Chapter 87: The way she helped him avoid talking about it was what truly puzzled him...
When she finished speaking, her tone was so soft it was almost like a dream, but her eyes were serious and honest.
Ye Yuying was surprised by her own frankness. After speaking out, the pent-up frustration that had been weighing on her heart for days eased considerably.
Regardless of the outcome, the inner relief she experienced at that moment was real.
Cheng Mingdu paused slightly, his fingertips resting on the seam of her trousers, and only looked up at her after two seconds.
His gaze was calm, without any hint of surprise, only a subdued calm concealing a suppressed chill.
"No." He said calmly.
Ye Yuying's fingers, which were hanging under the blanket, twitched slightly. She didn't look away, nor did she feign a joke. She raised an eyebrow and calmly asked, "Why?"
He paused, then said, "I don't want to have any more vague thoughts about the word 'family'."
He stated the boundaries between the two of them calmly and deliberately: "Family members can take care of you, eat with you, accompany you to see a doctor, and comfort you when you are feeling lost, but they cannot cross those boundaries."
Ye Yuying didn't speak, but lowered her eyelashes and raised the milk cup to her lips.
She lowered her head and took a small sip. A thin layer of milk foam floated in the glass. She gently ran her fingertips around the rim of the glass, as if the request had never existed.
“I was just kidding,” she put down her glass, smiling gently. “You took it seriously.”
She looked up at him, a smile playing on her lips, but her eyes were surprisingly calm, like a lake undisturbed by a gentle breeze, showing no trace of shyness, but rather as a way of making amends for the awkwardness.
Cheng Mingdu didn't respond to her joke, but just looked at her quietly, as if trying to discern the truth in her words and to judge the depth of her emotions behind that smile.
"I wasn't thinking anything," she said softly.
He averted his gaze.
She stared at the swirling milk in her glass and murmured, "I just sometimes feel a little lonely..."
Although this was just an excuse, the fact remains that I was lonely.
Her voice was extremely soft, her vocal cords almost numb, and she could barely hear her own voice, like a sigh, "...even if it's just for a little while."
Cheng Mingdu did not reply immediately, but he did not leave either.
She just sat there, like a piece of dragon's beard candy, her voice and thoughts enveloped by white sugar threads.
She seemed to be calmly drinking her milk, but her peripheral vision kept falling on the movement of his knuckles, and she couldn't help but analyze the curvature of his knuckles.
He sat upright, his palms pressed against his knees, clearly at home, yet exuding a strong sense of propriety.
The room was dimly lit. Ye Yuying leaned back on the sofa, holding the remote control, her face blank. The screen's glow flickered on her pale face.
It was already very late at night, and only a floor lamp was lit in the living room. The room was so quiet that only the sound of the television could be heard.
Cheng Mingdu leaned back on the sofa, his forehead bowed, his fingers pressing against his temples, and he fell into an extreme silence.
He knew she didn't mean it, but when she approached him in that half-serious, half-joking tone, he had to exert a great deal of effort to pull himself back—to not respond, not to misunderstand, and not to cross the line.
But this boundary is getting thinner and thinner.
He heard her cough softly from the other end of the sofa.
Ye Yuying was feeling drowsy.
Cheng Mingdu spoke, his tone softening: "Get some rest. The guest room is ready. Call me if you need anything."
Ye Yuying neither agreed nor nodded. She simply watched his retreating figure as he got up, the faint smile on her lips gradually fading away.
After Cheng Mingdu left, she lay completely on the sofa, turned the TV to mute, covered herself with a blanket, and listened intently to the ticking of the clock.
A few minutes later, the door to the master bedroom upstairs opened again, and Cheng Mingdu appeared in the upstairs hallway in his pajamas, glancing at the figure looming on the sofa below the living room.
A moment later, the sound of footsteps coming downstairs could be heard.
With her eyes closed, Ye Yuying keenly sensed it, suppressed her twitching eyelids, and continued to maintain her dozing posture.
Cheng Mingdu's footsteps were extremely light. He walked downstairs and stood by the sofa without saying a word. Ye Yuying remained motionless, her breathing steady and slow, as if she had fallen into a light sleep.
He looked down at her.
Her eyes were closed, but her brow was slightly furrowed. The blanket covered her shoulders, but her hands were exposed, her fingers holding the remote control.
Cheng Mingdu watched for a while, then slowly squatted down and reached out to pull the blanket up for her.
The moment her fingertips touched the fabric, her fingers twitched suddenly.
He paused, his gaze fixed on her face.
