Chapter 1: Theory
Early summer weather, sultry and stifling. A sticky heaviness churned in the air beneath the overcast sky.
Outside the windows of the tiered lecture hall, cicadas buzzed faintly. On the electronic whiteboard was the topic of today’s class: “What Exactly Is Love?”
“Sternberg’s triangular theory of love holds that no matter how complicated love may be, it is made up of three basic components.”
“Passion: physical attraction and sexual impulse. Intimacy: psychological connection, warmth, and understanding. Commitment: the decision and responsibility to maintain a relationship.”
An 8 a.m. class, a universally acknowledged blow-off course. Once attendance was signed, half the room had slumped over asleep, and most of the rest were on their laptops or scrolling their phones. Only the professor at the front, a man in his fifties, lectured on with calm composure, unhurried.
“Love with only passion is called ‘infatuated love.’ You’re drawn in by looks, you fall for someone at first sight, you act on impulse, and once the passion fades, all that’s usually left is hurt.”
Jian Nian had her eyes lowered, working on her economics homework, when a red rose was suddenly thrust in front of her, blocking her view.
She turned her head slightly. The girl who had been sitting beside her had, at some point, been replaced by a boy in a basketball jersey.
He smiled at her bashfully, his movements awkward. Not far away sat a few of his buddies, watching the two of them with teasing looks and whispering for him to say something.
“Junior Jian, I like you.” The boy took a deep breath and said it.
Jian Nian looked at him calmly. “And?”
The boy froze, then began to stammer. “A-and, will you be my girlfriend?”
The girl before him had a face so pretty it was like a porcelain doll’s, pale under the lights, her amber eyes unusually still. Hearing this, she seemed to feel a flicker of confusion, and her brows drew together slightly.
She stared at him for a moment, then asked, her voice flat, “Why should I?”
The girl who’d been sitting there came back to her seat. The red rose lay discarded on the floor, and someone walking past accidentally stepped on it, leaving its petals in ruins.
The boy in the jersey went back to his group of friends. Faint tsking could be heard, and the guys put their heads together, muttering curses under their breath.
“Fuck, her family’s already gone bankrupt and she’s still putting on airs. Does she really think she’s still some untouchable rich princess?”
“Right?”
The kindly professor stood at the podium, watching them with a beaming smile. “You young men have very unfamiliar faces. Are you here to audit?”
“Ah, yeah, yeah.”
“My, being eager to learn is a good thing. Everyone should learn from these young men. Come, come, the front is all empty seats. Sit up front, you’ll hear better.”
The few boys in jerseys wore stiff expressions. Under everyone’s gaze, they got to their feet reluctantly and trudged to the front row.
The professor rapped on the blackboard and said leisurely, “Now then, let’s continue…”
“And love with only commitment is called ’empty love.’ This kind of love is extremely common among our parents’ generation, marrying just for the sake of marrying, or holding a partnership together out of duty, under a heavily warped sense of morals and values, with no element of love in it at all…”
Jian Nian finished her homework with her head down. The bell rang, and the students filed out of the classroom one after another. | BlackLotus Novel Translations · Black Lotus Novel
As she passed the podium, the professor, cradling a thermos and sipping tea, smiled at her. “Finished your homework? Do me a favor and give this to the teacher of your next class.”
He held out an empty thermos, shaking his head, sighing as if in distress. “I told them I don’t like drinking it, and they insist I drink it anyway, saying it’s good for my health? If you ask me, it’s an IQ tax. At my age, still getting swindled every single day.”
Jian Nian was puzzled. “Then why not just pour it out?”
The professor’s smile stuck. He waved her off. “Hey, you. This kid. Go on, go on, off to your class.”
She changed classrooms. Jian Nian stuffed the thermos into her bag, next to her own. She walked among the stream of students, looking down at her phone.
She sent a message: [What are you doing?]
Two seconds later, a new message popped up on the screen.
L: [In a meeting.]
A few girls were walking together behind her, gossiping animatedly.
“Hey, hey, did you guys hear? Qi Hui from the school basketball team confessed to that ice queen junior from Econ and Management this morning and got shot down.”
“Seriously? I heard something happened with her family recently…”
“LOL, I heard about it. A bunch of the basketball guys skipped class together, and the coach cursed them out so loud you could hear it all the way in the lab building. The ones from Dorm 3304. It’s always the same few from 3304, they’re notorious.”
“I think it was bankruptcy? I saw it on the news, sounded pretty serious. I saw police on campus a few days ago, too.”
“So she’s fallen on hard times now? No wonder Qi Hui had the guts to confess to a young lady like her.”
“Pfft, rich people don’t fall that easily. They say bankrupt, but a few shops and a couple of cars left over is what the rest of us would work our whole lives for. Better to think about what to eat for lunch, no? The Second Cafeteria just opened a new place…”
Jian Nian turned a corner and walked into the classroom, handed the thermos to the teacher, sat down, and started class.
She had made up the homework, but she’d missed several days of class a while back cooperating with the police investigation, and she really couldn’t keep up with the regular coursework. Finance in the Econ and Management program was hard enough for her to begin with, and now the lectures sounded like Greek.
She frowned. Maybe she should just tell her family to hire a tutor to help her catch up.
