295: Chapter 295 Confronting Gu Qing

Toward the end of the meal, only a few iron skewers remained on the plate. Zhao Yang poured two cups from the unfinished bottle of tea and gave one to Gu Qing. Gu Qing took it but didn't drink it immediately; she just placed the disposable cup on the table and spun it around twice. Then she looked up at Zhao Yang.

"Zhao Yang."

"Hmm?"

"Last year at the Changsha Banquet, you asked me if I could accept it if I found out the real you was different from what I imagined."

The cup in Zhao Yang's hand stopped moving.

"You never told me what that 'difference' was." Gu Qing's voice was steady, no different from when she usually discussed experimental data. "I want to ask you today. Because I feel that if you always have concerns in your heart, our relationship won't go deep. I want to know what you're worried about."

Zhao Yang didn't speak. Gu Qing didn't rush him either, just sitting there holding the plastic cup. At other tables of the barbecue stall, people were playing drinking games loudly, and someone at the next table was talking on the phone, making a racket. But their table seemed to be covered by a transparent glass dome; the outside sounds were muffled by a layer.

The silence lasted for about a minute. Zhao Yang put down the cup in his hand and spoke.

"At Yanlin University, besides you, there is someone else."

He didn't beat around the bush and said it directly. He talked about the story of Li Yan, starting from when she was a Counselor and approached him to borrow money, to the trouble at her home, her parents being imprisoned, her brother setting a trap and nearly selling her off, and finally to how he helped her resolve those troubles.

He spoke very concisely, without explaining the causes and effects or building up emotions, just telling it piece by piece. He said he already had feelings for her before he and Li Yan established a relationship, that he was the one who took the initiative later, and that he never intended to make excuses for himself.

Gu Qing listened. Her expression went from calm at the beginning to slowly turning pale. It wasn't a sudden rush of color that then receded, but like a piece of paper being slowly soaked by water, the color fading bit by bit. Her fingers holding the cup tightened slightly and then relaxed.

Zhao Yang finished. The two sat there, neither speaking again. The noise of the barbecue stall continued, the charcoal fire was still burning, but their table seemed to have fallen into a pit that no one could see.

After a long time, Gu Qing stood up. She didn't say a word. She just stood up, placed the cup on the table, and turned to walk out of the alley. Her pace was neither fast nor slow, and she didn't look back.

Zhao Yang stood up and followed behind her. He didn't chase after her to pull her back, nor did he call out to her; he just followed quietly at a distance of about three to five steps. The streetlights stretched their shadows long, one in front of the other, both walking toward the girls' dormitory.

When they reached the girls' dormitory building, Gu Qing walked forward a few steps, pushed open the glass door, and went inside. From the moment she entered until she disappeared around the corner of the stairs, she never once looked back. Zhao Yang stood downstairs for a while, looking in the direction she had gone, and then turned and left.

When Gu Qing pushed open the dormitory door, Mei Lin was leaning against the headboard reading a fashion magazine, and Zhou Xuan was sitting at the desk with an English version of a Signal Pathway Manual spread out in front of her. Wang Ting was not there; she should have gone to the washroom to wash up.

Mei Lin turned a page of the magazine, looked up at Gu Qing, and then put the magazine down.

Gu Qing didn't speak. She walked to her bed, took off her coat, draped it over the back of the chair, and bent down to untie her shoelaces.

"Did you have a fight with Zhao Yang?" Mei Lin sat up from the bed and slipped her feet into her slippers. "Didn't you two go out to eat together this afternoon?"

Gu Qing put her shoes away, climbed the ladder to the upper bunk, pulled over the quilt to cover herself, and lay on her side facing the wall.

"If you don't want to talk about it, then don't." Mei Lin didn't press further; she just walked to the door and turned off the overhead light, leaving only the small desk lamp by her own bed.

After a while, the dormitory door pushed open, and Wang Ting came back carrying a washbasin. She put the basin on the rack, dried her hands with a towel, and looked up to see Gu Qing's back curled up in the quilt. Wang Ting looked in that direction and then at Mei Lin.

"Oh, what's going on? Didn't our Miss Gu go out on a date with God Zhao today? Why does she look like she's coming back from a defeat?"

Wang Ting's voice wasn't loud when she spoke, but the sense of schadenfreude in her tone was not restrained at all. She had disliked Gu Qing since the first day she met her—Gu Qing's looks, family background, grades, and Zhao Yang's attitude toward her—everything she wanted but couldn't get, Gu Qing had. So seeing Gu Qing like this, she felt an indescribable sense of satisfaction.

Mei Lin frowned.

"Wang Ting, can you say a few words less?"

"What did I say? I'm just showing some concern." Wang Ting sat in her chair and combed her hair, her tone still the same. "But Gu Qing, don't take it too much to heart. People like Zhao Yang stand at the top and look down on everyone. You're just too close and see things too clearly. Some people shouldn't think too highly of themselves."

Mei Lin put the magazine on the table and stood up to look at Wang Ting, prepared to say something. At that moment, Zhou Xuan spoke first. She didn't even look up from her book, her voice very light, but her tone as cold as a liquid nitrogen tank in a laboratory.

"Wang Ting, shut up."

The entire dormitory fell silent. Zhou Xuan didn't usually speak much; she spoke the least among the four and had the lowest presence, basically never participating in any gossip. But she never wasted words; she said what needed to be said and followed through. Wang Ting was snubbed by her and felt embarrassed, but she didn't continue. She huffed, threw the comb back on the table, climbed onto her bed, pulled up the quilt, and turned her face inward.

No one in the dormitory spoke again. The orange light from the desk lamp hit the wall on Mei Lin's side. The rustling sound of people turning over in their quilts gradually stopped. Zhou Xuan turned a page of her book, the sound of paper rubbing very light. After an unknown amount of time, the footsteps of the last batch of students returning late were heard in the corridor. One light after another went out, and the entire building sank into darkness.

Zhao Yang returned to his apartment. He double-locked the door, threw his keys on the shoe cabinet in the entryway, and sat down at his desk. He didn't turn on the light. The streetlight shining through the window cut a grayish-white rectangle onto the tabletop.

He picked up his phone and opened the chat window with Gu Qing, his finger hovering over the screen. The cursor blinked in the empty space. He typed a line of text and then deleted it. He typed another line and deleted it again. Finally, he sighed, placed the phone face down on the table, and didn't send any message.

He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he reached out and switched on the desk lamp, pulling Computational Complexity Theory from the bookshelf and turning to the page with the bookmark. The place where he was stuck yesterday was still stuck. He had tried several angles, but he couldn't get past the hurdle between the Sensitivity Conjecture of Boolean Functions and the lower bounds of circuit complexity.

But today he didn't switch. He continued to calculate following yesterday's line of thought, deriving line by line. In the absence of a better idea, an exhaustive search was a decent method.

This kind of exhaustive search might one day find a path and lead to inspiration; this was also what most mathematicians often did when they lacked inspiration.

Early the next morning.

Zhao Yang arrived at the lab at the usual time. When he entered, Li Xin was already there, squatting in front of the incubator numbering several pots of Transgenic Rice. Zhao Yang put on his white lab coat, sat at his lab bench, and began preparing the reaction system for today's quantitative PCR.

A few minutes later, Gu Qing pushed the door open and entered. She was wearing a dark cardigan, and her hair was tied tighter than usual, her face expressionless. She walked to her lab bench, put down her bag, and picked up the sample list on the table to look through it, without looking toward Zhao Yang.