Chapter 9

It was as if a butterfly had fluttered past; her heart skipped a beat for a second.

Ming Yufu lifted her lashes. Her obsidian-like phoenix eyes were long and charming, her gaze traveling upward to settle on the girl’s face.

Whenever the Ming family gathered at the ancestral home, the younger generation—under their parents’ instructions—would act cute and clever just like this, trying to win a sliver of her attention.

However, Ming Yufu had always remained unmoved, her aloof aura keeping people a thousand miles away. She felt no affection for those relatives, and their attempts to curry favor usually left no trace in her heart.

But Meng Li’s deliberately drawn-out, slow voice did not irritate her. Instead, it felt magical, causing the nerves near her ears to tighten.

Ming Yufu paused. “Don’t act spoiled.”

Even if Meng Li didn’t act spoiled, she would still explain the problems to her.

Ming Yufu had a photographic memory; she still remembered everything she had learned in university clearly. Moreover, mathematics consists of numbers and symbols that are interconnected; even with points of knowledge she hadn’t encountered before, she could infer one from another and teach herself.

Meng Li: Wronged. She wasn’t acting spoiled; she was simply expressing her thirst for knowledge.

For the sake of math, Meng Li could be flexible. She straightened her posture and placed her hands on her knees. “Oh, okay, Teacher Ming.” Her tone became serious in a second.

“President Ming, dinner is ready. Shall I serve it now?” Auntie Qian stood in the [stolen content]kitchen with a spatula, calling out.

Ming Yufu closed the textbook and turned her peerless, elegant face. Her ear and swan-like neck formed a beautiful line, her fair skin striking to the eye. She met Meng Li’s gaze. “Eat first?”

Meng Li nodded.

The claypot rice smelled too good; who could focus on studying? To learn math, one must be pious and single-minded. If not for the constraints of reality, Meng Li would even want to bathe, change her clothes, burn incense, and wash her hands to pray for the blessing of the God of Mathematics before solemnly opening the textbook to solve problems.

After dinner, Meng Li solemnly washed and dried her hands before taking out her textbook.

As it turned out, without the temptation of claypot rice, the difficulty of math did not decrease.

The lights in the study were brilliant, casting white light onto the math book. Meng Li stared at the numbers and symbols. She heard every step of the process, but her thoughts gradually failed to keep up with the high-level explanation, becoming sluggish and stuck.

The last time she had studied math so desperately, day and night, was during the year of her art entrance exams.

Her talent lay in painting; her academic grades were not particularly outstanding. Compared to profound functions, vectors, and geometry, her passion was more easily ignited by the blending of dyes on a palette. Her work displayed a talent and aura that others found difficult to reach.

For example, she felt that every inch of the hand currently holding the pen fit her aesthetic perfectly. It was extremely suitable for a sketching class as a reference for hands. The nails were beautiful and rounded, the finger bones showed a faint pink tint, and the ratio of the hand to the fingers was pleasing—an eye-opener at every turn.

“Therefore, the general solution can be obtained.”

The slender, white fingers wrote down the final string of formulas [unauthorized copy]on the scratch paper. Ming Yufu stopped her pen and looked up. “Understand?”

Hmm?

How did she finish so suddenly?

Meng Li’s gaze locked onto the derived solution. She frowned in thought, trying hard to comprehend, but her thinking failed. She realized she didn’t understand at all.

After a moment, she said shamefully, “I don’t understand.”

Ming Yufu asked, “Which step?”

Every step after the word “Solution.”

Meng Li said with a headache, “Let me think about it myself.”

Ming Yufu paused. “What’s wrong?”

Meng Li pouted. “Teacher’s hands are too beautiful. I have no heart for studying; I only want to paint.” Not being able to draw these hands on a tablet was a loss for the entire art world.

Those ruby lips were beautiful, uttering pleasant and sweet words.

Ming Yufu looked away. “An excuse. When your mind isn’t on the problem, everything ​unauthorized copy​you look at is beautiful.”

Meng Li felt guilty. Her gaze drifted as she said gloomily, “Can we use some other means to improve my math grades?”

Ming Yufu picked up the pen. “Such as?”

Meng Li let her imagination run wild. “Like drinking milk to promote brain development, or buying bread from the ‘Wang-is-Smart’ bakery at the school gate. Maybe eating it will make me smarter.”

