When Lu Qingyan groggily stirred awake from her nap, sothing felt...off.
Her arm was heavy, her head a little fuzzy, and her face slightly numb. She blinked slowly.
The lights of the classroom filtered into her vision like fog lifting from a dream. As she raised her head and rubbed her eyes, the reality of her situation hit her all at once.
Her arm—oh no.
Unknowingly, when she fell asleep, she had moved and ended up with half of her arm lying on Wang Jingyuan’s table.
Not only that—when she sat up in a daze and clumsily rubbed her eyes, her elbow knocked right into his writing hand, dragging a long, mournful ink stroke across the clean white paper.
A solid, bold black line, ugly and accusing, sprawled across the neat answer space like a wound.
Lu Qingyan’s soul nearly left her body on the spot.
In that instant, she visualized a slow-motion martial arts scene in which her elbow would be seized mid-air and flung out the window, never to return.
She reflexively gasped—but managed to clamp her mouth shut just in ti to muffle the scream.
Wang Jingyuan glanced at the black slash on his paper, then shifted his gaze sideways toward her.
Wang Jingyuan glanced at the black slash on his paper, then shifted his gaze sideways toward her.
Lu Qingyan froze.
This is the end. My elbow is forfeit.
But instead of glaring, shouting, or chopping her with a physics textbook, Wang Jingyuan only blinked once.
Then, his gaze rested on her forehead, where a vivid red desk imprint had blood in the shape of a question mark. It sat starkly against her pale skin, making her look like a slightly confused stead bun.
She blinked again, eyelashes fluttering, long and dense like velvet fans. Her pupils were still glassy from sleep, her sharp chin tilted slightly as she tilted her head like a groggy rabbit, and the pale skin at her neck was dusted with the faintest blue veins.
She appeared fragile and defenseless.
Wang Jingyuan unconsciously pressed the inside of his right cheek with the tip of his tongue before he slowly retracted his gaze.
Wang Jingyuan exhaled quietly through his nose, tilted his head away, and pressed his tongue to the inside of his cheek. He didn’t say anything for a mont.
"Um..." Lu Qingyan finally croaked, half-asleep and half-panicked. "I’m sorry. That wasn’t on purpose."
Wang Jingyuan didn’t care to respond to her at first but beca a little intrigued when he saw her like this.
He lowered his eyes and thought for a mont as he twirled his pen. Then he lowered his voice and whispered to her, "When you fell asleep earlier, it seed like you had a dream."
Lu Qingyan: ???
Lu Qingyan: "Wait, did I do sothing strange?"
She stared at him with round, panicked eyes.
He watched the way her expression shifted between shock, guilt, and horror before breaking into a falsely serious expression.
Wang Jingyuan nodded slightly and slowly said, "You said so stuff to ."
Lu Qingyan’s panicked, she couldn’t have told him how she transmigrated, right??
Wang Jingyuan saw her expression flashed between nervousness and remorse before she ended up staring at him with a scrunched up face and large eyes.
He hooked his finger at her, "Co closer."
Lu Qingyan leaned closer and heard him whispered in a low voice, "Earlier, you called ..."
"——dear——"
Lu Qingyan: !?!?!?
Wang Jingyuan slowly raised his lips, "Father."
Lu Qingyan: "...."
I believed your lie.
Actor. Absolute actor. I believed you for a second, you shaless man.
She saw a traced of humor flashed in the other person’s originally cold eyes before he adjusted his posture, beca serious again, and continued to work on his paper.
She vowed, she will never sleep in school again.
The rest of the morning passed in a blur of assignnts and lectures. By lunchti, Lu Qingyan had mostly recovered from the incident. After eating a plain lunch at the cafeteria, she returned to the classroom, ready to tackle the day’s academic challenges.
Or so she thought.
She found herself stuck on a complex physics question.
After she calculated for a while, she got an answer that didn’t seem quite right. Although physics was one of her weaker subjects, she still had so ability to determine if the answer seed reasonable.
She carefully checked the conditions of the question, but when she tried to recalculate, she still couldn’t figure out where she made the mistake.
She tried to solve it.
Then she tried again.
And again.
Sa answer each ti—and it felt wrong.
It was like the numbers were conspiring against her.
Right when she was scratching her head in wonder, she suddenly turned her head and saw Wang Jingyuan’s physics paper righteously out in the open on the desk.
Lu Qingyan stared at the last question that was fully answered for a few seconds before she looked away with great integrity.
What a joke.
Was she the kind of person who that needed to look at other people’s thods to answer questions?
I don’t need to look. I can do this. Hard work and grit! Persistent effort is the foundation of a true scholar!
For difficult questions, the correct answer is most valuable and fulfilling when one figures it out after careful deliberation and persistent effort!
Soon, ten minutes passed and Lu Qingyan put down her pen.
After ten minutes of hard work, she still got the sa answer.
She sighed. Integrity was a nice concept, but solving the problem correctly was better.
She once again set her gaze on Wang Jingyuan’s paper.
The proper thod of solving the problem seed to wave at her.
I’ll look just once.
How can the actions of a scholar be called peeking?
So Lu Qingyan moved her head little by little towards the paper on her seatmate’s desk and quickly scanned the thod of solving the complex question at the end.
When Wang Jingyuan walked into the classroom, he saw a fluffy head leaning against his desk. It swayed around his paper as if it was a chicken pecking at rice.
When Wang Jingyuan approached, he heard the head said, "How is that possible, how could the acceleration be three? He must’ve calculated wrong! I’ve done it many tis and it’s 2 tis the square root of 2"
"He definitely calculated it wrong!"
"Ah, wait—"
The head suddenly shook, "What is this formula? How co I’ve never seen it before? Did he co up with it?"
The head carefully scanned it for a while and racked its brain. After thinking for a while, "...Ohhhh. Derived from base formulas. Okay, I see you."
Her head swayed around the paper several more tis and after she copied down the solving thod, she consoled herself, "This question wasn’t even that hard. I just didn’t maximize the given conditions. That’s all. I was tired. Sleep-deprived. It’s not cheating, it’s academic borrowing. Peer collaboration. Healthy learning behavior..."
"I can’t believe I ended up looking at soone else’s answer," she muttered, half in disbelief. "I’ve really fallen."
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