After leaving the subway, they had to walk another eight hundred meters to reach the school.
Kong Lingrou had no choice but to start considering Shi Bei’s words.
Compared to taking the electric train, walking seemed a bit more worthwhile after all.
At the very least, the background of the streets along the way consisted of blue skies and white clouds, sparing them from descending deep into underground train cars to stand pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with countless commuters.
“I want to buy a bottle of water to take to the classroom.” Shi Bei pointed to a vending machine nearby.
Kong Lingrou pushed her over.
Just like that, relying on her brief temporary disability, Shi Bei gained the opportunity to order Kong Lingrou around… relying on herself to live a life ordering Kong Lingrou around.
“Which one do you want to buy?”
The buttons were a bit high up, so Shi Bei raised her hand to point toward them across the air.
Kong Lingrou pressed the button for her.
“Since we’re already here, why don’t you come to class with me?”
The teaching building that met her eyes was extremely unfamiliar, and Shi Bei subconsciously grabbed the hem of Kong Lingrou’s clothes: “If you’re going to help someone, see them through to the end, right?”
“Even if you don’t wrinkle my clothes, I intended to go with you anyway.” Kong Lingrou calmly pushed her toward the elevator hall, nodding in greeting to a professor who walked out from inside, and added, “The professor for your class has my contact information; he communicated the progress you missed directly to me.”
“How come I don’t know a thing about this?”
“It’s just the grading rules for this class and the already finalized group list. I’ll send them to you in a bit.”
“…I thought this was a super easy, low-effort lecture class, but it actually requires group work.”
“The easier and more low-effort the class is, the more likely it is to be divided into groups, isn’t it?”
Shi Bei fell silent. She was extremely bad at group collaboration. In the past, female students were scarce in the department; for courses requiring group work, as long as she sat around the female students in advance, she would quickly be invited to join them.
Thanks to them, she had never been left out even once.
Yet she would never take the initiative to communicate with others, always waiting for others to make arrangements before she provided technical support. On the rare occasion that bizarre conflicts broke out within the group, she would merely look on with cold detachment.
The concept that having sufficient ability meant there was no need for cooperation had originally been planted in her heart by Kong Lingrou.
This concept had saved her many times, leading her to believe in it without a shadow of a doubt—so much so that every time she failed to get along smoothly with others, she would secretly vow never to let herself need help from anyone again.
However, sitting in her wheelchair, Shi Bei watched Kong Lingrou go over to greet the Chinese professor at the front podium.
Kong Lingrou, who kept saying she didn’t need anyone, was actually extremely adept at socializing.
The Kong Lingrou that Shi Bei hated in the depths of her memory was a person who took advantage of her privileges, possessed a terrible personality and an explosive temper, and vented her frustration on those around her whenever she was unhappy.
Yet everyone else, as if under a spell, unconditionally liked her and yielded to her.
She had to admit that human memory unconsciously processes and modifies details under the interference of emotions.
Upon analyzing it carefully, Shi Bei made a correction: Kong Lingrou was completely different from the terrible person she had roughly summarized. She had always been exceedingly good at socializing and pulling people over to her side.
That was why she could manipulate others with ease and poise.
So long as she wanted to, everyone would like her.
Just like now, the professor engaged in conversation ignored a student who greeted him, whereas Kong Lingrou responded with a smile.
That lucky student who received her smile the moment he walked into the classroom couldn’t hide the upward curve of his lips at all.
Casting frequent glances back in her direction, he was bound to stay happy for at least the entire day.
Shi Bei looked at them with emotional detachment, a fragment perpetually preserved in the depths of her memory.
Late at night, on a beach.
Under an expansive sky without a single star, in a pitch-black environment where the boundary between sky and sea, and between sea and shore, could not be clearly distinguished, Kong Lingrou held her hand, saying in a tone that was calm yet extraordinarily gentle:
“Bei Bei, in this world, it would be best if there were only you and me.”
That scene felt as though it had burned a hole into her naive and confused heart; afterward, whenever any bad emotions were thrown into it, they would vanish instantly. After the two parted ways, it turned into a violently painful wound once more, leaving her with no choice but to bury it in haste.
Confronting her memories directly and analyzing them calmly, she still couldn’t understand how that Kong Lingrou—who had always been adept at manipulating human hearts and remained invincible—could have uttered such lonely words back then.
After chatting for a while, the professor turned a gentle gaze toward Shi Bei and said to her:
“You are in the last group, sitting in the area over in the southwest corner. Have your group members add you to the discussion group in a bit.”
Kong Lingrou offered her thanks with a slight smile and pushed Shi Bei over to the area where her group members were located.
Shi Bei pondered over his words for a long while.
Did that mean Kong Lingrou could also participate in their computer science group discussion together? How could that be possible? She had never heard of an auditing student joining a group project.
“Kong Lingrou.” There were many confusing points Shi Bei hadn’t figured out: “Are you part of my group too?”
Kong Lingrou settled her into the open space in the back row: “How could I be? I didn’t even enroll in your course.”
“If our group discussion doesn’t go well, will you help me?”
“Of course not.”
“Oh.”
In truth, she was merely saying it casually.
No matter how bad her luck was, there would usually be two to three reliable people in the group; if worse came to worst, Shi Bei was best at completing all the work entirely on her own.
At this moment, it hadn’t crossed her mind at all that there existed a situation in the world where it was impossible to communicate, yet equally impossible to replace bickering by simply doing more work.