“…”

Ming Yufu asked her, “Do you believe that by staying in the same room as a high-achiever, your grades will improve?”

Meng Li said decisively, “I don’t.” She had “study gods” in her middle and high school classes; if staying in the same room improved grades, she would have become a top student long ago.

Ming Yufu crushed her fantasy ruthlessly. “Then drinking milk and eating bread won’t work either.”

She tore off a fresh sheet of scratch paper. “I’ll explain it again. If there’s anywhere you can’t keep up or don’t understand, ask me directly.”

Ming Yufu looked up. Seeing that Meng Li was still daydreaming, she placed the pen cap under Meng Li’s chin and tilted it upward. “Don’t get distracted again.”

The moment the action happened, both of them froze.

Ming Yufu didn’t understand why she had performed such an intimate gesture, [stolen content]and Meng Li’s heart rate accelerated slightly, as if she had been touched by a phantom flirtation. Her brain sent the wrong signal; the cold sensation felt less like a pen cap and more like the woman’s delicate fingertip brushing her chin.

Her pupils reflected the woman’s charming, cold, and seductive face. She suddenly found that she really liked this “serious” side of her—treating her like a teacher treats a student, ordering her to listen carefully and not to disobey. Perhaps she was the legendary type who responded to “the stick” rather than “the carrot.”

“I guarantee I’ll have a proper attitude toward learning,” Meng Li reflected.

Ming Yufu lingered for half a beat before coming to her senses. She retracted the pen and lowered her eyes, her half-closed lashes distinct, and began the explanation again.

Her wrist was extremely steady, her handwriting neat and elegant with a slight sharpness. Unlike some teachers, she didn’t skip the simple parts; instead, she wrote down every step in detail, including common mistakes and key points, making it clear and easy to understand.

Whenever Meng Li hit a point she didn’t quite grasp, she interrupted to ask. Her thoughts were unraveled layer by layer, and her thinking became progressively concrete and clear.

“I’ve got it!” Meng Li suddenly saw the light.

Her eyes were crystal bright as she enthusiastically repeated the logic of the solution. “Is this the right way to understand it?”

Ming Yufu propped up her chin and nodded. “Yes. All problems of this category follow the same logic.”

Capturing the approval in the other woman’s eyes, Meng Li’s confidence instantly doubled. Let all the world’s difficult problems be thrown at her; she now had endless strength and energy to solve them.

The “study-slacker’s” beautiful fantasy lasted only a second before shattering, as Meng Li knew better than anyone just how her math skills truly were.

Her joys and sorrows were written all over her face; her mind was simple and easy to understand. The small mole under her eye was gilded by the lamplight, looking like a tiny speck of paint accidentally splashed unauthorized copy on during a painting. When she smiled, the small dot would float upward slightly, and her snowy-white teeth would peek through her red lips.

“Haste makes waste. Learning a lot is not as good as learning with precision.” Ming Yufu wrote a problem on the paper and handed it to her. “That’s all for today. This is the problem I’ve set for you; give me the solution steps tomorrow night.”

Meng Li felt a warmth in her heart at the woman’s serious expression. She took it, organized the problem sheet along with Ming Yufu’s scratch paper, smoothed out the edges, and carefully tucked them into her book, planning to do them tomorrow.

She couldn’t help but admire her. Knowledge points she hadn’t seen before could be taught to herself; there probably wasn’t a problem in the world that could stump her.

Night.

Meng Li sat in the independent study specially prepared for her, taking out her tablet and stylus to paint.

If you don’t play for three days, thorns grow on your hands. This refers to how one’s hands become clumsy if they don’t play the qin for three days. Painting is the same. No matter the skill, without long-term practice, one becomes rusty.

Besides, painting was Meng Li’s favorite hobby during her free time. The oil paints she ordered online hadn’t arrived yet, so she could only practice with the drawing software on her tablet.

The brush outlined first the waterfall-like long hair, then the gaze somewhere between aloof and focused, followed by the graceful curves wrapped in a mermaid skirt and the slender, thin ankles. Gradually, the seductive figure of the graceful, cold Omega took shape on the canvas.

When she reached the Omega’s hand holding the pen, Meng Li’s stylus paused for a second. The scene of her chin being tilted up by that pen flashed through her mind.

A wave of thirst hit her throat. She took a sip of water, swallowing the strange and subtle feeling deep within her heart.