The new week. Monday. Morning meeting.
The dean was away on business, so his assistant, Cen Yao, presided.
Ji Xiunian glanced at a new message on her phone.
Jiang Yue had written: “Teacher Ji, I’ve collected the student files. I’m outside the meeting room.”
Ji Xiunian slipped out the back door and took the documents. “Thank you for the trouble.”
Jiang Yue’s smile was sly and triumphant. “No trouble at all. She doesn’t deserve to be a teacher, and she schemed against me—of course I had to get even.”
When Ji Xiunian re-entered the meeting room, it was just Gao Qirui’s turn to speak.
Gao Qirui had been in charge of the college’s financial audits for some time now. Her eyes landed on Ji Xiunian, and her measured voice sharpened all at once. “Professor Ji, we’ve discovered problems with a batch of equipment donated by Leheng Group.”
Ji Xiunian met her gaze. “What problems?”
Gao Qirui signaled the secretary to bring up the file on the projector, where several figures were circled in thick red marker. “Here. Did Professor Ji really not notice anything wrong?”
“Please. Say what you have to say.”
“Is the problem truly not obvious to Professor Ji? Or is it that, being such close friends with Dean Zhou, you’re pretending not to understand?”
Ji Xiunian’s expression stayed flat. “And so?”
“So, anyone with eyes can see that this batch of equipment’s specifications don’t match the purchase prices. I have reasonable grounds to suspect tax evasion through the mechanism of social donations, and I will apply to the university’s finance office to audit the accounts.”
Ji Xiunian’s tone remained even. “I see. And what does any of that have to do with me?”
“After all, you two… are old acquaintances, aren’t you?” Lacking any real evidence, Gao Qirui could only insinuate. With a casual click, she opened a photo on the computer. “You two really do get along wonderfully.”
In the photo, two figures sat in the light of the setting sun, their silhouettes gentle and enduring.
Nothing at all like the drawn blades of their first meeting. Quite a few of the teachers present had witnessed Dean Zhou offering to drive Professor Ji home after that dinner… though at the time, wine had flowed freely, and no one had thought much of it.
Now, coming to their senses, they belatedly began to wonder: were these two sworn enemies, or… something more?
Ji Xiunian nodded slightly to the teacher at the computer. “Is there more?”
“Of course there’s more. I also have a video right here, you—”
Before she could finish, the speakers came alive… with her own voice.
“I’ll swap the equipment for—”
“Don’t worry. The Equipment Office… is my husband’s… student.”
“…”
Gao Qirui’s face changed. “Professor Ji! You forged evidence to frame me?!”
“I’m not that bored.” Ji Xiunian’s gaze was cold and clear as she opened a document folder. “Here is the contract you signed with the supplier. Shall we arrange a handwriting analysis?”
Gao Qirui bit her lip. “Ridiculous. A handwriting analysis, a strange audio clip—what could that possibly prove?”
“Is there something you’re waiting for?”
Ji Xiunian regarded her through half-lidded eyes. The woman who was gentle and quiet by day now had a gaze as bright and piercing as a hawk’s, seeing straight through to the heart. “Stop waiting. If that’s not enough, I also have a joint report signed by your students. I know you’ve used the threat of delayed graduation to hint that they should send you expensive gifts…”
Gao Qirui flew into a rage. “You’re lying!”
Meng Xiaoying, who had always been close to her, sneered too. “Clever moves, Professor Ji. Back when we were competing for full professor, you anonymously reported me. Now you’re playing dirty again.”
“I’ve said before—that wasn’t me.” Ji Xiunian didn’t spare Meng Xiaoying a glance. “Director Gao, anything else you’d like to say? Or shall I release all the materials to everyone right now?”
Panic flickered across Gao Qirui’s face before she forced herself calm.
It was fine. Her husband was a powerful official at the university. This could be handled.
Ji Xiunian looked at her, gentle and relentless all at once. “The university’s Discipline Inspection Committee just messaged me. Your husband has been suspended. My apologies—I took the liberty of causing him trouble as well.”
The tone was so offhand, as if she were saying, sorry, this dish has too much salt.
Fang Xun: “…”
Dumbstruck. Utterly dumbstruck.
Even though Ji Xiunian had warned her in advance, it still took her a long moment to recover—and then she remembered Ji Xiunian’s pre-meeting instructions and hurriedly loaded the new proposal onto the office computer.
Gao Qirui’s voice turned shrill. “You’re lying to me!”
“I don’t lie.” Ji Xiunian glanced down at her phone. “Let me do the math… they should be here for you about now. Some of these materials, I thought I’d never have use for in this lifetime.”
