An Baili had been waiting on this must-pass path all along. The moment she saw Lu Li, she walked up as if it were a chance encounter.

“Ah, Lu Li, Chu... Chu Class Rep, good morning~”

She probably didn’t even remember the class rep’s name, did she? And right now, he and An Baili shouldn’t even be that close yet.

Lu Li returned the greeting flatly, while thinking about how to get away.

An Baili’s look was the textbook country-girl type. Her aura was gloomy, and her personality withdrawn. Who knew what had shaped her that way. She never spoke a word about her family either. In his previous life, when they got married, her side hadn’t even brought any parents. Maybe that extreme personality of hers really had come from her family.

“Ah, hello, An Baili.”

Chu Jingyi really did carry herself with effortless grace. Gentle, refined, poised. Her smile was deeply infectious. Who knew how many naive boys had been bewitched by it, and stumbled into one of life’s top ten delusions.

But An Baili’s eyes behind those thick lenses stayed fixed on Lu Li. That gaze was like a starving tiger spotting prey. She hid it well. It only flashed for an instant before she said with a grin, “What a coincidence. I didn’t expect to run into you here. By the way, are you two going to school together?”

Chu Jingyi didn’t notice the faint chill in An Baili’s tone. Instead, she started fumbling through an explanation for why she and Lu Li had come to school together. Maybe nothing had happened between them. But in the face of Chu Jingyi’s clumsy explanation, An Baili’s gaze became less and less restrained.

Looking at the two of them, Lu Li felt drained. One, he was helpless against the class rep’s density. Two, he was helpless against An Baili’s persistence.

Just let it all burn. I’m tired.

He swayed his head lazily, left the two girls behind, and headed for the classroom alone. An Baili immediately ignored Chu Jingyi’s rambling and followed after Lu Li in small steps. She didn’t deliberately start a conversation. She simply trailed behind him obediently. She knew Lu Li inside and out. She knew he wasn’t someone who liked feeling constrained. Trying too hard to get close would only make him dislike her.

And it was exactly because she knew Lu Li too well that, in his previous life, he had chosen the most powerless form of resistance. Because he knew that aside from black-and-white legal documents, he simply couldn’t resist An Baili at all. To Lu Li, An Baili was like a drought demon soaring through the sky, holding this mere mortal completely in her grasp.

Sitting in the back row of the classroom, Lu Li listened to the two girls behind him chatting on and off, and suddenly thought of a nursery rhyme:

“Beneath the big tree by the gate, a flock of duckies waddled by, quacking and chirping, can’t find their mama~”

“What are you even singing?” Chu Jingyi couldn’t help frowning.

“A nursery rhyme. Doesn’t it sound nice?”

“It sounds awful.”

He could only shut his mouth and sing his heart out in silence.

The homeroom teacher held a class meeting and announced there would be a placement test tomorrow, telling everyone to go back and prepare well. What placement test? It was obviously just a ranking-and-sorting conference for the class’s little ecosystem. The good students clustered together. The bad students clustered together. The rich sat in the front rows. The poor crouched in the corners. Whatever little attachment Lu Li still had to school was completely shoveled away by reality.

No wonder love was humanity’s eternal pursuit. In a world this awful, everyone needed love to sweeten it a little. It was just a pity that true love only existed in imagination. In reality, there were only graves of love. A mess of thoughts bubbled up in Lu Li’s mind, and his thoughts drifted off with the birds outside the window to who knew where.

After pretending to attend class all morning, Lu Li went to the cafeteria and got himself a meal. Sure enough, cafeteria food was still this expensive. One meal cost thirty yuan. And plenty of students still looked down on food like this. Little did they know that, in Lu Li’s eyes, a plate of rice like this was no different from gold. At his hardest point, he had used plain steamed buns as lunch.

He found a quiet seat and sat down. After only a few bites, he saw Class Rep Chu carrying her tray over and sitting across from him. As for An Baili, that woman sat down at a diagonal from them in the shadows. Only Chu Jingyi failed to notice her.

