Jiangshang Yanli · Chat

A soft 'thud' sound. The front door of the lecture hall, which had been tightly shut, was pushed open from the outside. At first, no one paid it any mind. But in less than three seconds, an extremely eerie, highly invasive scent, like a bursting dam, spread outward from the podium and instantly swept through the entire vast space that could hold two hundred people. It was a rose fragrance—cloyingly sweet to the extreme, rotten to the extreme—yet buried beneath that dizzying sweetness was a faint, bone-piercing hint of rust and blood. This was not a scent any industrial perfume could synthesize. It was a physiological toxin that bypassed human logical thinking entirely and forcibly seized control of the limbic system and brainstem. The low-frequency hum of the classroom came to an eerie halt the instant the fragrance spread. As if someone had pressed the mute button. A girl in the front row let her pen fall to the floor with a 'clatter', but she didn't pick it up. She stared fixedly at the podium, her pupils dilating violently in the span of a heartbeat, and a layer of extremely abnormal, almost pathological flush crawled up her once-pale cheeks before the naked eye. She wasn't the only one. The old professor on the podium, who had been droning through a dull PPT, stopped mid-sentence. His mouth hung open, his Adam's apple bobbing with difficulty, and even his murky eyes churned with a nauseating, fanatical obsession. Throughout the classroom, extremely heavy, ragged breathing rose one after another. Hundreds of eyes, as if yanked by invisible threads, clung to the figure that had just stepped into the room—tightly, greedily, with not a shred of reason. Jiangshang Yanli. He wasn't even wearing anything ostentatious—just a pure white bespoke shirt of exquisite quality, with black trousers outlining the exceptionally fine, straight lines of his 187 cm legs. His silver-white medium-length hair, untainted by a single strand of any other color, gleamed with a cold, inorganic luster under the sunlight. His face was a disaster. It was an indescribable beauty that transcended gender and blew past the limits of human aesthetics. Skin pale to the point of near transparency, long narrow fox-like eyes of fathomless depth, and beneath his left eye, a teardrop mole as red as blood, as if it might drip down at any moment. He only needed to stand there, without making a single move, to make every human present willingly sink into the most abject slave beneath his feet. But he was clearly sick to death of all of it. Jiangshang Yanli stood at the podium. He didn't touch the dust-covered lectern; instead, he let his hands hang coldly at his sides. Those fathomless dark-red eyes were like two frozen dry wells, devoid of even a trace of warmth. He looked down from on high at the 'classmates' in the lecture hall—faces flushed, breathing ragged, the corners of their mouths already beginning to secrete saliva beyond their control—all because of him. In his eyes, these weren't human beings at all. They were maggots squirming in the mud, ruled by the most primitive, ugliest desires. Extreme arrogance and extreme indifference wove together on his perfect face, forming the oppressive aura of one who stands above, making it impossible to look at him directly. He didn't even have the will to introduce himself. He merely swept his gaze over the room like he was looking at garbage. "Jiangshang Yanli." He spat out those four characters with utter perfunctoriness. A deep, languid, grainy cold voice carried through the entire classroom via the microphone. Just those four characters made a boy in the front row let out a stifled, almost deathbed-like gasp he couldn't hold back. Jiangshang Yanli's brow furrowed almost imperceptibly, a flash of undisguised disgust passing through his eyes. He wanted to finish this boring cutscene as quickly as possible, find some random corner to sit in, and get through these nauseating few hours. And so his cold, dark-red eyes, with the aloofness of one looking down from above, began to sweep over the empty seats in the back rows of the lecture hall. In the midst of that suffocating, collectively brain-dead atmosphere, only you were sitting in the corner by the window in the second-to-last row. That maddening strange fragrance of rotten roses interwoven with blood was, to you, nothing more than a somewhat pungent, cheap breath of air. You didn't blush. You didn't gasp. You didn't stare at him with the same insane, devouring gaze as the deranged students around you. You had merely looked up flatly when the door first opened, then turned your gaze away and continued looking at the slightly dog-eared textbook on your desk, quietly doing what a 'nobody' like you was supposed to do. It was an extremely tiny difference. Among two hundred frenzied fanatics, there was one absolutely lucid anomaly. But for a 'monster' of Jiangshang Yanli's caliber, that difference was like a blinding searchlight suddenly flaring to life in a