Why did Jiang Yubai have such a captivating smile?
Lin Zhixia gazed at him unblinkingly, suddenly recalling a line from Tagore's "The Gardener": "My heart is a bird of the wilderness that has found its sky in your eyes."
The deep and vast sky still awaited her exploration. Driven by an unknown force, she couldn't resist drawing closer to him again. Like positive and negative charges attracting each other, the distance between them grew smaller and smaller.
The only problem was, they were still lying on the same bed.
Reason told Jiang Yubai he should get up and leave. But he couldn't maintain his usual composure. This narrow single bed was his utopia, where the delusions rooted deep in his heart ran wild.
Jiang Yubai happened to grab a corner of the quilt. He pulled it up to cover his face, wanting to regain his calm as quickly as possible.
However, Lin Zhixia also slipped under the covers and began playing with Jiang Yubai. She pounced on him beneath the quilt like a cat chasing a mouse, leaving him with no escape. She even asked him: "Are you avoiding me?"
He quickly denied it: "No, I..."
The pure white quilt enveloped the bed, forming a closed circle. In such an airtight, hidden world, Jiang Yubai's wording became rather obscure: "Need to adjust."
"Adjust?" Lin Zhixia seemed to understand yet not quite.
Jiang Yubai remained enigmatic, answering briefly: "Yes."
Lin Zhixia showed concern: "How are you adjusting? Using the Meditation method I taught you?"
Jiang Yubai falsely claimed: "The method you taught me is indeed useful." A faint, almost imperceptible fragrance surrounded him as he lay on the side near the edge of the bed. Lin Zhixia carefully extended her index finger, resting it on the first button of his shirt.
As if possessed, he reached out his hand and directly unfastened that button.
Lin Zhixia's eyes widened in surprise.
In Lin Zhixia's view, Jiang Yubai had always been someone "to be admired from afar but not treated with disrespect." He needed several minutes to prepare himself just to kiss her, and his clothing style was quite conservative. She never expected him to take the initiative to this extent.
To show her respect for him, Lin Zhixia politely sought his opinion: "I... I'm really curious, could you let me take a look?"
Jiang Yubai resignedly unfastened the second button of his shirt: "Just for a little while."
"How long is a little while?" Lin Zhixia quietly asked him.
Jiang Yubai pulled open the third button: "Ten seconds."
His clothes were in disarray, his collar open, revealing a broad expanse of his chest. The firm musculature flowed in smooth lines, as if meticulously sculpted by divine hands.
Both shy and excited, Lin Zhixia couldn't help but exclaim: "So amazing, you must work out very hard."
Jiang Yubai's fingertips touched the fourth button, and this territory soon fell as well, revealing his well-defined abdominal muscles. He still wanted to maintain a final shred of restraint in front of Lin Zhixia, determined not to let her think of him as frivolous or casual.
This display would begin from the collarbone and end at the abdominal muscles.
Lin Zhixia lay on her side against the wall. Her eyes shone with an appraising light as she commented with relish: "Absolutely perfect."
But Jiang Yubai had begun the countdown: "Ten, nine, eight, seven..."
Only then did Lin Zhixia remember - he had said he would only show her for ten seconds.Lin Zhixia's eyes were pure and clear as she spoke gently to Jiang Yubai, "We grew up together, our bond runs as deep as it gets. Our physical structures are different, so it's natural for me to be a little curious about you. Let me study you a bit—it's not like I'm going to do anything to you."
Jiang Yubai stopped counting. His expression dimmed, his voice low and hoarse as he asked, "You want to see me... just out of curiosity?"
He left another question unspoken: Like flipping through an unfamiliar book?
Lin Zhixia hurried to explain, "No, curiosity only accounts for forty percent. The other sixty percent... is because you're Jiang Yubai, my boyfriend, and I'll take responsibility for you in the future too."
Lin Zhixia's voice was soft and sweet, and Jiang Yubai, somewhat mollified by her coaxing, forgot about the "curiosity" making up forty percent of her motivation.
Under the fluffy quilt, the temperature seemed to rise steadily. Jiang Yubai's breathing grew uneven, his chest warm, and no matter how Lin Zhixia's fingertips traced over him, he didn't make a reciprocal request, much less say to her, "Let me take a look at you too."
He willingly became her subject of study.
That long morning was rather challenging for Jiang Yubai, while Lin Zhixia was in extremely high spirits.
After breakfast, Lin Zhixia took Jiang Yubai's hand and went out for a walk. They strolled a long way down the street and turned into a nearby park, where, by sheer coincidence, they ran into Wen Qi.
Wen Qi was wearing a waterproof black coat, sitting alone on a bench. A flock of gray pigeons clustered around his feet. Their feathers glossy, they huddled together, cooing incessantly. No matter how much birdseed Wen Qi scattered, the pigeons never seemed to have their fill.
Lin Zhixia greeted him, "Wen Qi?"
Wen Qi chuckled, "Ha!"
Lin Zhixia found it a bit odd. She could sense Wen Qi meant no harm, but his behavior, mannerisms, and speech were all distinctly unconventional.
For instance, at that moment, with only a sparse crowd in the park, Wen Qi shrank into the far corner of the bench, glancing sideways at Lin Zhixia and Jiang Yubai. He tightened his coat around himself, as if mustering immense resolve, before finally saying, "Hello."
