Wei Lan quietly stepped into the small kitchen behind the reading room, lit the stove, and brewed a large pot of red sugar ginger tea to warm everyone up. When he carried the steaming tray back into the main reading room, Qin Zhao quickly came over, instinctively took the tray from his hands, and pulled Wei Lan down into the soft armchair beside him.
“A Lan, drink up and warm yourself. Your face is so pale.” As he spoke, Qin Zhao poured a cup of piping-hot ginger tea himself, blew on it gently to cool it down, and brought it right to Wei Lan’s lips.
Wei Lan accepted the cup, feeling the warmth from his palm spread through his body, which was still trembling slightly from the cold. He raised his eyes to Qin Zhao and saw that beads of sweat mixed with rainwater still clung to the other man’s forehead. A streak of gray dust marked his cheek, yet his gaze was extraordinarily gentle and warm as he looked at Wei Lan. Wei Lan’s heart, long shielded by a layer of bitterly cold ice, seemed to melt completely beneath that sincere flame. He raised his hand and gently wiped the smudge from Qin Zhao’s cheek with the only clean handkerchief left in his pocket. His voice had lost its usual aloofness and become astonishingly soft. “I can drink it myself. You should drink some too. You’re the one who’s worked the hardest all this time.”
Qin Zhao froze at Wei Lan’s unexpectedly intimate gesture. It felt as though a warm current of electricity had coursed through his chest, drawing an uncontrollable, radiant smile from him. His perfectly even white teeth showed, making him look strikingly handsome. He immediately caught Wei Lan’s hand, the one still holding the handkerchief, and clasped it tightly in his own warm palm. “With you caring about me like this, I’d be worth it even if I were ten times more exhausted.”
At the other end of the long wooden table, Lu Chenjue and Shen Shuhe sat facing each other. Between them, two cups of ginger tea released a spicy fragrance that soothed the chill of the storm outside the window. Lu Chenjue had taken off the soaked shirt he’d been wearing over his clothes, leaving him in nothing but a thin T-shirt clinging to his body and revealing the firm, masculine contours of muscles honed by regular exercise. Shen Shuhe saw the raindrops still gathered along the alluring collarbones of the physics professor and hurriedly handed him a dry towel.
“Chen jue, dry yourself off, or you’ll catch a cold. Today... thank you. Truly. Without you and Professor Qin, I really wouldn’t have known what to do with that pile of ancient manuscripts.” Shen Shuhe spoke softly, her low voice carrying deep remorse and emotion.
Lu Chenjue took the towel and gently dried his short, drenched hair, his gaze never leaving Shen Shuhe’s delicate face. Beneath the dim light of the wall lamp after the rain, Shuhe’s face seemed veiled in a soft layer of mist, while her dark, phoenix-shaped eyes reflected a glittering light like the stars scattered across the night sky.
“I told you, Shuhe. You don’t have to stand on ceremony with me.” Lu Chenjue stopped drying his hair, set the towel on the table, and leaned forward, narrowing the distance between them once more. “In the world of theoretical physics, I’m always forced to face dry numbers, insentient elementary particles, and cosmic voids so cold they’re utterly despairing. I often feel like a free electron, spinning through the undefined orbit of a vacuum, with no stopping point, no place to belong, and no real connection to the world around me.”
Lu Chenjue paused for a moment, his gaze as deep as a cosmic black hole yet filled with the most primal tenderness. “But after meeting you, after entering this space filled with the fragrance of xuan paper and ancient ink, I suddenly realized that free electron seemed to have found its nucleus. Your existence, our conversations... they make me feel that I’m truly alive, rather than merely a biological existence.”