Chapter 7: The Required Outcome
Pei Hanchuan’s face appeared at the top of the screen and Zhiyi felt her body freeze for just a moment.
He wore a dark suit and sat behind a conference table beneath the silver emblem of Pei Strategic Holdings. His hair had been styled away from his forehead. There was no dirt on his skin. No scar beside his mouth from the wound she had stitched with fishing line.
Not to mention, he was a lot younger.
His shoulders were straight. His eyes were cold and focused as he looked slightly beyond the camera. One hand rested on an open document while the other held a pen.
He was sitting in a chair.
Not on the ground.
Not dragging legs that no longer responded behind him.
Not dying.
Zhiyi touched the photograph, her fingertip covered the corner of his mouth.
He was alive.
The word entered her mind without opening into additional questions.
Alive.
She scrolled past a corporate biography, three recent articles and a financial ranking. Chairman and CEO of Pei Strategic Holdings. Twenty-eight years old. Headquarters located in the central business district.
There was an address beneath the company listing.
Zhiyi opened it and clicked on directions.
A map appeared.
Eleven point four kilometers.
Twenty-one minutes by car under current traffic conditions.
Thirty-seven minutes by public transit.
Two hours and twenty-six minutes on foot.
The class bell rang, and the sound cut through the lecture hall. Chairs moved, tablets snapped closed, and the student’s conversations began before Professor Han had finished reminding the class about an assignment due the following week.
He looked at Zhiyi again, but she had no idea what he had been saying.
The next class would begin in fifteen minutes.
She couldn’t remember which subject it was.
The university application displayed her schedule. She could open it. Determine the building. Calculate the most efficient route.
Did it matter?
No.
Zhiyi closed the map long enough to gather her belongings.
The textbook came first. She closed it, checked that the mechanical pencil wasn’t trapped between the pages and placed it vertically against the padded side of her bag. Her notebook followed, then the pencil case. She aligned the bottom edges before fastening the interior strap over them.
Her hands performed the sequence without requiring conscious direction.
Nothing could be left behind.
Nothing could be placed incorrectly.
Her phone remained in her right hand.
The photograph of Hanchuan waited on the screen.
Alive.
"Miss Qiao," came a deep, concerned voice from in front of her. Professor Han had left the front of the lecture hall and was walking toward her now, his brows furrowing in confusion.
Zhiyi didn’t care about him. Instead, she pulled the zipper across the top of her bag.
Students moved around him. Some glanced back at her as they climbed the steps toward the exits.
Professor Han stopped beside her desk. "You haven’t answered me."
"I don’t know what you asked," she replied with a shrug.
His expression changed.
Zhiyi remembered that people often found that statement disrespectful. But respectful or not... it was still accurate.
"I asked whether the condition holds if the variables are no longer independent," the professor said, repeating his question slower now.
Her mind caught the question and the process began automatically.
If the random variables were no longer independent, the joint distribution couldn’t be expressed as the product of the marginal distributions. The conditional expectation would depend on the revised covariance structure. The existing proof would fail at the third transformation unless—
Zhiyi gripped the strap of her bag.
No.
She couldn’t finish it.
She couldn’t remain in the room until she finished it.
She needed to find Hanchuan. He was waiting for her.
But Professor Han was also waiting.
"The third transformation is invalid," she said at last. "You need the joint density."
The professor’s gaze shifted toward the board as Zhiyi rose to her feet.
"The covariance term can’t be removed unless you prove it equals zero," she added because the answer was still incomplete. "And the final boundary condition only works if both variables remain continuous across the interval."
Professor Han stared at the equation. Then he looked back at her.
"You saw all of that just now?"
"Yes."
"You didn’t even look at the board."
"I looked at it before," she replied with an awkward shrug.
The answer was done, and now she was free to leave. She walked past him, only to be stopped again.
"Miss Qiao, you have another lecture."
Disregarding him, she continued toward the exit.
"Your attendance—"
The door closed behind her.
The corridor was crowded.
Students moved in both directions while conversations collided beneath the high ceilings. Shoes struck polished tile. Someone laughed too loudly near the stairwell. Two girls stood in the middle of the passage comparing photographs on a phone and forcing everyone else to separate around them.
