*A teacher who believes in you and a teacher who has given up on you are the same teacher. The difference is about three weeks and one wrong decision.*
---
The faculty building smelled like the administrative offices of a world that took itself seriously — recycled air and printer toner and the faint ghost of someone's lunch heated in a microwave down the hall. Qin Xiao walked through it with the measured pace of a man arriving for an appointment he controls, which was, technically, the case.
He knew this office. Room 304, second corridor left of the stairwell. He knew the desk would be facing the window because Xia Shiya marked papers with natural light whenever she could. He knew there would be two chairs on the student side and that she would be standing when he arrived because Xia Shiya gave reprimands from a standing position — not from authority, he had gathered from the source material, but because standing let her move when she was frustrated and she was going to be frustrated.
He had also — because he had read the novel and the novel was comprehensive on this point — clocked that Xia Shiya scored somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety points and that the author had felt the need to mention specifically that this assessment excluded the distortions of celebrity makeup and beauty filters. Which was the kind of detail that told you a great deal about the author, but also told you something useful about Xia Shiya: the kind of face that didn't need architecture.
He knocked.
"Come in."
She was standing, as predicted. A loose dress the color of old linen, dark hair pulled back with the efficiency of someone who styles themselves for function rather than performance. She was looking at a paper on her desk and she did not look up immediately, which was a power move so standard that Qin Xiao filed it under *Script Running On Schedule* and waited with the patient expression of a man who had nowhere more interesting to be.
After a moment she looked up. Registered him. And the frustration that had been general and administrative in her posture became specific and personal.
"Sit down."
He sat. She remained standing, which confirmed his model. Good.
"Qin Xiao," she said, in the tone of a person who has assembled a list and intends to read from it. "I have been getting reports about you for three weeks. From students, from other faculty members, from the student union's own internal committee. Do you know what those reports say?"
Of course he did. He had read the novel.
What he said was: "I can guess."
"You have been using your student union position to pressure students who file complaints against your friends. You showed up to Professor Deng's seminar forty minutes late and left twenty minutes early and told the student rep it was 'a scheduling conflict you'd been meaning to mention.' You —" she paused, checking the paper, "— apparently told a junior student who questioned one of your union decisions that they should, and I'm quoting the report directly here, 'go think about what their parents paid tuition for.'"
He let this sit for a moment. The appropriate amount of time. Not too long — defensiveness reads as guilt — and not too short, because cutting straight to the response before she finished would register as dismissal, and dismissal was exactly the energy the original owner had been running.
"That last one," he said, "was a bad week."
Xia Shiya's eyes narrowed very slightly. She had been expecting either more resistance or more performance of remorse. What she was receiving was a calibrated acknowledgment that gave her nothing to push against, and she didn't quite know where to put it.
*Interesting,* he thought. *She actually processes quickly. That matches the book.*
"A bad week," she repeated.
"I'm not asking you to excuse it. I'm telling you the context. There's a difference."
In the novel, this scene had the original owner getting defensive and then delivering an inadvertent backhanded compliment that put Xia Shiya off-balance long enough for the conversation to tip in his favor. The original owner's version had been accidental. His would be slightly more intentional, and slightly cleaner in execution.
He looked at her properly for the first time since sitting — not the quick assessment he'd run at the door, but the sustained direct attention that communicated, without stating, *I see you, I'm present, I'm not managing you right now.* It was the kind of look that people who were used to being managed found disorienting.
"I know I've disappointed you," he said. "Specifically you. Not the committee, not the other teachers. You recommended me. That's different from a formal report."
A pause crossed her face. Very brief. The small recalibration of someone who has prepared a conversation for one version of a person and is encountering a different version.
She crossed her arms. "You were a good student, Qin Xiao. You still could be. That's the only reason I'm having this conversation instead of letting the process run."
She really did still believe in him. Even now, even after three weeks of reports. That was the prior investment talking — the genuine optimistic read she'd made on the original Qin Xiao before the decline, stubbornly present under the professional frustration. The novel had been right about this.
In the original plot, this was the moment where Qin Xiao made his offer — the vague intimation that he could help with whatever she needed, delivered with just enough ambiguity that she would spend the next three chapters trying to determine whether he had actually meant it before eventually deciding to approach him about her mother's hospital situation. Strings attached to strings attached to strings, and a woman of genuine dignity managing her own reluctance every step of the way.
He was not going to run that version.
Not because it was cruel, exactly — the original owner's version wasn't cruel, just inefficient and slightly undignified. He was not going to run it because he had a better version, and because Xia Shiya deserved to be dealt with directly. Not directly meaning immediately — he wasn't going to walk into a ten-minute reprimand and immediately offer resources like a man who had come here to do a transaction. Just directly meaning: no manufactured ambiguity, no strung-out artificial uncertainty, no making a person of her intelligence jump through a hoop she could see perfectly well.
"I heard you were in trouble," he said. "Not recently. I mean the situation with your mother."
Xia Shiya went very still.
It was the specific stillness of a person who has been unexpectedly touched in a place they had not advertised as tender. The original owner's memory had no record of ever knowing this — the mother's illness was not public information, had never been shared with students, had been the source of the quiet, private strain that explained why Xia Shiya's professional frustration over the past weeks had carried an edge sharper than a minor conduct issue warranted.
