The Rabbit and the Hot Carrot

After returning to the dormitory, the first thing Ye Nanzhi did was open her snack box and pull out a red bean bun to gnaw on.

Seeing her devouring it like a ravenous wolf, Feng Linlin was quite surprised.

–Didn’t you go to a hotpot restaurant for a team dinner? How did you end up like this! Oh, don’t eat that. It’s so dry; you’ll end up with a stomachache again tonight. I have instant porridge, do you want some?–

But Ye Nanzhi’s mind was replaying the scene before they parted ways, especially the surprised looks everyone gave her.

She had always left everyone with the impression of being lively, cheerful, and easy to get along with; her words today had caught them all off guard.

Then again, Liu Guang was right about one thing: she really didn’t understand Chu Ran at all.

She only knew the other woman was a second-year graduate student in the Architecture Department and that her drawing skills were excellent. Beyond that, she knew nothing.

Thinking of this, Ye Nanzhi took another bite of her bun.

“Xiao Ye!” Feng Linlin’s voice suddenly snapped Ye Nanzhi back to reality, but the sudden start caused a piece of bread to get stuck in her throat, sending her into a fit of coughing.

Fortunately, Feng Linlin quickly poured her a cup of hot water, helping her through the crisis.

Feng Linlin patted Ye Nanzhi’s back while taking out a box of instant preserved egg and lean meat porridge.

–Xiao Ye, if you aren’t full, I have this. Stop gnawing on that dry stuff.–

“No, I can’t eat much anyway.” Ye Nanzhi took out her phone and opened the school’s official website, navigating to the Outstanding Students section.

Seeing Ye Nanzhi staring intently at something, Feng Linlin leaned over to look.

–What are you looking at?–

–I was wondering what it was… Chu Ran!– Finding it uninteresting, Feng Linlin returned to her desk to start her skincare routine.

“You know her?” Ye Nanzhi abandoned her bun and followed her.

“I don’t,” Feng Linlin shook her head. “But I’ve heard of her. She’s a famous top student at our school! Haven’t you seen her photos on the honors boards in the Comprehensive Building and the Building Art Gallery?”

–Are you talking about Chu Ran?– Fang Fang had just returned from the washroom, her face still covered in water droplets.

“You know her too?”

“I’ve heard about her in the College Student Union. I heard she did her undergraduate here too and was recommended for admission to the master’s program. Over the years, she’s won many awards on behalf of our school. The school is cultivating her as a key talent and intends to keep her for a PhD, but she hasn’t replied to the school yet,” Fang Fang said while wiping her face.

“She’s that amazing!!” Ye Nanzhi couldn’t help but exhale. It seemed she truly knew nothing about Chu Ran.

Looking at the photo in the Outstanding Students column on the official website, the picture of Chu Ran in the top left corner had a red flower edited onto it.

In the photo, Chu Ran still looked indifferent. It seemed the photographer couldn’t stand the stiff expression and had forced her to purse her lips slightly, making her look a bit softer.

It was hard to associate such an excellent figure with the words “campus bullying.”

However, the answer regarding the bullying would arrive very soon.

The team dinner was on Wednesday, and the next day was Thursday. Ye Nanzhi’s classes were packed all day, and she wasn’t free until 4:30 PM. Only then did she have time to rush to the studio to look for her keys.

Rarely, Chu Ran was not there. The studio was empty. The drawing that hadn’t been finished yesterday had been completed by Chu Ran and stood there alone.

Ye Nanzhi went to the seat she occupied yesterday. After searching around to no avail, she began looking through other corners of the studio.

She looked inside and out but found nothing.

That’s impossible! Ye Nanzhi scratched her hair. Except for the studio, she had been with Tang Mu the whole time. If the keys had hit the ground, they would have made a sound; there was no reason both of them would miss it.

Even if the key was a small, thin piece of metal that was hard to find, the plush doll attached to the ring was also gone.

The way the ring had been stretched showed that the doll must have snagged on something, and the pull deformed the poor-quality ring.

Sigh, in the end, it was just bad quality. Ye Nanzhi sighed. It seemed the keys were lost. She would have to borrow her roommate’s key and go to the school’s commercial building to get a new set made.

Leaving the studio dejectedly, Ye Nanzhi planned to head straight for the commercial building, so she chose a relatively secluded stairwell to take a shortcut. But as soon as she closed the stairwell door, she heard strange noises.

It seemed to be coming from the top floor—both a male and a female voice. The atmosphere did not sound good.

