“Little Wei, the weather’s this beautiful today, and you’re still sitting here tapping away?” Qin Zhao leaned one hand against the wooden counter and tilted his head at Wei Lan, his tone full of teasing. “I’m here to borrow a few restoration materials.”
Wei Lan did not even look up. His fingers continued tapping steadily across the keyboard, his voice flat and utterly unruffled. “Professor Qin, our university library has clear regulations governing the process of borrowing books. Furthermore, the special restoration collection is not freely accessible to personnel outside the Department of History and Ancient Texts.”
“Hey, why put it like that?” Qin Zhao was not discouraged in the slightest by the other man’s aloofness. If anything, he seemed even more enthusiastic. He pulled a form from his pocket bearing the Academy of Sciences’ dazzling red seal. “I’ve got a proper letter of introduction right here. Our new research project involves using multispectral optical scanning technology to reconstruct faded ancient documents, and we need to compare them with the restored originals kept here. I need to borrow the Ming-restored edition of Huntian Yitu.”
Wei Lan’s fingers stopped moving. He looked up at the letter of introduction, then straight at Qin Zhao’s beaming face. His gaze was cold yet unfathomably deep, as though he wanted to see through the mind of this tenacious pursuer.
“The Ming-restored edition of Huntian Yitu is extremely sensitive to light and humidity,” Wei Lan said seriously, his voice carrying a rigid professionalism. “Preservation procedures require it to be kept in a temperature-controlled vacuum display case. I can’t let you take it outside.”
“I know, Little Wei.” Qin Zhao winked, the smile on his lips widening. “That’s exactly why I’m not taking it anywhere. I’ll sit right there in the special reading room, under your direct supervision. Look at these clumsy hands of mine—what if I tear a precious sheet of ancient Xuan paper while turning the pages? You’ll have to sit right beside me and use the specialized tweezers to turn each page for me to read. That’s the proper preservation procedure, right?”
Wei Lan lightly bit his lower lip, feeling helpless in the face of the physics professor’s persistence and shamelessly sound reasoning. He knew perfectly well that Qin Zhao was only using this as an excuse to get closer to him, but the letter of introduction with its red seal was entirely valid from an administrative standpoint.
“I still have a librarian’s duties to attend to. I can’t devote myself solely to Professor Qin.” Wei Lan tried to keep his voice cold as he refused.
“But there isn’t anyone else in the special reading room today, is there?” Qin Zhao pointed toward the empty reading room beside them, where afternoon sunlight fell across rows of vacant wooden chairs. “Just help me out, Little Wei. If my project succeeds, it’ll do a great deal for your work in intangible preservation. You can sit beside me, supervise the book, and teach me a little about ancient texts while you’re at it. I promise I’ll be on my best behavior and won’t bother you.”
Wei Lan looked at Qin Zhao’s energetic face and those sparkling eyes, sincere yet mischievous. His heart, so long kept shut, suddenly gave a faint little tremor. Qin Zhao’s noisiness was somewhat troublesome, but it carried a radiant warmth—the very thing Wei Lan had always lacked in the silent, lonely world of ancient books he had inhabited for so many years.
He let out a barely perceptible sigh, rose from his chair, and took a pair of spotless white cotton gloves from the drawer. “Professor Qin, please wait a moment. I’ll retrieve the materials from the stacks. But let me make this clear: you have exactly one hour to study.”
“Yes, sir, Little Wei!” Qin Zhao gave a cheeky military salute, his eyes following Wei Lan’s slender figure as he disappeared behind the door to the secure storage room. The corners of his lips curled into a smug smile. It seemed his plan to warm up this iceberg was already making progress.
Back in the cozy corner of the reading room occupied by Lu Chenjue and Shen Shuhe.
The tea had been steeped three times, its color gradually changing from pale yellow to clear amber, but their conversation showed no sign of ending. They had moved from Li Bai’s “Qiangjinjiu” to Zhuangzi’s cosmological ideas, then back again to modern quantum hypotheses about the multiverse and the superposition of states.
Shen Shuhe felt as though she had just found a missing piece in her own picture of the world. The dry physics concepts, explained by Lu Chenjue, suddenly came alive, taking on a profound philosophical beauty. In turn, Lu Chenjue found in Shen Shuhe’s ancient texts a release for a mind that was always taut with numbers and mathematical equations.