107. We must not let them succeed!

It was already eleven o'clock when Chen Ruowen woke up. She slowly got ready, intending to find Bai Jinyan to go downstairs for a meal. However, upon pushing open the door to her room at Guanlan Pavilion, she found someone sitting on the floor outside.

Guo Jingyuan was huddled in the corner by the door, arms wrapped around her knees, looking both pitiful and well-behaved. She stood up the moment she heard the door open.

"Ruowen, you're awake?"

"Why are you sitting here?" Chen Ruowen asked, puzzled.

"I woke up early and didn't know what to do, so I wanted to find you..."

In truth, Guo Jingyuan hadn't woken up all that early. After getting up, she had wandered around the villa, only to find that no one else seemed to be awake, so she had tried to return to her room. It was only then that she realized she didn't have her room card, and she had no idea who had even brought her back the night before.

"Have you eaten?" Chen Ruowen asked.

Guo Jingyuan nodded.

"At least you're not completely clueless," Chen Ruowen teased.

"I ordered breakfast for you too. Do you want to... go down and eat?"

"We'll talk about that later. I'm going to see if Bai Jinyan is up."

With that, Chen Ruowen walked over to the neighboring Tianxin Pavilion. She vaguely remembered that this was the room Bai Jinyan had chosen. She pressed on the door lock, bringing up a small keypad.

This unusual action piqued Guo Jingyuan's curiosity, and she leaned over to get a better look.

"Don't you need a room card?"

"Why would I need a card for a keypad lock?" Chen Ruowen asked, sounding strange.

The rooms at Ganyi Manor all used password locks. The initial password was a default string of zeros, and once guests checked in, they could set a personalized password as needed.

After punching in a few digits, the lock gave a beep, and the door swung open. Chen Ruowen clapped her hands in satisfaction.

"I knew it would be this password." She pulled the door open and looked at Guo Jingyuan. "Are you coming in with me, or are you going downstairs to wait?"

Guo Jingyuan chose to go downstairs.

Are you kidding? If she followed Chen Ruowen to find Bai Jinyan, she would just be a third wheel—that would be incredibly awkward.

The layout of Tianxin Pavilion was identical to Guanlan Pavilion. Chen Ruowen navigated the room with ease. She first checked the bedroom—nobody there—and then headed for the study, where she found Bai Jinyan.

"No way, you're still studying even after the exams?" Chen Ruowen whispered, teasing him.

Hearing the voice behind him, the figure hunched over the desk seemed a bit tense. Bai Jinyan quickly covered the papers he was working on before turning around.

"Why are you here?"

"To see if you were awake."

"Doesn't the room... have a password?"

Bai Jinyan looked confused. He remembered setting a password for the room yesterday. How had Chen Ruowen just waltzed in without a sound? Was the system broken? Or had he misremembered?

"Your password has always been my birthday, hasn't it? It's not hard to guess," Chen Ruowen replied, not understanding his confusion.

Come to think of it, Bai Jinyan hadn't chosen to use her birthday as his password on purpose. It happened years ago when Chen Ruowen had "borrowed" (stolen) his laptop. Because she couldn't remember his login password, she had simply changed it herself. Since her birthday was so easy to remember, Bai Jinyan hadn't bothered to change it back.

Straight-laced guys usually used the same password for everything, so later on, Bai Jinyan's bank cards and phone passcodes followed suit.

"What are you writing?" Chen Ruowen glanced at the cluttered desk.

"Writing in a yearbook," Bai Jinyan said, brushing past the topic of the password and generously clearing a space for her.

"What's a yearbook?" Chen Ruowen picked up one of the many colorful sheets of paper scattered across the desk. "Name, height, weight, hobbies, address, phone number... What is this? A resume?"

"...Usually, when middle school or high school students are about to graduate, they exchange yearbooks to fill in personal details and leave messages or blessings."

"Oh... what's the point of this? A census?"

"...It's to strengthen connections between classmates, collect contact information, and serve as a memento before everyone goes their separate ways."

Chen Ruowen scoffed. "If people are truly friends, they don't need this to get to know each other. And if you're never going to be in contact again after graduation, there's no point in writing this, is there?"

"It's just a keepsake," Bai Jinyan said, not attempting to persuade her.

It was clear she had no emotional attachment to her classmates at No. 1 High, nor had she ever experienced that bittersweet feeling of "reminiscing about youth." Explaining it to her would be pointless.

"Then why are you doing it? Who are you giving these keepsakes to?"

"These were given to me by my classmates," Bai Jinyan explained helplessly. "Some people gave them to me during the second semester of senior year, but I was too busy studying to fill them out. There's a class reunion tomorrow, so I'm finishing them now to return them."

"A class reunion?" Chen Ruowen was even more puzzled. "Why didn't I know about a reunion? You said these were all given to you by others? Why do you have so many, and I don't have a single one?"

Chen Ruowen felt a bit unhappy.

Even though she had just claimed that yearbooks were meaningless, seeing that Bai Jinyan had so many while she had received absolutely nothing—not even a notification about the class reunion—still bothered her.

"Do you want to go to the class reunion?" Bai Jinyan found it incredibly strange.

"Of course! I'm a student at No. 1 High too, aren't I? Why wasn't I invited?"

A student at No. 1 High... Bai Jinyan didn't believe for a second that Chen Ruowen had suddenly developed such a high sense of school spirit. He didn't have the heart to point out the harsh reality that she hadn't even spent four full months at the school in total. He just assumed she was bored again.

"It was just mentioned in the class group chat; there weren't any individual invitations sent out."

"Class group chat? Why do you have a class group chat? Why didn't you add me?"

Bai Jinyan didn't have the heart to remind her that when she first arrived at school, the class monitor had tried to add her to the group, only to be completely ignored...

"Ahem, forget it. Never mind that. If you want to go, I'll take you with me tomorrow."

"That's more like it."

This was exactly what Chen Ruowen had been waiting for. She had zero interest in any class reunion, but she had watched plenty of youth dramas produced by Shuangxing.

Many boys and girls liked to use graduation as an excuse to make confessions or seek intimate contact. With Du Yueyue's example fresh in her mind, she wasn't about to let anyone take advantage of her "Little Yan" during an event like that!

She remembered very clearly that there were a few girls in the class—Ye Qing or Li Qing, something like that—who had been trying to make a move on Bai Jinyan!

Hmph, she would never let them succeed!

Because of Chen Ruowen's arrival, Bai Jinyan was forced to stop working on the yearbooks and head downstairs for lunch early.

As the two stepped out of Tianxin Pavilion, they ran into Kang Wenbo and Geng Jiaojiao, who were walking hand-in-hand. All four of them froze for a moment.

"Jiaojiao, why were you in Wenbo's room?"

"Sister Ruowen, why are you coming out of Bai Jinyan's room?"

Chen Ruowen and Geng Jiaojiao asked simultaneously.

"Jiaojiao drank too much yesterday, and I didn't know her room password, so I had to bring her back to my place..."

"Ruowen came to my room to find me just now, and we were just heading down to eat together..."

Kang Wenbo and Bai Jinyan answered at the same time.

Then, both men fell silent, exchanged a guilty glance, coughed lightly, and quickly changed the subject to distract the two clueless women beside them.

"Let's just go eat."