Zhiyi stopped.
There were too many bodies.
Too many possible paths.
The nearest exit was down two flights of stairs and across the east courtyard. The main gate stood 423 meters from the lecture building. A taxi could reach the central business district in eighteen to thirty-four minutes depending on congestion near the river bridge.
Hanchuan was eleven point four kilometers away.
But what if the search result was outdated?
The article had no visible publication date because she hadn’t looked for one.
What if he no longer worked from the headquarters building?
What if he was travelling?
What if he had already left for another meeting?
What if he hadn’t been reborn?
Zhiyi’s fingers tightened around her phone.
He wouldn’t know her.
To Pei Hanchuan, Qiao Zhiyi would be a nineteen-year-old university student who arrived at his company without an appointment and insisted they had spent seven years surviving together after the end of the world.
He might think she was delusional.
He might call security.
He might refuse to see her.
The corridor blurred as Zhiyi stood motionless, her body unable to go forward while her mind was completely taken over with ’what ifs’.
If Hanchuan hadn’t been reborn, she would need evidence that what she was saying was accurate.
The first heat had no publicly visible warning signs. The weather in the days before it had been warm but unexceptional. The catastrophic temperature increase occurred too quickly for existing models to predict. Without access to the original atmospheric data, she couldn’t demonstrate what would happen.
But she could predict smaller events.
Market fluctuations. Traffic accidents. Infrastructure failures. A fire, perhaps, if she could remember one with sufficient precision.
Her memories of the years before the apocalypse weren’t organized by calendar date. She remembered survival conditions, resource locations and environmental changes. She could reconstruct the broader sequence, but not every event from a life she had stopped considering relevant ten years ago.
Still... Hanchuan might not believe her.
But that didn’t matter.
She remembered enough for both of them.
She knew which shelter he had used during the first heat. She knew when the men had been separated. She knew Jingwei died first, before the end of the second year and before the last year of the heat, every friend thereafter died. She knew Qinghe had been the last one left, and that he died trying to save Hanchuan.
Zhiyi knew how his legs had been crushed.
She knew where he would crawl when he could no longer travel.
She knew exactly how long he could survive there alone.
If he didn’t remember her, she would still prevent it.
She would tell him what was coming. She would give him every route, every location and every calculation she had. She would make certain he stayed with his friends. She would keep all five men alive long enough to reach the shelter they should have occupied from the beginning.
Then Hanchuan could live.
He could keep the company she had only heard about through stories. He could sit at a table with the four men whose deaths had hollowed something out of him long before Zhiyi found him.
He could find someone who belonged in that life.
Someone his own age.
Someone who understood his world and could stand beside him without requiring explanations.
Someone he could love before the end came.
The pressure inside Zhiyi’s chest intensified until taking another breath became difficult.
That wasn’t relevant.
Hanchuan would be alive.
That was the required outcome.
She forced her right foot forward.
Then her left.
Movement broke the stalled sequence. The possible routes reduced as she chose one. Zhiyi reached the stairwell, descended two flights and crossed the east courtyard without looking toward the building that held her next lecture.
Her phone vibrated and a message appeared across the top of the screen.
Father: Come home immediately after class. Your mother has arranged dinner.
Zhiyi dismissed it, but another message appeared before she reached the gate.
Father: Do not embarrass me again by being late.
She dismissed that one too.
The university’s stone arch rose ahead of her. Security officers stood inside the gate, checking vehicle permits and watching students scan their identification cards.
No one stopped Zhiyi as she left.
The afternoon sun touched her face and she flinched.
For an instant, the heat was sixty-seven degrees.
The air scorched her lungs. The road softened beneath her shoes. Pei’s hand trembled against the back of her head while a red warning light flashed across concrete walls.
Zhiyi couldn’t move.
A car horn sounded beyond the gate and the campus returned.
Green trees lined the road. Clouds crossed a pale blue sky. Students gathered around food stalls selling noodles and iced drinks. Water ran through the decorative fountain near the entrance, thrown wastefully into the air before falling back into the basin.
Zhiyi stared at it.
Clean water.
Hundreds of liters used for decoration.
A complete waste of a precious resource.