The afternoon classes were a complete write-off for Lu Huawei's focus.

Sitting rigidly at her desk, her long purple hair draping over her shoulders, she stared blankly at the teacher's moving lips.

Internally, her brain was a chaotic storm of worst-case scenarios.

The brief confidence she had felt in the hallway had completely evaporated, replaced by a sudden, chilling realization.

'Wait,' Huawei thought, her fingers tightening around her mechanical pencil. 'What if my data set is completely wrong?'

She looked down at her notebook, her eyes scanning her neatly drawn charts.

She had assumed Subject B wanted to perform a standard, cinematic love confession. But what if he didn't?

What if he had noticed her banging her head with her notebook during morning homeroom? What if he had realized she was a complete, unhinged weirdo who analyzed human behavior like an alien trying to blend in?

A cold sweat broke out along the back of her neck.

The sheer terror of being socially exposed hit her hard.

What if he had called her behind the old school building not to confess, but to stage a massive, public intervention?

"Lu Huawei, we all know you treat us like lab rats. Please stop lecturing us about retinas and calories."

'No, no, no,' she panicked internally, her signature ribbon trembling as she shook her head. 'If my reputation as a flawlessly polite school idol collapses, my research environment will be completely compromised!'

When the final bell of the day rang, it sounded less like a dismissal and more like a death toll.

Huawei packed her bag with agonizing slowness.

Yue tried to drag her to the local boba shop, but Huawei managed to send her away with a polite, slightly stiff excuse about an academic errand.

Once the classroom emptied out, Huawei stood up, carefully slid her research notebook inside her uniform jacket—pressing it right over her heart like literal body armor—and began her march toward the designated coordinates.

The path to the old school building was quiet, isolated, and cast in long, amber shadows by the setting sun. Every step felt heavier than the last.

As the weathered, concrete walls of the old campus structure came into view, Huawei stopped just around the corner.

She could hear the faint sound of footsteps shifting on the gravel just a few meters away.

Subject B was already there. Punctual. Exactly as requested.

Huawei closed her brilliant ruby eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. Her chest felt incredibly tight, a symptom her notebook currently categorized as Acute Social Anxiety (Probability: 94%).

'Calm down, Lu Huawei,' she told herself, forcing her posture into its usual majestic, untouchable alignment. 'You are a scientist. You are the protagonist. Even if he thinks you are a freak, you must face the data.'

Giving a heavy, dramatic gulp that echoed in her own ears, she gripped the straps of her bag tighter, stepped around the corner, and walked straight into the ambush of romance.

Subject B was pacing nervously, his sports bag slung over his shoulder.

The moment his eyes locked onto her silken purple hair and striking ruby eyes, he froze.

A furious, dark pink blush instantly rushed across his cheeks, traveling all the way to the tips of his ears. He took a hasty, trembling step forward.

"Y-You actually came!" he stammered, his fingers twitching as he reached into his jacket pocket.

He pulled out a crisp, white envelope sealed with a small pink heart sticker—a textbook romantic artifact.

Huawei braced herself, fully expecting him to pull out a written list of her social crimes. Instead, the boy looked at her with an intense, starstruck gaze.

"I knew it," he blurted out, a wide, excited grin breaking through his extreme nervousness. "I saw you looking at me in the hallway earlier as well! I... I like you too, Lu Huawei!"

Huawei's entire logical system crashed.

Her ruby eyes blinked once. Twice.

The sheer absurdity of his statement cut straight through her fear, leaving her perfectly, clinically calm.

"I wasn't looking at you," Huawei stated softly, her voice completely smooth and devoid of emotion.

"Eh?" The boy paused, his brain stalling for a fraction of a second.

"I was tracking a potential biological anomaly," Huawei explained logically, completely oblivious to how cold her words sounded. "My gaze was merely directed toward your facial proximity to calculate your sudden respiratory rate increase. It was not an indicator of personal preference or romantic alignment."

But Subject B's brain had already completely bypassed her explanation.

Driven by pure, unadulterated high school adrenaline, his ears completely filtered out her denial. He was entirely locked into his own cinematic reality.

"I-It's okay! You don't have to be shy!" he shouted over her voice, completely ignoring her words as he thrust the white envelope directly into her hands. "Please read this! Here is my letter!"

Before Huawei could even separate her lips to issue a formal rejection or correct his massive data error, the boy spun on his heel.

He let out a loud, triumphant laugh, pumped his fist into the air, and began sprinting away down the path, practically floating with absolute happiness as he disappeared around the school gates.

Huawei stood entirely alone in the amber shadows of the old building, her purple hair blowing gently in the wind.

She looked down at the white envelope resting in her palms, then looked up at the empty path where Subject B had just performed a victory sprint.

Slowly, she unzipped her uniform jacket, pulled out her research notebook, and flipped to a fresh page. Her hands were perfectly steady, but her mind was completely boggled.

'He completely ignored my verbal input,' she noted mentally, pressing her pen to the paper.

'Subject B has successfully deployed a love letter, but his cognitive reasoning appears to be completely compromised by delusion. Why did he run away happy? I literally told him I wasn't looking at him.'

She sighed, carefully sliding the mysterious letter into her notebook.

Her solo mission to understand love was becoming more unscientific by the second, and she still had an entire envelope of unread data to analyze before dinner.