“Class Rep, going to school with me and eating with me like this is really easy to make people misunderstand,” Lu Li said helplessly.

Chu Jingyi was starting to get used to Lu Li’s teasing. Her face only reddened slightly, but she still plopped down into the seat.

“First, I’m not the class rep right now. The class officers haven’t even been elected yet. Second, I sat here because I have something to talk to you about. It’s not the kind of thing people would misunderstand!”

“What is it?”

“You’re seriously amazing!” Stars were practically shining in Chu Jingyi’s eyes. “That plot yesterday was incredible. Even on the way home, just thinking about it made my scalp tingle! Especially that part where someone hosts invisible guests at home. At first I thought only one good ghost had come, but when I thought about it carefully later, I realized more than one ghost had shown up. While reading it, it just felt gripping. But thinking back on it afterward was absolutely chilling!”

Lu Li got a little more interested in talking too.

“That’s the idea. I deliberately arranged a lot of choices for the player at that stage. If the player doesn’t realize the truth, they’ll keep triggering bad ends. But once they do realize the truth, they get pulled into the horror atmosphere without even noticing. That hits deeper than just forcing a horror vibe on them directly. Who says horror games have to be dark as hell visually?”

Chu Jingyi was so excited she could barely eat.

“You’re amazing! Just this script alone—not only could it be made into a game, it’d be incredible as a movie too!”

“...Not really. If you adapt it, the whole structure changes. At least with an indie game, you can preserve your own ideas exactly as they are.”

Remembering the past, Lu Li couldn’t help feeling a little wistful. In his previous life, he had sold the adaptation rights to one of his games. The producers had said they wanted to appeal to the female market, and in the end they changed the plot beyond recognition. It had all ended in a storm of criticism.

“So, does that mean you’re willing to join my little team?”

“How many people are even in your little team right now? I don’t like working with strangers...” Chu Jingyi calmed down, stirred her food with her chopsticks, and a conflicted look appeared on her face. It was obvious she really wanted to be part of making this game.

“Just you and me. Congratulations. You’re a founding member.”

A smile spread across Chu Jingyi’s face, but then she deliberately put on a stern expression.

“But you can’t use that as an excuse to skip class. And I’m not going to go easy on you because of it either!”

Lu Li just chuckled and didn’t answer.

An Baili carried her tray over and sat beside Chu Jingyi, then asked curiously, “What are you talking about? You both look so happy.”

Chu Jingyi noticed that An Baili’s tray only had one serving of cabbage and rice soaked in seaweed soup, and couldn’t help exclaiming, “Baili, why are you eating so little?”

An Baili was still a girl, after all. Unlike Lu Li, she couldn’t shamelessly admit she had no money. She lowered her head and said, “...I’m dieting lately.”

Dieting?

Lu Li lost his appetite too. He really couldn’t stand seeing this woman mistreat herself. He deliberately lowered his head and avoided looking, in case that soft-hearted flaw of his acted up again. That was exactly how it had been in his previous life. Because he’d gone soft, he had ended up tightly bound to An Baili.

An Baili had a bad stomach, and she also suffered from menstrual pain. Those were chronic issues she’d picked up back in high school. She couldn’t even take painkillers, because they would worsen her stomach problems. Every time she ate anything even a little too heavy, she would go pale and squat on the ground without moving. But wasn’t Lu Li just as familiar with An Baili as she was with him?

“Stop eating rice soaked in soup,” Lu Li said without lifting his head. “It’s bad for your stomach.”

An Baili gave an obedient little “oh,” and actually put down her chopsticks. Then she sat there like a well-behaved child, looking at the swirl of hair on top of Lu Li’s head.

Chu Jingyi looked at the two of them strangely. She kept feeling that the atmosphere between them was odd. This kind of old-married-couple exchange had happened so naturally, as if they knew each other extremely well.

Was it just her imagination?