It was Saturday.
For Wen Qi, this was his personal time.
He strictly adhered to one rule—no socializing during personal time.
But Lin Zhixia had already greeted him. If he didn't respond, his peculiarity would be too obvious.
Wen Qi stood up from his seat and heard Lin Zhixia reply, "Jiang Yubai and I are out for a walk. How about you? Did you come to the park specifically to feed the pigeons?"
"Yeah," Wen Qi acknowledged. He shoved his hands into his pants pockets, his gaze drifting toward the lush green bushes.
"Oh, by the way," Lin Zhixia suddenly remembered something, "I'm going to be a teaching assistant next semester. You mentioned that our senior was once complained about by undergraduates. Could you tell me why she was complained against?"
This was an important matter.
It concerned Lin Zhixia's preparations for her teaching assistant role.
After all, the Indian senior and Lin Zhixia were in the same research group. The mistakes the senior made, Lin Zhixia might also commit.Lin Zhixia was still waiting for Wen Qi's answer, but Wen Qi remained tight-lipped. He mechanically repeated the motion of feeding pigeons until Jiang Yubai sat down beside him. Scooping up a handful of birdseed and scattering it, he finally said: "The senior student suppresses students' confidence."
During his master's degree studies, Wen Qi had very little interaction with his classmates. But he often overheard others talking in places like the laundry room or shared kitchen.
British university dormitories typically don't have balconies or places to hang laundry. The dormitory provides shared machines like washers and dryers, located in the ground floor laundry room.
One evening, Wen Qi was folding clothes in the laundry room when two particularly dejected undergraduates happened to be sitting nearby. Holding canned beer, they quietly complained about an Indian teaching assistant named "Aishwarya" who brutally crushed their confidence during her classes.
This teaching assistant named "Aishwarya" was precisely the Indian senior student Lin Zhixia had just mentioned.
Aishwarya was born in Mumbai, India, and completed her undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay - the most difficult university to get into across India. To gain admission to this institution, she had pushed herself extremely hard throughout high school, averaging less than six hours of sleep per day.
After her undergraduate studies, Aishwarya pursued a master's degree in the United States. Having accumulated sufficient research papers and secured scholarship funding, she then decided to pursue her PhD at Cambridge. With an outstanding academic record, she became a teaching assistant in her second year of doctoral studies.
However, the two undergraduates claimed that Aishwarya deliberately created intense academic pressure, often making students feel that "their ignorance stemmed from incompetence." She never used profanity or directly criticized anyone, but whenever students asked her questions, she would display a "how could you not know this" questioning expression.
On another occasion, Aishwarya was deriving a formula on the blackboard and initially showed patience. Later, when she asked two consecutive questions that an undergraduate answered incorrectly, her expression suddenly turned dark and terrifying, while she repeatedly muttered: "You must read more mathematics books."
That undergraduate nearly burst into tears on the spot.
"She's like a vicious witch" - this was the evaluation from those involved.
Thus, Wen Qi learned the full story behind the "Aishwarya complaint incident."
However, Wen Qi couldn't articulate it completely in words - face-to-face communication made him nervous.
He had heard that Lin Zhixia and Aishwarya were collaborating on a research paper.
He originally didn't want to get involved in this messy situation, but then it occurred to him that Lin Zhixia had exceptionally high intelligence, and she might unintentionally harm a group of undergraduates, creating consequences similar to Aishwarya's - with this consideration in mind, after returning home, Wen Qi wrote a long email to Lin Zhixia.
The email detailed the time, location, people involved, the cause and progression of the incident, and even included the university's handling outcome.
The university committee had received the undergraduates' complaints, but they didn't initiate an investigation against Aishwarya nor impose any penalties on her.Because, according to the university's "Student Complaint Procedure" regulations, students must submit a complaint report within 28 days after the occurrence of a severe incident—aishwarya's students had overlooked this requirement. They endured for several months until they entered their junior year, only then recalling the severe blow aishwarya had dealt them, which resulted in their complaint being entirely dismissed by the university.
Wen Qi carefully recalled the undergraduates' conversations, jotting down everything he could remember in the email.
This lengthy email totaled over two thousand words. The main body was in Chinese, though it also contained some English words.
After finishing the email, Wen Qi meticulously reviewed it once more.
He picked up a cup of coffee, took a silent sip, and just as he was about to hit the send button, his inbox chimed abruptly.
It turned out his advisor had sent a group email inviting all members of the research group to dinner.
Every year, whenever new members joined the group, the advisor would treat everyone to a dinner—a long-standing tradition in their research team.
Wen Qi nodded. After reading his advisor's email, he scrolled the mouse wheel back and forth, then returned to the previous email, accidentally copying a string of recipients into the CC field—unaware of this, he directly pressed the send button.
Instantly, Wen Qi broke out in a cold sweat.
His email titled "Complaint Incident Involving aishwarya" had not only been sent to Lin Zhixia but also to his entire research group, including his advisor and aishwarya herself.
For someone with social anxiety, this was almost the epitome of doomsday.
He knew, with profound certainty, that he was finished.
If the Indian senior student were a witch, he was about to become her sacrificial offering.
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