When Lu Yuzhi arrived at Shenghua, he didn’t have anyone announce his presence.
He walked alone down the plane-tree avenue by the Arts Department, skirted the main building, and turned into the faculty residential quarter.
These small red-brick buildings were quiet amid the bustle, home mostly to old scholars who had returned from overseas in the university’s early days.
He hadn’t come on official business. Fang Zhixing, a mathematics professor at Shenghua, was an old acquaintance of his.
Back when Lu Yuzhi was in the Business School, the old professor had chased after him for an entire semester, urging him to switch to mathematics, saying that his not going into research would be a loss for the country.
He hadn’t switched, but he had remembered the kindness.
Fang Zhixing opened the door, and seeing who it was, froze for a moment before breaking into a smile. “What wind blew the Ninth Master here?”
“Just passing by, thought I’d drop in on you.” Lu Yuzhi stepped inside, changed his shoes, and set the tea he’d brought on the entryway cabinet.
The living room wasn’t large, its walls covered in books, with several mathematics journals spread across the tea table.
Fang Zhixing’s wife was watering flowers on the balcony. Hearing the commotion, she turned, her eyes lighting up. “Is that Yuzhi? It’s been years! Wait a moment, I’ll go make tea.”
She set down the watering can, wiped her hands, and headed for the kitchen.
He took the teacup. “Thank you.”
Chen Yinqiu sat down across from him and looked him over. “You’ve gotten thinner. No matter how busy work gets, you must eat properly.”
Fang Zhixing came out of the study with a newly published collection of papers and adjusted his reading glasses. “Don’t start lecturing the moment you arrive.”
“He runs the entire Lu Corporation now. It’s already something that he can spare the time to visit an old man like me.”
Chen Yinqiu shot him a glare, refilled Lu Yuzhi’s tea, and launched into conversation.
She was also a professor in Shenghua’s Arts Department, having taught for most of her life.
As she talked, she sighed. “The atmosphere was so much better in our day. Students these days… ah, all little princesses and young masters.”
“The better off their families are, the less they can settle their hearts into studying art.”
“They compete over designer bags and cars, over who outshone whom today.”
“Just now in my class there was quite the farce. For the rest of the lecture no one could focus—everyone was too busy passing gossip around.”
Fang Zhixing grew curious. “What gossip?”
“The Shen Family sponsors an orphan girl called Mu Suihe. Supposedly she deliberately knocked Shen Jinxin’s bag onto the floor, then accused the other girl of doing it herself.”
“Later, when the young master of the Song Family wanted to check the surveillance footage, she refused no matter what. Now everyone knows she has a guilty conscience.”
Chen Yinqiu shook her head. “That girl looks like a jade carving, speaks so softly and gently—she seems like the type who doesn’t fight or compete.”
“I wouldn’t believe she’d frame someone.”
“But her refusing to check the footage rather confirms it.”
Lu Yuzhi’s fingers paused around his teacup.
Chen Yinqiu kept going. “In the end that girl hung her head with red eyes while a crowd pointed fingers at her. It made this old woman’s heart quite uneasy to watch.”
“But wrong is wrong. It wasn’t my place to say anything.”
Lu Yuzhi lowered his gaze, fine ripples trembling across the surface of his tea.
That morning, in the lecture hall, he had personally gone to warn her. She hadn’t listened—just kept her eyes on Shiqian’s back.
Sure enough, before long, she’d gone astray.
Chen Yinqiu sighed again. “Who knows how the Shen Family raised her.”
“Barely an adult, such a lovely child on the surface—how did she go so wrong?”
“If her birth parents were by her side, if someone had pulled her along properly, she wouldn’t have had to stumble through growing up alone, her nature twisted in the process.”
Lu Yuzhi set down his teacup.
The Shen Family treated her like some stray cat or dog—being fed was already more than she deserved.
In that kind of environment, naturally no one taught her right from wrong, no one told her which paths she could take and which she couldn’t.
