Chapter 126

Chapter 126

Nan Mu was a little discouraged. When he discussed the matter with Wen Miao, they both agreed that, to avoid tipping anyone off, it would be best not to bring up visiting Liang Mingqi’s uncle’s home with her again for the time being.

But to Nan Mu, time was the most precious thing he had.

As the days slipped by, the growing sense of urgency pressed him to do something immediately.

So when he overheard Liang Mingqi on the phone with her family, mentioning that she would be going straight to Jia Lingyuan’s home after work on Friday, the thought of following Liang Mingqi to find out where Jia Lingyuan lived even crossed his mind.

However, Wen Miao quickly shot the idea down.

“Jia Lingyuan has considerable social standing. The place he lives can’t possibly be like Su Yu’s, where we could come and go so easily. So even if you followed Liang Mingqi and found Jia Lingyuan’s home, it wouldn’t do any good. I think the most important thing is still finding a way to get into his house openly and aboveboard.”

“The problem is, we don’t have an opportunity like that right now.”

“If this road doesn’t work, then we take another one.” Wen Miao suddenly thought of something. “Don’t panic. Let me make a call first. Wait a bit.”

Wen Miao had remembered something Wen Tangtang had complained to her about over dinner before, regarding the research being done in their lab.

Wen Tangtang’s advisor was Professor Hu.

Professor Hu had a research project under him called “Regeneration of Nerve Cells and Cloning Research of Stem Cells.”

Wen Tangtang had been working on the project with Professor Hu for some time. But while testing various conditions, their group had discovered that achieving the step of “directing stem cells to differentiate into specific cells” was far too difficult. The main difficulty lay in how hard it was to carry out precise directional induction at a specific location.

As a result, Wen Tangtang’s group had recently hit a bottleneck in their research. Because of this, Wen Tangtang had complained to her about it no fewer than five or six times in recent days.

That was why Wen Miao suddenly thought that perhaps they could take a roundabout route to their goal.

===

At the entrance to the biological research laboratory of A University of Science and Technology.

When Wen Tangtang came out of the lab, she saw Wen Miao standing near the stairwell by the laboratory entrance, holding a stack of books and talking to a classmate.

After Wen Tangtang walked over, Wen Miao smiled and waved goodbye to the classmate, then hurried toward Wen Tangtang, anticipation still written across her face. “How did it go?”

“I brought it up with my advisor. I guess he’s really been pushed to his limit lately and has been trying to figure out what to do for a while now. So the moment I said, ‘I heard Dr. Jia Lingyuan seems to have a student with remarkable insight in the field of stem cells. I wonder if we could ask Dr. Jia Lingyuan to help introduce us,’ he agreed right away.”

“That’s great.” Wen Miao felt as though a huge weight had finally been lifted from her chest. “But are you sure Professor Hu will go in person? What if he just makes a phone call and settles it that way…?”

“Don’t worry.” Wen Tangtang patted Wen Miao on the shoulder. “My advisor is an absolute workaholic. For the sake of this project, he’s been holed up in the lab for more than half a year. Sometimes even my advisor’s wife has to call me when she’s looking for him. Because he never has time to go home, she tears him a new one every single time… He doesn’t even have time to go back to his own house, let alone visit someone else’s. But they’re old classmates, after all. Jia Lingyuan has been sick and bedridden for so long, and it’s bad enough that my advisor hasn’t visited him once all year. Now that he’s asking him for help, can he really do it empty-handed? I’ve already arranged everything for him. In a bit, I’ll go buy some gifts suitable for a patient, and when the time comes, he can just carry them over.”

Listening to Wen Tangtang lay everything out so logically, Wen Miao couldn’t help snickering. “Ever since you started doing research with Professor Hu, sometimes I can’t even tell whether you’re his advisor or he’s yours. You have to think of everything for him… Tell me, what is he going to do after you graduate?”
Wen Tangtang gave a little snort of laughter. “Exactly. Last time, when he was choosing interns to send to Wisdom Biotechnology, why did he insist on giving the spot to Nan Mu instead of me? Wasn’t it because he thought that if he sent me to Wisdom Biotechnology, he’d lose a capable assistant?”

Wen Miao’s steps faltered. A little awkwardly, she said, “So that’s what it was… But Nan Mu didn’t end up going either.”

Wen Tangtang didn’t notice anything off about Wen Miao and kept talking. “It doesn’t really matter whether Nan Mu goes or not. His goal is to stay at the university and teach anyway, but I don’t like being a teacher.”

“Why not? I think you’d be pretty suited for it. Just look at how well you’ve got Professor Hu handled,” Wen Miao teased.

Wen Tangtang waved a hand. “The reason Nan Mu and I chose Professor Hu in the first place was because he’s the type who keeps his head down and does real work. He’s not like those other professors who spend all their brain cells just managing interpersonal relationships. It’s exhausting. At least with Professor Hu, you don’t have to waste energy trying to figure out what he’s thinking.”

As she spoke, Wen Tangtang sighed. “But that’s about his only good point. I’m not trying to brag, but when it comes to the quarterly research funding, if Nan Mu and I weren’t running around handling everything for him, it’d be a miracle if he could get the approvals through. I used to think being a teacher at a university was great-you’d never have to be beaten down by society for the rest of your life… But now I’ve figured it out. If you leave academia, sure, society will beat you down. But the outside world is huge. You can run. The whip might land on you tomorrow, but it also might not. At least you get a chance to catch your breath. But at school, maybe there aren’t any whips, sure-but the problem is that red-hot iron keeps falling from the sky, endlessly. Once it hits you, it leaves a bloody brand. And the key thing is, there’s nowhere to hide, it drags on forever, and you can’t see any hope. If you run into a professor with no decency, they’ll grab you and shear you to death, desperate to squeeze every last bit of value out of you.”

Wen Miao listened in stunned silence. She suddenly wondered if she had been neglecting Wen Tangtang lately. Otherwise, why would Wen Tangtang suddenly come out with such a long, weighty speech?

“You… nothing’s happened recently, has it?”

Wen Tangtang froze for a moment, then suddenly laughed. She looked just like she always did, bright and cheerful.

“Nothing. What could possibly have happened to me? I’ve just been annoyed lately… Just venting, that’s all. Don’t overthink it.”

Wen Miao was still a little suspicious, but she couldn’t get anything else out of her, so she could only set the matter aside for now.

===

That afternoon, Wen Tangtang prepared a good number of supplements. Then, after hearing that Jia Lingyuan’s wife loved flowers and plants, she made a special trip to the flower and bird market to buy several pots of expensive ornamental varieties.

Wen Tangtang had bought those particular plants on purpose.

Because she had to find a way to bring Wen Miao and Wen Xin inside with her. If all the gifts were light and easy to carry, then she and Professor Hu could bring them in by themselves. So, in order to bring the others along with a perfectly legitimate excuse, she deliberately bought the kind of large potted plants that required two people to move.

When it was time to leave, she called Wen Miao and Wen Xin along. Then she said to Professor Hu, “These two are friends of mine, and they’re from our university too. Didn’t I buy those potted plants? They’re really heavy, so I brought them along to help carry them later.”

Professor Hu was a true old-school scholar and didn’t overthink it at all.

When he heard that several people were needed to move them, of course he agreed to bring them along. He even felt that Wen Tangtang was truly thorough in the way she handled things-she had considered every detail from every angle.