"Clara, you done yet?"
With her back to the desk, Iris Navarro was already undoing the buttons of her white coat, her long fingers moving fast.
They had pulled two all-nighters in a row. Her eyelids were practically glued together, and all she wanted now was to face-plant onto a bed.
"Just a little more. If you're wiped, Senior, you can head out first."
The girl's soft, mellow voice drifted through the empty lab, gentle enough to make people pause.
If anyone listened closely, though, they would catch the obvious fatigue underneath it, the kind that came after being tired for way too long.
"It's fine. We'll go together."
Iris shook her head, trying to stay awake, then turned to look at her junior, who was still bent over the desk, writing nonstop.
Clara Whitfield was wearing the same spotless white coat.
Her dark, silky hair was tied into a high ponytail with a plain hair tie, and it swayed lightly every time she reached over to flip through her notes.
Her skin was fair and smooth, almost unreal, like a freshly peeled egg. Under a wispy set of airy bangs sat a pair of round, watery eyes.
A pair of black square-framed glasses rested on her slightly upturned nose, covering nearly half her tiny face, while her pink lips pressed together a little.
She looked serious and proper, but there was also a trace of unhappiness there, which somehow made her seem... soft and adorable.
In a crowd like theirs, doctors known for being strict and precise, the word adorable probably sounded a bit out of place.
But Clara looked too soft.
Just going by her face, she was exactly the kind of girl people would assume was easy to bully at first glance.
Iris had to admit it—every single time she looked at her junior, she still got hit with that same flash of amazement.
Someone with a face like that could totally coast through life on looks alone, yet she had gone and become ridiculously accomplished while still so young.
Top scorer in the science track on the Jingshi college entrance exam. Perfect marks in math and science. Straight through a top-tier university from bachelor's to PhD. And in her freshman year, she had already become the one and only final student personally taken by Professor Ashton, a giant in the medical field.
Iris was two years ahead of her, and even then, she barely qualified to help out around the edges. Seriously, comparing people like this was enough to make anyone want to cry on the spot.
Still, she wasn't jealous at all.
Getting carried by a boss-level genius really felt insanely good.
Just last month, the surgery theoretically led by Clara Whitfield had gone down as a once-in-history success in the medical field. It brought their lab close to a hundred million in funding with basically zero stress, and their professor even used it as a model case in class.
She was still so young, yet she was already making waves.
A lot of people were saying that twenty-three-year-old Clara’s future in medicine would probably be no less impressive than her mentor’s—and her mentor was already pretty much the ceiling.
And this time, if the Dawn Project proposal they’d stayed up all night rushing to finish got approved by the university and officially launched—
that would be a huge highlight on all their resumes.
And every bit of that had everything to do with the girl standing right in front of her.
She looked soft and harmless, like some fluffy little lamb.
Seriously, Iris Navarro could never figure out how someone with such a naturally gentle, non-threatening face had ended up choosing surgery of all things.
Because everyone knew surgery was brutal—exhausting, high-pressure, and absolutely not for the weak.
Iris yawned, then thought about how this same girl, once inside the operating room, moved with crisp precision, blade in hand, never hesitating for even half a second. Her mind wandered, looping back to another thing that had shocked her before.
With a future this bright, why had her junior gotten married so early?
They’d known each other for two years, and Clara’s husband was mysterious to the point of being unreal. Forget meeting him—Iris had never even seen a normal text from the guy.
He was like some invisible extra. Present or not, who could even tell?
If she hadn’t happened to see Clara’s personal info when she joined the lab, no one would’ve guessed that someone this outstanding was actually a married college student.
Smart people don’t fall in love.
Marriage is a graveyard, and her junior had jumped in kinda early.
"I’m done, Senior."
Clara sorted the important files by her hand, locked them neatly into her drawer, then took off her white coat in one smooth motion. Clean, quick, practiced. After that, she left with Iris.
When the two of them walked out of the lab building, the sky was just starting to pale. A thin wash of morning light slipped through the light clouds and scattered softly across the campus.
Daybreak had only just arrived. At that hour, aside from a few students out for morning runs, the university was almost completely empty.
Clara Whitfield found her little scooter tucked away in a corner, dropped Iris Navarro off at the dorm, then rode straight toward the school gate.
She didn’t live on campus. She lived off-site.