Summary: Miles apart and bound by a steady, unspoken thread, Chen Yao and Lu Sicheng fight battles they never saw coming. When silence replaces laughter and a single photograph shatters fragile hopes, both must confront the one truth they can't outrun—sometimes, losing someone starts with saying nothing at all.
Chapter Five
The days bled together into a quiet, steady rhythm.
Morning lectures turned into late afternoons crammed in the library, case law scrawled out in sharp, hurried handwriting across the margins of Yao's battered notebooks. Evenings blurred into dense clouds of research, her apartment often filled only with the low crackle of rain against the windows and the soft scratch of her pen.
Through it all, the connection remained. Not loud. Not demanding. Just there.
Every morning when she unlocked her phone, there was a message.
Sometimes it was from Pang—something ridiculous, like a selfie with a new ramen bowl he was "testing for quality control." Sometimes Lu Yue sent blurry pictures of Rui chasing him through the base for stealing his charger again. Ming occasionally dropped dry observations about how many scrims they had left before Rui would stage a mutiny.
But always—
Without fail—
One message came in quieter than the rest.
From ZGDX_Chessman.
Never demanding her time.
Never pulling at her.
Just simple, steady check-ins that felt more like a lifeline than she cared to admit.
ZGDX_Chessman: Study session or training session? Prioritize.
ZGDX_Chessman: Don't skip meals. You're useless to me if you pass out.
ZGDX_Chessman: How's the weather there? Rain messing with your schedule?
Some days he sent a link to an article he thought she might find useful. Other days it was a photo of the team, Pang making a fool of himself in the background while the others laughed or threw things at him. He had sent a photo of the sky over Shenzhen just before a scrim, a rare sunset bleeding gold and crimson across the skyline. No words. Just the picture.
But Yao had stared at it far longer than she should have, her chest aching with something she could not quite name. She never said much back. But she answered. Always. Sometimes a dry quip, sometimes a quiet update, sometimes just a photo of her desk littered with papers and coffee cups.
Somehow, that was enough.
The days slipped into weeks, the weeks slipped into months and the rhythm of it carved itself into her life so smoothly that she barely noticed it happening.
Wake up.
Study.
Work.
Answer him.
Sleep.
Repeat.
She found herself looking forward to those messages more than she wanted to admit, checking her phone between classes like a habit she could not break. And on the other side of the world, in a base full of shouting and laughter and chaos, Lu Sicheng answered every time. Never rushing her. Never pressing. Just staying. A constant. And somehow, without either of them saying anything aloud, that quiet, stubborn thread between them grew thicker. Stronger. More inevitable.
Until one evening, three and a half months after she had left, after a brutal mock trial that left her head pounding and her body aching for sleep, Yao collapsed onto her couch, still in her formal clothes, heels kicked somewhere across the room, tie dangling half-loose around her neck. She unlocked her phone out of habit. There, waiting like clockwork, was a new message.
ZGDX_Chessman: Heard you had a trial today. How bad was it?
Yao smiled faintly, exhaustion and affection bleeding together in her chest as she typed back:
ZGDX_SaltMaiden: Won. Barely alive. Thinking about charging my classmates emotional damage fees.
His answer came seconds later.
ZGDX_Chessman: Good. Proud of you, Shorty.
Yao's fingers froze for a second over the keys, the weight of those four words settling heavier than they should have. Slowly, her chest tight and unfamiliar, she answered:
ZGDX_SaltMaiden: Miss you guys.
The typing bubble appeared almost immediately.
ZGDX_Chessman: We miss you too. Every damn day.
Yao closed her eyes for a moment, phone pressed lightly against her chest, the words thudding through her like a heartbeat. It was not a confession. It was not a declaration. It was just the truth, simple and undeniable. And it was enough. For now. It was enough.
Nearly four months later
It had been a long, grinding day. Classes had bled into late meetings, and by the time Yao finally collapsed onto the small couch in her apartment, her brain was too fried to even think about studying.
Instead, she did something she rarely allowed herself anymore. She opened Weibo. Just for a few minutes, she told herself. Just to catch up. The feed was full of the usual updates from law groups, articles from classmates, a few stray trending tags about the upcoming tournaments in Shanghai. She scrolled lazily, aimlessly, letting the noise wash over her.
And then—
She froze.
Right there, mid-scroll, a photo.
Posted by a fan account, bright and buzzing with excitement.
#Spotted: ZGDX's Captain Lu Sicheng out on a date!#
Yao stared at it, her thumb hovering motionless above the screen. The picture wasn't professional, it was grainy, clearly taken from a distance. A side view. Slightly blurred around the edges. But it was unmistakable.
Lu Sicheng. Still dressed in his usual style, dark jacket slung casually over a crisp white shirt, hair perfectly messy in that effortless way that made it look like he had walked out of an advertisement without trying. His expression was the same—cold, sharp, unreadable.
And beside him—
A woman. Tall. Elegant. Dressed in soft pink, laughing behind her hand at something he had said, her body angled toward him with a kind of easy familiarity that made Yao's stomach twist violently. Beautiful. Poised. Exactly the kind of woman who would look perfect standing next to him at the kinds of events she had no business even thinking about attending.
