Young love is like the wind—unseen, yet deeply felt.

It’s like a name carved into a desk—afraid you might see it, yet afraid you might not.

— Excerpt from Little Monster’s Diary

Prologue

September 2007, the scorching sun blazed, and Tsinghua University welcomed its new students.

The entire city was like an airtight enamel pot, the heatwave unbearable. Outside the Tsinghua University gate, lush and adorned camphor trees lined the path, their leaves dense, standing tall and firm, like a line of stern, heavily-guarded soldiers, each robust and formidable.

Ding Xian stood downstairs at the male dormitory for half an hour, holding her suitcase. She wasn't tall, with a high ponytail, light brows, small lips, and a pair of clear, spirited eyes. Someone once said that apart from those eyes, her features were quite ordinary, not outstanding, but still pleasant to look at.

An hour later, she still showed no signs of leaving.

Cao Wenjun, a sophomore in the Computer Science Department, went downstairs to buy water and saw this scene. Finding it novel, he casually took a photo and posted it in the dormitory's QQ group.

"Today's marvel: A 'waiting for husband' rock has appeared downstairs at the male dorm."

The group was full of tech geeks who paid no attention to anything other than games, code, programs, and experimental data. The photo didn't cause a stir in the group; no one replied, still busy with their own tasks.

Cao Wenjun simply thought he was sharing something amusing and didn't take it to heart. After taking the photo, he shoved his phone back into his pocket and went into the convenience store to buy water.

When he had bought his water and was standing at the convenience store entrance drinking it, his phone began to "beep—" madly. He unhurriedly pulled it out to look.

"Pfft—"

The water in his mouth sprayed straight out for two meters.

Someone in the group had replied. It was none other than the boss, Zhou Siyue.

Probably the same Zhou Siyue who had just lost a university league match a while ago, was in an incredibly bad mood, and would kill gods and Buddhas if he met them.

"Where is she?"

Cao Wenjun quickly screwed on the bottle cap, tucked the water bottle under his arm, and replied swiftly, "Uh, she's right downstairs from our dorm, Boss, are you... are you going to see her?"

"Mhm."

What kind of woman could make Zhou Siyue instantly emerge from the lab where he'd spent the entire summer?

Then, the group instantly conjured up a romantic drama about chasing a husband from afar and, while they were at it, instructed Cao Wenjun:

"Old Cao, hurry and invite our junior sister-in-law inside to sit down."

"Old Cao, help me collect my underwear, and hang out the boss's too, thanks."

"Old Cao, go take a picture of our junior sister-in-law's front face so we can see it."

Cao Wenjun actually managed to get a shot.

When Ding Xian was completely unprepared, he dashed over at lightning speed, aimed at her face, and pressed the shutter, then ran away at a hundred-meter sprint pace. The girl looked utterly bewildered. By the time she reacted, Cao Wenjun was holding his phone, fleeing the scene, waving to Ding Xian, and climbing the stairs, looking back every few steps. Before he even caught his breath, he sent his spoils of war one by one to his other two roommates.

In an era without beauty filters, Ding Xian's photo was incredibly ugly. Her eyes were wide with terror, like a dead fish, and even her usually cute small canine teeth didn't look so cute. Her skin, however, was quite good.

The roommates who saw it remarked that the boss's taste was truly hard to describe, expressing pity and regret for such a handsome face.

Later, according to their groupmate, Xiao Zhang, he and the boss were in the lab installing the robot for an upcoming university league competition. After seeing the message in the group, the boss directly crushed its leg...

—Crushed its leg.

Xiao Zhang was furious about this, trembling so much he couldn't speak properly. He cursed Young Master Zhou from every angle, inside and out, up and down, before finally remembering to ask, "Who was that girl?"

Cao Wenjun immediately offered the information he had just gathered:

"A high school classmate. I heard she retook the college entrance exam for a year for the boss, got into Tsinghua University, and even chose computer science."

Xiao Zhang froze, his hands stopped shaking, and a huge 'holy cow' was written all over his face.

Someone exclaimed, "This girl is amazing!"

However, thanks to these roommates, Ding Xian, a freshman student of the 2007 intake, became famous throughout Tsinghua University even before classes started, instantly becoming a positive example of early romance, a story that has been passed down to this day.

Studying for Tsinghua University for love—just thinking about it is grand.

"But..." Cao Wenjun paused, a worried frown on his face: "The boss seems to have rejected her..."

Everyone: What?! As expected of Zhou Siyue, what are women compared to code? Code is king!

