By this hour, quite a few people had already begun waking up one after another.
Some were even in the habit of getting up early to eat breakfast, so Jian Yue ran into quite a few classmates from his floor along the way.
They all seemed to know him. Occasionally someone would openly glance in his direction, and some of the friendlier types would strike up a conversation, asking where he was headed.
But it really wasn’t their fault for being so forward.
After all, the so-called pajamas Jian Yue wore were just a loose T-shirt, paired with baggy pajama pants that hung slack on him, making him look as though he’d been wrapped up in strips of wide cloth.
The problem was that, in others’ eyes, although Jian Yue came from a poor family, he carried himself with considerable aloofness. He often came across as fastidious and meticulous, the type of top student who was hard to approach.
There were even classmates who weren’t well acquainted with the young man who, upon seeing Jian Yue for the first time, jokingly called him an unattainable flower on a high peak.
So when they suddenly saw him appear in the hallway dressed in a way that didn’t match his usual image at all, the sense of distance that his casual attire wore down made them step forward to chat.
But this unattainable flower walked quickly. Though he maintained basic politeness and didn’t outright ignore their greetings, he didn’t spare them so much as an extra glance.
He seemed rather cold and did as he pleased, standing out awkwardly in this society built on personal connections.
The gazes of those around him, both overt and covert, kept drifting toward the young man, following him all the way until Jian Yue stopped in front of the dryer placed outside the communal washroom.
That was when they saw how the loose fabric of his clothes traced out the slender, soft curve of his body as he bent over.
The young man himself was oblivious to this. He reached out and opened the lid of the small dryer, as if searching for something. And most of them knew full well that this was the dryer specifically for underwear.
The school loved adding useless little details to things like this, since most people rarely used the dryers here anyway.
But right now, none of that was the point.
They only noticed that the young man seemed unable to find his own clothes in that machine.
He even frowned and checked around the outside, but never managed to find them.
If this had happened to anyone else, people might have found it somewhat absurd. No one would go out of their way to steal someone’s personal underwear, especially not here in the men’s dormitory.
But…
Watching this young man who, ever since appearing in the various professors’ classes a few days ago, had been repeatedly approached by people asking what major he was in and what his name was, they couldn’t help but entertain some subtle and rather nasty speculations.
If someone had deliberately stolen his clothes, there were really only a few possible uses for them.
After all, while plenty of people here claimed there was nothing wrong with their orientation, pretty boys did indeed receive the same treatment as pretty women in wealthy circles.
Though none of these were kind thoughts, of course.
In any case, they simply watched as the young man returned to his dorm empty-handed, secretly speculating in their minds about what the person who might have taken the young man’s clothes would do with them at night.
As the time drew near, all Jian Yue could do, after returning empty-handed, was search through the dried clothes once more to see if that pair of vanished underwear might turn up again.
He found the whole thing rather absurd.
After all, losing clothes was something he could accept, but losing that kind of thing…
After confirming with Mu Yansheng once more whether he had seen any underwear, Jian Yue gave up.
He suspected the cleaner had come by in the early morning to tidy up and thrown out the clothes he’d left inside after all, that possibility wasn’t exactly impossible.
Upon hearing the young man’s questions, Shen Yu seemed to glance, however subtly, at Mu Yansheng, who still sat motionless on the bed. Even Li Cheng, who for some reason was fully dressed yet in no hurry to leave first, cast a deliberate or accidental glance in Mu Yansheng’s direction.
The latter looked to be in an even worse mood.
Jian Yue, having confirmed he couldn’t find it, gave up entirely and went back to getting dressed. Pressed for time, the bed curtain he casually pulled closed was sloppy, with wide gaps on both sides, anyone could see everything inside with just a light glance inward.
Because he’d wasted the early morning on grogginess upon waking and searching for his missing things, his movements involuntarily sped up. He practically threw his clothes on in a frantic rush, stuffed his textbooks and pens into his shoulder bag, and got ready to head out.
Shen Yu naturally invited him to walk together, and Li Cheng, saying nothing, fell in step beside them. Just before leaving, Jian Yue glanced at Mu Yansheng, who for some reason still sat motionless on the bed, and asked one more question: “No classes today?”
Considering the man had helped him yesterday, the young man decided to ask about his somewhat unusual behavior this morning.
But just as he’d expected, the man’s tone was as barbed as ever, like nothing decent could ever come out of his mouth.
The moment the words “Mind your own business” left his lips, Jian Yue, well practiced by now, turned and walked away. As if he’d anticipated the answer, he left the dorm without looking back.
The foundational course always drew a crowd. By the time Jian Yue and Shen Yu reached the corridor, the sounds of commotion were already drifting from the lecture hall.
Jian Yue, planning to arrive early to secure a good seat in order to maintain the protagonist’s studious persona, was in fact well aware that the front-row seats he usually occupied were never contested. He’d even considered using this spare time to eat a bit more at the cafeteria… but the setting didn’t allow it.
Among the personas likely to develop according to the script’s plot, this protagonist’s personality was exactly the stubborn, prideful, sometimes inflexible type.
So even though he knew perfectly well there was no need to rush to the classroom, he still had to arrive early and prepare, in keeping with the protagonist’s character.
The appearance of the three of them brought a brief silence to the classroom.
This abrupt, collective hush plunged the room into a somewhat awkward atmosphere.
The ensuing whispers broke the initial, excessive stillness, but in that vast lecture hall, they still sounded sparse and faint.
Countless gazes landed on the three of them.
Without question, the young man walking in the middle was the protagonist who drew every single one of those eyes.
Even though Li Cheng and Shen Yu, standing at Jian Yue’s sides, were themselves among the most prominent figures at the school, one a young corporate heir, the other from a scholarly family of intellectuals, with elders who possessed considerable assets and were renowned names in academia, the attention they received would naturally be considerable.
But perhaps because they had seen too much, in an environment where wealthy people were everywhere, those two didn’t seem all that remarkable.
By comparison, the young man from an ordinary family said to have gotten into this university on his grades alone, drew far more attention.
Not to mention, he had such a strikingly beautiful face.
Beautiful was their unanimous, unspoken verdict, yet on closer inspection, “beautiful” alone hardly sufficed to describe him, the word felt far too vague for someone like him.
He was the kind of person who would be noticed at first glance in any crowd.
There was a cold, aloof beauty to his features, a distinctly distant air. At times, his temperament seemed even more haughty than that of these children born into wealth.
Yet beneath that pride, a closer look gave the strange illusion of something fragile and pitiable.
It was a deeply contradictory quality.
Beauty blended with weakness, self-reliance fused with resilience, carrying a fierce vitality that seemed bent on breaking something, a resolve and heaviness they would never know in their entire lives.
The looks that came with this temperament merged with it, forming a unique charm from which it was impossible to look away.
One would be drawn in by that beautiful appearance, moved to tenderness. And one would be seduced by that resolve, stirred into an even fiercer desire to conquer.
Perhaps it was because, in this environment, the young man seemed so utterly out of place among the crowd. That sense of intrigue and curiosity lent his artwork-like beauty an irresistible allure.
And so countless gazes turned toward the young man sitting so straight ahead peering, curious, or sighing in admiration.
Complicated emotions poured over him one after another, carrying a tingling itch that made one want to go up and strike up a conversation.