Zhuang Yu had the instinctive feeling that Meng Yanxi’s decision now was not the same as before. Ten minutes earlier, Meng Yanxi had been so sharp he seemed ready to kill someone. After Meng Huai came by, he had become restrained again.

So now it was just checking for cheating? Hadn’t he just said it had nothing to do with Sui Shi?

Zhuang Yu asked cautiously, “What if she didn’t cheat?”

Meng Yanxi lifted his eyelids slightly, his gaze sharp. “If you weren’t confident about the objective questions, would you dare leave the subjective questions completely blank? If you left all the subjective questions blank, would you still dare not even look at your results, only to discover you’d failed after graduating?”

Zhuang Yu understood at once, thinking to himself—truly worthy of Meng Yanxi. When it came to scheming, he stood head and shoulders above the rest.

The school keeps surveillance footage for six months. Within that half year, Zhuang Yu checked every one of He Yue’s exams.

University final exams are, in truth, Schrödinger’s strictness. You could say they aren’t strict—after all, the rules are written there, cheating is a red line, and once caught, at the very least you get a major demerit recorded in your file. But you could also say they are strict—every semester, there’s no shortage of students who take risks. Take one trip around a print shop, and you can even get hold of full exam question sets.

Proctors are random too—some strict, some not. It wasn’t until last semester, when Sui Shi carried out reforms, that final exams generally became strict. Even so, He Yue still brought cheat sheets. In that one semester alone, she brought cheat sheets to five exams. During the English exam, the proctor kept circling around her. She couldn’t copy properly—one multiple-choice answer copied wrong, and everything after it was wrong as well, resulting in only 25 points on the objective section, with the subjective section left undone.

She dug her own grave, yet in the end tried to pin it on Jin Zhao.

As for He Yue’s latest disciplinary outcome, Jin Zhao received the first-hand news that very evening.

It was updated to her by Wang Nan. At the time, she had just recorded a video of the little bun calling “Daddy” and was about to send it to Meng Yanxi when Wang Nan’s message popped up: “Zhaozhao! So satisfying! I just heard from leadership—He Yue is getting expelled! They said someone reported her for bringing cheat sheets to multiple exams. For someone like her with large-scale cheating, the school is going to expel her according to regulations! That’s great—she never has to come back again!”

Jin Zhao felt it was a bit sudden.

If expulsion were possible, the school would have expelled her from the start. In the end, they had only arranged a suspension—that was the result of the tug-of-war between the school and the parents. They were probably also afraid the student would really go and die, and that they wouldn’t be able to bear the public opinion fallout.

“How did the school agree to this?” she asked. “Didn’t leadership keep insisting before on leniency in education, on giving her another chance?”

Wang Nan said, “She offended a tough one. The whistleblower said they wouldn’t accept suspension, someone like this must be expelled. Otherwise, they’d dig deeper into why she could get cheat sheets for every course. Was the school treating finals lightly, leaking questions at will? You know how it is—some instructors really aren’t tight-lipped. Students take cheat sheets to print shops to get them printed, then the shops pull them out separately and sell them, circulating back and forth like a black market. If you don’t investigate, fine. But once you dig deep, it really is a huge scandal, let alone multiple courses leaking questions at the same time. With public opinion pressure in mind, the school probably chose the lesser of two evils.”

Wang Nan said with a cool tone, “Oh wow—studying bitterly for over twenty years, only to be expelled and have it recorded right before graduating college. All those years of studying, wasted, huh. Though she’d wasted them anyway.”

Jin Zhao suspected the whistleblower was Meng Yanxi. No—not just suspected, she was almost certain.

After all, Meng Yanxi had only learned of the matter that morning and had gotten angry. By evening, He Yue’s latest punishment was already decided. Such swift and decisive retaliation—other than Meng Yanxi, she truly couldn’t think of a second person.

She felt a little satisfied, just like the two words Wang Nan used—deeply gratifying.

Even though she had managed back then to get the other party suspended, thinking back on it still left her feeling stifled. Why should it be so? Just because she was unlucky? Just because she was a teacher, destined to yield to students, so that even giving it her all, she could only protect herself, not even fight back?

She hadn’t thought there was anything wrong with not telling Meng Yanxi about the injustice in her heart, because at the time she thought that she was already used to things like this and capable of protecting herself. If merely getting married meant she had to seek Meng Yanxi’s help, have Meng Yanxi stand up for her, she would feel ashamed—and might even make Meng Yanxi look down on her.

All these years, no matter what she encountered, the core logic with which she handled things had always been—don’t get distracted, don’t let it affect the most important self.

She herself was the most important. As long as she kept getting better, everything else didn’t matter.

