Chloe stood completely frozen.
Her jaw hung open in an entirely unladylike expression of raw shock. The trendy, untouchable aura vanished into thin air. Students walked past them on the busy paved walkway, casting strange looks at the fashionable girl staring blankly at a guy with a cheap backpack.
Mark did not speak.
He just watched her and kept his hands relaxed at his sides and maintained a flat, neutral expression. He let the silence stretch out, offering no further explanation or comfort.
It was a deliberate, calculated move. In any negotiation, the person who breaks a heavy silence usually surrenders power.
By refusing to fill the void, Mark forced Chloe's brain to think of the weight of his claim on its own. He retained total control of the pacing.
Several long seconds dragged by. The wind rustled the leaves of a nearby tree.
Finally, Chloe closed her mouth. She swallowed hard and cleared her throat, breaking eye contact to look down at the gray concrete near his shoes.
"You want us to join the dance practice," she said. Her voice was much quieter now, stripped of its usual haughty confidence.
"Yes," Mark answered simply.
Chloe looked back up, a deep, genuine confusion wrinkling her forehead.
"Why do you want that?" she asked, tilting her head. "Is that because of the scholarship? Do you need the money that badly?"
Mark shook his head slowly. "It's not about that. I just want to join. That's the truth."
It was the plain, unvarnished truth. He did not care about the tuition exemption anymore. The money was a good bonus, but it was no longer his primary motivation.
He simply wanted to experience an event that felt incredibly close to the brutal, logic-driven special exams printed in the pages of "Welcome to the High School of Meritocracy."
He wanted the thrill of moving pawns and manipulating the board from the shadows.
Chloe stared at his face, searching for a lie. She probably thought he was hiding a complex, selfish motive, but she could not find a single crack in his expression. She bit her lower lip and pretended to think it over. She crossed her arms and tapped a manicured finger against her sleeve as if weighing a heavy burden.
Mark watched the performance without blinking.
She was just acting. The truth was, she would agree to absolutely anything he demanded right now. She did not care about the physical effort of dancing or the lost free time. The chance to speak directly with the author who saved her life vastly outweighed any minor inconvenience.
"Alright," Chloe finally sighed, dropping her arms. "I'll tell my friends. I can't guarantee they will really participate, but I will show up."
Mark nodded. He knew exactly how her social circle functioned. Chloe dictated the trends for her entire clique. If she showed up to practice and treated the competition seriously, the rest of the fashion group would follow her without a second thought just to maintain their proximity to her influence. It was basically a guaranteed capture of six votes.
"Do we have a deal?" Chloe asked calmly.
She offered her right hand. Her face remained composed, but Mark could see a faint tremor in her fingertips. Deep inside, she was screaming with impatience and desperately wanted to know the method to contact the author she admires.
Mark reached out and took her hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong.
"Okay, let's talk tomorrow," Mark said, releasing her hand and immediately turning around to walk away.
"Wait," Chloe blurted out.
Her voice spiked in volume, entirely ruining her calm facade.
"Let's do this now," she demanded, taking a quick step forward. "Or else the deal is off."
Mark stopped but he did not turn around right away.
He knew better than to fall for a weak threat. He knew exactly how badly she craved the information locked inside his head. She would never walk away from this table.
He brought his hand up to his face and pinched the bridge of his nose. It looked like a gesture of exhaustion, but its actual purpose was to hide the wide, amused smile spreading across his lips.
Dropping his hand, he turned his head to look over his shoulder.
"Alright," Mark said playfully, matching her bluff. "The deal is off. See you."
He took a step forward.
Then...
Chloe lunged and grabbed Mark's right arm with both hands, her fingernails digging sharply into the cheap fabric of his sleeve. She tightened her grip with surprising force, completely abandoning her pride.
"Wait, I was just kidding," Chloe rushed out, her words tumbling over each other.
She pulled him back around to face her.
"Don't play games with me," she pleaded, dropping the threats entirely. "You know I really want this. Spare your time. I'll pay extra on top of the deal. Let's do this today. Right now."
Mark looked down at her face. Her eyes were wide, desperate, and entirely stripped of pretense. She looked like someone begging for water in a desert.
He let out a long, heavy sigh and played the part of a reluctant negotiator.
"Alright," Mark agreed softly. "Let's do this."
A big, brilliant smile broke across Chloe's face. The joy was so pure and sudden it completely transformed her features.
"Let's go to a cafe," she insisted, tugging Mark's arm toward the campus gates.
"Are you asking me on a date?" Mark asked mischievously, letting her pull him along.
Chloe stopped walking. She did not blush or look embarrassed. A visible wave of pure irritation washed over her features. She released his arm and just stared at him in dead silence, her eyes flat and unamused.
"I'm just kidding," Mark raised his hands in surrender. "Let's go."
Fifteen minutes later, the heavy glass door of a high-end campus cafe swung shut behind them. The air smelled strongly of roasted espresso beans and sweet vanilla syrup.
Chloe marched straight to the counter and ordered two of their most expensive, highly-rated iced coffees. She paid without looking at the receipt and carried the tray toward a small, circular table tucked away in a quiet corner near the back window.
Mark pulled out a wooden chair and sat down.
Instead of taking the seat directly across from him, Chloe pulled her chair around the small table and sat directly beside him. Their shoulders were only a few inches apart.
It was not a romantic gesture but a purely practical move. Sitting side-by-side made it much easier to share a single phone screen and discuss the details in low voices without shouting across the table.
Chloe took a quick sip of her drink and set the plastic cup down so hard the ice rattled.
"Now tell me," Chloe demanded, turning to face him.
Mark leaned back slightly against the wooden slats of his chair.
"Should I tell you directly how to contact eT14XjMteCsx," Mark asked, "or should I tell you first how I figured it out?"
"Tell me how you figured it out," Chloe answered without a second of hesitation.
Mark reached into his pocket and pulled out a cheap ballpoint pen. He grabbed a clean paper napkin from the dispenser on the table and flattened it out.
"The pen name," Mark started, drawing the letters onto the soft paper. "eT14XjMteCsx. Everyone thought it was just a random keyboard smash. But it's actually a Base64 encoded string."
Chloe nodded slowly and watched the blue ink bleed into the napkin. She already knew this part from the viral internet posts.
"When you decode that specific string from Base64," Mark explained, drawing an arrow below the letters, "it doesn't translate into a word. It translates into a mathematical equation."
He wrote the equation out clearly: `y = x³ - x + 1`.
Chloe frowned, staring at the math. "An equation? What does that have to do with contacting the author?"
"Everything," Mark said, tapping the pen against the paper. "In this equation, 'x' represents a sequence number, and 'y' represents a specific chapter in the book. If you plug in numbers for 'x' starting from one and going up to twenty-one, the equation spits out twenty-one specific chapter numbers."
He drew a small chart on the side of the napkin.
"If x is one, y equals one," Mark explained, writing the numbers. "If x is two, y is seven. If x is three, y is twenty-five. You keep doing this. Four gives you sixty-one. Five gives you one hundred twenty-one. All the way down to x equals twenty-one, which gives you chapter nine thousand two hundred and forty-one."
Chloe stared at the messy column of numbers. "So there are twenty-one specific chapters scattered across the entire ten thousand chapter book."
"Exactly," Mark confirmed. He set the pen down. "Can I borrow your phone?"
Chloe quickly unlocked her expensive smartphone and placed it in his hand. Mark opened the WebBook application and went to the author's massive novel.
He scrolled to the very first chapter and handed the device back.
"Look at the very last sentence of the chapter," Mark instructed, leaning closer to see the screen. "Look at the very first letter of that final sentence."