Ran Muqiu had told the taxi driver to turn around immediately, but on the way back, they ran straight into the after-school rush hour and were stuck in traffic for quite a while.
By the time he finally arrived at the school gates, Li Zhu was long gone.
Ran Muqiu let out a sigh of relief, yet felt a faint pang of disappointment. He wasn’t sure where he had gotten the strange confidence that Li Zhu would stay rooted to the spot waiting for him.
It was probably because the image of Li Zhu looking like an abandoned dog before he left had etched itself so deeply into his mind.
After pondering on the spot for a moment, he turned on his heel and headed straight for Twilight.
The last time he came here had also been because of Li Zhu. In the end, he hadn’t accomplished a thing and had ended up getting thoroughly bullied by a bastard for nothing.
Having learned his lesson, and afraid of being stopped by bouncers questioning if he was of age again, he avoided the front entrance and slipped around toward the back alley.
Lady luck seemed to be on his side; it didn’t take him long to locate Li Zhu.
Only, when he found him, Li Zhu was in the middle of getting beaten up.
The one hitting him was a scrawny man with dyed green hair, clad in a leather jacket and black pants—a greasy, lowlife hoodlum at first glance.
The green-haired thug seemed completely smashed. Even as he kicked Li Zhu, his own hands and feet were trembling, his lips twitched erratically, and his face was deathly pale, unable to spit out a single coherent syllable.
Meanwhile, the tall, slender youth had his arms wrapped around his head, curled tightly into a ball on the ground, making no attempt to dodge the strikes.
He put up zero resistance.
He was like a dirty, tattered rag—shoved around, tossed back and forth, and ultimately discarded in an abandoned corner.
It had to be said that Li Zhu’s current pathetic state aligned far better with the image Ran Muqiu had held of the downtrodden “protagonist shou” when he first arrived in this world.
But right now, Ran Muqiu had no time for extraneous thoughts.
He was furious.
Even though they had officially broken off their sugar arrangement, they had still spent time together. In Ran Muqiu’s mind, Li Zhu was not supposed to be treated this way by anyone other than himself!
After all, letting someone else abuse him was a blatant dereliction of his duty as the arrogant school-bully gong.
Besides, judging by how naturally Li Zhu curled up to protect his head, there was no telling how many similar beatings he had endured behind Ran Muqiu’s back.
His mind went completely blank. Without wasting another second thinking, Ran Muqiu charged forward.
For some reason, the moment the green-haired punk saw Ran Muqiu rushing over, he stopped kicking instantly. He cast a terrified glance at Ran Muqiu, pulled back his foot, and scrambled away without a second’s hesitation.
“Stop right there!”
Stamping his feet in rage, Ran Muqiu chased after him for a few steps.
Yet despite being visibly wasted and stumbling with every step, the man scurried off like a frightened rat, vanishing in the blink of an eye.
It was as if he were deathly afraid of him.
Unable to catch him, Ran Muqiu had no choice but to turn back.
Li Zhu lay flat on the pavement, his thin eyelids shut tight. Prominent bruises and scrapes marked his shoulders and elbows, and dark blood seeped through his shirt. He looked entirely devoid of life.
If not for the faint rise and fall of his chest, Ran Muqiu would have thought he had been beaten to death.
Ran Muqiu squatted down beside him, his hands trembling as he reached into his pocket for his phone. But after pulling it out, he remembered the battery was completely drained.
With no other choice, he dropped onto his knees, carefully braced a hand against the boy’s chest, and pressed a finger beneath his nose in an old-fashioned check for breath.
Li Zhu first felt a pair of soft hands resting on him, followed by a familiar, approaching scent.
He couldn’t fathom why Ran Muqiu had returned, nor did he know how much the boy had just witnessed. His mind felt chaotic, yet strangely empty.
He had intended to keep his eyes closed to steady his emotions, but before long, he heard a faint, quiet sniffle.
Apart from the physiological tears wrung out when kissed past his limit, Ran Muqiu had never once cried.
Li Zhu’s heart sank slowly. Unable to hold back any longer, he reached out, caught the hand hovering near his face, and opened his eyes.
Their gazes locked.
Startled, Ran Muqiu flinched. The hand poised beneath the boy’s tall nose bridge trembled, accidentally brushing against his eyelashes.
A heavy silence followed.
