Chapter 30: Sneaking a Look

After posting on Weibo, Jiang Ying felt her hands go a little weak. Yet, alongside that weakness, she suddenly felt a sense of catharsis, as if a bitter grudge had been vented.

She was a person of steady, rule-abiding character. She had always lived by the principle of "if you don't offend me, I won't offend you; if you do, I’ll reason with you." But Lu Zhixi’s actions were simply too excessive.

Setting her phone aside, Jiang Ying finally sat at her desk and finished her meal.

"Are you going to the library this afternoon, or will you be working on your thesis in the dorm?" Zhou Anning asked, pulling her laptop and a few books from her drawer.

"I'll stay in the dorm," Jiang Ying replied.

With January approaching, the deadline for the first draft of their graduation thesis was drawing near. Ordinarily, she would have headed to the library, but she was afraid of running into Lu Zhixi again. She feared him bringing up the past, feared his apologies, and feared his impulsive nature. The fierce, ruthless look in his eyes when he had charged at Yu Siyan remained vivid in her mind.

She opened her laptop to face her thesis draft, but after half an hour, she hadn’t typed a single word. Both she and Zhou Anning began to sigh in unison.

"The dorm is too comfortable; I just want to slack off," Zhou Anning lamented.

"My brain is filled with paste," Jiang Ying added.

When Zhou Anning asked what was on her mind, Jiang Ying honestly admitted that she was thinking about yesterday’s events, which had made it impossible for her to sleep well. "I really didn't expect him to just charge over like that... Every time I think of the injury on Siyan's face, I feel terrible."

As she spoke, she sighed again.

"Do you remember back in August when you told me that one night, an illegitimate half-brother of Lu Zhixi’s broke into your villa in the middle of the night?" Zhou Anning suddenly brought up a past incident.

"I remember. Why?"

When Lu Zhixi had pulled her into the car yesterday, he had also mentioned that illegitimate brother, Danny.

Zhou Anning said slowly, "You were quite scared that night by the hair and water stains left in the first-floor bathroom. Lu Zhixi told you it was his brother taking a bath. When we talked about it back then, we both thought his explanation made sense. But now... don't you think it's possible that we were both wrong?"

Hearing this, Jiang Ying already knew what she was going to say next.

"You mean..." she began hesitantly.

Zhou Anning nodded, mimicking the motion of grabbing hair and holding someone underwater.

As psychology students, they both knew very well that a person's behavioral patterns are difficult to change suddenly. If someone makes a startling move, it is either because such behavior is their usual habit, or because they have been subjected to a major stimulus that resulted in abnormal behavior.

If yesterday’s incident hadn't occurred, Lu Zhixi would have maintained a fairly decent and restrained image in both of their minds. And if one were to isolate yesterday’s accident, it could be interpreted as Lu Zhixi seeing Jiang Ying with Yu Siyan, getting stimulated, and losing control—nothing more than the typical drama of an ex-lover who cannot forget the past, having a moment of regret, and pursuing aggressively.

"What if it's a combination of a habitual action and a major stimulus?" Zhou Anning proposed a theory. "I mean, perhaps he isn't who we thought he was at all. Yesterday, he was triggered again, and so he... simply put, he couldn't keep up the act anymore."

She pointed to the graduation thesis on Jiang Ying's screen. "Isn't your thesis research exactly about this? The correlation between family wealth and adolescent behavioral disorders. Do you have a conclusion yet?"

"I still have some supplementary questionnaires to collect, but I basically have a conclusion... Based on current results, the proportion of adolescents with problems in the high-income family group is significantly higher than in the control group. But I had always thought Lu Zhixi was an exception."

"Perhaps he is a typical case now. Has Lu Zhixi ever filled out your questionnaire? Next time you see him, ask him to support your academic research as an ex-boyfriend."

Seeing Jiang Ying’s grave expression, Zhou Anning tried to crack a joke to lighten the mood, but Jiang Ying was already completely lost in her own thoughts.

Jiang Ying thought carefully. There had indeed been moments in the past when she felt abnormal changes in Lu Zhixi’s mood, but those anomalies were fleeting. She hadn't looked into them, even dismissing them as her own delusions.

Why was that?

After pondering for a long time, Jiang Ying suddenly recalled the moment they first met—the freshman entrance psychological assessment questionnaire. If Lu Zhixi hadn't repeatedly neglected to fill out that questionnaire, she would never have met him. After he finally filled it out, the results showed his state was perfectly normal, which had cemented her first impression of him.

—The primacy effect, again.

Splendid. This world was truly a massive case study in psychology, and Jiang Ying had just given herself a practical lesson in the primacy effect.

Jiang Ying tugged at her hair in frustration. She had actually always felt that Lu Zhixi was her role model in how he handled family issues. Despite his parents’ unhappy marriage and the frequent trouble caused by his illegitimate siblings, he always seemed so stable and calm, as if he didn't care at all and could still live his own life well. For a long time, this had given her encouragement; she had strived to emulate him to better manage her own emotions regarding her father’s alcoholism.

