much.”
Clearly, everyone was still in the mood to keep going.
A lively gathering always dreads the first person to leave, because once there’s one, there’ll be a second and a third.
“Exactly, Lin Qing. It’s rare for everyone to get together like this.”
“Didn’t you say you haven’t found a job yet? It’s not like you have work to get up for — what’s the rush?”
A classmate accidentally let slip, speaking before thinking.
After all, the fact that Lin Qing hadn’t secured a job after graduation had already made the rounds through the Applied Mathematics department, and the homeroom teacher had muttered about it privately on more than one occasion.
If a student from the Applied Mathematics department couldn’t find work, what major could?
The atmosphere grew even more strained.
Lin Qing surveyed the room around her and defused the situation herself: “Isn’t it precisely because I haven’t found a job that I need to go home early, get some sleep, and keep looking tomorrow?”
The department beauty could no longer contain herself. She stepped down gracefully from the singing platform and into the crowd.
The moment she opened her mouth, her words dripped with sarcasm directed squarely at Lin Qing: “Tomorrow’s Saturday — which company, which institution is open? If you’re going to kill the mood, at least come up with a better excuse. And if you really want to leave, just slip out quietly. Why make such a show of it? It’s so manipulative — making everyone stop to beg you to stay.”
Lin Qing couldn’t be bothered to deal with her and continued gathering her things.
Her legs were her own. She’d leave when she wanted to.
Saying goodbye was common courtesy.
As for the department beauty’s moral manipulation — Lin Qing was too slippery a fish to take the bait.
Lin Qing’s cold indifference quickly infuriated the department beauty.
She spoke loudly to the people around her, in a way that was obviously meant for everyone to hear: “Isn’t she just trying to pretend she’s leaving first, in front of everyone, hoping a certain someone will feel sorry for her and come running after? You’ve already broken up, and you’re still playing hard to get. Pathetic.”
And after saying so, she cast a pointed, meaningful look toward Zeng Rui, who sat in the prime spot.
She wanted to cue him to take a stance.
Who was actually the manipulative one here?!
Lin Qing was becoming a little annoyed herself.
The department beauty was obviously bursting with something she’d been sitting on for a long time and was looking to stir up trouble.
In truth, Lin Qing hadn’t been particularly interested in this Dutch-treat graduation gathering to begin with.
Knowing full well that after graduation everyone would go their separate ways and might never cross paths again for the rest of their lives, why waste the time and energy on social niceties?
Lin Qing was a pragmatist.
Zhang Xueyou’s song “Blessing” was already a thirty-year-old relic — it didn’t fit the current climate.
Four years they’d spent together. The whole department was just a handful of people.
A group of people who prided themselves on being “sharp calculators,” corralled together in the Mathematics Department by their academic credentials and degrees.
Calculating credit hours, GPA, rankings, scholarships, graduate school recommendations — all that scheming and competing — and they still hadn’t had enough?
If you were genuinely close to someone, you’d find a way to meet up — graduation or not.
The only reason she’d come at all was to give herself a sense of ceremonial closure on her four years of university life.
The ways she could show herself kindness were already few enough, and today she’d even managed to step on a landmine.
Lin Qing dropped her canvas bag and coat outright, and a cold smile curled at the corner of her lips.
She swept her gaze across the entire private room. Every face wore the expression of someone waiting for a spectacle.
She snatched the microphone from the department beauty’s hand and replied in a cool, measured tone: “You say I did it deliberately? Four years in the Mathematics Department, and it seems you’ve learned nothing. You don’t even know what ‘spontaneous order’ is!”
The room went even quieter. You could have heard a hair hit the floor.
Lin Qing’s composure held steady as she delivered her argument with perfect calm: “The silence just now was a form of spontaneous order that emerged naturally within a scale-free network — spontaneous order.”
On the sofa, Zeng Rui gave a barely perceptible shudder and straightened up in his seat.
“Lin Qing, don’t think that just because your GPA is high, you can use anything to argue your way out of anything!”
The department beauty narrowed her eyes and shot Lin Qing a withering glare, crossing her arms with undisguised contempt.
