Chapter 14: Like? Love?

“Sigh.”

Su Nian sighed as soon as he returned to the classroom.

“How can there be such a strong smell of jealousy? She’s not about to demonize, is she?”

Xiali looked at Su Nian curiously. She had just been sleeping in.

But Su Nian shot her a fierce glare. After running through it just now, it basically came down to Xiali’s greed and his own softness.

Still, the plan was proceeding on track. Su Nian never cared about Yun Buran’s favorability, grades, or dark side. He only wanted her thoughts to glow and her heart to heat up.

Even so, there had been an accident. Just now, he had offered her a way out of the whole androphobia situation when she was acting awkward, but Su Nian was very aware that the flames of lust were already blazing, and the wind of jealousy might burn everything to ashes.

However, Su Nian already had a plan in mind. What Xiali would never know was that love could be redemption—and pain could be too.

At that moment, he coincidentally received a message from Tao Ge.

“Your tutoring session tonight is canceled. The teachers are taking you to do experiments.”

The physics competition finals required experiments. Though Su Nian was confident he could write the best lab report, this hands-on opportunity was arranged specifically for him by the school. He had to go.

“Damn, if you leave her hanging again tonight, she’s going to turn dark.”

Xiali said with some worry.

“Heh, I think the heat isn’t high enough yet.”

—

Yun Buran sat in a daze, watching the sky grow darker and darker. She kept her pen raised but couldn’t calculate anything.

‘Something came up tonight. Today’s tutoring is canceled. Stick to the plan and finish on your own.’

The evening self-study bell rang. She wasn’t sure whether to stay in the classroom or go back, but her body started moving anyway.

Everyone else had gotten used to her leaving during evening self-study, so no one reacted. But the class monitor noticed her expression—it was unusually haggard.

She walked through the campus as usual in the night. It was slightly cold in May, and today there was even some fog. A bit of moisture clung to her small face, and the cold wind kept blowing her hair against her cheeks. This night was more wronged than she was.

‘About time to leave the school gates. Let’s turn on location sharing.’

One of her two pinned contacts lit up again. She had always rented a place, but she usually only stayed there on weekends, so this was indeed her first time walking back alone at night.

Yun Buran bit her lower lip lightly and didn’t reply, but she entered the location sharing interface.

Her mind was a mess. She forced herself to think about the English and Chinese she had memorized today, but all she could picture was that bob-haired girl from the afternoon.

She wasn’t even as pretty as me!

And so, Yun Buran reached the door, opened it, changed her shoes, turned on the living room light, hesitated, then turned it off again. She used the light from her phone to find her way to the bedroom, switched on the light, and flopped face-first onto the bed.

Maybe after a minute, she stiffly pulled off her backpack. She felt like time had been stretched infinitely lately. Ever since that first meeting, these few days seemed to have surpassed all the years of campus life before.

She was so jealous. Jealous to the point where her breathing grew heavier and her chest felt tighter.

‘If I had been born a year later, could I be in the same grade as him? The same class? Or maybe, even—could I have been his childhood friend?’

The more she thought, the messier it got. Her face flushed, and her legs couldn’t help but clench together—but a notification sound startled her.

“Don’t abandon your most important talent.”

Yun Buran knew what that was: hard work.

So she went to splash cold water on her face, washed off the facial cleanser foam, put on her hairband, took out her glasses, and sat down seriously at the desk again.

She seemed to regain her earlier rhythm—the version of herself that was constantly submerged in a sea of problems. But her mindset was slightly different this time, because she had recently met a “demon.”

Soon, the sound of writing continued without pause. She never stopped her pen for a moment, feeling as if she had entered an unprecedented state. But she didn’t notice it; her eyes were only on the test paper in front of her.

It wasn’t until the science homework was mostly done that she snapped back to reality and felt a sharp ache in her wrist.

Most importantly, her heart no longer felt so heavy. She could sense a fullness inside her, yet when she worked hard in the past, she never experienced this feeling. Why was that?

“You must be tired from writing, right?”

The message popped up at just the right moment. Yun Buran picked up her phone, her expression complicated. She should have been overjoyed, but now there was a trace of fear mixed in.

That young man could always see through everything in her heart, giving her emotional support at just the right time. She was completely under his control.

She raised her hand, stared at her palm, and made a certain decision.

All of a sudden, her phone started vibrating, startling Yun Buran. Su Nian was video-calling her.

She fumbled around, not knowing what to do. Should she change out of her pajamas first? Fix her hair? Or put away the clothes on the bed?

But Yun Buran bit her lower lip and decided to just answer the call.

Su Nian was strolling on the way home, walking alone under a streetlamp with a fat cat on his shoulder—though Yun Buran couldn’t see it.

She held the phone. The young man’s face was half lit by the pale lamplight and half in shadow. The thought of his face being squeezed into that tiny screen stirred an odd feeling in her heart.

Su Nian was also seeing Yun Buran like this for the first time. She was wearing a pink and white set of pajamas. From this angle, he had a clear view of her collar, but Yun Buran didn’t seem to care.

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Her fair face had a faint blush, and her eyes behind the round glasses were complicated and hard to read, holding many emotions. But the one thing he could be sure of was that something was about to burst out.

“The joint exam is only a few days away. Time is tight and the workload is heavy. Let’s talk science.”

Su Nian read her expression, but he still spoke coolly.

Yun Buran believed Su Nian could understand what she was feeling, but she still calmed herself down and suppressed her restlessness.

“Mm-hmm.”

“In science subjects, you can have separate learning systems for math, physics, chemistry, and biology. That said, you don’t actually have your own learning system at all, do you?”

Yun Buran tilted her head, and her bangs slid to the side of her glasses.

“You need a clear learning path for each stage. Tell me what you know about studying math and physics.”

That stumped Yun Buran. Not because she didn’t know, but because there were too many methods.

“Error notebook, summarizing problem types, doing problems from the textbook carefully, drilling by topic…”

Su Nian cut her off again.

“So that’s it. You haven’t formed your own learning system. You just follow the teacher blindly and work hard. That can get you decent grades, but you’ll never reach the peak in science.”

Yun Buran fell silent. This wasn’t something she could fix by just reflecting. She was simply bad at science—no matter the understanding ability or problem-solving speed, she was slower than the science geniuses in her class.

That was exactly why she partly accepted it when Su Nian said her talent was hard work. Because she believed she really didn’t have any talent.