She picked up her phone and opened the [Mom] contact on WeChat with practiced ease, then realized something and suddenly froze.
In the chat window, the last message had been sent a month ago.
Mom: [Don’t come see me. Go to your classes and study hard.]
Jian Nian: [Okay.]
Jian Nian stared at the conversation for a while. Her chest suddenly felt heavy, uncomfortable. Quietly, she closed the chat and switched to another one.
[What are you doing?] she asked again.
L: [Debugging a program.]
A few minutes later, another message came.
L: [Can’t get away. Ordered you delivery.]
Lunch was from a restaurant Jian Nian had eaten at before.
Her health wasn’t good, so her meals were normally made by the chefs at home. Sometimes, when she got tired of the nutritionist-designed meals at home, she’d go eat at this restaurant.
It was just that in these past two years, her mother had controlled her even more strictly, and she hadn’t eaten out at all.
There was only one class in the afternoon. After it ended, Jian Nian found an empty classroom and studied on her own to make up for the lessons she’d missed. Whenever she got tired, she unscrewed her thermos and took a sip of water.
Inside the thermos was warm honey water, steeped with some kind of unidentifiable tea. The honey wasn’t great quality, and she could taste a fake sweetness in it, so she didn’t drink much.
She sent another message.
[What are you doing?]
The other person’s replies were always short, brief and to the point.
L: [Still debugging.]
L: [Writing code.]
L: [In a meeting.]
This way of asking seemed to be called “checking up on someone,” the kind of thing couples do.
Jian Nian had learned it in class from a group of girls chatting in the seats in front of her. They were roommates. One of them had just gotten a boyfriend, and another was teaching her how to “check up,” showing her own chat history with her boyfriend.
After the guy reported where he was and what he was doing, he also had to reply with a video of himself using hand gestures to show a random number the girl had sent.
Jian Nian didn’t quite understand why anyone would “check up” on someone, but after she tentatively copied what they did, she found that it really did make her chest feel less heavy.
There was still half an hour until the end of the school day. Jian Nian glanced at the time, packed up her textbooks and thermos, and walked out of the school. — BLACK LOTUS Translation | Black Lotus Novel
Not far from the West Gate of Huai University was a bus stop. She studied the routes on her phone, her brows knitted tightly.
Route 77, east side of Qinghuai District? From University Road to… Qiaotou West Station? That didn’t seem right.
While she was still working it out, Route 77 suddenly pulled up in front of her. Jian Nian didn’t have time to think and hurriedly climbed aboard.
Scan the ride code… where?
She looked down at the machine, held her phone up to it in some confusion, and heard no beep. Just as she was starting to feel at a loss, the driver glanced at her and said in a heavily accented dialect, “Down there, down there.”
“Beep.”
The scan went through. Jian Nian breathed a sigh of relief, swept her eyes over the bus, saw two empty seats in the back row, and went to sit.
A summer evening was the stuffiest time of day. The air inside the bus didn’t circulate, and the smell of gasoline mixed with all kinds of other odors. Not long after sitting down, Jian Nian started to feel dizzy, her face going pale.
She closed her eyes and leaned against the window to rest, fighting down the nausea.
But the next moment, the mechanical female voice announcing the stop made her eyes fly open.
“Next stop… passengers getting off, please prepare to alight.”
Something was off…?
Jian Nian scrolled through her phone and checked the route, and only then discovered that she was going the wrong way.
“…”
She got off, found the stop across the road, and fumbled around for quite a while before finally boarding a Route 77 bus heading in the right direction.
By the time she reached her stop, it was almost dark. Her face was ashen. She stood for a while to let the nausea pass, then made her way into an old, run-down residential compound.
Electric scooters were parked all along the road. It had been raining constantly lately, and many of them had raincoats draped over them.
She reached the foot of one apartment building. The broken entrance door was propped open with an iron frame, mottled with rust. Inside it was pitch-black, and it gave off a damp, stifling smell.
The light overhead, neglected for years, was dim. Jian Nian took out a tissue, spread it carefully flat on the filthy concrete steps at the entrance, sat down to rest for a while, and took out her phone.
She’d been so carsick on the bus that she hadn’t dared look at it at all.
She opened WeChat and found a small red dot at the bottom: a friend request.
The avatar was a Ragdoll cat. It looked like her family’s own cat.
Jian Nian found it strange. Back when things were good, distant relatives had often come out of the woodwork to stage grand reunion scenes, and all sorts of people had fawned over her.
Now that the trouble had come, everyone was keeping their distance, afraid of getting dragged in and being sent inside along with her. Why would anyone add her now?
Jian Nian accepted the request, then left it there without sending a message.
Anyway, if it was something important, the other person would say so.
Suddenly, a message popped up at the top.
L: [Where are you?]
She tapped into it and only then saw that it had been sent twenty minutes ago; it just hadn’t shown up. The signal on the bus had probably been terrible.
She typed back: [Just got home.]
She thought for a moment, then asked again.
[What are you doing?]
The next second, a new message appeared. · B L A C K L O T U S Novel Translations | BlackLotusNovel
L: [Look up.]
A summer night breeze suddenly blew in, carrying a cool yet humid scent.
Jian Nian looked up on instinct.
In the dim, restless night around her, her gaze met a pair of pitch-black eyes.