She would not know how he knew. She would, almost certainly, be asking herself that question right now. And the answer — that he had read a novel about her life before arriving in it — was not one he could provide.
"How did you —" she started.
"You mentioned needing to leave early twice last month. You looked tired in a way that isn't just workload." He paused, letting the observation land with its full weight rather than immediately softening it. "I'm not asking for details. I'm just saying that I noticed. In case that's part of why this month has felt like a lot."
The stillness had not left her. But something in the rigid quality of it had changed — gone from defensive to something more complicated. She looked at him the way people look at someone who has said something true that they weren't prepared to have said back to them.
He stood. Slowly, no urgency.
"I came because you asked me to," he said. "And because I owe you a better explanation than 'bad week,' and I don't actually disagree with the reports. I'll handle the union. The rest —" he paused at the door, the exact correct amount of unhurried — "if there's anything you need, let me know. Not as a student making a bid for leniency. Just as someone who has been taking up space in your patience for three weeks and would like to be useful for once."
He left before she could respond. Not rushed — just precise timing. The door closed quietly behind him.
In the hallway, Qin Xiao exhaled through his nose and allowed himself a single private moment of satisfaction.
She had been prepared for defensiveness, remorse, manipulation, or some combination of all three. She had been prepared, frankly, for the original Qin Xiao — the arrogant declining noble son who used whatever goodwill remained in an account he was steadily overdrawn on. What she had gotten instead was someone who acknowledged the problem, identified her actual situation without exploiting it, and then left without demanding credit for doing so.
That gap — between what she expected and what she got — was the beginning of everything.
*Not bad,* he thought. *Not bad at all.*
Ding~
╔═════════════════════════╗
║ 🔔 Ding~
║ [Heroine recognition
║ event detected]
║ 📈 Xia Shiya favorability:
║ +8
║ ⭐ Current: 8 / 100
║ 💬 System: A beginning.
║ The system notes
║ "not bad at all" is
║ underselling this.
╚═════════════════════════╝
*The system,* Qin Xiao thought, *has opinions.*
He was walking back through the corridor toward the stairs when his phone buzzed with a message from a number he didn't recognize. He checked it — campus network contact, student union internal channel. The message was brief: *President — Su Yao is making a scene in the east wing again. Something about a stolen pen. The girl is about to cry.*
He stopped walking.
A stolen pen. The east wing. A girl about to cry.
He knew this scene. He knew it precisely — not just because he had read the novel but because the original owner's memory had filed it away with the specific ownership detail that the system chose not to make available as a reminder: the pen in question was his. Custom-made, several million yuan, a 20th birthday gift from Qin Lin that the original owner had treated with the careful reverence that people apply to things given by the one person they unconditionally loved. It was not in his room this morning because it had been moved by someone into a schoolbag that was not his.
Su Yao. Su Mengke. One of them adopted, one of them weaponizing that adoption the way people weaponize every vulnerability they have identified in someone too grateful to fight back. Both of them scripted into this story — one as a minor recurring obstacle, one as the first heroine to genuinely orbit the MC in the original novel.
Su Mengke's favorability toward the protagonist had started here. With this scene. With Chu Feng stepping in where no one else bothered, treating a girl in a washed-out uniform like a person worth the trouble of defending.
The Dragon King, Qin Xiao reminded himself, was not in this city yet.
He had exactly seventy-two hours.
He changed direction. The stairs down. East wing.
The system, as if it had been watching him recalculate, offered one more notification:
╔═════════════════════════╗
║ 🔔 Ding~
║ [Plot interception
║ opportunity detected]
║ 🎯 Event: Su Mengke
║ first contact
║ 💰 Destiny Value yield:
║ [Estimated moderate —
║ early stage event]
║ 💬 System: The host
║ will want to be
║ appropriately unhurried
║ about this. First
║ impressions matter.
║ The system has read
║ the original material.
╚═════════════════════════╝
*First impressions,* Qin Xiao thought dryly, walking faster.
He heard the scene before he saw it — a voice with the particular sharpness of someone who has learned that volume substitutes for being right, and underneath it, nothing. Not crying, not arguing back. Just silence, which was somehow worse than either.
He turned the corner.
The east wing common area. Four or five students arranged around a small figure with dark, dry hair falling across most of her face — a school uniform that had been washed so many times the color had become approximate — and the look of a person who has given up on the immediate situation and is simply waiting for it to end. Su Yao was holding something up, passing it between her hands like evidence in a trial she had already decided the verdict of.
The pen was worth more than anything in this hallway. Including the people in it.
Qin Xiao arrived. He didn't say anything for a moment — just stood at the edge of the group with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at the pen in Su Yao's hands with an expression that was not angry, not threatening, not even particularly concerned.
Just very, very still.
Su Yao noticed the stillness first. Then she noticed whose stillness it was.
"President Qin," she said, recalibrating instantly to the social register that his presence required. "We were just — there was something missing from your office, and we found it on —"
"In her bag," he said.
Su Yao hesitated. "Yes."
"Interesting," Qin Xiao said. "Since I left it in her bag myself."