Lin Qing pressed her advantage without mercy: “Whether it’s sophistry, you’ll know if you keep listening. Every one of us, when we talk, doesn’t speak continuously — we start and stop. Suppose today, in this room, one person’s speaking pattern is five seconds talking and one second pausing; another is six seconds talking and half a second pausing. Over a long enough cycle, everyone’s pauses will eventually coincide — and that’s what triggers a ‘collective silence.'”
“The collective silence effect — I’ve heard of that.”
Lin Qing’s argument was too compelling; it immediately triggered someone’s memory.
“Orderly plus orderly always yields orderly.”
“Differentiable plus differentiable always yields differentiable.”
“So pauses plus pauses will always produce a pause.”
As fellow Applied Mathematics students, when the subject turned professional, no one wanted to be left behind.
People began talking over each other, showing off, chiming in to agree.
The department beauty was seething. She hadn’t expected Lin Qing to use a single mathematical concept to turn the entire room’s opinion around.
The look in Zeng Rui’s eyes as he watched Lin Qing visibly softened, betraying a trace of reluctance, faint but unmistakable.
Yet Lin Qing showed no indication of returning the microphone to the department beauty.
They weren’t friends before graduation — was she really supposed to expect them to become connections afterward?
If she was going to make enemies, she might as well do it thoroughly.
She lowered her head, ticking off on her fingers as she continued her reckoning: “There are eighteen people here tonight. According to the model, only one-third of them need to fall silent simultaneously to trigger this collective silence. I had just gotten up; my three roommates were on their phones; Zeng Rui was drinking. That means there was still one more person who, at just the right moment, stuttered to a stop and became the final element needed to complete the sequence.”
The department beauty’s face flushed crimson.
Every pair of eyes in the room turned toward her.
“Nobody here is oblivious. You’ve hogged the mic all night, and just now, you skipped the song right before the chorus hit. Those petty little tricks of yours are as transparent as Sima Zhao’s ambitions — everyone can see them.” Lin Qing exposed her without mercy.
“That was a coincidence,” the department beauty insisted.
“Call it a coincidence if you like. Either way, everyone in this room has taken a course in probability theory.”
Lin Qing gave her one final contemptuous glance, then set the microphone down gently on the black marble surface, slung her canvas bag over her shoulder, and walked toward the door with her head held high.
She understood the wisdom of not pursuing a cornered enemy.
Stepping out of the building, the chill of early winter immediately enveloped Lin Qing.
She instinctively pulled the collar of her down jacket tighter and, treading on the sparse, fallen leaves, set off at a brisk pace toward the subway entrance.
“Lin Qing — Lin Qing! Lin Qing!!”
It wasn’t until she heard someone calling her name repeatedly from behind that Lin Qing stopped.
Her fair, cool face emerged from the soft white down of her jacket collar.
The one who had chased after her was, of all people, Zeng Rui!
He was wearing only a single layer, his reverse-triangle physique — the product of years of regular exercise — fully on display.
A pity. Lin Qing had lost all interest in that particular frame long ago.
What was more irritating was that the department beauty had actually followed after them too, clutching Zeng Rui’s Moncler jacket.
“You rushed out so fast you didn’t even put on a coat — trying to freeze to death?” The department beauty draped the jacket over Zeng Rui’s shoulders, her tone carrying the pretense of a complaint but the reality of coquettish affection, right in front of Lin Qing.
Unfortunately for her, a sudden surge of reluctance meant that in this moment, Zeng Rui’s eyes held only Lin Qing.
“Lin Qing, is this really how things have to end between us?”
The one who couldn’t accept it was, to Lin Qing’s surprise, Zeng Rui himself.
Lin Qing pressed her lips together, gave a slight smile, and asked in return: “What other option is there?”
Life wasn’t a romantic drama. Not every girl who broke up with a rich boy would end up facing a future mother-in-law who slapped a five-million-yuan check on the floor and begged her to walk away from her son.
Lin Qing saw things clearly.
Setting aside the vast difference in their family backgrounds, the simple fact of him going abroad made any future between them impossible.
Long-distance relationships only need to overcome distance.
International ones have to conquer time zones as well.
Everyone loves themselves more than they love others. Zeng Rui couldn’t give up going abroad for her, and she couldn’t love him to the point of losing herself.
This equation had no solution.