That was why, when she heard Meng Yanxi’s heartbroken accusation, she could only guiltily say “no,” yet couldn’t truly refute him.

Because from beginning to end, she really had only been accumulating her own strength. Perhaps she was pessimistic by nature. Even though she now deeply loved Meng Yanxi and knew Meng Yanxi loved her, she still wanted to leave herself a way out—so that one day, even if the two of them no longer loved each other, they could each live well, part with dignity, without grinding their former affection into something unbearable because of external things.

She didn’t think there was anything wrong with this, and had even made it a habit.

Yet after seeing the hurt look on Meng Yanxi’s face, she suddenly regretted it. She should have told him from the very beginning. Even if it was ultimately resolved, she should have let him know.

He seemed to have understood long ago her excessive fixation on independence, her failure to learn how to rely on others. That was why he had told her early on that opening her heart to rely on him was not weakness, but loving him. So this time, when she once again stubbornly shut him out, it made him think that she did not love him.

It was only then that she suddenly realized—love, besides being wholehearted devotion, also includes reliance and being relied upon. That is two people growing in both directions, and the most essential need of a mutual rush toward each other. It represents giving oneself without reservation. The absence of either side means holding something back, or more bluntly put—loving not enough.

All Meng Yanxi wanted was for her to return to him a love without reservation, just as he had given her.

♥︎ ྀི◟ ͜ ◞♥︎ ྀི◟ ͜ ◞♥︎ ྀི

That night, Meng Yanxi did not go home. He dragged Luo Heng and Lu Jingyue to drink at Luxi.

Luo Heng commented on this, saying, “Bad at it but addicted to it—terrible alcohol tolerance, yet loves drinking.”

Lawyer Luo was eager to go home, with the goal of knocking Meng Yanxi out. That wasn’t difficult—after all, Meng Yanxi’s alcohol tolerance was truly awful.

But things didn’t go as hoped. Lawyer Luo did indeed knock Meng Yanxi out without the slightest effort, but he miscalculated the number of men disappointed in love.

Not one, but two.

After knocking out Meng Yanxi, there was still Lu Jingyue. Even worse, unlike Meng Yanxi, Lu Jingyue’s alcohol tolerance was exceptionally good.

In the end, Meng Yanxi had already slept and woken up, yet Lu Jingyue still hadn’t gone down.

Luo Heng: “……”

After waking up, Meng Yanxi sat silently on the sofa—sometimes watching them drink, sometimes lowering his head to look at his phone, his finger repeatedly tapping into Jin Zhao’s profile.

Later, Lu Jingyue finally collapsed. Luo Heng wiped his face and walked back to Meng Yanxi, lifting his leg to nudge his foot. “Let’s go. Go back and sleep. Call your driver to pick you up.”

Meng Yanxi said, “Not going back.”

“Alright, stop talking out of anger.” A man’s words are lies—Luo Heng didn’t believe him at all. “With how lovey-dovey you and your wife are, you miss her even if you’re apart for a minute. You think you can really hold out an entire night without going back?”

Meng Yanxi lowered his eyes. His long lashes fell, making him look strangely broken. “Lingling doesn’t love me.”

Luo Heng figured Meng Yanxi wasn’t planning to go back tonight anyway. He himself was too lazy to move, so he sprawled down on the sofa where he was, an arm covering his face, muttering, “I’m tired, I won’t persuade you anymore. Anyway, with how much of a love-brained idiot you are, once you sober up, you’ll be able to coax yourself just fine.”

Meng Yanxi was silent for a few seconds, then suddenly stretched out his leg and kicked him.

Luo Heng said, “What is it?”

Meng Yanxi kept kicking.

Luo Heng said, “Don’t make noise, I want to sleep.”

Meng Yanxi kicked him again.

He was holding his phone, having checked it eight hundred times that day. He glanced at it again now, then suddenly said to Luo Heng, “You haven’t posted on Moments today.”

Luo Heng: “?”

He lifted his arm and looked at Meng Yanxi in disbelief. “I didn’t post on Moments yesterday either. I didn’t post the day before yesterday either. So why must I post today?”

Meng Yanxi said, “Hurry up and post on Moments.”

Luo Heng stared at Meng Yanxi.

Although Master Luo was thick-nerved and foolishly cute most of the time, he was, after all, a lawyer—and a well-known one at that. His logical thinking was still quite solid. He stared at Meng Yanxi for a few seconds, then suddenly laughed and asked back, “Post who? Post you? Want to add a location too?”

Meng Yanxi thought about it, then nodded with restrained dignity. “Sure.”

Luo Heng burst out laughing, pointing at him in exasperation. “Meng Yanxi, can you have even a shred of self-respect? Who the hell runs away from home and still posts their own location? You’re afraid your wife won’t be able to find you, is that it?”