The convenience store near the east gate sold three flavors of cheesecake.
Zi Han bought the plain one, added a cold yogurt from the refrigerated section, paid, and left.
She had mapped out the school grounds in her first week, and she had discovered a tree on the far east side of the school grounds, set back from the main path, close enough to the academic block that it didn't look suspicious, but far enough from the cafeteria and the café that the probability of running into anyone relevant was extremely low.
Relevant meaning Ming Ye.
She settled at the base of the tree, placed her yogurt in the grass beside her, opened her cheesecake, and opened her laptop.
The article she had failed to finish last night was still open.
She read the first paragraph.
Then the second.
By the third, she had forgotten about Ming Ye entirely. There was only the image of a mycelium structure on her screen, the way its branching pathways mapped almost perfectly against a neuron's dendritic tree.
Zi Han was excited and also scared. She had died in her previous world before she could prove anything.
Zi Han pushed the thought aside and continued reading.
If this world had the same biological principles, then perhaps—
"Hey."
The sudden voice behind her made her shoulders stiffen.
Zi Han turned her head slowly and found Shi Xian standing a few steps away, with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a carton of orange juice. He looked mildly surprised to find her here, which suggested he hadn't been looking for her specifically, which was slightly reassuring.
"Hey," she said.
An unremarkable start. She wished he'd go as quickly as he came.
He nodded toward the tree. "Mind if I—"
"It's a public tree," she said, ignoring the rapid thudding of her heart against her ribs.
He smiled and sat down a comfortable distance away, stretching his legs out in the grass. For a moment he said nothing. Zi Han looked back at her screen.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
Zi Han blinked once. "Reading."
Shi Xian tilted his head slightly, curious. "Reading what?"
She hesitated.
Explaining that she was studying the neurological potential of mushrooms sounded strange even in her own head. To most people, mushrooms were something you fried and ate, not something you researched.
Instead of answering, Zi Han looked back at her screen.
Shi Xian's gaze drifted downward out of simple curiosity. His eyes briefly landed on the open article before he realized what he was doing.
"Mushrooms?" he said before he could stop himself.
Zi Han minimized the tab on instinct, then immediately recognized that minimizing it was significantly more suspicious than simply leaving it open. She looked at the now-blank screen for a moment.
"Sorry," Shi Xian said. "I didn't mean to peek."
"It's fine," she said. "I don't mind."
This was false.
She did mind. A lot, in fact.
The universe saw an opportunity and took it, as it always did, because the universe was committed to making her life difficult. She winced internally. Of all the things to be caught reading about, it had to be mushrooms. Now he probably thought she was some kind of eccentric who spent her free time researching fungi for fun.
Shi Xian studied her face for a moment before glancing back at the screen again.
"Why are you reading about mushrooms?"
Zi Han kept her expression neutral.
"I just find them interesting."
She said it in the most casual tone she could manage, silently hoping the conversation would end there before he decided she was weird.
Instead, Shi Xian nodded thoughtfully.
"I think mushrooms are interesting too."
Now, to be honest, that was not entirely true.
In fact, before today he had never spent more than five seconds thinking about mushrooms in his entire life. Shi Xian's relationship with mycology was essentially nonexistent. He knew that mushrooms existed, that some of them were edible, and that one variety apparently made people see things, which he had learned from a documentary he had watched approximately forty percent of before falling asleep.
But the girl sitting under the tree was one of the most intelligent students in Mingde, and also one of the most difficult people to talk to. She rarely spoke in class, rarely joined group discussions, and seemed to disappear the moment lectures ended.
Someone like that naturally sparked curiosity.
Besides, Shi Xian liked intelligent people. Conversations with them were far more interesting than the usual campus gossip.
Zi Han studied him, looking for a hint of a lie or falsity.
He met her gaze confidently.
She could not immediately tell if he was being polite or sincere. His expression gave nothing obvious away.
"Really," she said, and it came out flatter than she intended.
"The way they communicate," he said after a brief pause. "Underground. Through the mycelium. I read something about it once, how they pass nutrients between trees." He paused again. "I thought that was strange. That something that looks so simple has this whole network underneath."
