I Really Am Being Wronged

Annoyed as he was, He Yu still showed up Monday morning, single-strap bag over his shoulder, and knocked on the door of the neighboring campus building.

The teacher closest to the door said: 'Come in.'

He Yu, perfectly polite: 'Hello. I'm looking for Professor Xie.'

'Xie Qingcheng — I'm his student.'

Xie Qingcheng came out from the inner office, and He Yu was mildly surprised to find him wearing glasses today.

Xie Qingcheng hadn't been nearsighted before.

'Good timing,' Xie Qingcheng said briskly. 'Come in.'

He Yu couldn't help looking a beat too long. The glasses suited him — softened the edge, added something bookish. He seemed less objectionable like this.

Unfortunately the moment Xie Qingcheng opened his mouth, it was exactly the tone He Yu couldn't stand: 'I need you to turn these materials into a few slideshow decks. There are also documents here that need to be digitized. A lot of it is medical data — I don't trust software accuracy on this, and image-to-text conversion makes errors. Type it out by hand and proofread it multiple times when you're done. Understood?'

He Yu looked at the stack of massive medical volumes on the desk. Almost every one of them could serve as a murder weapon.

'Professor Xie, are you aware that technology exists to liberate mankind?'

Xie Qingcheng dropped a copy of General Psychology and a copy of Social Psychology onto the desk in front of him. The desk shook. The computer monitor trembled.

'And I know that mankind shouldn't become too dependent on it. Get to work. Start with whatever I've marked in red in those two.'

He Yu looked at the two bricks of textbooks, each one nearly doubled in thickness by all the annotation slips tucked inside. He kept his composure with some effort — he was sitting in Xie Qingcheng's office, after all, with several other professors still in the room. He lowered his voice:

'Are you trying to kill me?'

'No. I'm trying to build your patience and endurance.' Xie Qingcheng stood beside him with a coffee cup and took a calm sip.

He Yu: '...'

'My standards aren't high. Just be thorough.' Xie Qingcheng dropped that single line, tossed He Yu a can of Red Bull, and turned away to deal with his own work.

He Yu narrowed his eyes slightly.

He opened Xie Qingcheng's computer, moved the cursor to a Word file, then paused. Behind those long lashes, his expression had gone overcast.

'Let me have a look...'

A man in his thirties like Xie Qingcheng would generally have something not entirely presentable on his personal computer or phone — human nature, nothing to judge. But to avoid social ruin, gentlemen made a point of setting passwords, creating hidden folders, and never lending the devices to anyone.

Xie Qingcheng didn't bother.

The computer he'd left in the office for He Yu to use was his own personal machine. He Yu was a top-tier hacker. So, with the quietly underhanded intention of digging up leverage, he ran a search through the file directories — expecting to find at least one or two adult videos — and drained the entire Red Bull without turning up a thing.

Not quite convinced, he switched to a different script and ran another sweep. Same result.

Xie Qingcheng's personal computer was immaculate. Spotless. Beyond academic files and payroll spreadsheets, it was so clean it was almost aberrant.

He Yu leaned back in the office chair with a furrowed brow, long fingers turning the empty can between them. He thought for a moment, then rewrote the search in a different language and hit enter.

This time he actually turned up a folder Xie Qingcheng seemed to use often outside work hours. The name alone was suspicious: 'Happiness.'

True to his straight-man sensibility, Xie Qingcheng kept his file names blunt and functional. Important documents got titles like 'Courseware Case No. 1' and 'Courseware Case No. 2'; anything less important kept whatever the system had auto-generated — he couldn't be bothered to rename so much as a folder. His untitled folders had already stacked up to 'New Folder (23).'

So the moment this 'Happiness' folder appeared — slightly out of character for Xie Qingcheng — He Yu's eyes lit up. He sat up straight, fully alert, fixed his full attention on the screen, moved the cursor to the pale-yellow folder, and double-clicked.

The folder opened.

He Yu scanned it quickly. His expression shifted from eager to neutral, then settled into a frown. He found Xie Qingcheng baffling.

The folder called 'Happiness' contained nothing but a few photographs of peach blossom jellyfish.

Beyond that, a handful of videos. He opened one — nothing but jellyfish footage from around the world: moon jellies, rocket jellies, every form imaginable. One video ran over an hour; he scrubbed through it several times, and it was all the same — those weightless, smoke-like creatures drifting through the water.

'...'

