Xinmin Road was a wide street lined on both sides with rows of orange street lamps. Unknown birds roosted in the dense canopy of trees; the wind blew through and the leaves rustled and swayed.

Nearby was the main sports complex. Young men and women were playing ball in the moonlight. The road was busy and full of life. The bells of bicycles rang lightly alongside the rusty clatter of chains, and golden fallen leaves were scattered under the trees, painting some kind of vivid oil-canvas in the dim corners.

Not far away was a small convenience store — assorted goods of every kind and variety. Ning Sui lifted the transparent door curtain and peered inside, asking directly: “Excuse me, do you have any bandages?”

“The Yunnan Baiyao ones are sold out — only this kind left.”

The male shopkeeper had a cigarette dangling from his lip, posture indolent as he reclined in his chair with one leg crossed over the other, arm lazily outstretched to point at the display cabinet before her.

It was the cartoon kind of adhesive bandages — Doraemon, Chibi Maruko-chan.

She couldn’t quite imagine what those would look like on him.

Ning Sui blinked involuntarily, the corner of her mouth twitched upward then was quickly suppressed. She picked them up and passed them over: “This will do then.”

Xie Yichen followed her in. The little shop was a bit cramped, and he was too tall, so he ducked down slightly, watching Ning Sui scan the code and pay a little over twenty yuan, a small box of colorful cartoon items now in hand.

He tugged at the corner of his mouth: “What is this thing?”

Outside was the sports field, with benches by the entrance.

This side was a different exit, one that almost no one passed through. Ning Sui dug around in her backpack and found a box of iodine-soaked cotton swabs: “Sit down for a moment.”

Xie Yichen looked like he was going to say something, but sat down anyway. He stretched out his long fingers with casual indifference and, under the lamp, examined the scattered minor scrapes on the back of his hand. He exhaled a leisurely hum: “Honestly, it’s nothing — doesn’t matter if we do this or not.”

But Ning Sui looked carefully at the spot: “We should still disinfect it. We don’t want the wound to get infected.”

One could tell that punch just now had taken considerable force. It was even bleeding — the scab was forming shallowly on the surface, not yet fully coagulated: “Give me your hand.”

Ning Sui was standing. She deftly snapped open the white end of the cotton swab, watched the iodine seep through the tube to the other end, then bowed her head and, holding Xie Yichen’s hand in front of her, carefully and gently touched the reddish-brown tip to the raised knuckles of his hand.

The solution was a little cold, and where it made contact with the wound brought a faint, slight sting.

But what had a stronger presence right now was the warmth emanating from his broad, wide palm, and the low, slowly-settling breath nearby. Ning Sui’s hands were small, so she was almost cradling his fingers as she kept her head down, all apparent focus on applying the medication.

She hadn’t tied her hair up today. Her black, long, and smooth hair fell down past her warm ears, setting off the pale, fine skin of her profile.

The warm-toned lamplight fell on the top of her head, casting even her hair into a ring of golden, life-filled brightness at the edges.

Was there anyone in this world who could carry the warmth of the everyday world within themselves just by existing?

Without needing to carve out a piece of the sky through hardship and clamor — just standing there quietly, they would always land in a beautiful light.

Apart from the distant, rhythmic thudding of a basketball from the courts, a dull and steady beat, the atmosphere here was quiet, with only a hazy and dim light around them. Xie Yichen’s throat moved slightly, his gaze fixed unmoving on her slightly fluttering eyelashes.

There — they were soft, and seemed as if a single touch would send them into a gentle, continuous trembling.

“You……”

Ning Sui looked up, and realized he had been watching her.

She paused for quite a long moment before asking softly: “Does it hurt?”

Xie Yichen: “— It doesn’t.”

Ning Sui thought the wound looked like it should hurt, but he really didn’t show any particular reaction. So she carefully peeled open the strawberry bear adhesive bandage, slowed her movements, and stuck it onto the back of his hand.

Xie Yichen glanced over.

Pink cartoon print, silly-looking and conspicuous.

She was applying it with what seemed like a fair amount of enthusiasm.

“……”

“Mm.” Ning Sui thought for a moment, then suddenly noticed there were also scrape marks on the back of his left hand — the kind that looked like they’d been made by glass. “Why is there an injury here too?”

She looked up at him: “Xie Yichen.”

“Mm?”

Ning Sui pressed her lips together and ventured: “You didn’t specifically go out of your way to hit someone just to have symmetrical matching injuries, did you?”

“……”

Xie Yichen let out a snort of laughter through his nose and didn’t answer, instead fixing his gaze on her to ask: “Who was that guy.”

“He was my roommate’s ex-boyfriend — they broke up because he was cheating.” Ning Sui applied iodine to his left hand as well, then firmly applied a Kuromi-print adhesive bandage, pressing it down gently twice. “A nobody.”