Indeed, not everything in this world can be achieved just by trying hard.

Meanwhile.

The rejected Ding Xian was a bit bewildered, her cheeks puffed out, sitting cross-legged on her dorm bed, chin in hand, pondering. Her index finger rhythmically tapped her cheek. The fan overhead whirred, but the hot air wouldn't disperse; even the surrounding air seemed to be challenging her.

Did Zhou Siyue actually like her or not?

She suddenly remembered a Chinese class in Senior Three.

The teacher leaned her hands on the podium, swept her gaze across the students below, pushed up her glasses with her index finger, and asked: "In your eyes, what is growing up?"

Someone reacted extremely quickly, eager to answer:

"Waking up in the morning with wet pants, then a knowing smile, 'Oh, it wasn't bed-wetting.'"

The one who answered first was the naughtiest boy in class, who always loved to interject when the teacher spoke, especially with female teachers. Immediately, the previously silent classroom erupted in laughter; even the person next to Ding Xian couldn't help but curve his or her lips into a smile.

The young female teacher, thin-skinned, walked out in a huff, and the latter half of the class was changed to self-study.

Ding Xian, as the Chinese class representative, lay propped on her desk, tilting her head to look at the side profile of the person next to her, who was writing furiously.

Zhou Siyue was bent over, writing a math test, his pen and paper flying as he calculated. The fingers holding the pen were long and slender, with clearly defined knuckles, and faint blue veins were visible. His downcast brows and eyes were as indifferent as ever, but the slight upward curve of his lips clearly showed he had heard the previous remark.

"Zhou Siyue."

"Hm?" The young man replied distractedly, his pen not pausing, his eyelids not lifting. Under his pen, a heap of formulas cascaded out, rows of numbers springing from his pen tip as if lined up. Ding Xian gazed at the white paper covered in rough work, at the answers that appeared with almost no hesitation, full of sighs, then comforted herself: 'Don't get excited, he's the national mental abacus calculation champion.'

"So, did you... 'wet the bed' that day?" Ding Xian rested her chin on the table, asking curiously.

That day? Which day? It took Zhou Siyue a good while to realize which day she was referring to. How dare she bring that up again!

"If I don't hit you for three days, you'll climb onto the roof and pull off the tiles, won't you? Next time you barge into my room..." Along with the boy's somewhat annoyed voice, Ding Xian's forehead was mercilessly flicked by his ballpoint pen.

Ding Xian rubbed her head, continuing to doodle and pick at the desk. Subconsciously, she scratched deep grooves into the name originally carved on the desktop, and as she scratched, she didn't forget to provoke him: "I'll barge in!"

Young Master Zhou put down his pen, then suddenly turned to look at her. His hair shone golden in the dazzling sunset, the lines of his neck flowed smoothly down to his school uniform collar, and his prominent Adam's apple bobbed slightly. "Hmph, try it if you're not afraid to die."

Ding Xian stared blankly at him.

That gaze was playful and full of teasing, the Young Master's devilish side emerging again.

Yet, she always felt that back then, Zhou Siyue's eyes held affection for her.

Thinking of this, she licked her dry lips with a touch of regret. Her roommate, who was lying on the bed with a face mask on, had been watching her for half an hour and couldn't help but interject: "I heard everything today, Ding Xian, right? You're quite something."

Ding Xian snapped back, wanting to say "you flatter me," but then thought, 'Flatter me for what? He hasn't even agreed.' She sat on the bed, awkwardly scratching her eyebrow.

Bored, the mask-wearing roommate pulled her into a discussion about love.

"Don't panic. If once doesn't work, we try twice. If twice doesn't work, then thrice. If thrice doesn't work, then four times. I refuse to believe that your flower won't be able to stick into that pile of cow dung."

In a polytechnic university where handsome guys were rare and "frogs"* were everywhere, the mask-wearing roommate thought Ding Xian's senior was probably just an ordinary, bespectacled engineering student.

*T/N: Unattractive guys

For Ding Xian, this fresh and refined little lotus, he was more than enough.

Ding Xian lowered her head, picking at her fingers, and muttered: "He's not cow dung."

Her sharp-eared roommate, hearing this, had a look of understanding: "I know, I know, your senior is the most handsome. A woman in unrequited love has no aesthetic sense. You'd even think your crush picking his nose looks ethereal, like he just floated down from a painting, right?"

After speaking, she glanced at Ding Xian, who was calmly practicing yoga on the bed, inverted against the wall, her arms propped on the bed. The hem of her white cotton T-shirt slid down to her lower back, revealing the deeply concave line of her spine and two moderately deep dimples of Venus.