“W-what is wrong with you?” Seeing that he wasn’t dead, Ran Muqiu tried to swallow down the urge to cry. But the redness around his eyes wouldn’t fade. Sniffling, his rabbit-like eyes brimming with unshed tears, he scolded, “When someone hits you, don’t you even know how to dodge?”
Low-rent Apartment
The young man lay face-down on the worn wooden sofa in the living room. His shirt had been unbuttoned and peeled back, exposing a lean, well-defined back marked with ugly bruises and bloody gashes of varying sizes. It looked horrifying.
Ran Muqiu sat on his knees beside him, gingerly applying ointment while occasionally freeing a hand to rub at his own eyes.
Rubbing them only made his already-red rims even redder, giving him an utterly pitiful look.
His host looked far too much like an obedient, devoted little wife. After watching from the sidelines for a while, 233 finally couldn’t help chiming in: 【Host, a scumbag gong would never do something like this.】
Ran Muqiu whispered back: ‘I know, but he can’t reach his own back.’
Besides, his persona had shattered into a million pieces in front of Li Zhu ages ago; letting it crumble a little more hardly made a difference now.
What’s more, he had already given up on conquering the protagonist shou and didn’t plan on farming Heartbreak points from him anymore.
Thinking of the Heartbreak Value, Ran Muqiu naturally recalled the system chime from earlier.
Why on earth did that happen?
Ran Muqiu racked his brain, but couldn’t fathom what had triggered the sudden surge in Li Zhu’s Heartbreak Value.
He hadn’t done anything terrible, had he?
He had just politely offered to end their sugar arrangement!
He zoned out for a good while. When he finally snapped back to reality, he noticed Li Zhu had turned his head. Those clear, affectionate, amber-tinted peach blossom eyes were staring unblinkingly at him.
There was no telling how long he had been watching.
In the past, whenever Ran Muqiu was around Li Zhu, he was either plotting ways to act obnoxious or terrified of being exposed for using him as a tool, leaving him on edge the entire time.
Rarely had they shared such a quiet moment without the need to maintain the haughty air of a benefactor or a scumbag bully.
Consequently, this was the first time Ran Muqiu truly took note of his gaze.
He only felt that Li Zhu’s stare was unnervingly intense—as if he wanted to carve Ran Muqiu’s silhouette straight into his soul.
Rattled by the gaze, a faint warmth crept up Ran Muqiu’s cheeks. After a beat, he looked away slightly, trimmed a piece of gauze to size, and pressed it over a wound on the boy’s back.
Having played an intern doctor in a previous world, he possessed a solid grasp of basic wound care and handled the bandages with practiced ease.
Li Zhu’s gaze lingered on the boy’s slightly reddened earlobes before dropping to his hands, which were nervously rummaging through the first-aid kit.
The boy’s arms were slender and pale, with a tiny streak of blood smeared across his wrist.
It had probably brushed against his back.
A faint curve tugged at the corner of Li Zhu’s lips. Taking these hits today had been well worth it.
Moments later, a soft voice floated down from above. “Why do you work at Twilight?”
The boy’s tone was gentle. “Is it because you’re short on money?”
Ran Muqiu wasn’t stupid. Between snooping around Twilight last week and catching him getting assaulted in the back alley today, putting the two together made it easy to guess what kind of work Li Zhu did there.
He seemed to have asked this over text earlier, but Li Zhu hadn’t answered back then.
Now, Li Zhu remained equally silent on the matter. After a beat, he countered with a different question: “Did you really not see the texts?”
Ran Muqiu froze.
The texts again.
He couldn’t help patting the phone in his pocket, growing genuinely curious about what was written in the messages Li Zhu kept bringing up.
“I—I did see them,” he stammered, falling back on his previous excuse while not daring to pull out the dead phone. He mumbled, “I, I just forgot what they said.”
Li Zhu fell silent for a long moment, saying nothing further.
The air pressure around him seemed to plummet.
Squatting beside him, Ran Muqiu studied the sharp contour of the boy’s profile for a bit. A thought struck him, and he ventured tentatively, “Um, if it’s about money, don’t worry. I can actually keep sponsoring you for a while.”
The protagonist shou came from a destitute background. After performing poorly on his high school entrance exam, Nancheng High refused to offer him a scholarship, leaving him in constant financial strain.
Originally, according to the script, after enduring plenty of angst and turmoil, he was supposed to live comfortably. But with a cannon fodder gong like him throwing a wrench into the gears, the romance between the protagonist gong and shou was progressing far slower than intended. The plot point where the “Overbearing School Prince Pampered Him” still seemed a long way off.
