In the end, Nana Toki let He Jiawen’s crew go, letting the tide roll back without a breakwater.

This is a civilized city; they’re still students. Murder and cleanup isn’t on the table—at most a scare, a slap of thunder without rain. Otherwise, finding a place to dump a body would be a nasty puzzle under moonlight.

System: "..." Is the host only worried about where to dump a body?!

“Anyway, can you stand?” Nana shifted her gaze to the girl in the restroom corner. Her summer uniform clung wet and translucent, a thin film over a black camisole, curves traced like inked lines on pale paper.

Oh? This Nesting Phoenix is the slender, aloof type?

...

Maybe she felt Nana’s stare burn like noon sun. The bullied girl ignored Nana’s offered hand and staggered up by herself, features sharp with a heroic cut—even drenched and disheveled, she held her chin high like a proud black swan on midnight water.

...

Silence pooled again, ink-calm in the restroom. The two women faced each other with a wordless accord. Wenquan’s eyes were still water, unruffled by even a fingertip ripple, and her aura bristled like a ring of thorns—beautiful to look at, dangerous to touch.

Nana blinked, curious, studying Wenquan. So this is zero percent favorability? Frost-cold. And this kind of cool, ascetic Nesting Phoenix is more magnetic than the cute, fluffy kind.

Even she felt that itch—to tease, to press, a wicked little tide she had to dam.

“Your clothes are soaked. Want a fresh set?” Nana asked, her voice soft, a warm breeze out of a teahouse door. Wenquan tilted her neck, stared strangely, and said nothing, like a shuttered window holding back rain.

...

The air dipped into awkward frost. Nana wondered if Wenquan was doing it on purpose. She’d been plenty proactive; why wouldn’t this girl speak? Did she step on a landmine she couldn’t see?

Nana frowned, the crease like a knife mark. She stayed quiet; Wenquan stayed quiet. Only when Song Qingtian, back in class, ran out of patience and came hunting did the still water break.

“Qiqi! You constipated or fall into the toilet trench? Who takes an hour to pee?” Song’s voice blared like a brass horn, the restroom hundreds of meters away still catching the echo like a canyon.

“If you don’t explain today, I’m not letting you off!”

Bang! The door slammed open like a cymbal crash. Song froze on the threshold, seeing her bestie locked in a stare-down with a woman soaked head to toe, the air skewed and uncanny like fog at dusk.

“What are you two… doing? Is this that new girls’-high-school bond-boost gimmick?”

She wanted to ask, but Wenquan’s calm face and dripping hair felt like rain chilling a stone; she swallowed the line. That girl screamed trouble, like a sleeping tiger with its eyes half-open—best not poke.

“It’s nothing. Her clothes got soaked. I asked if she wanted a change.” Nana lifted a white casual set from nowhere, a crane feather conjured from her sleeve. She never mentioned He Jiawen.

“Uh, how do you end up soaked from a bathroom trip… Also, Qiqi, why are you carrying spare clothes?” Song frowned, mind snagging on the detail like thread on a nail. Their school pockets aren’t bottomless.

How did she run around campus with a whole outfit?

“How would I know? Ask her.” Nana pointed at Wenquan, exasperation flicking like a fan. This girl just refused to engage. She wasn’t some man‑eating demon; one sentence wouldn’t kill her.

“Anyway, take these.” Nana pushed the clothes into Wenquan’s hands, firm as setting a stone. “I hate having gifts refused. If you don’t want them, toss them in any trash bin.”

She didn’t expect a single outfit to buy favorability points, anyway.

Song, who’d barged in and shredded the quiet, still stood clueless at the door. She looked at Wenquan, then at her bestie, and couldn’t wring sense from this odd current. It didn’t feel like campus bullying, but the uncanny mood hovered like mist—what was this?

They were probably meeting for the first time.

Wenquan held the clothes and met Nana’s eyes for four or five slow seconds. Just when Nana thought she was wasting daylight, Wenquan moved. She raised her hands and, in front of them, unbuttoned her uniform—one, then another—white skin showing like porcelain under rain.

Song flushed, breath catching, ready to say something—then choked it back.

Under that soaked fabric, the skin wasn’t whole. Beneath the parts you could see, the rest bloomed in bruises—waist, thighs, arms, back—places people shouldn’t have to show, stamped with violet patches like poisonous blossoms.

This wasn’t just campus bullying. This was storm damage on a house of thin wood. Song couldn’t imagine what kind of inhuman days this girl had been living.

“Achoo—!” The cold hit her like a cellar door opening. Song shivered, as if dropped into a bottomless ice cave. She looked up and saw Nana’s face gone midnight-dark, a storm with knives in the wind.

“Qiqi…” The temperature seemed to plunge ten degrees in a blink. Song tugged Nana’s sleeve, spooked; she’d never seen her friend look like a blade about to drink.

“Mm? What’s wrong?” Pulled back, Nana’s mood slid shut like a lacquer lid. In the few minutes that followed, Wenquan changed—white jacket on pale skin, a winter snow sprite stepping out of frost.

“The fit’s perfect. I’ve got a good eye.” Nana smiled, but no laughter reached the lake under her gaze.

She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t seen those marks.

Of course the System wouldn’t hand out easy virtue points. This plane’s script wasn’t your typical urban campus fare.

Wenquan never spoke. Even leaving, she didn’t offer a simple thanks—just footsteps fading like rain.

“What a strange one,” Song muttered, watching Wenquan’s back disappear like a swallow into dusk.

Nana stayed quiet, eyes unfocused, gaze drifting like ash on water.

...

Nana’s original plan was simple: find the Nesting Phoenix, launch a swift assault, and chase. But the intel she’d gathered said this plane’s Phoenix wasn’t suited to that rhythm.

She’d met cold versions before—pride like high mountain snow. Wenquan’s damage was another thing entirely; that kind of sealing‑off doesn’t grow in a day or a season.

Nana suspected it wasn’t just He Jiawen’s little school clique. Outside the campus, other currents were battering Wenquan’s shores.

Maybe she needed to learn the girl’s background first, roots and soil before pruning.

Next morning, after early self‑study, Nana headed out to find Wenquan’s class and lay groundwork. The homeroom teacher called her to the office, a bell cutting through fog.

At first she was puzzled, thoughts meandering like smoke. A few minutes later, the Class Four homeroom teacher arrived with He Jiawen, four lackeys, and Wenquan—and the picture snapped into focus like glass.

They’d come to fish for yesterday’s storm.

“Lu Qiqi,” the Class Four teacher said—a balding man in his thirties or forties, face stiff as a carved plaque—“some students reported you bullied Class Four’s Wenquan. Is that true?”

Nana glanced at He Jiawen’s batch with a look like watching moths headbutt a lantern.

Did they forget she filmed ironclad proof?

Or are villains on this plane working with half a brain?

“No. I don’t even know any Wenquan.”

It was true enough; all she had was a name on a page.

But—

“You’re lying!” one of He Jiawen’s lackeys blurted, voice snapping like a twig. “We clearly saw you bullying Wenquan in the restroom yesterday!”

“Yeah! You splashed her with dirty water from the mop bucket and trashed the whole place. We saw everything, hiding in the stalls, clear as a mirror!”

“Lu Qiqi, stop quibbling!”