Green Plum, Green Plum (21)
Touched by love
She waited a whole week without a reply.
After returning to school to fill out her college application, Xu Jiao couldn’t hold back any longer and sent a punctuation mark in Shen Yelan’s chat box.
“?”
Still no reply.
Xu Jiao pursed her lips, tossed her phone aside, and sat idly at her desk. She flipped through her bedtime book, 《Walden》 (A book by Henry David Thoreau), out of boredom, swinging her legs back and forth. She noticed Xiao Huang weaving between her legs under the desk, rubbing its fuzzy head against her.
She enjoyed Xiao Huang’s affection, leaned down to gently stroke its ears, and ruffled its head, while inwardly questioning the system:
“Did I guess wrong?”
“Or is there a passionate soul beneath this boring exterior? The type who looks serious but has a heart full of tricks?”
“If she really likes me, shouldn’t she reply to her sweetheart’s messages instantly? Or is she playing hard to get with me?”
Xu Jiao was utterly baffled.
She didn’t know that this question would accompany her throughout the entire summer before her final year of high school.
……
“There won’t be a next time.”
Shen Yelan got off the plane and, in the vast Gobi Desert where yellow dust filled the air, raised her hand to adjust the scarf around her neck. She spoke coldly to Dong Qing, who had come to pick her up.
Dong Qing raised her hand and gave her shoulder a hard pat, smiling as she nearly knocked her off balance: “Little one, you shouldn’t be ungrateful. When you begged me to take you to make money back then, your attitude wasn’t like this. Now that I need your help, why are you turning your back on me?”
“A deadbeat attitude is no good, my apprentice,” she lectured earnestly.
However, Shen Yelan’s expression remained as cold as ice, unmoved by her attitude. After standing up straight again, she looked around at the surroundings and then gave Dong Qing a once-over, her tone tinged with anger:
“This is what you call being on your deathbed, unable to get up, only wanting to see me one last time?”
“And now you’re miraculously recovered?”
Dong Qing rubbed her nose, raised her eyebrows, and replied: “I really needed someone and was afraid you wouldn’t come. Hey, look at that sour face of yours. What, haven’t had anything to eat yet and I dragged you out of bed?”
Shen Yelan clenched her teeth and didn’t say a word.
She had eaten—
But after receiving the news, she didn’t even have time to take care of Xu Jiao. She had left her at home, planning to send a message to explain after getting off the plane and order some light food delivery. However, the signal along the way had been weak.
She suppressed her emotions and said to Dong Qing, “Enough with the nonsense, just take me to a place with a signal.”
Dong Qing smiled but didn’t move.
Shen Yelan had a bad premonition for no apparent reason: “What is it?”
Dong Qing looked at the sky with feigned lightheartedness: “You know, in this area, the forces are chaotic, and there’s always stray bullets flying around.”
“So?” Shen Yelan asked patiently.
Dong Qing: “So, just a second before you arrived, our signal base station was accidentally bombed, and the people from the foreign company stationed here were just kidnapped. It won’t be possible to restore the signal in less than two months.”
Shen Yelan: “…”
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Shen Yelan: “???”
She looked around in shock, then asked, “What if you hadn’t picked me up today?”
Dong Qing laughed heartily and patted Shen Yelan’s arm forcefully again: “How could that be! My dear apprentice, you have great fortune and luck, there’s no way I wouldn’t find you. For the sake of our years of friendship, I would wait here for you until midnight! How about that, loyal enough?”
Upon hearing those words, Shen Yelan suddenly felt an impulse to kill her master.
Which means, if she had been unable to meet up with Dong Qing today due to some accident, she would have been left to fend for herself in this unfamiliar and remote place, relying on her meager skills to scrape by.
Seeing the murderous intent in her eyes almost solidify, Dong Qing, aware of her own fault, humbly gave up her seat to Shen Yelan and said in a low voice:
“Don’t be mad, apprentice. Look, you stay here with me for three months, and our boss is really generous with this job. When you go back to school, you’ll have any kind of girlfriend you want, right?”
Shen Yelan remained unmoved, got into the car, closed her eyes to rest, and said indifferently:
“I only want that one.”
Dong Qing recalled the image of Xu Jiao from the club, leaned over the back of Shen Yelan’s seat with one hand, and tilted her head to scrutinize her: “I never thought I’d end up teaching a love-struck fool!”
Shen Yelan didn’t respond.
The off-road vehicle drove off, bumping along the rough road. With nothing else to do, Dong Qing continued to gossip, asking Shen Yelan, “How long have you liked her?”
“Does she like you too?”
Suddenly, the vehicle passed over a deep pit, causing everyone inside to almost lift off their seats. Shen Yelan quickly raised her hand to grab the overhead handle, stabilizing herself, and opened her eyes to calmly look at the scenery ahead.
Although Dong Qing had never experienced a deeply passionate love, she was well-versed in the ways of the world from her experiences in the realm of romance and social gatherings. Seeing Shen Yelan’s calm demeanor, she could easily guess the answer. Once she regained her balance, she sighed.
From the back seat came a heartfelt piece of advice:
“Good apprentice, listen to your master’s advice—”
“Love has always left only regret.”
Shen Yelan turned her head slightly to look at her, expressionless, and continued: “Sweet dreams are always the easiest to wake from, from Wei Zian’s 《Flowers and Moon Marks》 of the Qing Dynasty. Must’ve really strained your brain to come up with that line, huh?”