Under these circumstances, Ran Muqiu naturally couldn’t just leave him high and dry.
Otherwise, Li Zhu might not even be able to afford his textbook fees next term.
Li Zhu sounded as though he hadn’t understood. “What do you mean by ‘keep sponsoring’?”
Ran Muqiu scratched his head in mild embarrassment and explained, “I mean purely lending a hand while you’re in a tough spot—no strings attached. Because we’re not in that kind of relationship anymore.”
His voice dropped to a barely audible murmur on the final words.
Yet the young man heard every syllable clearly.
The atmosphere plunged straight below freezing.
Li Zhu stared at him for a long moment before turning his face away, pressing his lips into a tight, flat line, lapsing into total silence.
At a complete loss and wondering if he had said the wrong thing again, Ran Muqiu bit his lip, racking his brain for a way to break the heavy quiet.
Distracted, his hands lost their gentle touch. Carelessly, the cotton swab poked right into an inconspicuous, bleeding puncture along the boy’s waist.
【Target [Li Zhuo] Heartbreak Value +5!】
Ran Muqiu: ?
W-w-why is it going up again?
He looked up in panic, only to realize he had reopened Li Zhu’s wound. Startled, he rushed forward to clean it up.
Before he could touch him, however, Li Zhu sat up.
Taking the cotton swab and antiseptic from Ran Muqiu’s hands with a furrowed brow, he didn’t ask for further help, roughly tending to the messy gash on his own.
His movements were nowhere near as gentle or meticulous as Ran Muqiu’s; they were aggressive and harsh, looking excruciatingly painful.
Yet his brow didn’t so much as twitch, as if the battered flesh didn’t belong to him at all.
Ran Muqiu parted his lips: “I—”
Before he could finish.
【Target [Li Zhu] Heartbreak Value +5!】
Ran Muqiu: ???
What is going on?
I didn’t even do anything!
Ran Muqiu panicked completely.
For the first time, he had zero grasp on the mission’s mechanics. His large, dark eyes darted frantically, trying to spot any subtle change in Li Zhu’s expression while desperately reviewing his own actions.
Yet after turning it over and over, all he could muster was:
“I-I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I hurt you just now.”
Li Zhu kept his eyes lowered. “No. It has nothing to do with you.”
Ran Muqiu was left at a loss for words, unsure of where to even place his hands.
Once again, he felt like an absolute idiot. Not only did he lack talent, but his brain wasn’t sharp enough either—no wonder he was stuck playing minor cannon fodder roles forever.
“I haven’t spent a single cent of the money you gave me,” Li Zhu said suddenly.
“Huh?” Ran Muqiu’s mental self-scolding screeched to a halt. He froze. “B-but aren’t you short on cash?”
“Why do you think I’m short on cash?”
Ran Muqiu stared back, completely speechless.
Why? Because the script said so!
‘What’s happening? Is the intel about the protagonist shou being poor a mistake?’ Ran Muqiu called out weakly to the system. ‘Did the main system bug out?’
【Impossible. Initial setting data does not contain errors,】 233 quickly ran a diagnostic check, confirming the system’s baseline data before analyzing: 【However, we cannot rule out the possibility that after the world timeline began, the protagonist shou earned money through other means.】
That’s an option?
Ran Muqiu choked for a moment before fuming internally: ‘How can the World-Hopping Bureau scam people like this?’
If a character possessed such high autonomy, shouldn’t that have been disclosed in the character profile beforehand?
233 agreed: 【Indeed, it is somewhat problematic. I will convey your protest to Headquarters.】
Ran Muqiu: ‘??’
By the time 233 lodged a formal protest with Headquarters, the mission would long be over. There certainly wouldn’t be an answer now, and even if there were, it would be too late.
Ran Muqiu ignored the system for the moment.
Still, upon reflection, when he had run into Li Zhu at Twilight last week, the boy had looked entirely in his element—hardly like someone on his first day.
Could it be that he had been working there for a very long time already?
Ran Muqiu felt an awkward flush creep over him.
He shuddered to think what had happened. If Li Zhu had never been hurting for money in the first place, then his own arrogant, strutting swagger when demanding to keep him as a sugar baby.
Li Zhu must have thought he was utterly obnoxious—a complete degenerate!
“B-but if it wasn’t for the money.” Ran Muqiu stammered, bewildered, “Then why, why did you ever agree to be kept by me?”