So Xie Qingcheng's idea of happiness was watching jellyfish videos?

The videos were beautiful, he'd grant that — ancient lives adrift in the water like trails of mist, like the reflection of a moon sinking into a lake. But He Yu still couldn't fathom the taste of this old man, and he closed the videos and backed out.

Reluctant as he was to give up, He Yu propped his chin on one hand and cycled through several more search modes, and came to the conclusion that Xie Qingcheng's personal computer was exactly like fresh snow: a pristine, unblemished world. He dropped the mouse and conceded —

Any normal man has at least some desires, doesn't he...

He sat there, turning the empty can in his fingers, lost in thought.

His gaze drifted back to the screen. He decided Xie Qingcheng was simply too cold — must genuinely have a frigid temperament.

Which meant a different approach was called for.

He Yu abandoned his plan to hunt for incriminating material on Xie Qingcheng's computer. He ran his tongue softly along the back of his teeth, and the distracted look in his eyes drew back to a point —

He had a new idea.

The next day.

Xie Qingcheng's lecture was in the afternoon, and He Yu happened to be free. He'd also been the one to put the slides together, so he simply showed up at the Medical University and settled into the last row of the multimedia classroom to sit in.

Xie Qingcheng had not wanted him there: 'What does a film major want with an audited course in psychiatry?'

He Yu, measured and gracious: 'Gege, I basically am a psychiatric case.'

'...'

'Besides, your slides are the ones I put together last night — if anything goes wrong I can fix it on the spot. Makes sense, doesn't it?'

Xie Qingcheng considered this and decided he was right, and let it go.

The moment He Yu walked in, though, Xie Qingcheng already had misgivings — he'd forgotten that He Yu had previously had those conversations with several of the female students on the roster. Those girls, who had chosen to take psychiatry as an elective, very visibly widened their eyes when He Yu walked through the door, and then broke into rare, thoroughly lovestruck smiles.

'Hey — how did you end up here?'

He Yu gave a small wave, but immediately pressed a finger to his lips and tilted his head toward Xie Qingcheng on the podium.

The girl immediately dropped her voice and nodded in quick little motions: 'Oh, oh, oh!' Then, fully cooperative, she turned back to face the front and readied herself to pay attention.

He Yu took the seat in the last row by the window, tossed his bag down, crossed his arms, leaned back, and pulled off the earbuds he'd worn the whole way over. He looked toward Xie Qingcheng.

The message was clear: see, I'm being respectful — even though your lecture might as well be spoken in tongues as far as I'm concerned, I'll still sit here and listen properly.

His surface courtesy earned him a single look of contempt.

Xie Qingcheng set his teaching materials down on the table without ceremony, shifted his gaze away from He Yu, and said in a flat voice: 'Why is everyone looking at him? Never seen someone audit from another school before?'

Under Professor Xie's pressure, the students fell silent and said nothing, though their glances continued to move quietly between each other.

Honestly? No.

Not outside of a campus romance drama, anyway.

The female students — especially those who'd already met He Yu — began, upon realizing what this might mean, to quietly slot themselves into the scenario and let their imaginations run. A few of the faster-brained ones had already planned which maternity hospital they'd deliver at; each girl adjusted her posture to its most elegant, hoping the handsome boy in the back row might notice.

All of this played out in plain view of Xie Qingcheng, standing on the podium.

The respectable professor — and presumed cold-natured specimen — found this deeply distasteful. But his instincts being what they were, he wouldn't blame the girls. He would only think it was He Yu's fault.

So Xie Qingcheng stared at He Yu for several more seconds.

Then said, in a cool voice:

'Books open. Class begins. No one turns their head to look back for the rest of this session. If your neck loses control and swivels, six points off your final grade. Consider yourselves warned.'

Students: '...'

The targeted He Yu bowed his head and laughed despite himself.

He'd always thought Xie Xue bullying her students was ridiculous. Now he knew exactly where she'd learned it.

Straight from Xie Qingcheng.

'...According to CCMD-3, mood disorders include manic episodes, depressive episodes, bipolar disorder, cyclothymia, dysthymia...'

Xie Qingcheng started by going through the homework he'd assigned the previous session. Most university students donate four years of their prime to the humble planks of dormitory beds and drift through their days like immortals at leisure — but medical students are definitively not among them. If anything, they were looking at a minimum of five years of the kind of grinding daily pressure that felt like a permanent senior year of high school.