Xie Yichen gave a lazy hum, took back the jacket she had been returning to him, and then picked up his bag and stood.

This place was not all that far of a walk from the Purple Bamboo sports field, so the two of them made their way north along Xinmin Road.

Xie Yichen strolled at a leisurely pace, stepping here and there on the thick layers of fallen leaves underfoot. Ning Sui glanced sideways and, following his lead, stepped on some herself — the soft, faint crunch sent her thoughts drifting back to that quiet snowy night in her second year of high school.

Several people on bicycles swept whooshing past them down the long slope. Xie Yichen still had his hands in his pockets. His long, dense lashes hung low, and yet his air remained at ease and unhurried.

His mouth was pressed into a gentle flat line as he looked down, without any particular expression. Ning Sui asked casually: “Everyone else has a bicycle, but you don’t?”

“Nope.”

“How come you haven’t bought one?” Tsinghua’s campus ran two kilometers north to south, didn’t it?

He gave a sound of acknowledgment, drawing out the ending: “Oh, because I have a motorbike.”

Ning Sui: “……”

Xie Yichen glanced sideways at her, the corner of his mouth lifting as he added: “Parked over by the dorm — I didn’t bring it out.”

And so they walked all the way to the Purple Bamboo sports field.

They hadn’t known this before arriving, but a large screen had been set up, and someone was adjusting the equipment — it seemed a film screening was about to begin.

On the lawn that was normally wide and open, students sat here and there in small, relaxed clusters.

There were even girls who had spread out picnic mats on the ground with a small night lamp beside them, sitting cross-legged with friends, waiting for the film to begin.

Ning Sui was visibly interested. Xie Yichen asked one of the male students nearby and found that this was a recruitment event run by the film club — they were screening a British independent film from the past couple of years that had received award nominations. It was fairly niche, called A Brilliant Young Mind (also known as X+Y).

Ning Sui snuck glances at the staff members bustling about and couldn’t help saying: “Your Tsinghua really has money — even a random campus club can afford equipment this good.”

“Yeah, that’s true.” Xie Yichen tilted his lips, then at an unhurried pace gave her a sidelong look. “There’s still time to transfer here, if you’re considering it.”

“……”

They also found a spot right in the middle toward the front. Ning Sui pulled out something from her bag that was shaped somewhat like a table mat — just large enough for two people to sit with a comfortable distance between them. Xie Yichen raised an eyebrow with mild interest: “How do you always have everything?”

It was all because Fanfan had prepared so much and kept stuffing things into her bag. Ning Sui gave him a look and said sincerely: “Yeah. Feel free to call me Sui-A-Dream.”

“……”

The campus supermarket, C Building, was right nearby. Before they settled in, Ning Sui suddenly said: “I’ll go buy some drinks?”

Xie Yichen’s tone was languid: “What for? Feel like drinking?”

The way he looked, he clearly didn’t take the injury on his body seriously at all.

Ning Sui thought, just in the things she’d personally witnessed, there had already been quite a few. She had no idea how many more there’d been that she hadn’t seen.

……Why did he keep getting hurt?

She also had no idea what had actually happened earlier today.

He didn’t bring it up on his own, and she had no way of finding out.

“No — to clean up your left hand a bit more.” Ning Sui kept her gaze down. “I’m worried the iodine wasn’t effective enough.”

Xie Yichen stilled for a moment, then quickly looked down at her. The expression in his eyes was dark and somewhat inscrutable.

Ning Sui held her breath for a beat, then after a moment made herself lift her head to look back at him, meeting his gaze in quiet silence.

“Are we going or not?” She was quite determined.

Xie Yichen looked at her steadily, then after a long pause let out a low, abrupt laugh.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

His voice was low and unhurried: “C Building was recently renovated — it’s pretty different from before. Want me to show you around?”

It really was different.

When Ning Sui and Ning Deyan had visited back then, she’d still been in middle school. Three or four years had passed — the place had been renovated several times already.

The underground supermarket was spacious and well-lit, shelves stocked with an array of goods. A few small food stalls alongside it sold skewers, fresh fruit, pastries, and milk tea. All payments were done via facial recognition — very convenient.

The alcohol shelf was right beside the cashier. Everything was available, and the prices at Tsinghua were quite low — apparently the school subsidized the costs. Xie Yichen carried a shopping basket, and Ning Sui thoughtfully placed several different cans of beer in.

The two of them casually browsed a lap around the supermarket and, when they returned, the film had just begun. The spot they’d chosen earlier now had other people in it, so they followed the track around to diagonally ahead, picking a more secluded spot that wasn’t too far from the screen.