Now it seemed he might be even more unstable than she was—he was simply better at pretending.

At this thought, Jiang Ying felt a tightness in her chest. If that were the case, would the Weibo post she made have triggered him again? Should she delete it? But it had been up for so long; what if he had already seen it?

Jiang Ying opened Weibo and found that it only displayed "Yesterday’s Visitors." This meant that if she wanted to know if Lu Zhixi had seen her new post, she would have to wait until after midnight today to check the records. But surely he wouldn't come over just for a Weibo post? After all, she had posted plenty of things in the past without his knowledge, and even when he minded, he only ever mentioned it over the phone.

Moreover, if Lu Zhixi had really intended to do something, he should have called her by now; he certainly had plenty of phone numbers at his disposal.

After weighing her options, Jiang Ying sent a message to Yu Siyan, asking if his day had gone smoothly. Perhaps because he was busy at the academic forum, Yu Siyan didn't reply for nearly an hour, saying he was fine but was busy helping his mentor with chores in the conference hall and didn't have much time to look at his phone.

By the time Jiang Ying was ready for bed that night, everything was calm. The commotion Lu Zhixi had caused at the school seemed like a stone thrown into a pond—after causing a splash, he had immediately walked away. Perhaps Lu Zhixi had thought it through and gone back to the United States, she mused.

But she was wrong.

When she woke up the next morning, she casually clicked on Weibo. The visitor record for yesterday indeed showed Lu Zhixi’s name, followed by the number—189 times.

It was even higher than last time!

Had he spent his entire day doing nothing but this?

After setting her profile to invisible, she clicked on his homepage and saw that his IP was still showing Beijing. So, he hadn't returned to the United States after all.

"Are you going to the library today?" Zhou Anning asked.

Jiang Ying had intended to, but now she shook her head. "Forget it, I'll stay in the dorm today too."

Zhou Anning, unconditionally accepting the decision, opened a delivery app and began to mutter, "Since we're writing our theses in the dorm, we can't treat ourselves poorly. Two cups of milk tea, a bag of roasted chestnuts, and two skewers of strawberry tanghulu..."

By the afternoon, Jiang Ying still hadn't received any messages from Lu Zhixi. She checked in with Yu Siyan, who was still busy at the academic forum, and everything was normal on his end as well.

After confirming the situation with Yu Siyan, Jiang Ying finally put down her phone and refocused on her thesis. Upon opening her email, she found that she had received new supplementary responses to her questionnaire the previous night.

Her thesis subjects covered adolescents from various family backgrounds. The high-income family group was difficult to recruit, so she had asked her kind-hearted friend Lily to help find people she knew to fill them out. Most of the newly received questionnaires were from this group. After organizing them, Jiang Ying sent a WeChat message to Lily to thank her.

Lily replied quickly: "You're welcome! I'm happy to help. We haven't chatted in a long time; when are you free? Let’s video call!"

As it happened, Jiang Ying had been sitting at her computer for nearly two hours. She asked Lily if she wanted to video call now, and Lily readily agreed, sending an invite.

"Hiiiiii, beauty!" Lily greeted her enthusiastically. "You look a bit frail today, it makes me want to bully you!"

It was already the middle of the night in New York. Lily, a night owl, was still energetic, wearing a face mask while playing on her phone. In contrast, Jiang Ying hadn't slept well the past two days; her delicate features looked a bit haggard, giving her a look of fragility.

They chatted about their recent lives, and then Jiang Ying asked a question: "You've known Lu Zhixi for a long time, right? In your eyes, what kind of person is he?"

Lily paused, not answering directly, and instead asked, "Did something happen? Why are you suddenly asking this?"

Her mind raced, and she suddenly remembered hearing her parents mention a couple of days ago that Lu Zhixi had suddenly left New York without contacting his parents or grandfather, which had infuriated his family.

"Good heavens, he didn't go to Beijing to find you, did he?" Lily’s eyes widened.

Jiang Ying was suspicious. "How did you guess that? Did he tell you?"

Of course not. Unless he needed a favor, Lu Zhixi never contacted Lily. And the only "favor" he would ever need was one thing—having Lily chat with Jiang Ying to probe how she was doing. Thus, Lily naturally guessed where he had gone.

However, Lily dared not tell Jiang Ying how she had guessed. She cherished her friendship with Jiang Ying and feared that if she spilled the truth, not only would Lu Zhixi be angry, but Jiang Ying would be too. Lily thought to herself, feeling miserable, *This is so hard. I don't want to be someone who deceives her friends.*

To make it up to Jiang Ying, she answered the question about Lu Zhixi truthfully. Besides, Lu Zhixi hadn't told her to keep this part a secret.

"He isn't a very easy person to get along with," Lily pursed her lips. "But as a friend, I think Brother Xi actually has a very high threshold of patience. As long as you don't touch what he truly cares about, you can actually joke around with him quite a bit."