What kind of dream is the most terrifying?
Being hunted by ghosts and monsters?
Dreaming of the passing of a loved one or friend?
Those can jolt a person awake in a cold sweat, only to wake into reality and realize it was just a dream.
Compared to them, though, a dream that endlessly repeats some utterly meaningless content is far more tormenting.
Like dreaming of playing, over and over, a MOBA match with no plot whatsoever—or of spacing out in a stretch of pure darkness, nothing happening, no telling how much time had passed.
Because the memory in her mind was almost a blank sheet, there was no association to carry the dream anywhere afterward, and so no images at all, and no lucky business of a dream restoring her memories.
That was where a dream almost entirely without memory came from, and even after waking, that spiritually-tormenting queasiness still lingered.
Even without understanding last night’s sensation, it planted, in preliminary fashion, a craving for memory in the girl’s heart—like a starving person’s craving for food.
Beyond that, there was also…
“Gurgle~”
“Is that a fart?” Mi Xiaoliu asked, puzzled, rubbing her uncomfortable belly.
“No.
How could a girl’s fart possibly be discovered by someone?” Sasha explained.
“Master, please remember how you feel right now—this is called being hungry, and it’s because you ate nothing this morning or last night that you feel this way.”
Beyond that, there was also a very real, gnawing hunger.
There had simply been too much for Sasha to teach yesterday—the use of the faucet, brushing teeth, washing her face, and so on—all of which had to be guided step by step like teaching a baby, and in the rush the matter of filling her stomach had gotten forgotten.
“Mm.
I’ll remember it.” Clutching her belly, Mi Xiaoliu nodded earnestly.
Eating = spending money.
No money = can’t eat = hungry belly.
“There’s a bun shop at the corner up ahead of you, Master.
Meat buns cost one-fifty, plain buns one.
At your appetite, breakfast only needs two yuan of plain buns—but seeing as you ate nothing last night either, you can spend four.
I’d suggest you walk faster, Master, since it’s nearly time for the bell.”
“Mm.”
Everyone she met on the way to school made a wide berth around her the moment they spotted the badge on her chest.
Some shops even shut their just-opened doors again as she passed.
If she lingered anywhere a moment too long, certain short-tempered types unafraid of danger would even point a weapon straight at her and tell her to keep her distance.
Under such conditions, she naturally never got to buy breakfast as she’d hoped.
“This is awful…
How can these people be like this?
Don’t tell me Master is going to keep starving to death and reviving again…”
“Starving to death and reviving?”
Still no memory came back to her, but she could feel it definitely wasn’t anything good.
“Mm.
Master’s superpower is Self-Healing—only it’s not quite like normal self-healing.” Sasha seemed reluctant to bring the matter up.
“More to the point, what Master should be worried about is what to do next.
This city doesn’t have a single person Master knows.”
“How do I get money?”
“That’s a complicated question…
A child Master’s age usually gets money from their parents, and no proper place is willing to hire child labor.”
“Parents?”
“Master’s parents died when Master was seven,” Sasha answered.
“Oh.”
Seemed to be another bad thing, but the feeling it brought wasn’t as sharp as that line just now about starving to death and reviving.
“Move, move!”
Rounding the corner, she could hear, at very close range diagonally ahead, a girl shouting anxiously.
From this distance, unless something changed, Mi Xiaoliu—who’d already stepped out with her right foot—was about to collide with her the very next second.
A sense of déjà vu, coming from the non-common-sense memory she’d drawn in that ten-percent chance yesterday.
In her memory, someone had taken her to secretly read a coming-of-age romance manga, in which the first encounter of the male and female leads happened via a corner collision—and it taught the reader how to handle such an event.
In the 0.1 second before the imminent crash, Mi Xiaoliu thought at light speed with a brain plugged into the shared Malphite network, making Malphite players the world over stall for a beat.
Going by that manga’s plot, the girl at the corner ought to have a piece of bread clamped in her mouth.
0.2 seconds—and a red-haired girl with a single ponytail tied at the back of her head suddenly appeared.
Mi Xiaoliu recognized her at a glance as the girl who sat in the seat in front of her.
With barely a single day of memory, she remembered that day’s people quite deeply.
There was, sure enough, a piece of bread clamped in the girl’s mouth—exactly like in the manga.
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In her mind, Sasha voiced her bafflement at how a red-haired single-ponytail girl could shout out loud while holding that bread-in-mouth pose.