Across the sports field, many students had brought desk lamps, and it looked like a lawn full of gleaming little stars.

This film told the story of a young autistic math genius named Nathan — strange in personality, impaired in expression, who gradually comes to understand what love is through the influence of others around him.

All around was quiet, everyone absorbed in the film. Ning Sui heard a rustling sound beside her — it was Xie Yichen handing her a can of beer.

He seemed to know she still found the process of opening cans amusing, and hadn’t done it for her.

The outside of the can was cool and slightly cold. Ning Sui stared at the pull tab, exploring it with her fingertip with a probing kind of curiosity.

With a satisfying crack, the beer fizzed and a small wave of liquid leapt out, with a few drops landing on her eyelashes.

Before she could even say anything, a tissue was held out in front of her, and from beside her came the low murmur of a quiet laugh rising from his throat.

Ning Sui suddenly felt her ears grow warm. She took the tissue and wiped her face, then unwound the fluffy scarf from around her neck that had been getting in the way.

She held the can, swirled it gently, and glanced at him before finally speaking: “What a coincidence — my pen pal’s username was apparently also Nathan.”

Xie Yichen had just picked up a can himself. Without any change in expression, he opened it smoothly and easily. His voice was low: “Is that so. What kind of person is he?”

Ning Sui said: “Very capable. I think he’s a genius.”

Xie Yichen’s expression paused for a moment, then he raised an eyebrow sharply, his tone carrying something quite intriguing: “— Oh, high praise.”

“Mm. His thinking is very sharp, and he has a real gift for mathematics. And what’s special is that, I think, his empathy is also very strong. He has an exceptionally good temperament.”

In the dark, with no streetlamp nearby, her black eyes were still lit up by the light around them, flickering with tiny sparks of gold.

Xie Yichen pressed down his dark gaze and hadn’t replied yet, when he heard Ning Sui say quietly: “The one and only flaw is that he’s a bit of a scoundrel.”

“?”

Xie Yichen: “What do you mean?”

Ning Sui slowly agreed: “Right, I’d like to know that too.”

“……”

“I’ve noticed that the pattern of how we interact is usually me sharing my confusion, and him guiding me through it. But he’s never told me anything about himself. Very mysterious. And he really enjoys listening to all the stories of my family life — like my little brother making trouble and my mom chasing him around with a beating.”

Ning Sui dropped her gaze slightly, pondering: “So I always feel like he’s actually some deeply concealed family-drama screenwriter, secretly mining my life for material.”

Xie Yichen: “……”

Actually, back then at the training camp in second year of high school, there had been around two hundred students from different provinces. He had only briefly crossed paths with many of them, didn’t know their names, and some he couldn’t even remember the faces of by now.

Ning Sui was the only one he’d had a real, defined connection with.

That evening, by chance, he’d overheard her on the phone, and seeing her in a low state, Xie Yichen had simply sat down and gone over the problems she was stuck on using her own exam paper.

So later, when Ning Sui sent him photos of competition exam papers through the math olympiad question-answering website, he had recognized her handwriting at a glance.

At the time, he hadn’t considered telling her who he was — partly because he was afraid of stumbling back into something painful for her, and partly because, he reasoned, even if she knew now, it didn’t mean anything. What could he do? They both still had the gaokao to get through.

And so, quite naturally, they started chatting online.

Xie Yichen discovered that Ning Sui was actually not the quiet introvert he’d imagined her to be — she was quite interesting, occasionally wonderfully absurd, full of unexpected, creative ideas.

Chatting with her from time to time put him at ease in a way little else did.

Perhaps it was the remove of the internet, but she sometimes spoke to him with unusual openness — about her family of origin, about what she liked and didn’t like. She talked a lot online, and had even mentioned to him once what she was allergic to.

Ning Sui always told him amusing stories from home — like that mischievous younger brother of hers, who had thirty-nine kilograms’ worth of defiance packed into a forty-kilogram frame, who’d done everything from climbing onto the roof to pulling off tiles, and had gotten himself thrashed for it more times than could be counted.

And her parents — always bickering, but still the ones who cared most for each other, who to this day without fail marked their wedding anniversary.

Her descriptions carried a vibrant, everyday warmth that swept over him — something he had never encountered before, alive with color and detail, both novel and wondrous.

Xie Yichen looked at her directly. The shifting light from the screen fell quietly over the two of them from the side, making their irises look dark and deep.

Quite a while passed.

The young man’s jaw was firm and well-defined. He seemed to give a slight smile, lazily raising his can: “Pick one — watch the film, or hear a story?”

Ning Sui straightened up, lips pressed together just slightly, but her eyes quietly gleaming: “Hear a story.”

Two cans clinked together in the air, metal on metal, the sound dull and crisp.

