Chapter 46: Peeping (Double Chapter)

At 8:00 AM, the basement coffee shop of Building 5 at Huada University had just opened. Only a handful of early-rising students were scattered at their seats, looking over study materials and working on assignments.

Outside, a light drizzle was falling, and the sky was overcast. Jiang Ying sat at a window seat, so drowsy she was nodding off.

After swallowing several sips of coffee to wake herself up, she took out her phone to check her notifications. A prompt box on the screen displayed a breaking news headline.

"......The anonymous whistleblower continues to provide evidence, supporting the Williams family group in the major regulatory violation incident it currently faces. As one of the primary responsible parties, Junior Williams urgently resigned as the chairman of the board and CEO of the listed company upon receiving the charges. Because Old Williams's second daughter, Chloe, and youngest son, Vincent, failed to gain the board's trust, Old Williams, despite his advanced age, has returned to take the helm personally, barely stabilizing the continuously plunging stock price....... Alex, the only son of Junior Williams, remains unreachable."

Jiang Ying gazed at Lu Zhixi's name in the news report.

The night after parting ways with him at the school gate the day before, she immediately dreamed of him.

Gloomy weather, dim streets, a red light prohibiting passage.

Lu Zhixi stood rigidly on the street corner across the road, his light hair messy, his pale and handsome brows and eyes hovering with a morbid gloom.

His clear, glass- bead-like eyes stared straight at her, his pale lips parting and closing as he said to her—

I want you.

As these words fell, that dead, silent red light began to flash with a heart-stopping countdown.

The split second before it switched to green, the dream shattered.

When Jiang Ying woke up drenched in sweat from the bed, the time was 4:00 AM.

For a long time prior to this, she had not dreamed of him again, and she had taken that as a sign of successful withdrawal after a breakup.

Yet tonight's dream felt like a returning bolt of lightning, violently striking her body, leaving her suffocating, trembling, and with her heart pounding wildly.

Yu Siyan's warning to her on the day of their breakup poured into her mind like an alarm bell—she had to be extremely careful to avoid letting her relationship with Lu Zhixi slide into some dangerous territory.

The wind chimes at the coffee shop entrance jingled, and someone pushed open the door curtain from the outside. The chilly wind of early spring poured into the room along with her movement.

Affected by the chill, Jiang Ying quickly pulled back her wandering thoughts. Shivering from the cold, she swiftly grabbed a tissue to cover her mouth and nose, and sneezed.

The newcomer walked over and sat down opposite her. "Oh dear, catching a cold? With the season changing lately, you really need to be careful."

Jiang Ying looked up and immediately greeted her with a smile, "Teacher Chen, you're here. I'm sorry to trouble you to make the trip."

"It's no trouble. I have classes at the school today, so I was coming anyway."

Teacher Chen took off her coat and ordered a hot latte from the waiter.

"Haven't seen you all semester. How have you been? Is everything going smoothly?"

Chen Xin worked in the psychological treatment department of Tanshushan Psychiatric Hospital and was also hired by the Huada University Psychological Counseling Center as a part-time psychological counselor. Jiang Ying had gotten to know her while doing student work at the counseling center previously.

She had tried asking Chen Xin via WeChat last night if she was available to meet and chat, and since Chen Xin happened to have work at Huada today, the two of them promptly set a time.

"It's like this, I have a friend......"

After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Jiang Ying cut straight to the point.

In handling her relationship with Lu Zhixi, Jiang Ying had thought of feasible methods on her own, but out of caution, she still decided to seek help and advice from a professional at the same time.

After blurring their past relationship, she tactfully described their current awkward situation to Chen Xin.

"Teacher Chen, I am not a professional psychotherapist, nor have I handled other cases. Do you have any good suggestions? I ultimately hope that we can live our respective lives without interfering with each other."

Chen Xin listened attentively to her situation and then asked, "Is your friend's family background relatively affluent?"

"Yes."

Having received an affirmative answer, Chen Xin roughly understood the situation she described.

She told Jiang Ying that in the cases she was familiar with, individuals with paranoid traits often lacked the desire to seek help.

"These people might possess some typical traits, such as being reclusive and lacking trust in others. If he is willing to interact with you, regardless of what your relationship is, it shows that he trusts you deeply. This is a good thing; at the very least, you can communicate."

Building on this, Chen Xin explained further:

"A person's cognition ultimately rests on two base points—the self and the other. In fact, to a certain extent, psychology is also a discipline that studies the interaction pathways between the subject and the other. Excluding some special cases, ordinary people are able to realize that the world does not revolve around them. Therefore, engaging in dialogue on equal terms, negotiating, and making concessions are default social norms."

"But for someone like your friend, perhaps growing up, most people around him existed simply to serve him. To a certain extent, you could say the world did revolve around him, which is why he often exhibits a very domineering attitude."

Chen Xin suggested that she use a gentle approach, within a range her friend could accept, to let him understand how her life operated, gradually helping him accept the fact that he could not interfere with her life, and then slowly pulling away the distance so he could return to his own life.

She added that because individual cases varied, this method might not necessarily work, but it was at least worth a try.

