Chapter 579: All Men Are the Same

Chapter 579: All Men Are the Same

It was because, starting in her teens, Xia Jinyu had continually witnessed the ugly side of the opposite sex around her. It wasn’t the obvious kind of ugliness. It was the thoughts and true motives hidden inside people—and Xia Jinyu could see through them.

Those ugly thoughts were enough to horrify her.

The thoughts inside adolescent boys’ heads were filthier than a toilet.

Xia Jinyu had read that line in a book when she was very young. When she reached the corresponding age, she saw it for herself—and even felt that the line understated the truth. Filthier than a toilet? It was worse than that. For a long time, it frightened her.

In middle school, Xia Jinyu had been the prettiest girl in the entire school.

She was still beautiful now, of course, but imagine her when that beauty had only just begun to blossom. Natural beauty combined with the invincibility of youth. A girl like her could hardly expect not to attract admirers. Her family had been wealthy even then, and she was a rich second-generation child, but she wasn’t yet so far above everyone else as to be completely unapproachable.

Her admirers included classmates she saw every day; a handsome, fair-skinned older student with refined features and long fingers; a sunny, muscular athlete on the basketball team; and a quiet, bookish top student who wore glasses and kept a low profile.

So many people had pursued Xia Jinyu.

Some were rich, some handsome, some excellent students, and some outstanding in every respect.

At first, Xia Jinyu hadn’t rejected every one of them outright.

When you’re a teenager, if you get the chance, who would refuse to fall in love?

At first glance, many people seemed to have a special connection with you. Put plainly, they were good-looking.

Whether it was their faces or their figures, everyone had something that could attract the opposite sex.

Xia Jinyu had been attracted to people, too.

But every romance that might have developed was nipped in the bud. They all ended after the first casual conversation following a confession, whether she was trying to get to know the person a little or had found him decent enough that she wanted to turn him down properly. Either way, they had to talk first.

Those boys, all going through adolescence themselves, were immature compared with Xia Jinyu, no matter how physically developed they were—whether they were six-foot-plus basketball starters or muscular guys who worked out regularly.

Their minds were filthy, and so purely filthy.

Sometimes, around them, Xia Jinyu felt as if she had the ability to read minds.

All she had to do was have a simple conversation and steer the topic toward dating, and the boys would immediately reveal themselves. Their thoughts were remarkably similar. Money usually wasn’t part of the picture; they thought about only one thing… and some of them also wanted to show off.

From middle school through her time studying abroad and then returning to China, she kept meeting and talking to men.

Right up until shortly before she returned to China, she had continued interacting with men, but each encounter ended at some point when the relationship could go no further.

At first, Xia Jinyu had genuinely wanted to fall in love. She had always hoped to meet someone simple and sincere, someone who could connect with her mind first, who would try to understand what she thought and felt, and only then move toward physical intimacy. Finding such a person during adolescence was a pipe dream.

She soon became completely disillusioned.

For the next several years, the men who pursued her were no longer potential partners she tried to understand. They became “research subjects” for her work as a psychologist. She even wrote several papers on the inner lives of men, though none was ever formally published. One reason was that she had considered the public reaction: the wording in those papers was extremely radical.

Another reason was that Xia Jinyu felt her research was incomplete.

She was “afraid” of taking things further with men, which made it difficult for her to study the subject comprehensively. She didn’t force herself to do so.

It was worth noting that Xia Jinyu had encountered men who were simple and sincere, men with whom she could connect on a spiritual level. Her work was to study people and dissect their inner lives. She had actively sought out such men and interacted with them, only to discover that they either had a mental illness or a physical illness.

Or they weren’t exclusively heterosexual.

Those men, in turn, did not fit her views on love and choosing a partner.

In other words, the men who met Xia Jinyu’s basic criteria all had filthy minds.

And so Xia Jinyu would never, ever take the initiative. Never.

To her, taking the initiative meant having expectations. Reality had long since taught her that every expectation would end in disappointment. This man was not much different from the men she’d met ten years ago. Their ideas about relationships between men and women were much the same: each had this or that intention, while putting on a respectable front and saying all the right things.

She had observed far too much.

She hadn’t chosen anyone ten years ago, so she wouldn’t choose anyone now. And she would never take the initiative in the future, either.

That was why, to win Xia Jinyu over, a man had to attract her with certain qualities and then take the initiative—even excessively so. Wu Chen had spent plenty of time studying Xia Jinyu during the thousand-year loop and had come to understand her in every detail. Much of what he knew came directly from things Xia Jinyu herself had said.

Wu Chen had approached her while playing different personalities, sometimes with kindness, sometimes by deliberately offending her.

He knew the secret to getting through to Xia Jinyu.