If a person with lofty goals but low capabilities became the group leader, and if there happened to be one or two like-minded individuals of the same bad taste around him, they would trap everyone right at the starting line.
After half an hour of discussion.
“Are you not considering feasibility at all?” Shi Bei asked their group leader in disbelief.
“You didn’t come to the previous classes anyway. We’re giving you time first to catch up with our ideas—do you actually understand now or not?” The group leader cocked his leg, turned toward Shi Bei, and said with impatience, “Right now, of course we think about the goals first before considering practicality.”
Shi Bei: “…”
According to the professor’s instructions, the goal for the entire semester was to create a playable game.
Since this was a course for their computer science major, the focus of grading lay in programming logic and code structure, while the planning section was not important.
The professor had said to discuss within the groups first; if they didn’t have any particular ideas, they could just use AI to generate a few options and pick one through group discussion.
However, the leader of Shi Bei’s group declared haughtily that since they were doing it, it had to be completely original. Afterward, they were going to upload the finished work to a gaming platform, enter competitions, and attend exhibitions to win gaming awards.
And so, the entire discussion revolved around the group leader and two other male students who talked endlessly about the theme of video games. They discussed it with immense delight, tossing out the names of several major action games one after another, sparking wave after wave of cheers and excitement—as though the games being mentioned were works they had personally created in the past.
They completely failed to consider that they were merely a group of students with only a single semester’s time.
Having waited a long while with no actual outcome, Shi Bei lost her patience and asked another question: “So what language are we actually going to use?”
Group Leader: “That’s not the point. The point is, what kind of game do you think is the absolute coolest?”
Shi Bei: “…………”
And then, those few male students launched into a fresh round of discussion regarding what kind of game was the coolest.
It had to feature gorgeous designs, innovate, polish details… they could build a rendering engine from scratch and write the logic.
Because all three of them were international students from China, the group leader and another person had Taiwanese accents, accompanied by a male student with a Northern accent; most of the time, they were speaking Chinese.
The other two Asian-looking female students and a European male student listened on in utter bewilderment.
If one of the female students hadn’t made an effort to ask questions in Japanese, they probably wouldn’t even know what the current situation was.
At first, Shi Bei tried hard to listen, analyzing and comparing several game engines in her head, preparing to offer suitable suggestions based on the final result they discussed.
Until she heard the group leader say: “The performance of the engine we build ourselves needs to surpass commercial products on the market…”
She couldn’t help but widen her eyes. Her gaze swept over the remaining group members who weren’t participating in the discussion yet hadn’t spoken up to refute, feeling only a wave of helplessness wash over her face.
Unable to help herself, she tilted her head and asked Kong Lingrou in a low voice:
“What did he just say?”
“You didn’t mishear.” Seeing her pitiful look of disbelief, the corners of Kong Lingrou’s lips curved slightly as she said: “Next, the few of you will spend an entire semester creating a game capable of defeating all similar products on the market.”
“Kong Lingrou, why aren’t you scolding him?! Don’t you hate seeing people act boastful and pretentious the most?!”
“Who knows, maybe he really is a one-in-a-million genius in the gaming world, a next Nintendo preparing to rise from the ground. To have the privilege to witness it fills me with great honor.”
“You’re too much—your face is practically written all over with ‘none of my business, holding myself aloof, sitting back to watch the show’!”
Kong Lingrou made no counterargument, simply shrugging her shoulders.
“…” Shi Bei’s face was full of gloom and indignation.
“Anyway, since you can communicate in Chinese, wouldn’t it be fine if you just gave them a good scolding directly? Or speak English and have your group members vote to switch you to be the group leader instead.”
“It’s too much trouble… let’s just wait for them to discuss it slowly. I don’t believe they’re really wild enough to change our group name to Nintendo.”
More than half the class had passed.
The group next to them had already drawn out the interface for a 2D mini-game; it looked like a card game and was extremely cute.
Holding their drafts, they discussed and finalized the architecture, the atmosphere joyful and friendly.
A group a bit further away was extremely bold, seemingly preparing to make a 3D shooting game with physics and animations.
Shi Bei was a bit curious about how they planned to rush it through within the short duration of a semester’s course.
Looking left and right, every single group was better than the one she was in.
Once Shi Bei stopped speaking, the few people’s discussion naturally didn’t ask for her opinion at all. The person who gradually fell silent alongside her was another Japanese female student.
The Japanese female student silently began playing on her phone, while Shi Bei continuously bugged Kong Lingrou to talk to her from time to time.
“Other people are already discussing the topic of unified code standards,” Shi Bei sprawled across the desk, straining her ears to listen to the situation of the neighboring group.
Kong Lingrou was looking at her phone.
Shi Bei leaned over and saw that she was browsing a shopping website for dog leashes.
“It’s useless telling me—I’m not part of your group.”
“I heard what you said when you were trying to get close to our professor earlier—something about having been curious about this course for a long time, and feeling honored to experience the classroom atmosphere… and as a result, you’re just here shopping on your phone?”
“I really have been curious for a long time, and I am indeed experiencing the atmosphere right now.”
“No you’re not.” For some reason, Shi Bei felt a bit disappointed. After thinking for a moment, she said seriously: “Actually, our programming major is a really cool field. Writing complex systems to be elegant and robust is extremely interesting, just like architects building bridges. We coders generally don’t brag like this; today is definitely an abnormal situation.”
“…”
“Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“Bei Bei, I won’t step up on my own initiative to resolve any trivial matters for you anymore,” Kong Lingrou said, looking toward her, “the way I used to when we were kids.”