Zi Han looked at him for a moment longer.
That was not what she expected him to say.
It wasn't technically wrong, either.
"That's the Wood Wide Web," she said. "Mycorrhizal networks." She paused. "Most people don't know about that."
He shrugged lightly. "I read a lot."
Something in her chest loosened slightly, not completely, but enough that the next words came out without her having to think about them first.
"The part that interests me isn't the communication," she said. "It's the structure. Mycelium under a microscope, the branching, the way it extends and connects, it maps almost identically onto human neural pathways. Dendritic trees." She pulled the laptop back open. The article reappeared on the screen. "If you look at this—"
She stopped.
Shi Xian was watching her with an expression she couldn't immediately categorize. Attentive, yes, but also slightly surprised, as if something had shifted in the last thirty seconds that he hadn't anticipated.
Zi Han became aware, suddenly, that she had been talking for longer than she had intended. The back of her neck went warm.
She closed her mouth.
"Sorry," she said, pulling the laptop back slightly. "I ramble about things I find interesting. It's.....sorry."
Shi Xian blinked once before smiling. It looked genuine.
"No," he said. "Keep going."
She looked at him.
"The neural pathway thing," he said. "You were saying it maps identically. What does that mean, practically? What could you do with that?"
Nobody had ever asked her that question in a tone that suggested they actually wanted to know the answer. Most times her ideas and thought processes were shunned away, even by fellow researchers.
This put her in a better mood than she had expected, mainly because she had been sitting on three years of interrupted research with no one to talk to about it, and someone finally seemed to be genuinely interested in it.
"Theoretically," she said slowly, "if you could isolate the mechanism, the way mycelium builds those structures and responds to stimuli, you could potentially use it as a biological scaffold. For repair." She paused. "Spinal cord damage. Degenerative conditions. The body rejecting synthetic materials has always been the problem, but something biological, something that already behaves like neural tissue—"
She stopped again.
Shi Xian had not moved.
"That," he said after a moment, "would be significant."
"Yes," she said. "It would."
A silence followed that was, for the first time, not uncomfortable.
Zi Han looked down at her cheesecake, which she had forgotten to eat. She picked it up and took a small bite. The yogurt had gotten slightly warm.
"Where did you read about this?" Shi Xian asked.
She considered the question.
"Here and there," she said.
He accepted this without pushing, which she appreciated.
They sat in quiet for a moment. Somewhere across the grounds, a bell rang distantly, marking the halfway point of the break.
"You should write that down," Shi Xian said eventually. "What you just said. The scaffold idea."
Zi Han glanced at him.
"I mean it," he said, and there was something in his tone that was different from his usual classroom politeness. It sounded less performative. "That's not a casual thought. That's the kind of thing people spend years trying to—" He stopped himself, and something crossed his face briefly that she didn't have time to identify before he looked away. "You should write it down," he repeated more quietly.
Zi Han watched his face for a moment, then said,
"I'll think about it."
---
On the path that curved behind the academic block, Ming Ye walked alone.
He had sent Lu Qian ahead. He wanted some quiet, and Lu Qian's rambling voice had been quite annoying.
He noticed Zi Han through the gap in the hedgerow without meaning to. She was sitting at the base of a tree with a laptop open on her knees and a half-eaten cheesecake beside her. Shi Xian sat a short distance away, leaning forward slightly, listening.
Ming Ye stopped walking.
She was talking to the class representative of Class A and the school's golden boy, Shi Xian. She had her laptop turned slightly toward him, and she was pointing at something on the screen. Her expression was composed and stoic, but her eyes told a different story. They were not guarded as they had been with him. In fact, she seemed to enjoy the conversation. She seemed free.
Then she laughed, suddenly and briefly. It was just a small sound, but yet a tingling sensation washed through Ming Ye.
Ming Ye watched them.
She was so fearful around him, and yet so free around everyone else.
He wasn't sure what to call what he felt about that.
He put his hands in his pockets and walked.
He would figure it out later.