Wen Shan saw the posted date at the bottom. It was the day before she published her thesis.
“Impossible! This is my thesis, he—”
“Let me ask someone to withdraw the paper from your forum first, otherwise—”
“Why do you want me to withdraw mine?” Wen Shan stood up indignantly but at the sharp pain in her back, dropped to the ground in a squat.
It was not her who copied it. Why did she have to withdraw her paper instead?
She had spent ages completing the thesis. Why did she have to hide all her hard work?
“Shan Shan.” Nalan Chunbo picked her up and put her on the sofa, then quickly went to get the medicine for her.
Wen Shan didn’t know whether her tears were caused by grief or pain, but they kept rolling down her cheeks.
Nalan Chunbo found painkillers so he immediately got water for her and told her to take them. Wen Shan was still crying like a little child who got bullied at school.
“I am not going to take it down. Why must I delete mine if I didn’t plagiarize it?” Wen Shan sobbed, wiping away her tears roughly. Her back was painful but her heartache hurt even more because Nalan Chunbo was going to delete her thesis. It was the same as not believing her.
Nalan Chunbo looked at his sweetheart who was sobbing as if the world was ending. He felt sorry for her back pain but also felt angry at her immaturity. “The thesis is yours, but the problem now is that he published it first. In order to avoid unnecessary trouble, we need to remove yours first.”
“I won’t delete it. If I do, people will only think that I plagiarized his work. Obviously, he’s the one who copied me,” Wen Shan cried loudly, “Don’t you believe me? If you don’t believe me, you can ask the guy that proofread my thesis. He knows all my questions, even the citation sources, I—”
“Wen Shan, calm down.” Nalan Chunbo pressed her shoulders to prevent her from moving around and worsening her injury. “Can you calm down please? It’s not that I don’t believe you, I just don’t want you to receive backlash for this later. Now that he has reported your plagiarism to the Academy, if it is still posted on the forum, the forum will take action unless you can come up with evidence that he plagiarized your work immediately.”
Immediately?
How could she get it now?
She was aware that Professor Yin had the habit of stealing other people’s theses, but he only stole from his teaching assistants back then. When she published the paper, she was not his teaching assistant yet.
“It’s Mao Cang, I know it. When I was writing my thesis, I was doing experiments in the laboratory and I used the laboratory laptop. Mao Cang must have done something with it!” Wen Shan was so agitated she felt like going out to find Mao Cang to get the truth out of him.
Nalan Chunbo held her trembling body and straightened her back carefully so she would not make her injury worse.
“What I’m saying now is that you must remove your thesis from the forum. I will investigate this matter, but you must promise to do this,” Nalan Chunbo said seriously. Wen Shan’s eyes were red and puffy from crying. Nalan Chunbo wiped her tears with one hand and asked gently, “Don’t you believe your Papa Nalan?”
Wen Shan bit her lip. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him but by doing that, it would be as if she was admitting that she was the one who had copied it.
Nalan Chunbo wiped her tears and kissed her forehead. “It will be resolved. It will definitely be resolved.”
Nevertheless, he was reluctant to let her suffer before the matter was solved. Instead of waiting for the forum to take down the thesis, it was better for him to do it behind the scenes.
