Mir couldn’t have cared less about Xia Ye’s attitude toward him.
Generous soul that he was, he split the two thousand he’d borrowed and handed her fifteen hundred outright.
He wanted her to pick up some daily necessities—when she’d arrived, the only thing she’d brought was a single photo of her and her family.
But it was already late, and after the two of them ate, they bought nothing and simply headed back to turn in for the night.
Using the key Erin had given her, Xia Ye unlocked the door to her room.
She didn’t bother to take in the place she’d be living from now on; she walked straight past the kitchen and the bathroom and made for the bedroom.
The girl’s resolve wasn’t as sturdy as she let on.
She’d kept up the cold-beauty front the whole time she was around Mir, and now that she was finally alone, she couldn’t hold the feelings back any longer.
With no dignity whatsoever, she flung herself onto the bare, unmade bed.
She pulled the family photo out from where she’d kept it close and broke into heaving sobs.
The pain of losing her family could no longer be pushed down—she had only refused to let anyone see how breakable she really was.
Mercifully, the apartment was well soundproofed, so Mir next door shouldn’t have caught the sound of her crying.
Before long she’d worn herself out with tears, and a full day’s exhaustion came crashing down on her fragile nerves.
The girl drifted off clutching a photo—a warm family portrait that could now only be used to remember the dead.
If only this were all a dream…
Go on and cry.
You’ll feel better once it’s out.
Mir, who by rights should have been next door, appeared beside her and drew the blanket up over her, and on his way out he didn’t forget to ease the door softly shut.
Dummy.
Remember to lock the door before you start crying.
He’d only come to drop off a blanket—he hadn’t expected to catch her at her most fragile.
Everyone’s got a fragile side.
Back in his own room, Mir pressed a hand to his chest.
A stab of blinding white light flashed by.
The puppet boy was gone, and standing in his place was a silver-haired girl who looked about ten years old.
She stood only around a meter thirty, silver-white hair spilling to her shoulders.
Together with a pair of pink eyes, it made her look as innocent and endearing as a harmless little white rabbit.
A plain white dress took nothing away from how sweet she looked; she seemed for all the world like a little angel who’d wandered into the mortal world by mistake.
Now that he’d shifted into his child form, Mir didn’t get up to anything strange with himself—after all, no matter how you sliced it, getting any funny ideas about your own body would be plain weird. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Shifting into the child form also gave Mir’s Psi-Spirit Energy an enormous boost, though that wasn’t the reason he switched in the first place.
The main reason he became like this was to keep his Psi-Spirit Energy from running wild.
If he kept his true, child-form body sealed away inside the puppet for too long, then past a certain deadline he’d be forcibly reverted to it—and his power would discharge on its own, its level spiking to a terrifying tier.
Three years ago, freshly arrived in this world, Mir had gone berserk exactly once.
There were no casualties, but the incident still caused a massive uproar; luckily Her Majesty the Empress smoothed it over in time.
It was precisely because of that rampage three years ago that Erin discovered Mir’s true nature.
Ever since, Mir set aside two hours every day to spend in his child form—but he never used his sleeping hours to “let the girl out for air.” When he slept, he generally stayed in puppet form.
The building was made of no ordinary materials, but there was no guaranteeing some person with a bizarre Psi-Spirit ability wouldn’t come barging in—and then those animals over in the News Department would run wild with it:
“SHOCKING!
Academy Dean’s Son Secretly Harboring a Little Girl in His Own Dorm!”
“TERRIFYING!
Student Performs a Live On-the-Spot Transformation into a Little Girl!”
Just picturing it was horrifying, wasn’t it!
At this point someone might ask: why doesn’t Mir just live in his child form full-time?
The main reason isn’t anything like male pride.
It’s that the moment he shifts into the child form, it isn’t only his body that changes—his mind starts going childish too.
The troublemaker core is still there, sure, but he doesn’t like it.
“Mmn~ I’m hungry.” The little girl pouted and rubbed her tummy.
Most of the meal she’d just eaten had gone toward fueling the puppet; this smaller body hadn’t gotten much out of it.
But at this hour the cafeteria was already closed, and she hadn’t stocked any snacks.
So she decided to go find Erin.
Puppet-Mir would never have made this choice.
For starters, there was the little matter of the pepper he’d dumped in the coffee—no telling whether Erin had drunk that pot yet.
If she had, then going to her now would be nothing short of delivering himself up for a spanking.
For another thing—was it really safe for a little kid to be wandering around alone in the dead of night without something strange happening?
(The pure-hearted author means the game Night Wander here; I know some of you were thinking otherwise.)
But hunger had already taken the wheel of Mir’s mind, and she couldn’t be bothered with such trivialities.
What could possibly matter more than filling her stomach?
Rising onto her tiptoes, she pulled a set of red children’s clothes from the wardrobe and changed into them with practiced ease, then took a pair of little red leather boots down from the rack and tugged them on.
Little Mir—launching out! Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“Honestly, sending a guy out to buy drinks in the dead of night.” At a vending machine, a boy was struggling to jam his money into that skinny little slot.
“That jerk’s a crab and he still won’t throw scissors! If I’d known, I never would’ve settled it with rock-paper-scissors.” The boy griped away about his roommate’s unreasonableness.
A cold breeze brushed the back of his neck, and he shivered.
“It’s the middle of the night—there wouldn’t happen to be some Spirit Race guy out here with nothing better to do than scare people, would there?” The empty little lane left the boy’s legs feeling weak, and before he knew it he was glancing around him.
Then he spotted a red figure in the distance, walking toward him.
“The heck? What is that?”
The boy’s instinct was to bolt, but his money was already stuck in the machine.
If he ran now, wouldn’t he just be handing a freebie to that suspected Spirit Race thing?
The red figure was getting closer and closer.
“Fine, let’s just see what the heck you are!” The boy gritted his teeth, picking a drink with one hand while keeping his eyes on the red unidentified object.
But just as he was about to make out what the figure really was—
Fwmp!
“What the—?! It vanished?!” the boy yelped in shock.
“What are you? Get out here! I know you’re there!” What kind of power was that?
Teleportation?
Spatial transfer?
Or just plain speed?
The boy felt like he was panicking hard.
He wasn’t the victim of a terrorist attack, was he?
And on academy grounds, no less!
Five minutes passed.
No one appeared, and the boy—frozen in place and braced for a fight—looked exactly like an idiot.
Looked like the thing had left.
The boy let his nerves relax.
Still, that thing had been genuinely terrifying.
With lingering dread, he tightened his grip on his drink.
Wait?
His drink?
The boy stared at the drink clutched in his hand, face full of horror.
He distinctly remembered still standing at the vending machine picking one out—so how was the drink already in his hand?