The girl’s voice was strangely familiar. Ye Nanzhi walked up the stairs step by step. When she was only one floor away, she suddenly heard a thud.

It was the sound of a body hitting a wall. With a heavy dong, it must have hurt.

Then, a boy spat and started swearing.

–You f*cking don’t know what’s good for you!–

Following that, a struggle seemed to break out. Leather shoes scraped against the floor, making squeaking sounds. Bodies collided with walls and railings, with continuous thuds echoing.

Then came a muffled groan from the boy, which gradually turned into a cry of pain.

–Fck your ancestors, Chu Ran! You fcking dare to hit me!–

Chu Ran… Ye Nanzhi couldn’t be sure if she had heard correctly, but her intuition told her the situation above was critical. There was no time to think, so she intentionally made a noise.

“Who’s there?”

Seeing no reaction, Ye Nanzhi took out her phone and pretended to call the police.

“Hello, campus 110?”

As Ye Nanzhi spoke, the people upstairs suddenly stopped.

There was a metallic clatter as something hit the floor. The boy spat and cursed, “Consider yourself lucky,” before running down the stairs past her. He had a swollen bruise near his eye and a trail of blood on the corner of his mouth.

He seemed to have sustained many injuries; he limped as he walked, clutching his chest.

As he passed Ye Nanzhi, he gave her a vicious glare, his intent obvious—he was angry about her meddling warning.

Once it was quiet upstairs, Ye Nanzhi slowly made her way up.

She saw Chu Ran sitting on the stairs, also with a bruise on the corner of her mouth.

“Senior Chu!” Ye Nanzhi rushed up to support her. “Are you okay? I’ll call the police for you!”

“I’m fine. No need for the police.” Chu Ran calmly withdrew her arm from Ye Nanzhi’s support and slowly walked downstairs toward the studio.

When Ye Nanzhi returned to the studio, she had a bag of medicine in her hand.

Chu Ran’s hand was scraped and bleeding, and her face was bruised. Ye Nanzhi had bought gauze, iodine, and a pack of masks.

They were both girls; she probably didn’t want others to see her face marked up.

The moment she pushed open the studio door, a flicker of surprise appeared in Chu Ran’s eyes, though it vanished quickly.

Ye Nanzhi stood at the door, her figure looking a bit small.

“I bought medicine. Your injuries… it’s better to treat them simply. It’ll be a hassle if they get infected.”

Seeing that Chu Ran didn’t speak, Ye Nanzhi dared to walk in, approaching her step by step.

She quietly touched Chu Ran’s wrist. Seeing no rejection, she lifted it, using a cotton swab dipped in iodine to gently wipe the wound.

This wasn’t the first time Ye Nanzhi had observed Chu Ran’s hand at close range. Usually, this hand held a brush, moving before her eyes to fill the white paper with rich content.

But this was the first time she had fully touched that familiar hand. Unlike the brief contact of their first meeting, Ye Nanzhi’s four fingers were curled into the other’s palm.

Chu Ran’s hands were slender, her skin delicate and white, and her knuckles were well-defined. Her pink nails were always trimmed round and clean.

Just like Chu Ran herself, she always appeared before everyone in a clean and crisp manner, like a crystalline ice sculpture in winter—graceful to look at, but so cold that people didn’t dare approach.

However, Chu Ran’s palm was warm.

Unlike the cold aura around her, her hand was warm and soft.

As Ye Nanzhi held Chu Ran’s hand, she noticed that due to years of painting, thin calluses had formed on Chu Ran’s index finger and palm, faintly rubbing against the back of her hand.

At the first touch of the cotton swab, Chu Ran instinctively flinched.

“Does it hurt?” Ye Nanzhi frowned. “I’m sorry, I’ll try to be as gentle as possible.”

She gently blew on the wound while slowly treating it with the swab.

From her side profile, Chu Ran saw the girl’s cautious look. Her long eyelashes were like the fluttering wings of a butterfly.

Her bright eyes were now focused intently on the injury. Her soft, white hands tightly gripped the cotton swab, carefully wiping away the blood.

After a simple cleaning, she applied ointment and wrapped the gauze twice, tying a pretty knot at the base of the index finger.

Once everything was done, Ye Nanzhi instructed her.

“Be careful today; try not to let it touch water. If you wash up, I brought medical gloves inside; you can cover it with them.”

Then, Ye Nanzhi pulled an egg from her coat.

“I’ve been keeping it against my chest; luckily it hasn’t cooled down!”

Chu Ran looked at her in shock, her gaze seemingly asking: Are you… hungry?

