“Xiaoxiao, are you free in a couple of days?”

Early the next morning, Bai Xiaoxiao was still bleary-eyed when she heard her phone vibrate. She picked it up and saw a message from her senior, Lu Wanxin.

“I’m free. What’s up?”

Bai Xiaoxiao was a little puzzled about why Senior Wanxin was asking, but she answered honestly anyway.

She’d been bored at home all month, and she didn’t talk much with her brother. If Senior Wanxin was asking her to go out together, she could consider it.

“I booked three tickets to the zoo. Xiaomeng said she still isn’t feeling well and needs a little more time to recover, so I wanted to ask what you think.”

So it really was the outing for the three of them that Senior Wanxin had mentioned before. Bai Xiaoxiao was fine with going somewhere like the zoo.

The psychological scars from what happened to Senior Cai Mengmeng hadn’t healed yet. That had been the closest she’d ever come to death. Bai Xiaoxiao had been through the same thing, but at least she hadn’t suffered any lasting physical injuries. Silver Spear Battle Maiden had saved her at the last moment.

If the laser had hit Bai Xiaoxiao in the thigh and blown it apart in a cloud of blood, she’d probably have been just as devastated as Senior Cai Mengmeng.

She’d paid twenty years of her life to become a Magical Girl. Wouldn’t it be a terrible waste to die just like that?

But come to think of it, why had she agreed to such a harsh condition in the first place?

She had to pay her contracted spirit twenty years of her life just to use magic and become a Magical Girl? The more she thought about it, the stranger it seemed.

Oh no, her head was starting to hurt. Better not think about it. She’d already agreed, so she might as well be a good Magical Girl.

After thinking it over for a while, Bai Xiaoxiao finally replied to Lu Wanxin: “I’m free whenever.”

Lu Wanxin sent back a heart emoji, then followed it with several bizarre kissy-face stickers.

Girls being all lovey-dovey with each other really was kind of weird, wasn’t it?! Bai Xiaoxiao still wasn’t used to it, but Senior Wanxin seemed to be having so much fun that she couldn’t bring herself to stop her.

“Let’s meet outside the agency in three days. We can take a taxi to the zoo together.”

Tianhai Zoo was more than twenty kilometers away, so the trip would take over half an hour by taxi. Senior Wanxin could drive, so she could take Bai Xiaoxiao and Cai Mengmeng there herself.

“OK, that works for me.”

After getting Xiaoxiao’s agreement, Lu Wanxin checked with Cai Mengmeng too.

Cai Mengmeng had slowly started to recover from the trauma, and she agreed as well. These days, she believed you had to enjoy life while you could.

As a Magical Girl, it was perfectly normal to die without warning. A long, peaceful life? That had nothing to do with this line of work.

“Three days, huh...”

That meant she still had three days to get to know her brother better. Senior Wanxin and Senior Cai Mengmeng had already been curious about the brother they’d never met. If things kept going like this, she could probably introduce him to them.

Senior Wanxin was single, too. Bai Xiaoxiao had no idea if she actually liked girls, but if she introduced her brother and the two hit it off, she’d be their matchmaker.

After lunch, her brother went back to his room again. Curious about what he did in there all day, Bai Xiaoxiao pressed her ear to the wall and listened in.

Maybe the soundproofing was too good, or maybe her hearing wasn’t sharp enough. All she could make out was the tapping of a keyboard.

After listening for ages without learning anything useful, Bai Xiaoxiao finally gave up on spying on her brother.

They were family under the same roof now, after all. It didn’t feel right to do that.

At dinner, Bai Xiaoxiao kept looking at Li Xinghe’s face. She really wanted to know how her brother could spend all day at home playing games and still have more money than he could ever spend.

There were fresh vegetables and meat for lunch and dinner every day. Li Xinghe had probably bought enough for two days in one go that morning and stored it in the fridge. But there were at least three expensive meat dishes on the table. Bai Xiaoxiao might not have a good grasp of money, but she knew ordinary families couldn’t afford food like this.

Even when she’d lived downtown, she hadn’t eaten this well. Her mother had hired someone to cook for her, but even then, she hadn’t been served meat at every meal.

Besides, the packaging in the kitchen looked expensive at a glance. If he’d bought so many costly, delicious dishes just to win her over, there really was no need.

“What’s wrong, Xiaoxiao? Is there something on my face?”

She’d been staring at her brother so intently that he thought something had gotten on his face. Bai Xiaoxiao quickly shook her head. She’d just gotten lost in thought, wondering where all this money came from.

Uncle Li’s family didn’t look like they owned a factory or anything. And it couldn’t be that they’d made all this money investing in real estate, could it?

“No, no. I was just thinking about how you’ve spent so much money buying me all this good food, Brother... I feel kind of bad.”

There was a whole lobster on the dinner table. It looked like the kind of thing that would be the most expensive item on even a fancy restaurant’s menu.

Did something like this really belong on an ordinary family’s dinner table?

Well, they weren’t exactly an ordinary family—their house and her room were ridiculously huge. But even rich people had to have their limits, right?

“Oh, that? I made quite a bit investing back in college. Now I get tens of thousands a day just from the interest in the bank. This is nothing.”

Bai Xiaoxiao froze at his explanation, then stared at him in disbelief.

“Huhhhhhhhhh??????”

If he was getting tens of thousands a day in bank interest, didn’t that mean he had hundreds of millions?

And that was just the money in the bank. It didn’t even include fixed assets like the house.

Li Xinghe seemed to notice that Bai Xiaoxiao was confused, so he went on.

“You know about blockchain, right? I bought hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin back then. A few years later, it was worth thousands of times more. My initial investment went from a few hundred thousand to over a hundred million. Too bad I didn’t wait another couple of years—the price went even higher after that.”

He talked about it as if it had been no big deal. Bai Xiaoxiao didn’t really understand what “thousands of times” or “over a hundred million” meant. She had less than two million in her bank account, and she’d earned even that by working hard to kill monsters.

On top of that, she’d sacrificed so many years of her life. Her contracted spirit had said she had about fifty years left. Had trading all those years for a few million really been worth it?

Bai Xiaoxiao sat in silence, feeling as if her whole worldview had just crumbled.

The delicious food in her mouth had lost its flavor. She chewed her rice absentmindedly, then said she was full.

She diligently washed her bowl, then went straight back to her room on the third floor, leaving Li Xinghe staring after her in confusion and wondering if he’d said something wrong.

Next time, he should come up with a different lie. It was only natural that other people would feel it was unfair to get a huge fortune through a windfall like that.