"The advice Teacher Chen gave me is similar to the method I thought of beforehand."

While having lunch in the cafeteria at noon, Jiang Ying finished telling Zhou Anning about the conclusion of her conversation with Chen Xin and immediately took a sip of the steaming clay pot soup.

Logically speaking, the weather in early spring had already started to warm up, but these past two days she always felt unbearably cold. Only when the warm soup entered her stomach did her body feel slightly warmed up.

"I think you guys still have a bit of that 'benevolent healer, uplifting the world' vibe in you. You're just too merciful."

Although Zhou Anning was also a psychology major, her empathy for anyone other than Jiang Ying existed, but not by much.

Especially someone like Lu Zhixi, whom she had already firmly categorized as a massive pain in the neck, was not worth an ounce of patience in Zhou Anning's eyes.

"Isn't it just about overcoming weakness with strength? If you ask me, you should just directly break through Lu Zhixi's psychological defenses, seize the psychological high ground, and suppress him."

Jiang Ying admitted that what Zhou Anning said also made a lot of sense, but putting aside what consequences such an aggressive method might cause, how was this so-called breakthrough supposed to be done?

"Simple. Whenever he disobeys, you preemptively scold him until his mind goes blank, and then take the opportunity to stroke his head and praise him for being a good boy. Once he tastes the sweetness, he'll follow your logic."

Jiang Ying stared at Zhou Anning in silence for a moment.

"Did you reference those niche relationship articles from that public account of yours?"

Zhou Anning nodded candidly. "Mhm. Teacher Chen's advice belongs to the soft-line tactics. If that doesn't work, then you just play hardball. What if it works?"

Jiang Ying remained silent.

She hoped Teacher Chen's advice would work, because her intuition told her that Zhou Anning's method of fighting poison with poison was dangerous.

*

After lunch, Lu Zhixi's call came through, his voice brisk and light.

"Yingying, are you still busy?"

Ever since Jiang Ying agreed to keep communicating with him in the car, he had been calling her punctually every day like clockwork.

He didn't bring up any strange topics either; the questions he asked were similar to what delicious food she had eaten or what tasks she was busy with, just like a casual chat.

However, every time the call ended, Lu Zhixi would tentatively ask her if she wanted to video chat or meet up.

Like an evil criminal trying to seduce and lure her.

"I'm going to the department's graduation and employment exchange meeting later," she said.

This was something that had been decided a month ago.

The department's student union had invited current senior undergraduates and first-year graduate students in the psychology department to talk about how to prepare for graduate school recommendation exams, studying abroad, or finding a job. It was considered an old tradition of the psychology department.

Lu Zhixi immediately asked if she was going alone and who else would be at the exchange meeting.

Actually, back when they were dating, he liked to ask her questions like this, but Jiang Ying had thought he was just asking casually back then.

Now she understood that Lu Zhixi was actually checking up on her whereabouts.

Jiang Ying originally wanted to say that this had nothing to do with him, but thinking of her conversation with Chen Xin that morning, she changed her tune and told Lu Zhixi everyone who would be attending.

Upon hearing one of the names, his reaction was indeed very strong, a trace of disbelief in his voice: "Why is Yu Siyan going? He isn't even a student at Huada."

"When the student union sent out the invitation, he and I were still together, so they invited him along by the way. Besides, he will be studying for his graduate degree at Huada this September and will be my classmate, so it's completely normal for him to be invited."

Jiang Ying told him the facts exactly as they were.

The person on the other end of the line was silent for two seconds before saying, "I don't want you to go."

"Your objection is invalid."

Receiving a rejection, Lu Zhixi was obviously very unhappy. "But you clearly said before that as long as I communicate with you, you are willing to make adjustments."

Jiang Ying recalled for a moment and remembered that was what she had said after they broke up, when she discovered he was pulling strings behind the scenes.

She didn't know whether to laugh or cry: "The premise for me doing that is that you have to be my boyfriend. But right now, I've only agreed to take your calls."

As soon as she finished speaking, the other side fell silent instantly, as if plotting some little scheme.

Thinking of Lu Zhixi's past record, Jiang Ying reminded him, "You are not allowed to use any weird methods to prevent him from getting to the venue, otherwise I won't answer your calls anymore."

After two or three seconds, Lu Zhixi finally spoke, "Alright."

Jiang Ying choked slightly.

So he really had been planning to cause trouble.

According to how things went yesterday, usually around the ten-minute mark, Lu Zhixi would know better than to disturb her any further.

Yet today, he lingered on the line and refused to hang up, nor did he speak, acting as though he wanted to tag along with her to the exchange meeting.

Jiang Ying decided to give him some time to accept it and didn't rush to hang up the phone. Tucking her mobile phone into her pocket and putting on her wireless earphones, she walked all the way toward the department building.

Just as she reached the entrance of the department, a dark-haired young man happened to walk toward her from the other end of the path.

Jiang Ying smiled and greeted him, "Siyan."

As soon as those words left her mouth, Lu Zhixi's dissatisfied voice immediately rang out in her earphones.

"Why are you so happy?"