“This is for the bruise!” Ye Nanzhi read her confusion. She had Chu Ran sit down, peeled the egg, and used the warm egg white to gently massage the bruise on the corner of Chu Ran’s mouth.

As she rubbed, she comforted her.

“My mom says this method is very effective. When I was hurt as a kid, my mom always rubbed it for me like this. The bruises fade very quickly.”

As she moved closer, the girl’s fragrance enveloped Chu Ran.

Chu Ran used to hate girls who were fragrant, especially those who doused themselves in perfume so strong it was pungent from meters away. Chu Ran thought those scents were cheap and gave her a headache.

But the scent on Ye Nanzhi was different. She couldn’t tell if it was laundry detergent, the scent of conditioner from her hair, or the girl’s own natural fragrance—it was faint and subtle.

A bit more would be too rich; a bit less would be too plain. It was a perfect scent, with a hint of sweetness.

This was the first time Chu Ran didn’t feel a sense of rejection toward someone else’s scent.

When she looked up, she met the girl’s eyes. At the moment of contact, the girl instinctively looked away, moving her focus back to the injury on the mouth as if the eye contact had never happened.

As the temperature of the egg faded, the pain in Chu Ran’s mouth eased significantly. Ye Nanzhi felt it was about enough and wanted to pull back, but Chu Ran suddenly grabbed her wrist.

“Don’t you have anything you want to ask me?” Chu Ran asked.

Ye Nanzhi: “?”

Chu Ran: “You aren’t asking me why I fought, or how I could beat an adult male like that?”

To be able to injure a man more severely than herself, it was obvious that this wasn’t Chu Ran’s first fight. One could even say she had fought many times before.

Ye Nanzhi lowered her eyelashes, seemingly without much doubt about the question.

“I heard it. He was the one who moved first.”

She pulled her wrist from Chu Ran’s palm and turned to tidy up the swabs and gauze on the table.

But Chu Ran couldn’t sit still any longer and followed her.

“Ye Nanzhi, I’m giving you one last chance. Do you really have nothing you want to ask me?”

Don’t you want to ask why I fight? Don’t you want to ask about my past? Don’t you want to ask if there really is a scar from fighting on my arm?

Ye Nanzhi, you should ask me.

Last night, you stood in front of everyone from the Art Club; you didn’t even dare to look at them, and your hands were nervously balled into fists. Liu Guang’s words caused waves in your heart.

Actually, you want to know the answer too, don’t you?

Ye Nanzhi’s hand tidying the items paused, as if she suddenly remembered something. She turned around.

“Now that you mention it, I do have a question for you, Senior.”

She turned suddenly, but Chu Ran was clearly not prepared with an answer.

Her bandaged hand, ignoring the pain of the pull, instinctively gripped her sleeve tightly, as if terrified this unsightly scene was about to be made public.

The girl’s lips parted, and her bright eyes fixed on her as she asked:

“Senior, I dropped my keys in the studio yesterday. Did you see them?”

“…”

The hand gripping the sleeve loosened. Chu Ran froze in place, clearly surprised by the question.

Ye Nanzhi smiled. “Hehe, if you didn’t see them, forget it. I’ll go get another set made.” With that, she turned back to continue cleaning up the trash.

But the person behind her suddenly spoke.

“Is it this one?”

Ye Nanzhi turned back. In Chu Ran’s palm lay a silver key with a heart-shaped sticker on it—a mark Ye Nanzhi had made to distinguish her dorm key.

Seeing her lost item returned, she ran over excitedly, like a rabbit seeing a carrot, hopping along.

“That’s the one! Thank you, Senior!”

“I saw it in the studio after you left yesterday,” Chu Ran explained. “I wanted to bring it to you, but then…”

Then, at the campus crossroads, I saw the people from the Art Club, and you.

“Then, something happened and I got delayed. I’m sorry.” Chu Ran omitted the encounter and brushed it over lightly.

But Ye Nanzhi didn’t care. She discovered that her key… was attached to a brand-new keychain.

The keychain was exquisitely made, with interlocking clasps and a metal rabbit hanging from it. it looked sturdy and smooth. She thought it wouldn’t be easily snagged and lost this time.

Before Ye Nanzhi could speak, Chu Ran took the initiative to say, “The keychain is also a gift for you.”

Ye Nanzhi flipped the little bunny over. The metal rabbit was lifelike and vividly crafted. On the carrot it was holding, there was even a red, sparkling decoration.

Wait, why did this rabbit look more and more familiar? Realizing the truth, Ye Nanzhi looked up in shock.

Wasn’t this the same rabbit from her bra!