A single ordinary homework assignment took up half a class period to review, which said everything about the volume.

The uninvited auditor He Yu remained quiet, with the appropriate awareness of someone who'd shown up without being asked — arms folded, sitting in the back corner, watching Xie Qingcheng.

He noticed that although Xie Qingcheng's method of threatening students was identical to Xie Xue's, the way he taught was entirely different. Xie Xue worked to animate the room, to make the content as vivid and engaging as possible. Xie Qingcheng seemed to barely acknowledge that the students existed.

He stood upright at the podium, yet somehow seemed not to belong to this world at all — as if reality were beside the point, as if half of him were already submerged in some other space, while knowledge itself took on substance around him, drifting and curling in his wake.

He was, unmistakably, a pure academic — he had no interest in coaxing students toward understanding, no intention of patiently imploring anyone to study harder. Quite the opposite: Xie Qingcheng stood above it all. He moved like a ferryman who had strolled out of a temple of learning at his own unhurried pace, ink-stained at the fingertips, the scent of books settled into the line of his mouth; in his focused, self-contained, almost selfless expression there was a quality of refinement so extreme it bordered on the unearthly.

He seemed entirely indifferent to whether you learned anything; he clearly didn't care whether you were looking at him. And yet the quality he carried on that podium was itself the most perfect embodiment of what 'knowledge' could be.

He Yu was half-convinced he might open his mouth at any moment and say: 'The knowledge this deity has deigned to bestow upon you should be received on your knees with the deepest gratitude.'

The young man sat there thinking, watching the man on the podium — composed, remote, wholly absorbed in his own medical world.

'All right. That covers yesterday's assignment. Now lift your heads and look at the projected slides.'

The sentence pulled He Yu back.

He raised his eyes. The arms he'd kept folded across his chest loosened; his fingers laced together and rested on the desk, his body tipping slightly forward.

It was the posture of someone who expected something.

He Yu had no business expecting anything from Xie Qingcheng's class.

But Professor Xie, accustomed as he was to seeing no one, had even less regard for a freeloader who'd shown up uninvited, and hadn't noticed the slight, sudden tension that crossed He Yu's face.

He opened the laptop, connected to the signal, adjusted the projector, and — under the collective gaze of the students — moved the cursor to the file He Yu had made, the one labeled 'Deck 1.'

Double-click.

The slideshow opened.

Xie Qingcheng looked up without glancing back at the screen: 'Today we cover hallucinations — somatic hallucinations, genuine hallucinations, pseudohallucinations...'

He lectured on, absorbed in it, until a male student in the front row finally couldn't help it and let out a muffled laugh. Only then did he register that something was wrong — but he didn't look back at the slides. He frowned at the audacious student instead. 'What is it?'

This time, the one who failed to suppress a laugh was not just the one student.

'Professor Xie, your slides...'

Only then did Xie Qingcheng realize something was off. He turned to look.

Thanks to the principal's commitment to students' learning and ongoing improvements to the school's facilities, the newly installed multimedia projector was large and razor-sharp — it cast the slide onto the screen in perfect, unsparing detail —

A cluster of adorable jellyfish babies rendered in computer illustration software, styled like chibi moon jellies.

And they were GIFs, the lot of them — the jellyfish babies looping cheerfully through a sequence of: 'Baby is so mad,' 'Baby has fainted,' 'Baby is done with you, goodbye.'

The image was so cloying and infantile it hit like a physical blow. Xie Qingcheng's breath caught. His hand moved on instinct toward his pocket for a cigarette.

He Yu turned his face away, shoulders shaking faintly, head dipping as he laughed.

Xie Qingcheng turned around in fury — and found the culprit sitting there with his lashes lowered, lounging comfortably against the seatback. Catching the look, He Yu raised his head, making no effort whatsoever to hide the thin smile settled at the corner of his mouth.

This little —

Xie Qingcheng's gaze could have pinned He Yu to his chair.

He Yu was confident he would never admit in front of a roomful of people that the slides had been made by conscripted labor. He uncrossed his fingers with perfect composure, smiled, raised one hand with a slight lift of his brow, and tapped his phone on the desk — once, lightly.

The implication was unmistakable: check your messages.

'...' Xie Qingcheng's expression had reached new lows. He walked back to the podium and closed the slideshow. 'Wrong deck. One moment.'