“Mm.” Xie Yichen’s voice dropped lower. He looked out across the clusters of people gathered together across the sports field, and after a moment finally spoke: “I saw my mom today.”

They hadn’t seen each other in several months.

Today, Qiu Ruoyun had come to Beijing on a business trip and said she wanted to have lunch with him. Xie Yichen naturally had no reason to refuse.

His maternal uncle Qiu Zhao had come along as well. The three of them, along with Qiu Ruoyun’s most trusted aide, found a fairly upscale private dining room in a restaurant near the university.

Over the course of the meal, Qiu Zhao and Qiu Ruoyun discussed company matters. Qiu Zhao felt that as the company had grown to its current scale, it needed more visibility and more opportunities. Going public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange or the US market could yield a higher valuation, and he hoped to push this forward actively.

Qiu Ruoyun, however, felt the timing wasn’t right. She and Xie Zhenlin had been planning for a long time and naturally understood the company very well. Every step had been taken carefully — accumulating strength before making a move. Acting too hastily could result in total failure. The foundation had to be solid first.

Qiu Zhao said he had already reached out to several Hong Kong foreign investment banks. Qiu Ruoyun had already been reluctant about Qiu Zhao’s appointment at the company — a concession made under the pressure of her elderly mother — and now her younger brother was constantly trying to interfere with the pace of the company’s development. So it was only to be expected that a fight would break out.

Qiu Zhao felt that since she was a businesswoman, sentimentality was the cheapest thing in the world: “Whatever else you want to say, the first thing is to get a few hundred million cashed out first! The stock market has been rising, and the economy will keep going up next year — if not now, when do you go public?”

“This thing is a commodity. You hold out for the best price, or when the wind changes and policy shifts, you can easily end up with nothing in your hands!”

Qiu Ruoyun remained colder, but her words struck precisely: “Zhenlin and I have our own plans. We welcome constructive input from people on our side, but we don’t welcome excessive meddling.”

“Don’t forget who put you in the position you’re in today. Either listen to me and do your job properly, or I can put you where you are just as easily as I can make you leave immediately.”

At some point, someone knocked over a glass on the table. A shard of glass flew and caught the back of Xie Yichen’s hand, slicing sharply across it.

The scene was so similar to something from years before — except that time, there had been much more blood.

The scar was right there. He’d been injured too many times in the past to pay it much attention. He didn’t know if Qiu Ruoyun had noticed today, but he figured even if she had, she wouldn’t have given it too much thought.

Xie Yichen felt, more than anything, a certain wordless exhaustion. The way they treated their interests was entirely stripped of any personal feeling — even with family, a single disagreement was enough for them to tear into each other at the dinner table.

If there ever came a day when the company truly ran into trouble, what would happen then? Xie Yichen didn’t know.

Xie Zhenlin had promised him they wouldn’t scatter when disaster struck.

“So — your aunt agreed to let your uncle into the company because of your grandmother?”

“Mm. Her mental state hasn’t been great recently — my grandfather’s death hit her very hard.” Xie Yichen didn’t say that the doctor had already diagnosed her with schizophrenia, but he thought Ning Sui could probably infer as much.

Ning Sui’s fingertips tightened involuntarily: “So — in your third year of high school, was that also why you withdrew from the competition selection?”

Xie Yichen gave a quiet hum.

Something in her chest ached suddenly, as if washed through with salt water. Ning Sui pulled her knees closer. In that moment she saw how skewed outsiders had always been — they only saw his brilliance and luminance, never knowing what he silently carried behind that radiance.

If he hadn’t withdrawn from the training team, Xie Yichen had the ability to make it onto the national team.

Even if, ultimately, the difference in outcome wasn’t enormous, Ning Sui still felt — these things had rightly been his, and to have missed them just like that was a genuine loss.

— He was meant to have had an even more magnificent life.

The two of them had each finished an entire can of beer. Their breaths carried a faint warmth between them.

Ning Sui’s gaze fell on its own, drawn downward. Over his hoodie he had put on a dark blue casual jacket, his left forearm covered completely.

“That — why? Can you say?”

Her tone was very soft, and her eyes had grown slightly bright with the wetness of feeling. Without noticing, her body had leaned forward — the posture of someone who wanted to be closer.

Ning Sui thought it was probably a secret. She pressed her lips together slightly. Xie Yichen furrowed his brow without speaking; those pitch-dark eyes made her heartbeat quicken further. Ning Sui quickly raised her hand and swore: “I absolutely won’t tell anyone. If I do — if I do, then I’ll—”

She deliberated for a moment, then said with an air of resigned resolve: “My brother’s future calculus homework: whenever he computes limits, the denominator will always be zero or positive infinity.”

“……”