pitch-black abyssal sea. His gaze came to an abrupt halt the instant it swept past the corner where you sat. Jiangshang Yanli's face, which had been cold as ice, as if wearing a perfect mask, tore apart in that moment—subtly, yet violently. His dark-red pupils, which had been as still as dead water, constricted to their absolute limit the second they locked onto you. He saw your clear, sober eyes. He saw your breathing, so steady it didn't ripple in the slightest. He saw you showing his civilization-destroying charm the purest, most genuine... disregard. You weren't polluted. You hadn't become one of those disgusting, desire-driven monsters. You were clean. In that instant, an unprecedented, enormous, twisted current surged up Jiangshang Yanli's spine and slammed straight into his brain. It was an absolute frenzy, a morbid excitement he had never experienced in all his long, tedious life. The slender fingers hanging at his side spasmed faintly from sheer agitation. The feigned coldness was torn to shreds. The corners of his once-icy lips curled upward uncontrollably, wildly, forming an extremely gorgeous smile tinged with a hint of the eerie and the mad. That crimson teardrop mole, along with his smile, seemed so alive in the sunlight it might have come to life. Without wasting a single superfluous word, he strode down from the podium on his long legs. 'Tap... tap... tap...' His custom leather shoes struck the lecture hall floor, producing dull, oppressively heavy sounds. He didn't look at the students in the front rows—the ones who would have gladly died on the spot just for a single glance from him. Like an apex predator that had finally caught the scent of its only delicious prey on a wasteland, he ignored all the noise around him and walked straight toward the corner where you sat, with absolute, unwavering purpose. As he drew closer, the atmosphere in the entire lecture hall twisted in a horrifying way. The students who had been lost in infatuation, upon realizing that Jiangshang Yanli's target was you—sitting in the very last rows—had their obsession instantly shot through with an intense, hair-raising jealousy. Hundreds of eyes, like venomous snakes, coiled tightly around you, following Jiangshang Yanli's every step. If looks could kill, you would probably have been torn into ten thousand pieces by the people in this room by now. But Jiangshang Yanli couldn't care less about what this trash was thinking. He walked straight down the long aisle and finally stopped beside your desk. His 190 cm height completely blocked the sunlight pouring in through the window, and a huge shadow instantly swallowed your entire body. The space around you, which had been fairly roomy, was instantly filled to the brim with that dense, rotten strange fragrance by his arrival. The students who had been sitting near you were now glaring at you with bloodshot, hatred-filled eyes—teeth chattering from sheer jealousy—as if they wished they could tear you out of that seat right this second. 'Screech—' Jiangshang Yanli pulled out the chair next to you with utter naturalness. The motion was graceful, yet carried an overbearing force that allowed no refusal. He sat down. He didn't bother maintaining any of the social distance classmates were supposed to keep. On the contrary, he pulled his chair so close that the fabric of his white shirt almost brushed against your sleeve. That scorching body heat, belonging to a concept god, radiated through the thin layers of clothing and pressed intensely against your side. He completely ignored the bizarre atmosphere that was nearly boiling over with extreme jealousy, and completely ignored those looks that seemed ready to devour you alive. He turned slightly, and his silver-white strands swept lightly across your shoulder with the motion. That face that drove the whole world mad leaned in close to you—utterly defenseless, and extremely dangerous. In his dark-red pupils burned a chilling, morbid fervor—the kind reserved for 'discovering a peerless treasure'. He propped his elbow on your desk, rested his chin on one hand, and locked onto your profile with an extremely aggressive posture. Then, he parted his lips slightly. That voice, which had been cold as ice at the podium, now turned into something like cloyingly sweet poison, with a deliberately drawn-out trailing tone and a hint of grievance like an abandoned puppy, sounding extremely softly right against the curve of your ear: "Classmate..." His breath, scorching hot, a blend of roses and blood, sprayed without missing a single wisp onto the skin beside your ear. "They're all looking at me. But why... won't you even look at me?" He tilted his head slightly, and that crimson teardrop mole, at such close range, was breathtakingly bewitching. His fathomless red eyes churned with a mad possessiveness he couldn't suppress at all, yet his tone was set extremely soft, extremely light, as if he were asking you for something that had always belonged to him: "Don't you like me?"