Worlds Apart | Chapter 29 | The Fever of the Ivory Tower | Novela.app

Chapter 29 - The Fever of the Ivory Tower The heavy laboratory door hissed shut, sealing out the humid Singapore air and replacing it with the sterile, sharp scent of ethanol and ozone. Jiang Tong was thirty minutes late—a rare, almost unheard-of lapse for a man who usually lived his life by the precision of a micropipette. Pei Jing, his senior lab partner and a PhD candidate known for his clinical detachment, did not look up immediately. His eyes remained fixed on the glowing monitor, where rows of RNA sequencing data flickered like digital rain. "You're late," Pei Jing remarked, his voice flat, carrying the weight of a formal reprimand. He finally looked up, intending to deliver a sharp critique on the necessity of academic discipline, but the words died in his throat the moment his gaze landed on Jiang Tong. "I didn't expect—" Pei Jing paused, his brow furrowing as he scrutinized the younger man. "What on earth happened to you?" Jiang Tong stood there, looking like a man who had just escaped a beautiful riot. His cheeks were flushed a deep, tell-tale crimson, and a fine sheen of perspiration glistened on his forehead under the harsh fluorescent lights. His lips were unnaturally red, slightly swollen as if they had been subjected to a frantic, visceral friction. Most jarring of all was his attire. Usually the epitome of the neat, "elegant and noble" scholar, Jiang Tong’s shirt was now a disaster—wrinkled and distorted like a discarded cabbage leaf. The top two buttons were missing or undone, revealing the firm, heaving lines of his chest. In Pei Jing’s conservative estimation, the display was utterly indecent for a professional setting. "Huh?" Jiang Tong seemed to rouse himself from a trance. He blinked, his eyes unfocused, and instinctively reached up to touch his lower lip. The gesture was soft, almost reverent, as if he were trying to preserve the ghost of a sensation. "I’m fine," Jiang Tong murmured. As his mind cleared, the blush intensified, spreading down his neck. Despite the disheveled appearance, his spirit seemed to be soaring on an invisible updraft. He moved toward the laboratory sink with a lightness in his step that bordered on the rhythmic. Pei Jing watched him, half-expecting the man to pick up a boiling flask and begin a celebratory waltz across the linoleum floor. *He’s lost his mind,* Pei Jing thought, turning back to his computer with a sigh of resignation. There was a strange, frantic energy radiating off Jiang Tong—a biological impulse so potent it threatened to disrupt the sterile equilibrium of the lab. Pei Jing had a sudden, sharp intuition that he did not want to know the source of this "abnormality." As long as the data was processed and the PCR machines kept humming, he would let the "lab grunt" have his momentary delirium. "Ah, another beautiful day," Jiang Tong whispered to himself, the words lost beneath the whir of the ventilation system. But beneath the surface of his euphoria, a darker current of self-reflection began to pull at him. Jiang Tong had always considered himself a rational actor, a man of the "ivory tower" who understood the cost-effectiveness of every decision. He had dated before, but those encounters had been lukewarm, easily categorized and filed away. Nothing had ever prepared him for the sheer, overwhelming匱乏—the sense of lack—that Xiao Fengtai inspired in him. He felt like a "scumbag," a term he often applied to himself in the quiet hours of the night. He was the tutor, the one who should have been the "Mr. Nice Guy," the stable influence. Instead, he was drowning in the "Beijing accent" and the rebellious charm of a boy who was his "one who puts bread on the table." The power dynamic was a mess of "regular script" calligraphy and "Singapore Dollars," a tangled web where the lines between mentor, lover, and "kept man" were blurring into obsolescence. He thought of the "little ancestor" waiting for him outside the confines of this sterile world. The intensity of their connection was a "cognitive dissonance" he couldn't resolve. He wanted to fold Xiao Fengtai up and carry him in his pocket, a secret talisman against the cold reality of his research and his struggling family back home. As he reached for a pipette, his fingers trembled slightly. He knew the summer was approaching, and with it, the "application season." The "safety schools" and the "Ivy League" dreams were calling, and the "red line" he had tried so hard not to cross was now far behind him, obscured by the dust of his own desperate, soaring heart. *** **GLOSSARY OF NEW TERMS**