Dong Qing: “…”
The flustered underachiever slapped the seat and said with a murderous air, “Today I must clean up my own mess! No one stop me!”
……
Shen Yelan squatted in that remote and desolate place for more than two months.
Had she not filled out her application choices a step earlier, her future might have been ruined along with Dong Qing’s. She even arrived late for the school registration, missing the guidance from the senior students and had to go through the process at the college office on her own.
The counselor gave her a heartfelt piece of advice, “We consider students who do not register within the first week as having automatically forfeited their spots. If you have any issues, you can call the college to request leave, but you can’t let this happen again.”
Dust-covered Shen Yelan bowed her head and apologized, “I’m sorry, teacher. I will definitely arrive early next time.”
Before getting to know all the new students’ personalities, the counselor didn’t mind leaving a good impression on the new students. After giving her a formal reminder, the counselor moved on from the matter and gave Shen Yelan the previous new student materials and a general map of the school.
After completing the procedures, Shen Yelan navigated through the large campus, found her dorm building after making several turns, settled into her dorm, and briefly greeted her roommates. She finally took out her phone, which had been left uncharged due to lack of signal, plugged it in, and turned it on.
A bunch of junk messages popped up, along with strange group messages.
Before being contacted by Su Xi, she hadn’t even downloaded this chat app, so she hadn’t set any filters for adding friends. Now, all sorts of people were in her contacts, and all kinds of group messages were jumping in.
Among this pile of messages, one person’s profile picture looked familiar to her.
It was a silly grinning yellow dog.
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Shen Yelan had seen it several times before.
At the same time, there was a string of shared articles, followed by a question mark, as if testing whether she was there.
The person’s name was…
“My Dog is Super Cute”
Shen Yelan: “…”
She clicked on each of the shared articles. Although some were a bit disjointed, she patiently read through them and then edited a message to send over:
“Is this Sister Xu Jiao?”
“Sorry, something happened to my friend before, and I left in a hurry, so I didn’t have time to contact you. Where are you now?”
……
“What kind of friend could make her go offline for three months?”
“System, do you believe this reason? Anyway, I don’t.”
Xu Jiao was studying with a friend in the old teaching building. Hearing her phone go off, she picked it up and stared at it for a while, inwardly criticizing Shen Yelan’s flimsy excuse with the system.
The system was silent for two seconds, “But she never lies, at least not to you, right?”
Xu Jiao pouted, “Just wait. I’ll deal with her after I finish this set of CET-6 practice questions.”
Then Xu Jiao got engrossed in her sea of questions and, before she knew it, she had stayed in the classroom until nearly eleven o’clock at night. She was the only one left in the entire classroom. The security guard patrolled twice, reminding students to return to their dormitories early, as the door would be locked soon.
Xu Jiao nodded absentmindedly, pondering the answer to the reading question she had just tackled.
At this moment, the classroom door was pushed open again—
Xu Jiao thought it was the security guard urging her again, so she casually looked up, only to see a person whose skin tone had darkened a shade compared to before. The face was somewhat familiar yet somewhat strange.
It was Shen Yelan.
The reason she felt strange was that the aura around this person had changed. The once intimidating dark eyes now gleamed like tempered blades, emitting a sharp, cold light. Even in the dimly lit corridor, they still shone brightly.
It was already somewhat autumn in the north, and the temperature dropped at night. Shen Yelan was wearing a very light gray trench coat, reaching down to her calves. As she walked, the coat flared out in a graceful arc.
She closed the classroom door behind her, sealing the room in silence, and took one step after another toward Xu Jiao.
Xu Jiao raised an eyebrow and said the same thing she had said the last time they met again: “Long time no see.”
Shen Yelan stopped in front of her, glanced at the papers on her desk, and asked in a low, slightly hoarse voice:
“I replied to your message. Didn’t you see it, Sister Xu Jiao?”
Xu Jiao let out an “ah” and belatedly said, “I forgot to reply—how did you know I was here?”
“If I remember correctly, we are not in the same major.”
Shen Yelan stared at her for two seconds, remaining silent for a long time in response to her casual “forgot,” before answering, “I searched for you from the cafeteria, to your faculty’s classroom, to your department’s dormitory, and finally to the teaching buildings near your major and dormitory.”
Xu Jiao secretly clicked her tongue.
She knew how big the school was, and just hearing about this search project made her feel despair.
Shen Yelan really is…
Before she could think of how to describe this person, she suddenly saw Shen Yelan walk up to her, raise her hand to embrace her, lower her head to smell the scent of her newly changed shampoo, and with a voice filled with barely hidden emotion, deeply said:
“I miss you so much.”
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Xu Jiao: “…”
She hadn’t even tried to melt her heart, and she came to her voluntarily?
The problem was that they didn’t seem to be in a lover’s relationship, so what should she say in response?
Xu Jiao hesitated for two seconds, just about to politely reply with “me too,” when she saw Shen Yelan let go, lower her eyes, and firmly say, “I want you.”
Xu Jiao: “…?”
Her pen paused on the problem, and she calmly responded, “Just think about it.” Also, she didn’t even look at where they were.
Hearing her rejection, Shen Yelan’s eyes filled with turbulent emotions, and unexpectedly, she raised her hand to press down on Xu Jiao’s hand holding the pen, enunciating each word clearly:
“I want you.”
“Right now.”
“This is the second time.”
Xu Jiao was shocked by her declaration, the pen falling from her hand. In her heart, she asked the system, “Am I taking the wrong approach? Using love to reform her doesn’t work, so I can only…”
“Use my body to melt her?”