The students had rarely seen Professor Xie make a mistake, let alone one this absurd. If not for Xie Qingcheng's authority holding them in check, they would have been howling. Everyone was working very hard to keep it together — too hard to notice the undercurrent running between that auditor from the neighboring school and their professor.

Xie Qingcheng seized the moment to open his phone, expression still dark.

There it was — a message from He Yu, sent two minutes ago:

'Would you like the real slides?'

'What do you want.'

Typing...

He waited.

Still typing...

Xie Qingcheng couldn't take it anymore. He looked up again, gaze cutting across the rows of barely-suppressed laughter to find the young man — leisurely, unhurried, impeccably composed — reclining in his chair and typing.

He seemed to be deliberately grinding at the precise point of Xie Qingcheng's suffering, prolonging this socially annihilating embarrassment for as long as possible — not sparing him a glance, those long fingers extending just one, tracing a few strokes across the screen, typing a few characters, deleting them, then typing again, deleting again.

As though he were genuinely, carefully deliberating over the terms of the trade.

Except that He Yu's brow, arched with the smug satisfaction of a scheme going exactly as planned, had already given away the glee he was hiding beneath that well-mannered surface.

Just as Xie Qingcheng was reaching the limit of what he could endure and was about to walk over and knock on the desk, the message finally came.

Xie Qingcheng pressed his phone open immediately.

'You remember selling my clothes, right?'

Xie Qingcheng: '...'

'Transfer me 5,000. I'll come up and fix the slides.'

Xie Qingcheng: '...'

'One more thing — if you leave it alone, in ten minutes your computer will automatically download and start playing some rather unsavory videos. Force-shutting down won't help. Your call, Professor. Fair warning: my price might go up in a few minutes.'

Having typed out his terms, the hacker set down their covert line of communication — conducted under the eyes of the entire room.

He settled comfortably back in his chair, one arm hooked behind him, elbow resting on the seatback.

Then he tilted his chin up, in a motion so small no one else would catch it, toward the projector, and raised his other hand to idly tug at his own collar — then looked at Xie Qingcheng with an expression of pure innocence and quiet menace, perfectly obedient.

'...'

Xie Qingcheng's expression was thunderous. Eyes fixed on He Yu, he slowly closed his hand around the phone, opened Alipay, and typed in 5,000 through clenched teeth.

One second later.

He Yu's phone on the desk buzzed once.

He dropped his gaze, letting his lids fall over those almond eyes, and checked the incoming transfer: five thousand yuan.

He Yu stood up — and he had played bit roles in low-budget productions, but the man was well past beginner-level acting. He arranged his features into an expression of concern and walked up to the podium. 'Sorry about that, Professor Xie — it looks like I accidentally mixed up the files when I was backing up your sister's materials to your computer yesterday. My apologies.'

Paid to deliver, He Yu set about collecting the shreds of Professor Xie's dignity from the floor with impeccable courtesy, then bent his head and got to work on Xie Qingcheng's laptop.

Within moments, the correct deck had been retrieved from the folder.

He Yu straightened, stepped aside with respectful, unhurried grace, and made room: 'After you, Professor.'

The slide incident concluded, as these things tended to go, with He Yu winning again.

Only for the second half of class, the cloud on Xie Qingcheng's face was darker than end-of-the-world overcast, the air thick with a coming storm, and his gaze had gone so cold it seemed to carry actual ice in it.

He Yu didn't doubt for a moment that if eye-daggers could take physical form, he'd be a well-ventilated sieve by now.

But that hypothesis didn't hold, so he sat there with a faint smile and an air of easy mischief that no one else could quite read, and accepted every last eye-dagger without complaint.

'...That concludes today's class.' Xie Qingcheng finally ended the wretched slideshow portion five minutes early. It had to be said: nothing else had gone wrong in the second half, which allowed the tension in his chest to ease, just slightly.

'I'll post this week's assignment to the intranet now. Remember to download and complete it.'

With some of the strain lifted, Professor Xie closed the slides, opened a browser, typed in the campus network address, and hit enter with a clean, decisive tap.

A few seconds later...

'Seductive resources at your fingertips — over 1M+ steamy clips of hot hunks and gorgeous babes...'

Projected at full force alongside the text was an ad pop-up: a heavily made-up woman striking poses at every student in the room, whose glasses had collectively shattered.

Complete silence.

Xie Qingcheng spun around.

He Yu: '............'

The greatest injustice in living memory.

This time it genuinely wasn't him.