A girl in adolescence loves to compare herself with others and indulge in vanity. Wanting to climb upward, resorting to cheap little tricks, going astray—these were all common enough.
Fang Zhixing suddenly pressed a hand to his chest, his hand trembling slightly.
Chen Yinqiu’s face changed at once. She pulled a medicine bottle from the small drawer under the coffee table, shook out a pill and slipped it into his mouth, then brought over some warm water to help him swallow it, her voice both anxious and annoyed: “I told you to rest more, but you wouldn’t listen. You just had to stand your last watch.”
“Students can be taught by someone else. Can your body be replaced just as easily?”
Fang Zhixing recovered and waved a hand. “It’s nothing, just an old ailment.”
“After this class of students graduates, I won’t take on any more. I’ll listen to you and rest properly.”
Lu Yuzhi watched the old man’s color slowly return after taking the medicine, lost in thought.
Perhaps he could stay at Shenghua a while longer.
He knew about Shiqian failing math two years in a row.
Whether this nephew could shoulder the Lu Family—he needed to observe a while longer.
Beyond that, there was a bit of selfishness too.
That reckless little girl—if he were there watching over her, perhaps she’d rein herself in a little, and not walk herself into a dead end.
He didn’t intend to meddle much in her affairs.
But sitting in the same classroom, his identity alone carried a certain deterrent force.
Enough to keep her from acting up in front of him.
The next morning, Advanced Mathematics class.
The lecture hall was buzzing with noise.
Some were scrolling through last night’s newly posted gossip threads on their phones, some were slumped over their desks catching up on sleep, and a few boys in the back row were debating whether to skip class later and go play ball.
Song Shiqian sauntered in through the back door, baseball cap pressed low, lazily took a seat in the back row, pulled the brim down, and prepared to nap.
Shen Jinxin quietly scooted over beside him, looking at his face, thinking: Shiqian is really good-looking.
The class bell rang. Footsteps sounded in the corridor—unhurried, composed.
The man who entered wore a black shirt and black trousers, his cuffs casually rolled up to his wrists.
Unusually, he wore a pair of rimless glasses, the lenses concealing the usual aloof arrogance beneath those single-lidded eyes, lending him an air of refined bookish elegance.
He turned and wrote three characters on the blackboard: Lu Yuzhi.
The strokes were restrained, yet a hint of sharpness showed at the finishing strokes.
Lu Yuzhi turned around and spoke: “Your Professor Fang is unwell. For the rest of this semester, I’ll be teaching your Advanced Mathematics class.”
A girl in the back row dropped her pen. It clattered and rolled across the floor, and she didn’t even bend to pick it up.
That face…
The Lu Jiu Ye whom her father and brother had spent over half a year worrying and hadn’t managed to meet? And she’d just laid eyes on the real person, just like that?
Not just that girl—everyone who recognized him froze in their seats.
The noble daughters who were usually so haughty opened their mouths again and again, unable to close them.
The little friend beside one of them tugged at her sleeve, her voice shrill and hushed: “The Ninth Master of the Lu Family? Why would he come to Shenghua? Condescend to teach Advanced Mathematics?!”
And those who had never seen Lu Jiu Ye in person all stared fixedly at the man on the podium.
From his broad shoulders down to his waistline, from his waistline to those hands flipping through the lesson plan, they couldn’t help swallowing: “Broad shoulders, narrow waist, a cold and ascetic flower on a high peak standing up there—who could possibly focus on the lecture?”
Shenghua was full of rich kids getting gilded degrees, and plenty of good-looking professors too. They’d seen their share of men.
But the aloof air of someone long accustomed to high position that this man carried, set against the classroom full of green youngsters, was simply on another level entirely.
Some of the young heiresses, dazzled by his good looks, began to speak without thinking. “Who knows what his family does? Could I just take him by force?”
A well-informed friend beside her rolled her eyes and slapped her back to her senses. “Wake up. Even if you sold your entire family, you couldn’t afford to so much as touch one of that man’s fingers.”