Lovely Allergen

Chapter 72: To Fall Sick from Yearning

"Were you designing to a cyberpunk aesthetic?" Yue Zhishi asked Qu Zhi, holding her sketches.

Qu Zhi nodded. "I felt like there was never-ending rain in cyberpunk works, and the rain would always be dark, heavy drizzle." She then looked at the designs in front of Yue Zhishi — they were all very disconnected. "Is it hard to integrate everything together? I feel like everyone's design preferences are too different."

"Why don't we just directly let everyone design to their own styles," Chen Pi suggested. "Like Qu Zhi can do a cyberpunk set and Xiao Qi can make a gentle, traditional set with Zhou Yi. And then we can just design the last set with something else."

"That's too casual," Zhou Yi said, his voice low and very soft.

"I think so too, but if we really can't link everything together, then we might as well separate them into three sections. It'll be fine if there's some connection among them."

Yue Zhishi was reclining on top of his desk, listening to everyone with his eyes closed. The word 'rain' was brought up again and again, and it brought forth his memories again and again, from three years old to nineteen — from the past to now.

Past, present.

"Wait." Opening his eyes, Yue Zhishi raised his head, his light-coloured pupils shining under the lights. "I have an idea."

He stood up as he talked, circling out of his desk to the whiteboard, and stuck everyone's disorderly rough drafts onto the board with magnets — from Zhou Yi's water sleeves and to Xiao Qi's bamboo pavilion umbrella dress, his and Chen Pi's modern style drawings and finally, Qu Zhi's postmodern cyberpunk.

"Isn't this actually a continuous timeline?" Yue Zhishi turned his face towards the group. "Rain runs through all times. To say it differently — no matter how eras change and transform, rain will always fall."

"The times of rain!" Pleasant surprise covered Nan Jia's face. "I think it's a pretty good idea to have time be the thread running through all these different design styles." She'd even thought about what kind of background and music they could use during their show. "If we follow this order, we can use traditional Chinese instruments like and in the beginning, and then transition to futuristic electronic music at the end."

"That's super cool." Qu Zhi agreed with her thoughts with a short sentence.

Yue Zhishi continued on. "If we use 'time' in the first round, then in the second round, I think we can use 'space' as a parallel design concept."

Xiao Qi timidly asked, "Space as in different countries?"

"Won't the scope be too narrow if we limit it to countries?" Qu Zhi pressed down the end of her ballpoint pen. "If we're using 'space', then we should think larger, more widely."

Yue Zhishi nodded very quickly. "Yes, I just remembered that when rain falls in different places, it's never exactly the same." He tried describing it to everyone. "If rain falls on a lake, it'll show up as dotted, spreading ripples. If it falls on car windows, it'll turn into transparent lines. If it falls onto an umbrella, sometimes it'll condense into beads of water."

"Clouds and lakes, the grasslands and leaf tips seeping with rainwater — rain will fall on all of them. We can utilise these different places to create rain's sense of space. We can combine this part with creative uses of fabric materials. If we can simulate 'space' with both our techniques and fabrics, then I think we'll be able to get extra points in terms of designing."

He initially didn't think much of it after saying everything in one go, but when Yue Zhishi realised everyone was staring at him, he was a bit embarrassed. He lifted a hand, ruffling his hair, and turned back to his usual goodnatured self. Very lightly, he released an 'ah' and said, "That's just some of my very immature thoughts."