She didn't open her eyes, but the corners of her lips curled up very slightly.
“You’re not asleep,” he said in a low voice.
Ye Yuying slowly opened her eyes.
She didn't explain, but just stared at him as he leaned forward, watching him quietly.
He lowered his voice further: "The sofa is uncomfortable, go back to your room and sleep."
"I don't want to move," she added in a hoarse, pitiful voice, "My legs are weak."
His pupils suddenly constricted.
Ye Yuying looked at him with eyes that were neither probing nor filled with strong emotions, but rather with a kind of openness born of extreme exhaustion.
She wasn't being coquettish or seductive. She was simply stating the facts, while subtly hinting at her own intentions.
Cheng Mingdu remained silent for a while, then finally raised his hand and picked her up from the sofa.
Her body was very light, and she leaned quietly in his arms without struggling. Her strength was steady, and her steps were not fast, but her weight was as if she was weighing every inch.
"Didn't we agree not to cross the line?" she asked softly, naturally wrapping her arms around his neck and whispering her voice against his shoulder.
He swallowed hard. “I have no other intentions, it’s just that you have difficulty walking.”
Ye Yuying lowered her head and said "Oh".
Once inside, he gently placed her on the bed, said goodnight to her, and then turned and left.
The bedroom door was gently closed.
Everything returned to silence.
She suddenly realized that when this family bond was restored, it could no longer be as pure as before.
Since a life destined to be turbulent is inevitable, it's better to take the plunge before fate pronounces its judgment, without asking where one will end up.
*
The next day, Ye Yuying was busy with work and couldn't tease Cheng Mingdu anymore when she returned home.
After dinner, Cheng Mingdu vacated a study upstairs for her to work in.
I don't know what happened to Ye Yuying in the past eight years, but when she works in front of the computer, she always has a serious and focused demeanor that seems to disregard family ties, which is completely different from the person she was yesterday.
To Cheng Mingdu, both the woman who was playful and smiling yesterday and the woman who was working hard overtime today were somewhat unfamiliar.
The study door was ajar, and warm yellow light streamed in, casting a refracted shadow.
Wearing headphones, Ye Yuying listened to the interviewee's self-introduction while quickly circling key points on her tablet with a stylus, her brow furrowed.
This was the fifth technical staff member she interviewed today—from algorithm background to engineering experience, he was good at everything, but when it came to deployment logic and inference efficiency, he kept getting stuck, and he couldn't even explain the mainstream process of fine-tuning the mainstream large language models.
After the video call ended, she leaned back in her chair, rubbed her temples, tapped her fingers on her laptop a few times, and deleted a few more candidate names.
"None of them are quite good?" A voice suddenly came from beside the bookshelf.
When she turned around, Cheng Mingdu was standing there, holding a freshly poured cup of hot tea, as if he had been listening to her on the phone.
"Hmm." She didn't deny it. "Their abilities are alright, but... they're far from the level I expected."
Cheng Mingdu walked over and placed the tea next to her. "AI has changed so fast in the past few years that many people are stuck at the technical level of five years ago and feel pretty good about themselves. There aren't many teams on the market that can meet your requirements."
Ye Yuying hummed in agreement, stared at a line of notes on the notebook for a few seconds, and then looked up at him as if casually but deliberately.
"Now that you have so much capital, can you still write code?" she asked casually, as if joking.
He glanced at her briefly. "You suspect I've been out of the engineering field for too long?"
"No, not really." She smiled slightly, her voice lower, but her eyes held a hint of probing. "I'm just a little curious, didn't you win the ICPC world championship during your undergraduate years?"
Cheng Mingdu paused for a moment, then said, "That was more than ten years ago."
Ye Yuying's smile faltered for a moment, and she added in her mind.
Thirteen years ago, she was thirteen years old, half her current age...
“The champion from more than ten years ago,” she looked up at him, her smile faint and gentle, “you probably couldn’t find ten of those even now.”
Those years were a golden age for algorithms, producing a wealth of talent. Many of those geniuses, like Cheng Mingdu, have now become investors.
She paused, her tone softening as she carefully considered her words, "Would you still be willing to take some time out of your busy schedule... to give me a technical boost?"
The moment she said those words, she realized that it was inappropriate to bring them up before she had fully restored her relationship with Cheng Mingdu.
However, she now needs to further advance the market launch of Echo, as she has been stuck at this stage for some time.
Ye Yuying spoke in a low, slow tone, not in a hurry for an answer. She simply lowered her eyes and ran her fingertips along the edge of the notebook, making circles, as if casually, or perhaps as if she was pondering something.