Back then, Gao Qirui had very nearly destroyed her reputation and stolen her spot for the exchange program abroad, then married a university official nineteen years her senior, settling smoothly into the school with everything going her way.
And she… had had no energy to fight her then. Even when her eldest brother, Jiang Wei, had dumped a stack of corruption reports in her lap, she hadn’t bothered to read them.
Who knew the day would come when they’d prove useful.
Gao Qirui stood frozen for a moment, then screamed, “You want to destroy me? Ji Xiunian?!”
Ji Xiunian ignored her and opened the meeting room doors. Before long, people from the university’s Discipline Inspection Committee entered. One of them—an old acquaintance of her brother—was quite courteous. “Professor Ji, which one is Teacher Gao?”
Her expression was mild. “Hello. That one.”
Gao Qirui’s hands clenched white against the table, her face nearly twisted out of shape.
She told herself she would not become a joke in front of Ji Xiunian—but the scream tore out of her anyway, raw and ragged. “I didn’t do anything! What right do you have to take me away?!”
“Teacher Gao, we’re not arresting you. We’d just like you to come answer some questions.”
“Get out! All of you, get out!”
Her reason crumbled. She swept the water glass off the table and shattered it against the floor. “She’s lying! She’s a liar, I didn’t do anything! I’m not going anywhere!”
She was shrieking, hysterical—and the others, who had harbored a few private doubts, now understood the truth from her reaction alone. If she had nothing to hide, why panic like this?
It was Fang Xun, quick-thinking as ever, who called security from downstairs to restrain her by force.
Gao Qirui’s hair hung in disarray, a thin line of blood on her cheek. Pausing beside Ji Xiunian, she smiled, vicious and venomous, her lowered voice a hiss. “Ji Xiunian, you really are a hypocrite… First you pretended to be kind to me, then turned on me over a piece of bread. Then you played the magnanimous one for years—letting it look like I was bullying you while you never fought back. And look at you now. You wanted to destroy me all along…”
“You’re imagining things.” Ji Xiunian cut her off, her voice dropping low too. “I never fought back only because I couldn’t be bothered.”
“But this time, you crossed my bottom line.”
“I won’t allow anyone to disturb her life.”
“Not just you. Myself included.”
Gao Qirui sneered at her. “So you really never got over her? So even you have things you can’t have! Wonderful! Someone born with your family, your background—you could have anything you wanted just by reaching out. You’ll never understand, never, how hard it is for someone like me to climb.”
Back then, when her dance dress tore, she’d mended it herself with needle and thread and hidden in the last row, terrified of being laughed at—while Ji Xiunian owned an entire wardrobe of dance dresses and stood front and center, praised by the teachers. She had schemed to win over her roommates, and in the end, the whole dorm had turned on her over a single piece of bread.
“So this climbing of yours—even when it means destroying other people’s lives—you feel no guilt at all?”
“None.” Gao Qirui’s eyes were cold. “My only regret is that I wasn’t ruthless enough.”
Jealousy, absurd and festering, had long since warped this woman’s heart.
A faint thread of pity surfaced in Ji Xiunian’s eyes.
Perhaps she had once despised Gao Qirui. But in this moment, she genuinely found her pitiable.
Gao Qirui howled, “Get out! Don’t you dare look at me like that!”
With that she bolted from the room, heedless of everything… Why? Why did some people get born on the clouds, and still have the gall to look down on her from on high!
The commotion in the corridor was loud and long.
Ji Xiunian returned to her seat, expression placid. “Fang Xun, please present the new proposal.”
“…Oh. Yes, of course.”
Even prepared as she was, Fang Xun, like everyone else, was still reeling from the drama. Who would have thought that gentle, mild Teacher Ji could strike so cleanly, so methodically?
She’d even taken out the woman’s husband in the same sweep.
Ruthless, honestly…
The meeting ended with no further objections.
Only Cen Yao ventured a question, hesitant. “The deadline is coming up. The contract was already stamped—can we still process it retroactively?”
Ji Xiunian thought for a moment. “I’ll go see Dean Zhou later.”
And mention, while she was at it, that Gao Qirui would never trouble her again.
The office was utterly silent; you could hear the pages turning.
The more Zhou Lang read, the deeper her brow furrowed. Uncertain, she asked, “This… when did this happen?”
Le Cheng hesitated over how to answer.
It was a rumor that had spread through Ning University’s campus sixteen years ago.