“Why?” Li Zhu’s voice dropped low, his hands slowing their movements. “I thought you knew why.”
Ever since enrolling, the slender youth who commanded everyone’s attention—including his own had kept his eyes locked entirely on Li Zhu.
The boy’s motive had seemed clear and naive, his clumsy attempts at seeking attention so transparent they almost made one smile.
Yet did Li Zhu ever need him to work so hard for his attention?
The boy was just a little too silly. Like a kitten chasing its own tail in circles while tangled in yarn, he hadn’t realized that all he had to do was ask; without having to lift another finger, whatever he desired would be handed to him on a silver platter.
Fortunately, just as Li Zhu was on the verge of losing his patience and dropping a hint, Ran Muqiu finally took the initiative and showed up at his door.
Even now, Li Zhu remembered how he looked that evening.
Chin tilted in feigned arrogance, yet so excruciatingly shy he didn’t dare make eye contact. A simple sentence had to be chopped into three stammering parts just to get it out.
When the word “kept” finally slipped from his lips, it was as soft as a mosquito’s hum and before he even finished, his ears had already flushed crimson.
In that singular moment, Li Zhu had felt an overwhelming, dizzying ecstasy. His heartbeat thundered against his ears, threatening to burst from his chest the next second.
How could he possibly have refused?
Only a madman would say no.
Yet without warning, Ran Muqiu’s gaze had drifted toward someone else.
In the way the boy looked at that other person, Li Zhu saw the exact same anticipation and care Ran Muqiu had once reserved solely for him—along with subtle, unfamiliar emotions.
He watched him during class; he watched him between periods. Soon, Ran Muqiu could barely even see Li Zhu anymore.
And now, he didn’t even want to maintain their “arrangement,” asking to revert to “ordinary friends.”
Li Zhu would never allow that to happen.
His expression turned icy bit by bit, his eyelids lowering slightly to conceal the dark hostility swelling in his eyes.
Meanwhile, Ran Muqiu was drowning in profound embarrassment over his unearned self-absorption from months ago. His head steamed with shame; he hadn’t caught Li Zhu’s murmured words, nor had he noticed the creeping darkness in the boy’s eyes.
It took Ran Muqiu two solid minutes to pull himself together.
“It, it’s all my fault.” His ears still dusted with a blush of lingering humiliation, Ran Muqiu hung his head and whispered softly, “Anyway, it’s all over now. I won’t do things like that ever again. You, you can rest assured.”
The figure before him remained silent for a long beat.
Ran Muqiu couldn’t resist sneaking a glance. The moment he looked up, he caught sight of the hand Li Zhu had just uncurled—the pale knuckles bruised with red pressure marks from clenching his fist with extreme force.
“Yeah.” The young man’s tone was completely flat, as though the reaction just now had been nothing more than Ran Muqiu’s imagination. “Fine. Let’s call it off, then.”
Ran Muqiu let out a long sigh of relief, a heavy weight finally lifting from his chest.
Still, the situation was terribly awkward.
Li Zhu’s other injuries were on his abdomen and could easily be handled on his own. The first-aid kit was already in his hands, so squatting here felt entirely useless.
On top of that, Li Zhu exuded an oppressive, low-pressure chill. Watching him, Ran Muqiu was terrified that saying a single wrong word would trigger another inexplicable spike in the Heartbreak Value.
After a brief hesitation, Ran Muqiu rose to his feet.
“Then, I’ll head home first, okay?” Ran Muqiu ventured cautiously. “Will you be alright on your own?”
Li Zhu kept his head lowered, completely silent.
Ran Muqiu threw a few uneasy backward glances his way, but feeling he had no valid reason to linger, he slung his backpack over his shoulders and shuffled reluctantly toward the exit.
The very instant the metal gate was pulled open, a loud, metallic clatter erupted behind him.
Startled, Ran Muqiu whipped his head around.
The young man who had just been resting calmly on the sofa had somehow tumbled straight onto the hard floor, causing his freshly bandaged wounds to seep fresh blood once again.
His lips were pale and cold sweat beaded on his forehead. Yet despite the pain, he bit down hard on his back teeth, refusing to let out so much as a whimper.
The system notifications, however, chimed with frantic intensity—a sharp, jarring contrast to the boy’s stony silence:
【Target [Li Zhuo] Heartbreak Value +5!】
【Target [Li Zhuo] Heartbreak Value +5!】
【Target [Li Zhuo] Heartbreak Value +5!】
Ran Muqiu: “?”