Yao's lungs seized, her fingers tightening convulsively around the phone. It felt like the floor dropped out from under her all at once. She sat there, unmoving, as her heart cracked open in her chest, slow and splintering and horribly, horribly quiet. She did not even realize when she locked the phone, dropping it onto the couch beside her like it had burned her hand. For a long time, she just sat there, the dull thud of blood pounding against her temples louder than anything else. Because she understood now. Whatever she had thought—whatever fragile, foolish hope she had let build between late-night messages and stolen moments across oceans—had been exactly that.
Foolish.
A fantasy she had no right to.
Because no matter how well they had gotten along, no matter how many times he had reached for her in quiet ways, the reality was brutal in its simplicity: She was still the daughter of a scandal. Still the bastard no one wanted to claim, till she had met Jinyang and her family. Still the girl who had spent half her life hiding the parts of herself that didn't fit neatly into anyone's world. And no family—his family—would ever approve of her, no matter how close they had all made her feel. She wasn't a Lu. She wasn't even a full Chen. She was an outsider. Always had been. Always would be.
Yao squeezed her eyes shut against the hot, blinding sting pressing behind them, dragging in a slow, ragged breath through her nose. She did not cry. She refused. Instead, she picked up her phone with shaking fingers, moved to the Salt and Chaos group chat, and muted it. Then muted her private thread with Sicheng. Then turned the whole device off and tossed it facedown onto her desk. No goodbyes. No explanations. Just silence. Radio silence.
Because if she had to hear from them now, if she had to pretend nothing had changed when her chest was burning from the inside out, she was not sure she could survive it. She curled onto her side, drawing her knees to her chest, burying her face in the pillow to block out the world. And for the first time in weeks, there were no stupid memes from Pang lighting up her morning. No teasing from Yue. No steady, grounding messages from Sicheng. Just the endless, aching silence of a girl trying desperately to stitch herself back together with nothing but trembling hands and a broken heart.
At first, it was easy to miss.
One day.
Two.
The Salt and Chaos group chat kept rolling as always—chaotic, noisy, messy.
Pang posted photos of his latest culinary disaster. Lu Yue sent a blurry video of Rui chasing him through the base again after he stole his charger for the third time in a week. Lao Mao offered dry commentary on their collective lack of survival instincts. Lao K, predictably, ignored most of it while Ming occasionally dropped warnings to focus between scrims.
But it was there, in the quiet space between the noise. No sarcastic comments from her. No dry one-liners slipping between their jokes. No quiet photos of textbooks sprawled across a coffee-stained desk, captioned with biting complaints about how Cambridge was trying to kill her. Nothing.
Three days in, Pang noticed first. "Where's Salt Maiden?" he asked brightly in the middle of dinner, stuffing dumplings into his mouth. "She hasn't insulted me in, like, seventy-two hours. I'm getting worried."
Yue, halfway through mocking him, froze slightly.
Lao K's chopsticks paused midair.
Even Rui, who was reading something on his tablet at the far end of the room, lifted his head a fraction.
Sicheng didn't move. He just sat there at the end of the table, still, silent, the sleeve of his jacket wrinkled where he had been unconsciously curling his hand into a fist. He had noticed too. Long before Pang had said anything. The first day she had not answered his quiet check-in, he had told himself it was nothing. Busy. Tired. Buried under coursework. The second day, when his good morning text had gone unanswered, when her usual sarcastic return fire never came, he had told himself she needed space. That he was overthinking it. The third day, when she hadn't even opened his messages…. Something inside him started to sink.
"Maybe she's just... busy?" Pang offered weakly, glancing around the table at the sudden, heavy silence.
"Maybe." Lao Mao said, but there was no conviction in his voice.
Yue frowned down at his phone, typing something into the group chat, sending a stupid meme, something she usually could not resist responding to.
Nothing.
Not even a "try harder."
Across the table, Sicheng's phone buzzed once against the surface. He lifted it slowly, thumb swiping across the screen. Not her. Not even read receipts. Nothing. Cold. Empty. The ache that had been growing quietly inside his chest flared hotter, sharper. He pushed back from the table without a word, chair scraping harshly against the floor. The others looked up sharply, startled, but no one dared say anything.
Sicheng shoved his hands into his jacket pockets as he walked out, the familiar hum of the base fading into a dull roar behind him. In the quiet of the empty hallway, he stopped. Stared down at his phone again. Scrolling back through her last message, the last normal message she had sent him almost a month ago.
Miss you guys.
We miss you too. Every damn day.
A low breath escaped him, barely audible.
He started to type.
ZGDX_Chessman: Yao. Where are you.
Paused.
Deleted it.
Typed again:
ZGDX_Chessman: You okay.
Deleted that too.
Instead, he stood there, thumb hovering uselessly over the screen, the cold hard truth pressing heavier against his ribs with every passing second. Because he knew her. He knew her rhythms. Her silences. Her ways of withdrawing when she felt cornered, when the old scars she tried so hard to hide started bleeding again. And this wasn't space. This wasn't busy. This was something else. Something worse. Something broken.
Lu Sicheng closed his eyes briefly, jaw tightening. Whatever had happened. She wasn't reaching for them anymore. And it terrified him in ways he could not name.