The mask-wearing roommate gasped, "Well, well, I didn't realize, you've got some curves! It makes no sense—with what you've got, just stand in front of him, lift your shirt, and it'd be over in minutes."

"I've undressed before, it didn't work."

Ding Xian said calmly, her eyes closed.

The mask-wearing roommate had not expected events to unfold so quickly. Although Ding Xian's chest wasn't large, she had what she needed, so she shouldn't be so disliked.

Are there still such hard-to-find ascetic types these days?

The roommate was dumbfounded, her mind unable to process it immediately: "You undressed downstairs at the male dorm in broad daylight?"

"Of course not today." Ding Xian rolled her eyes.

It must have been during Senior Three. Ding Xian's maternal grandmother was seriously ill, and Ding Xian's father was on a business trip for half a year. An older sister from the countryside called to say that their grandmother needed a caregiver, which would cost a thousand a month, and since there were three other siblings in the countryside, each person only needed to contribute two hundred plus a month.

At that time, the Ding Family was already stretched thin. Ding Xian's father had been transferred to a new position less than two years prior, and his salary was still at a basic level. Ding Xian's mother had just been laid off and was unemployed at home, and they still had to pay the monthly mortgage. Plus, there was a little devil of a younger brother at home constantly buying things. For Ding Xian's mother, these two hundred yuan were clearly the last straw.

So, the couple discussed it and decided to let Ding Xian's mother go home to take care of her for a while. The next day, Ding Xian was entrusted to the Zhou Family's care by her mother, who then took her son and returned to the countryside.

This departure lasted half a year.

Ding Xian spent her first semester of Senior Three at the Zhou Residence. The night before she returned to the countryside for winter break, the two of them were doing homework in the room.

Actually, it was Ding Xian writing a test in Zhou Siyue's room, while Young Master Zhou was half-leaning against the headboard in a relaxed, unrestrained posture, one long leg stretched out, the other bent, playing a handheld game console.

He couldn't be bothered to even lift his eyelids the whole time.

In January, outside Beijing City, the world was already frozen, the north wind biting. Outside the window, it seemed as if a thin wool blanket covered everything.

How could Ding Xian have the mind to write a test? Her thoughts were entirely on the young man behind her, covered by the wool blanket. After half a day of writing, she was still stuck on the second question.

About half an hour later, Young Master Zhou got tired of playing, put down the game console, rubbed his neck, and came over to check her test paper. Then he saw a mock exam paper cleaner than the snow outside.

Uncharacteristically, he didn't lose his temper, just asked indifferently, "Are you still going to try for Tsinghua University?"

Ding Xian felt his attitude towards her was strange. He hadn't been like this when discussing problems with the class beauty yesterday. Why was he barking orders at her? Her temper flared up, and she tossed the paper, "I'm not taking it—"

Her words were cut short. Zhou Siyue bent down, cupped the back of her head, and pulled her towards him.

Something soft and warm covered her lips. The young man was very clumsy, with no technique to speak of; his lips just touched hers and didn't move. Their two pairs of lips were simply pressed together foolishly.

Zhou Siyue himself was probably stunned.

They stayed like that for three minutes.

Ding Xian could clearly hear the young man's soft breaths and her own heart thumping wildly, about to burst from her chest.

Zhou Siyue's eyelashes were so long they could prick someone to death.

The tips of his long, dense eyelashes brushed against Ding Xian's eyelids, making them itch. This itch went straight to her heart.

Outside were rows of evergreen camphor trees, standing guard regardless of autumn, summer, or winter; inside were young, inexperienced, chaotic hearts secretly crossing paths.

Neither of them closed their eyes. They just stared at each other foolishly, lips pressed, noses touching, unsure of what to do next.

It was Ding Xian who spoke first: "Uh, should we... turn a bit?"

It seemed that's how it was done on TV: face to face, holding the other's chin, and turning to the side.

"Shut up," the young man said, his earlobes red.

Later, Ding Xian regretted it countless times.

That was the closest she had ever been to Zhou Siyue. This man was cold, arrogant to the bone, sharp-tongued, and harsh to her. How many chances were there for him to offer himself willingly?

If she had known, she should have just "taken care of" him that night!

When we were very, very young, we all dreamed a dream, about aspirations, about love.

Everyone thought he or she was a Mary Sue, but in reality, he or she was just human thunder;

The person you thought liked you actually didn't like you that much, it's just that you weren't willing to wake up.