About half an hour later, the door to the painting studio was gently pushed open.
Jiang Muyun walked in, holding a cup of steaming hot coffee.
“Yan Yu, you’re already here? So early.”
She greeted with a smile, her voice as gentle as ever.
“I was thinking of coming early to prepare, but I didn’t expect you to be even faster than me.”
“Yeah.”
Yan Yu didn’t even look up, focused on the lines she was drawing.
Jiang Muyun didn’t seem to mind her coldness.
She set down the coffee, took off her coat, revealing a knit sweater underneath.
She walked over to another drawing board and looked at Yan Yu’s already well-structured sketch, softly praising, “Oh, Yan Yu, you draw so meticulously. Your lines are really steady.”
Yan Yu’s brush tip paused for a moment, but she didn’t respond.
She had heard plenty of these polite compliments before, finding them nothing but hypocritical.
Jiang Muyun stopped talking too and began sketching on her own board.
The studio fell quiet, filled only with the soft scratching of pencils on paper and the occasional slight sound of Jiang Muyun picking up her coffee cup.
Yan Yu quickly finished the sketch and began mixing colors, preparing to quietly start painting.
Jiang Muyun’s side, however, never seemed to settle down completely.
She occasionally walked over to check Yan Yu’s progress, asking one or two innocuous questions, like “This blue shade is really nice, what colors did you mix?” or “Wouldn’t handling the edge like this create more depth?”
Yan Yu answered each time with the briefest words possible, avoiding any extended conversation.
Time slowly passed.
Yan Yu had finished laying down the background color for her poster and began detailing the main figure and other elements.
Right at that moment.
“Oh!”
A low exclamation came from beside her.
At the same time, Yan Yu felt something bump hard into her elbow!
Her hand, holding the fine brush, jerked.
An abrupt streak of lake blue instantly cut across a blank area of the paper, ruining the previously clean composition.
To make things worse, whatever bumped her elbow seemed to have also knocked over a nearby cup of clean water used for washing brushes.
Splash!
About half the cup’s worth of water spilled out.
Although Yan Yu reacted quickly and moved her draft away, the edge of the paper was still rapidly soaked and began to bleed.
Jiang Muyun looked so remorseful and flustered that anyone seeing it would think it was genuinely an accident.
Huang Lu’s gaze swept over the messy floor, then looked at Yan Yu’s painting, which was now nearly one-third ruined.
Then he looked at Yan Yu, asking in an official tone, “Yan Yu, how bad is it? Can you still finish? The Cultural Festival warm-up starts the day after tomorrow. The poster must be ready by tomorrow.”
Yan Yu pressed her lips tightly together.
She could feel the gazes from around her—some sympathetic, some curious.
Jiang Muyun still had her head bowed, her expression unclear, but she had perfectly adopted a posture of fragile helplessness.
Yan Yu knew that if she loudly accused Jiang Muyun of doing it on purpose right now, she would only come across as aggressive, making a mountain out of a molehill, or even unreasonable.
Forcing down the icy anger in her heart, when Yan Yu spoke again, her voice had already regained its calm.
“The part of the draft that’s soaked and bleeding is unusable. I need to redraw that background section or find a way to cover and modify it.”
She paused.
“But my volunteer work hours only go until five o’clock this afternoon. After five, I still need to go out to buy medicine.”
“So, Miss Jiang, since you’re the one who damaged the painting, you can complete the rest of it.”
“On what grounds?!”
Jiang Muyun abruptly stood up, her chair scraping against the floor with a sharp sound.
“Why should I work overtime alone? I bumped into you, but it was just an accident! An accident, do you understand? I’ve already apologized. Can’t you just accommodate a bit, leave a little later, and we finish the work together?”
She turned to Huang Lu, speaking rapidly, her tone full of grievance and indignation:
“President, we’re a team. The task should be shared. How can she just abandon her team member and leave alone because of this little accident? That’s just too irresponsible!”
“I’m abandoning my team member?”
Yan Yu finally stopped trying to fix the painting.
She slowly raised her eyes, her gaze calm as she looked at Jiang Muyun.
“Then what do you call personally destroying your team member’s work product? Is that fulfilling your responsibility? Or is it something that can just be brushed off with a casual ‘I didn’t mean to’?”
“Yan Yu! You—!”
Jiang Muyun was left pale by her retort, her chest heaving violently, the finger pointing at Yan Yu trembling uncontrollably.
She instinctively glanced around, meeting the surprised or shocked looks of the other students.
Feeling her face had been completely lost, the humiliation of being publicly refuted clouded her mind, and she spoke without thinking.
“You… if you keep twisting things like this, I’ll call Qinghan over! She’s nearby. Let her judge who’s right!”
She completely disregarded Huang Lu’s presence and had long abandoned the gentle image she usually maintained.
Turning angrily, she strode on her high heels towards the other end of the studio, heading for the corridor that led to the Student Council’s temporary office.
Su Qinghan was indeed not far away.
As the person in charge of coordinating the promotional videos for the Student Council’s Cultural Festival, she was in the next room checking shooting locations and schedules with other Student Council members.
The work was only halfway done when she saw Jiang Muyun walking quickly towards her, eyes red-rimmed and face full of anger.
Su Qinghan couldn’t help but frown.
“Qinghan!”
The moment Jiang Muyun saw her, tears instantly fell like broken strings, her voice choked and full of grievance.
“Come quickly and help me… Yan Yu is bullying me!”
Su Qinghan put down the documents in her hand, her gaze falling on Jiang Muyun’s tear-streaked face.
She asked in a low voice, “What happened? Explain slowly.”
Jiang Muyun sniffled and quickly recounted the incident.
“…I already apologized, and I said I’d help fix it, but she just won’t let it go! She even embarrassed me in front of everyone! Qinghan, you have to come and stand up for me!”
She tightly gripped Su Qinghan’s arm, tearfully pleading.
Su Qinghan’s frown deepened.
She glanced towards the painting studio, then looked at Jiang Muyun crying pitifully before her, and finally nodded.
“Alright, let’s go take a look.”
Meanwhile, the atmosphere in front of the drawing boards was stiff and oppressive.
Huang Lu’s expression was unpleasant, but he didn’t say anything more, just instructed the other members to continue with their work.
Yan Yu picked up her brush again, dipped it in paint, and focused on trying to cover and modify that glaring stain on the board.
Her movements were steady and composed, her expression calm and unruffled, as if the heated argument from moments ago had never happened.
But only she herself knew that deep down, because Jiang Muyun had mentioned Su Qinghan, a faint, almost imperceptible ripple had stirred.
Would Su Qinghan… come?
If she did come, whose side would she take?
Reason repeatedly reminded her that given how Su Qinghan usually protected Jiang Muyun, plus their current relationship, she, Yan Yu, probably wouldn’t come out ahead.
But for some reason, a corner of her heart, stirred by the lingering emotions of the Original Host, faintly gave rise to a slim, almost non-existent hope—perhaps Su Qinghan was different from Jiang Muyun.
At least in those fragmented yet deliberately beautified memories of the Original Host, Su Qinghan had always been calm, even fair, when handling official matters.
Would she… at least first ask for the full story of what happened?