The fallout from the "Notebook Leak Incident" was a system failure of catastrophic proportions. The familiar, if chaotic, background processes of Chen Yuexi's dramatics and Tang Youyou's mystical support services had not just crashed; they had been uninstalled. The silence was deafening, and for Lin Xiaoyang, it was the most inefficient state imaginable.
His attempts at communication were met with a firewall more impenetrable than any he could code.
To Dramaturge Queen (Yuexi): [9:15 AM] About yesterday… can we talk?
Status: Message Read.
Reply: None.
To Stargazer Youyou: [9:17 AM] Youyou, I'm sorry about the notebook.
Status: Message Read.
Reply:A single, cryptic emoji: 🌌 followed by a system-generated message: "This user is currently realigning their cosmic energy. Please do not disturb."
He was being ghosted by a thespian and blocked by a celestial body. The irony was so profound it hurt.
For two days, he drifted through campus like a phantom process. The library was too quiet. The dorm was too empty. He even found himself lingering near The Roasted Bean, a place he usually avoided, hoping to accidentally-on-purpose run into a certain short-haired barista. She was never there during his shifts anymore. It was as if she had requested a permanent transfer to a different branch of the narrative.
His only remaining social thread was Su Yuning. And she was, predictably, fascinated by the carnage.
"Fascinating," she said, cornering him after a lecture. She held up her own tablet, displaying a simplified state diagram of his social circle. "The variables 'Chen' and 'Tang' have entered a 'Passive-Aggressive Silence' state. Their previous high-frequency, high-energy output has dropped to near-zero. This is a significant shift in the system's equilibrium."
"It's not fascinating, it's a disaster," Xiaoyang mumbled, slouching lower in his seat.
"Disaster is a subjective term. For my research, it is a wealth of data," she corrected him. "Their behavior confirms my hypothesis: the disclosure of being perceived as a 'data point' or 'system process' triggers a core emotional rejection response. The very act of observation has altered the state of the observed. A classic quantum social dilemma."
"I didn't mean to observe them! Not like that!" he protested, a flare of frustration cutting through his lethargy. "I was just… thinking."
" 'Thinking' is an internal observational process. You externalized it. A critical error in social protocol." She made a note. "The 'Hometown Variable,' S.Q.H., however, seems to operate on a different protocol. One that not only accepts but thrives on detailed observation. This duality is the key to my model. I require more data on S.Q.H."
Xiaoyang put his head in his hands. "No."
"Your continued resistance to providing S.Q.H. data is, in itself, the most compelling data point of all," Yuning stated, her eyes gleaming with scientific fervor. "It indicates an emotional encryption level far beyond the others."
Defeated, Xiaoyang fled. He needed a neutral third party, someone who understood chaos but wasn't actively contributing to it. He needed his roommate, Li Hao.
He found Li Hao in their dorm, meticulously styling his hair in the mirror, a look of intense concentration on his face.
"Li Hao," Xiaoyang began, collapsing onto his bed. "I have a problem."
"Brother Yang! You've come to the right place!" Li Hao declared, not turning around. "Is it about the Great Notebook Schism? Campus gossip is faster than 5G, my friend."
"…Yes."
"Ah! A classic 'Foot-in-Mouth' protocol error!" Li Hao finally turned, pointing a hairbrush at him. "You see, in the art of romance, there is a fundamental principle: Thoughts are the RAM, carefully curated words are the saved files. You, my friend, accidentally posted your RAM dump to the public cloud!"
"I know that now," Xiaoyang groaned. "How do I fix it?"
"Fix it?" Li Hao laughed. "You can't 'fix' a corrupted romantic filesystem with a simple apology.exe! You need a system restore from a backup point before the error occurred. But since you don't have one…" He shrugged dramatically. "You have to rebuild the OS from the ground up. And that requires a grand gesture. A new, positive shared memory to overwrite the bad sectors."
A grand gesture. The very phrase made Xiaoyang's energy reserves scream in protest. Grand gestures were, by definition, the antithesis of energy conservation.
"What kind of gesture?"
"That, my friend, depends on the target audience." Li Hao leaned in conspiratorially. "For the Theatrical Director, you need a scene. For the Mystic, you need a sign. The problem is, you have two different OSes to rebuild simultaneously. It's a multi-boot nightmare!"
Later that afternoon, desperate and out of options, Xiaoyang decided to take Li Hao's advice. He would start with what he knew: code. He would fix the project. It was the one thing they had all built together. Maybe a functional, successful app could be a neutral ground for a ceasefire.
He opened the project's shared code repository. He hadn't checked it since the incident. To his surprise, there had been activity.
Chen Yuexi had pushed a commit. The message was stark, devoid of her usual flair: "UI text revisions. Removed superfluous emotional descriptors."
He looked at the changes. She had methodically gone through all her lovingly crafted interface text—the playful tooltips, the encouraging messages—and stripped them down to bare, functional instructions. "Welcome, Heart-Seeker!" had become "Login." "Your journey to efficiency begins now!" was now "Dashboard." It was like watching a rainbow being desaturated to grayscale.
A few minutes later, another commit notification popped up. This one was from Tang Youyou. Her commit message was: "Reverted 'Aura-Based Color Scheme' to standard palette. Rationale: Insufficient empirical data."
She had removed the entire "cosmic harmony" color theme she had spent weeks perfecting, based on the "energy frequencies" of different hues. The interface was now a generic, inoffensive blue.
They were still working. But they were erasing themselves from the project. It was a silent, digital protest. A withdrawal of their unique, chaotic, and vital spirits. The project was becoming more "efficient," and it felt utterly lifeless.
This was his fault. He had praised efficiency, and in their hurt, they were giving it to him in the most brutal way possible.
Just as a profound sense of failure settled over him, his phone buzzed. A notification from a messaging app he barely used. It was from Shen Qinghe.
Qinghe: [4:22 PM] The shared memory of a leaking pen you mentioned. It was a Pilot G-2, 0.7mm, black ink. The leak occurred because you dropped it, tip-first, on the tiled floor of the third-floor washroom, trying to avoid Li Hao who was chasing a beetle. The date was October 14th. A Tuesday.
Xiaoyang stared at the message. In the midst of his current social collapse, she was sending him a packet of pristine, perfectly preserved legacy data. It was a reminder of a time when his biggest problem was a leaking pen and a chaotic roommate. A time when being known felt like a comfort, not a crime.
It was also a stark contrast. The girls here were retreating from him, silencing the very things that made them who they were. Qinghe, from hundreds of miles away, was reinforcing her identity by reaffirming the details of his.
He didn't know how to reply. What could he say? 'Thanks for the memory. I've just driven the two girls closest to me into emotional shutdown'?
He closed the message, the silence from his phone feeling heavier than ever. The system hadn't rebooted. It was stuck in an infinite loop of guilt, and the only login credentials that could possibly unlock it were in the hands of people who no longer wished to speak to him.
Rebuilding the OS was starting to seem like an impossible task. He was just a programmer, and he had accidentally formatted the hard drives of two very important, very unique systems.