A faintly warm night breeze drifted in through the window, carrying the soft dampness of a summer night and the clear chirps of a few insects. Moonlight spilled through the gauze curtains into the small room, illuminating the girls sitting side by side on the bed, their blushing profiles half in shadow, half in light.
The black-haired girl, wrapped in a bath towel, tentatively reached out and laid her palm on the pink-haired girl’s hand. The moment her palm touched skin, the pink-haired girl jerked back as if she’d been shocked.
“Xiao Yuan?” The black-haired girl drew her hand back in a daze and turned to stare in disbelief at the pink-haired girl she called Xiao Yuan.
“Xiao Li, have you ever thought about what it’d be like to enter another world?” Yuan lowered her star-dusted lashes.
“What do you mean?” Li was completely bewildered by the sudden, ill-timed question.
“What if one day, you woke up in a strange world and found a strange girl waiting for you, wrapped in a bath towel? What would you do?” Yuan turned toward the girl across from her and stared straight into those eyes, where moonlight mingled with confusion.
“Something like that happened to you, didn’t it, Xiao Yuan?” Li pressed her lips together.
The pink-haired girl silently gave a small nod.
“You don’t need to replenish your magic anymore, do you, Xiao Yuan?” The black-haired girl’s voice was so soft it seemed liable to disappear into the noisy insect chorus at any moment.
Yuan remained silent, nodding firmly.
“So that’s how it is…” Li lowered her eyelids, almost as if speaking to herself. When she opened them again, the gentleness of the night was gone without a trace. The shy girl snapped, flinging the only bath towel she had over Yuan’s face and turning hysterical.
“If you don’t want to… replenish magic with me, just say so! What’s the point of coming up with such a lame excuse?!”
Yuan didn’t manage to say another word before she watched the black-haired girl angrily get dressed and slam the door behind her.
“Finally, she’s gone!” The door slammed shut, and silence settled over the room again. With the towel Li had thrown over her head, Yuan let out a long sigh of relief, then pulled it off and draped it over the edge of the bed.
The truth was, she wasn’t really the girl named Jiecheng Yuan. At least, she hadn’t been a few hours ago.
The truth was just as she’d told the black-haired girl named Li: he’d been an ordinary college student, but after waking up, he’d found himself in the bathroom as Jiecheng Yuan. After checking the student ID in the clothes she’d taken off and sorting through the situation in her head, she was able to confirm that she’d been transported into the world of a game.
Other people who transmigrated into a book, a game, or a show usually ended up as cannon fodder or the villain. But the character she’d become, Jiecheng Yuan, was unquestionably the heroine of this game—the kind who got the center spot on the cover.
This should’ve been something to celebrate, if the game hadn’t been an adults-only title…
As the protagonist, Jiecheng Yuan was bound to have more CGs than anyone else in the game.
If things had gone as they normally did, Jiecheng Yuan would’ve just been about to replenish magic for the first time with the character controlled by the player, Xiwei Li. She’d be the one underneath, passively receiving the magic—in short, Jiecheng Yuan’s first special CG was about to appear.
Remembering that scene, then peering through the gap in the bathroom door at Xiwei Li waiting anxiously on the bed, she could think of only one thing: A person born between heaven and earth should stand tall—how could she meekly let herself be the one underneath?!
And so, this was how things had ended up.
“I avoided the magic-replenishment scene, but how am I supposed to get back?” Jiecheng Yuan took several deep breaths, exhaling all the stale air that had built up inside her. Even so, the tightness in her chest wouldn’t go away.
She’d been so focused on dealing with the immediate problem—avoiding the magic-replenishment scene—that it was only now, with a moment to calm down, that she realized the problems she needed to solve were piling up like a mountain.
At least this scene was taking place at Jiecheng Yuan’s home, giving her plenty of time to think—that was what she’d thought, anyway.
But before she could fully calm herself and sort through the tangled mess of her situation, a deafening crash like a thunderclap outside the window interrupted her thoughts again.
Jiecheng Yuan’s heart jolted. She sprang off the bed and rushed to the window, not caring that she was still wearing only a bath towel. She yanked open the curtain blocking her view, and a scene of chaos on the street greeted her.
“Wha…”
Even from the seventh floor, she could clearly make out Xiwei Li—the girl who’d just been yelling at her—lying in the middle of the road. The noisy insects fell silent at the sudden commotion. On the empty street after midnight, only the pale streetlights illuminated Li’s slender form and the crimson stain slowly spreading beneath her.
Jiecheng Yuan had never seen anything like this before. Her legs gave way, and she fell to the floor. When she tried to get back up, it was as if heavy lead weights were pinning her down.
Unease, terror, helplessness. Real danger had appeared before her without warning. She wasn’t the clumsy but brave Magical Girl from the original story—she was just an ordinary person who’d spent twenty years drifting through an ordinary life. She hadn’t even recovered from the shock of being transported into this world when disaster struck.
“What’s going on? What’s going on? An ambulance, right… an ambulance…”
Jiecheng Yuan muttered to herself in a panic. Bracing one hand on the windowsill, she slowly stood up and stumbled toward the bedside table where her phone was, as though she were walking on cotton.
It was the first time she’d realized her own body could be so uncooperative. Even such a simple movement took her ages.
At least she’d managed to get her phone. The whole series of movements seemed to have drained all her strength. Clutching the phone in one hand, she collapsed onto the floor again, leaned against the bedside table, and pressed her trembling finger to her fingerprint sensor. The screen unlocked with a click.
Beep—beep—beep—
The emergency number was already on the screen. All she had to do now was press the call button…
“I can’t let you make that call just yet, Jiecheng-san.”
An unfamiliar girl’s voice sounded by her ear. A cold hand settled on her wrist. It wasn’t applying much pressure, but it carried an authority she couldn’t resist, slowly pushing down the hand she’d raised—and the phone in it.
Jiecheng Yuan clearly remembered that the front door had been locked. So how had someone appeared behind her without making a sound?
She wanted to turn around and see the girl’s face, but she couldn’t even manage that. All she could make out was a few strands of silver hair hanging down.
“Let’s see what becomes of the kind and upright Jiecheng Yuan when she’s at her worst.”
The voice was so close. The breath against her ear was warm, yet every clearly spoken word sent a chill through her.
Before Jiecheng Yuan could react any further, her world fell into darkness.
When light returned to her vision, the darkness outside had already been chased away by bright sunlight. Instead of the familiar underside of the top bunk in her dorm room, there was that still-unfamiliar ceiling.
She was lying on the floor. The bath towel that should’ve been wrapped around her had fallen beside her, and the wide-open front door groaned on its hinges as the wind blew through it.
Jiecheng Yuan rubbed her eyes and sat up from the floor. Her vision wavered, whether from the mysterious girl’s attack or the summer heat. Then she happened to catch a glimpse of something that made her feel as if she’d been plunged into an ancient ice cavern in the middle of summer.
A twisted design, drawn in bold, dark-red lines, was etched across her abdomen.
An ordinary person might not understand what those lines meant, but she’d cleared the entire game. She knew exactly what their appearance signified: a Magical Girl had cast aside every virtue she should’ve possessed and given herself over to darkness and evil, willingly falling into depravity.
The game called it a “dark fall.” She’d once joked that “evil fall” might’ve been a more fitting name.
But the character she’d transmigrated into—Jiecheng Yuan, the game’s poster girl and its protagonist, complete with a protagonist’s halo—had just fallen to darkness?