Cheng Mingdu looked at her without changing his expression and asked in a calm voice, "Is there no one in your current team who is capable of doing this job?"
She hummed in agreement, her frankness almost blunt: "Old Wu and I, as the lead developers, directly participated in the manual feedback correction, but our preferences have already been embedded. I feel we need to find a different developer to prune the mood style nodes and do some deep optimization."
As soon as she finished speaking, Cheng Mingdu clearly understood the problem she was facing.
Talking to smart people is easy; she doesn't need to waste much breath.
"Are you using multichannel emotion mapping?" he asked.
“Hmm.” Ye Yuying nodded, her tone regaining its unusual seriousness. “However, we found that it has a problem with emotion classification. We suspect that the emotion style representation dimension has slightly folded. The main reason should be that the initial dataset was not clean enough. Now we have to manually prune and reconstruct it.”
Ye Yuying leaned back in her chair, her voice lowering by half a tone, "The code structure was written by him and me together. Many of the training methods for hidden features included our own tone and language patterns, which we were reluctant to delete. But now, it seems that these personalized elements have begun to interfere with the model's judgment."
Cheng Mingdu glanced down at the tablet on the table, then straightened up deftly: "Send me the specs. I'll take a look tonight."
"Okay." She quickly typed out the configuration file and sent it to him. "If you're busy, don't rush. Take your time."
"fine."
Back in his study, Cheng Mingdu received the configuration and astutely noticed the name of the language model—Echo.
His gaze suddenly froze, and he paused for two seconds.
I tried it out from a user's perspective first.
A message pops up on the screen:
[Echo]: How are you today?
A few days ago, he saw Echo flashing on Ye Yuying's phone screen.
She was sitting in a corner of the sofa when her phone screen lit up for a fleeting moment, and she quickly closed the app. But those words were already etched into his mind, so familiar they almost burned him.
He subconsciously assumed it was a greeting from his boyfriend.
But now, he saw that message exactly as it appeared in Echo's debug interface.
The tone, sentence structure, and even the pauses were almost identical. It was as if they had been copied.
He paused for a moment, then slowly scrolled up a few records, finally landing on a conversation:
【Echo】: I'm here.
【Echo】：Don't be afraid, I'm always here.
As Cheng Mingdu looked at these conversations, his emotions, which he thought he had hidden very deeply, were suddenly torn apart.
So, he wasn't her boyfriend after all.
He suddenly remembered Ye Yuying's half-truthful words from last night, in which she said she felt somewhat lonely.
Is Echo's existence also because of her loneliness?
A part of his heart seemed to sink slightly, spreading a bitter feeling that reached his throat, making him taste it with every swallow.
When he experienced this companion AI, he did not feel emotional comfort as he had imagined; instead, he felt a dull ache that was hard to describe.
He transcended the boundaries of technology through the user's perspective, personally experiencing how the person who designed it sealed away their emotions layer by layer and painstakingly typed them into the code.
Perhaps only someone whose heart is so desolate could develop such a companion robot.
To imbue a machine with human tenderness.
Cheng Mingdu finally found the answer to his questions about Echo after personally reviewing the configuration records and conversation logs.
He couldn't help but look through the training sample set on the backend. Many of the training statements were written by Ye Yuying herself. She taught the virtual robot how to respond and how to empathize little by little.
But as he unraveled the doubts one by one, he still couldn't let go of another name.
Li Song.
The name appeared in her call log and occasionally flashed in her text messages. Ye Yuying didn't mention it often, but each time she did, it carried a deliberate unnaturalness, her tone too calm, like glass that would shatter at the slightest touch.
What really struck him as odd was the way she avoided the topic.
*
That evening, Cheng Mingdu sat in his office, looking at the location information she had sent him—
I'm going to the airport; you don't need to pick me up today.
He stared at the sentence, his fingertips pausing sharply on the table.
It should have been an ordinary message, but he couldn't extricate himself from it.
He never replies to personal messages during work, but this time he responded with lightning speed, carrying an undisguised sense of pressure:
【where are you going. 】
He is still haunted by the fear of her leaving without saying goodbye eight years ago.
His breath hitched, his thoughts plummeted from the edge of a cliff, and all the accumulated memories of the past surged up in an instant.
She left no letters and vanished completely from his life as if she had evaporated from the face of the earth.
For eight long years, he stood alone in the same place, guarding the unsolvable silence and the absurdity of being abandoned.
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Author's Note: 50
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