At first, the story was that a part-time counselor in the College of Art was a “lesbian” carrying on improper relationships with multiple female students. Then the rumor shifted: no—the counselor was the victim of a same-sex secret admirer, someone whose love had been refused, who had framed her out of spite to destroy her.
The source of that rumor was Gao Qirui.
And one of the story’s two leads… was at this moment frantically flipping through a calendar.
It was… sixteen years ago. May.
Where had she been then?
Right—she had gone back to her hometown in the south to honor the ancestors. She hadn’t returned to school until mid-June.
Zhou Lang remembered clearly.
The moment she’d passed through the school gate, she’d felt the strange looks, the stares. It took her a whole dazed day to learn that she had already become a “freak” who liked women, a paranoid lunatic who destroyed people with public opinion.
The very next day was the day she and her girlfriend were supposed to leave the country together.
She waited for Ji Xiunian at the airport the entire day. She never came.
After that, heartsick and hollowed out, she chose to leave.
But she had never known… that a full month before her return, Ji Xiunian had already been swallowed by that storm.
Zhou Lang’s hand suddenly crushed a sheet of paper.
Across all those long, lost years, she had finally glimpsed the traces of that old wound.
It was the answer to sixteen years of her own bitterness.
Why had Ji Xiunian never said a word?
Why… had she noticed nothing at all at the time?
She… was someone who cared so deeply about others’ eyes. How had she endured that period alone?
Had she cried by herself, in secret?
Emotion churned in her chest—she couldn’t tell whether it was heartache or fury.
Heartache for the woman who had always endured in silence; fury at the naive, oblivious girl she herself had been.
Le Cheng sighed softly and had no choice but to interrupt. “President Zhou, President Duan is waiting for you in the conference room.”
“I’m not seeing her.”
“We told her, but she won’t leave.”
“So what does she want?”
“She says you’ll have to tell her yourself.”
Zhou Lang rolled up the documents in her hand and shut her laptop in irritation. “Fine. I’ll go.”
Ji Xiunian arrived at Leheng Group for the second time.
On the top floor, she saw no sign of Le Cheng—only Zhou Lang’s young secretary. “May I ask who’s calling?”
“Ji Xiunian. A teacher at Ning University.”
“Oh, of course. Did you have an appointment with President Zhou?”
“No. Is one required?”
“Not strictly. It’s just that President Zhou is in a meeting. Without an appointment, Assistant Le may not be able to alert her in time.”
Ji Xiunian said it was no matter, and sat down to wait.
Two loose strands of hair drifted down by her temple, framing a chin like white porcelain. Her slender, graceful neck curved in a beautiful line as she bent her head—simply sitting there, she was a picture in herself.
The young secretary, bringing her coffee, couldn’t stop sneaking glances.
Zhou Lang did not emerge for a very long time.
Ji Xiunian had an evening dance class to get to. She stood. “Is she… very busy right now?”
“All I know is that President Duan arrived suddenly, saying she had urgent business with President Zhou.”
“President Duan?”
“Yes, she’s been here all afternoon.”
The smile faded slightly from Ji Xiunian’s eyes. “Could I ask you to pass along this document, then?”
“Of course. You’re leaving?”
“Yes. I have somewhere to be.”
“Safe travels.”
The young secretary saw her off politely, inwardly marveling: Professor Ji had such presence—truly a great beauty, every bit Dean Zhou’s equal.
She was still thinking this when the conference room door opened.
Once the visitors had gone in, she stopped Le Cheng. “Assistant Le, a teacher surnamed Ji came by and left a document.”
“Teacher Ji Xiunian? She was here?”
“She’s gone. She waited quite a while.”
Le Cheng’s heart plummeted. Oh no.
He pushed straight through the door. “President Zhou, Professor Ji was just here.”
Zhou Lang stood at the window. She spun around. “Where is she?”
“She waited a long time, and left…”
“Why didn’t you tell me?!”
Zhou Lang, losing her temper with him for the first time, snatched up her suit jacket and bolted.
Le Cheng scrambled after her. “President Zhou!”
Bursting out of the office, she nearly bowled over the secretary carrying coffee in her rush for the elevator. The look on her face was anxiety such as no one had ever seen—nothing like the President Zhou who always wore that radiant smile, composed and unreadable, impossible to fathom.
The employees stared at the woman who had just sprinted past, blinked, and wondered if their eyes were broken.
Le Cheng, a proper executive assistant to the end, still found it in himself to defend the boss’s last shred of dignity, face hardening. “What are you looking at? Back to work.”
Then he sighed. He really would have to have a word with the little secretary later—never again turn away the boss’s wife at the door.
