A Speck Amid The Dust of The World - CH 3.1

Zeng Li, Wu Ying and Ma Yiyi are roommates at University Z. Originally, there were four people in the dormitory, but one classmate dropped out after only a few months of study. Since then,  there has never had an arrangement for new people to come take the empty bed.

The three of them are not from the same major. Zeng Li studied library and records department, Ma Yiyi studied hotel management, and Wu Ying studied clinical medicine. Z University is not a well-known university, but the campus is located next to A University, it borrowed some fame from its famous neighbour, and it barely developed into a comprehensive university.

Zeng Li’s major is the rarest. She originally applied for the computer department, but she was transferred because the computer department was oversubscribed.

She has always been a person who is very afraid of loneliness. When she arrived at Z University, all her high school classmates and friends disappeared, so she quickly turned her gaze to the two people in the same room.

However, who would have known that Ma Yiyi and Wu Ying are high school classmates who have been close for a long time and happened to go to the same university, and Wu Ying’s father asked to put the two in one bedroom so that they can take care of each other and adapt to the new environment. Naturally, the two of them excluded Zeng Li from their circle from the beginning.

Zeng Li is tall, slender, delicate and pretty. There are not many girls in the library and records department. In addition, she is not good at using her appearance to interact with people. Even with her acquaintances, she can barely talk abit, when it comes to unfamiliar people she can’t squeeze a word out, which makes it easy for people to misunderstand her as pretending to be arrogant and withdrawn, she often makes people distance themselves from her. She hadn’t studied very well since she was a child, and she was mostly lucky to be admitted to Z University but the little excitement after entering the university campus was diluted by this lonely melancholy.

In addition to love life, how to win a friendship between the same sex may also be the most important thing for girls in that time.

The next day was Sunday, and Zeng Li had to go to work this week. It was their busy day when everyone was on vacation, so they usually took shifts. As soon as the door opened in the morning, she took the time to clean up the books that her colleagues left behind when they got off work yesterday. When she finished and sat down, it was past nine o’clock and several readers appeared. Everyone was quietly looking for books, and sometimes they stood in front of the bookshelf and stopped to read carefully.

On the other side of the reading room is a huge glass window with several round tables beside the window. Because there is a dedicated reading room downstairs, there are not many tables and chairs here, and they are only for readers who cannot borrow books to sit and flip through materials occasionally. However, Zeng Li’s professional academic classroom is at the highest point of the library. In winter, there is plenty of light. The window is facing the corner of the municipal park next to it. Many people like to sit here and bask in the sun.

After a while, a reader asked Zeng Li to help him find a book. After Zeng Li checked the code, she took the reader to the innermost place. However, she didn’t know was if someone left the book casually at somewhere else or something. After looking for it for a long time, she didn’t find it. Zeng Li was afraid that someone at the door was waiting to borrow or return a book, so she had to give up.

When she returned to his seat, Zeng Li saw the book on the table. She didn’t know which reader had just come in to return it. She guess that he didn’t see Zeng Li when he entered the door, so he put it next to the scanner. The title of the book is “Distraction Osteogenesis of Facial Skeleton”. It is a thick and heavy translated textbook, like a brick, and it is expensive. From the time it was first placed on the bookshelf to the present, the estimated number of times it has been borrowed can be counted with five fingers. However, Zeng Li still has a fresh memory of it, because she once sprayed minced celery and dough on the skull of its cover picture.……

Zeng Li took a few steps, looked around, and saw Ai Jingchu.

He took a book and sat patiently on the chair in front of the window to read. The sun is exceptionally bright today. Through the glass in the reading room, the beams of light are shining warmly on the floor, desktop, and side of his face. The light made his eyes narrow a little bit, and his brows frowned slightly. In the half-light and half-darkness, his facial features were more three-dimensional.

One of the long legs under the table was opened, and the other was slightly retracted, but the upper body was slightly tilted forward towards the table, holding the pages of the book with his left hand, and the five fingers of his right hand were slightly curled up and clasped on the tabletop, which was extraordinarily slender under the stretching of the sun shadow. Suddenly, the fingers of his right hand moved, starting with the small thumb, then the ring finger, middle finger, and index finger. From right to left, four fingers tapped rhythmically on the table. His nails are short, and he uses the area between the abdomen and the fingertips, so there is no knock on his nails. He knocks lightly and quickly, making a very small sound. Once or twice, he will stop for a few seconds, and then he knocks carelessly another time.

Ai Jingchu sat calmly in the early morning sun, half bathed in the warm sun and half faintly in the light and shadow.

Zeng Li suddenly remembered that when Zhou Wen talked to her about medical records the other day, she said that in terms of the aesthetics of human beings, especially Oriental people, the tip of the nose, the tip of the mouth, and the tip of the chin can be seen from the side. If three points can be connected into a straight line, it is the most perfect golden ratio. Some people’s teeth are not protruding at all, because the chin is retracted a little bit, it can give people a sense of discomfort and obtrusiveness; some people have small buck teeth, but the chin and nose are very three-dimensional, and these three points are connected in one line. This shape will not make others think that the teeth are ugly.