296: Chapter 296 Did they have a fight?

Everyone in the laboratory felt that something was a bit off when they saw this scene.

Li Xin squatted in front of the incubator, marker in hand, but his gaze kept drifting toward Gu Qing and Zhao Yang. Usually, the first thing Gu Qing did upon entering the lab was to circle around Zhao Yang's lab bench. Sometimes she would ask what reagents he was using today, and sometimes she would just stand there and take a look without saying anything. Today, from the moment she entered the door to the moment she sat down, she didn't even tilt her head toward Zhao Yang's direction once.

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When Zhou Ting walked over with the primer calculation sheet, she intentionally took a few extra glances. After Gu Qing helped her check the decimal points and returned the calculation sheet, she continued to lower her head to prepare her own reaction system. Zhou Ting didn't leave; she stood nearby and lowered her voice.

"What's going on with you and Zhao Yang?"

"It's nothing," Gu Qing replied without looking up.

Zhou Ting glanced over at Zhao Yang's side again. Zhao Yang was labeling centrifuge tubes, his movements the same as usual, with no visible abnormalities. However, the two of them hadn't spoken a word all morning; any normal person could tell there was a problem.

"Having a tiff?"

"I said it's nothing."

Zhou Ting didn't ask further and returned to her own lab bench with the calculation sheet. Li Xin leaned over, pointed toward Zhao Yang with his marker, and mouthed, "What happened?" Zhou Ting shook her head.

After finishing the labeling at his lab bench, Zhao Yang inserted the centrifuge tubes into the ice box. When he looked up, his eyes happened to meet Gu Qing's. For perhaps a fraction of a second, Gu Qing was the first to shift her gaze away. Zhao Yang's movements paused for a moment before he closed the lid of the ice box, saying nothing more.

He had long anticipated the situation between him and Gu Qing. Ever since he intended to lay his cards on the table at the Changsha Banquet last year, he knew this day would come sooner or later. The only difference was whether it would be early or late, and how Gu Qing would choose. Now that it had happened, he wouldn't go and explain anything.

After all, this matter was his own problem; if Gu Qing couldn't accept it, that was only natural.

Throughout the day, the atmosphere in the laboratory was very strange. Previously, Zhao Yang and Gu Qing would often huddle together to discuss data, standing in front of the whiteboard to draw network diagrams, sometimes for half an hour at a time. Today, they each did their own thing, and if they had any questions, they went directly to ask Professor Gu Ming.

When running a gel in the afternoon, Zhao Yang needed someone to help him load the samples, so he called for Li Xin. Gu Qing was in the adjacent cell room performing a transformation and didn't come out the entire time. After Li Xin finished loading a row of samples next to Zhao Yang, he really couldn't hold it in anymore.

"God Zhao, did you and Gu Qing have a fight?"

"No."

"Then why haven't you two said a single word today?"

"It's nothing much."

Li Xin knew he wouldn't get anything more out of him even if he kept asking, so he didn't continue. He took the empty strip tubes to the sink to rinse them and ran into Zhou Ting, who was also washing things. The two exchanged a look and tactfully stopped discussing the topic.

Over the next few days, the situation didn't change at all. Zhao Yang and Gu Qing came to the lab every day and did their work step-by-step. Zhao Yang led the network construction while Gu Qing was responsible for data cleaning and visualization. Their respective tasks had a lot of overlap, but they communicated through the project group chat or by having Li Xin relay messages. When they were face-to-face, they still didn't speak, and their eyes barely met.

In the middle of this, Zhou Ting tried to probe again. While eating lunch in the breakroom, she quietly asked Gu Qing if she was still in a cold war with Zhao Yang. Gu Qing gave the same reply: "It's nothing."

This time, Zhou Ting noticed that when Gu Qing said those two words, her eyelashes drooped slightly, and her grip on the lunchbox lid tightened. Seeing this, Zhou Ting didn't ask any further.

Several days passed like this. The rhythm of Zhao Yang's life wasn't too affected. During the day, he conducted experiments and analyzed data in the lab; at night, he returned to his apartment to read literature on P vs NP, occasionally making a phone call to Liang Mengsong to check on the progress of the chip factory.

Changcheng had already been confirmed as the location, and the factory site had been selected near Poyang Lake. Ground had already been broken for construction.

As for the lithography machine, assembly had not yet begun.

The renovations at the villa were also nearly complete. Chen Haifeng sent an inspection report last week, stating that the overall decoration of the basement had finished. The partitions and sealing for each functional area were complete, and the industrial circuits and ventilation systems had been debugged through several rounds without issues.

After the supercomputing servers were racked, they ran for two days; heat dissipation and power consumption were within normal ranges. Only the end-effectors of a few automated robotic arms needed some fine-tuning based on specific experimental scenarios. Once Zhao Yang had time to go and take a look, they could officially sign off on it.

After March, the graduation atmosphere on the Yanlin University campus grew thicker. The bulletin boards next to the basketball courts were covered with posters for graduation season activities, and students in academic gowns were taking photos in the Library every day. Over at the School of Life Sciences, most seniors were busy finalizing their graduation theses and preparing for their oral defenses.

Gu Qing was also busy with her graduation thesis. Like Zhao Yang, she had applied for early graduation and had already passed the audit. Her thesis was on the functional identification of salt-tolerance-related transcription factors in Arabidopsis. Most of the data was collected while following Professor Gu Ming's research group; from last year's protoplast transformation to the later expression analysis, the thesis framework was very complete. Zhao Yang's graduation thesis focused on the structural improvement of biological reagent molecules, primarily theoretical analysis. He had submitted it at the beginning of the year, and his defense was scheduled for mid-April.

At a group meeting in early April, Professor Gu Ming officially announced the conclusion of the salt-alkali-tolerant rice project. The indica rice transformation data sent back from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences was excellent, basically consistent with the functional verification results at Yanlin University. The phenotypes of several key transcription factors in the indica background were even more pronounced than in the previous japonica materials.

Professor Gu Ming submitted the final data analysis report that Zhao Yang had helped him organize to a core domestic Biology journal. The review cycle was fast, and there weren't many revision suggestions; the acceptance letter arrived in late April.

On the day the paper was officially published, Zhao Yang's system panel jumped by over twenty thousand Biology experience points. Combined with the daily experience accumulated from experiments since the beginning of the year, his Biology experience bar was less than fifty thousand points away from LV5.

Before finishing work that day, Zhao Yang went to Teacher Gu's office.

"Teacher Gu, I plan to leave the laboratory."

Professor Gu Ming was organizing a row of old journals on his bookshelf. Hearing Zhao Yang's words, his hand froze in mid-air. He turned to look at him, his gaze filled with hesitation.

"Not doing experiments anymore?"

Although he had long guessed that Zhao Yang likely wouldn't stay in his laboratory for long, hearing Zhao Yang say it now still left Professor Gu Ming with complicated feelings.

"It's not that I'm not doing them. It's that I've set up a laboratory of my own. I've equipped it with basic molecular Biology equipment, and the conditions are slightly better than here. In the future, I can just do the Biology experiments there myself."

Professor Gu Ming slotted the old journal back into the bookshelf and sat down in a nearby chair, looking at Zhao Yang with curiosity in his eyes.

He hadn't expected Zhao Yang to actually set up his own lab, but considering his current status, Professor Gu Ming felt somewhat relieved.

"When did you set it up?"

"I started setting it up last year, and it was just finished after the New Year."