Mi Xiaoliu imitated the coming-of-age manga she’d read at some point—
Sidestepping the girl’s charge at the last possible distance, she swiftly stuck out a leg.
The girl who’d dared to sprint against the flow and wreak havoc on the traffic was instantly sent sprawling like a dog.
She looked rather furious.
The heroine in that manga had seemed pretty furious at the time too.
“We’re done for!
Master, what are you doing?!
Run—we can’t afford the medical bills!” Sasha panicked.
Only Sasha didn’t seem to have recognized this girl as the one who sat in front of Mi Xiaoliu—but this wasn’t the kind of thing she could run from for long.
“Don’t play dumb!
Did you trip me on purpose?”
The single-ponytail girl wasn’t hurt, only her clothes scuffed a bit.
The moment the break came, the girl who sat in front of Mi Xiaoliu marched right up, pinned her against the wall, and started demanding answers—not even minding the badge on Mi Xiaoliu’s chest that symbolized danger, which had only been slapped on for refusing the physical anyway.
If it wasn’t on purpose, why trip her and then run?
Yesterday you touched her braid, and after that touched her nose…
How could this shrimp barely taller than her be pulling this obnoxious little-kid stunt to get her attention?
Amid her anger there was also a touch of secret pleasure.
Boy or girl, when someone learns they’re liked—even if that someone isn’t their type—the heart still sneaks a bit of smugness at having its charm affirmed.
At bottom, though, she was angry.
If this brain-dead kid hadn’t stuck out a foot and tripped her, she wouldn’t now be stuck standing in the hallway with him as punishment for fifty minutes on top of the forty-five-minute class.
Perhaps the wall-pin was too suggestive a pose; everyone by the windows who could see the hallway turned their attention this way, drawing others to lean over and look too.
Someone even let out a “woooo,” forcing the single-ponytail girl to step back, flushing, and act as if nothing had happened.
“On purpose?” Mi Xiaoliu was puzzled.
The four-thousand-yuan common sense she’d bought didn’t include the meaning of the phrase “on purpose.”
“Master, apologize,” said Sasha.
“Apologize?” Mi Xiaoliu turned the new word over.
“Mm.
Say, ‘I’m sorry,'” came the simple explanation.
Mi Xiaoliu did as told, facing the single-ponytail girl.
“Say, ‘I’m sorry.'”
Single-ponytail: “???”
She’d never in her life seen anyone this brazen.
Sasha: “…”
“What’s going on?” A pair of hands settled on the single-ponytail girl’s shoulders from behind—the bespectacled blonde girl who’d sat in the window seat yesterday.
She stood a full 1.75 meters (about 5’9″), always holding her chin high and proud, an ampleness at her chest.
Her skin was somewhat dark, and a headband boldly pressed the hair at her brow back, confidently baring her whole face, forehead included.
And her features happened to be able to carry off exactly that hairstyle.
“This person touched my braid and…
my nose yesterday, and today on the way to school he stuck out a leg and tripped me—that’s why I was late,” the single-ponytail girl accused, pointing at Mi Xiaoliu as though she’d found a backer.
“All right, all right, don’t stoop to his level.
He’s just a thirteen-year-old little kid.” Smiling, the blonde girl pushed her toward the classroom, murmuring in her ear, “Maybe he does this because he likes you.
Kids love playing the ‘pick on the one you like to get their attention’ game—don’t stoop to his level.”
Things like this she’d been through plenty in her elementary and middle school days.
“Kind of gross.
Brats are the worst.”
“Would you find it gross if it were a handsome guy?”
“If it were Yiwen, I wouldn’t.”
“…”
“Maybe he’s just a plain old defective,” someone cut in out of nowhere.
It was the strange girl who sat in the far back corner.
One hand propping up her cheek, not even looking this way—purple short hair, her looks not fully visible, but her face was passably ordinary, with the hunched-back habit a lot of students have.
Standing, she’d be perhaps a touch over 1.6 meters (about 5’3″), but only a touch.
Since yesterday, no one had spoken to her, in class or out—an intensely solitary girl.
The reason she was called strange was that, even during class, she kept a pair of sunglasses on her face that all but completely covered its upper half.
Everyone except the transfer students, Mi Xiaoliu included, couldn’t help sneaking a glance at those sunglasses.
As she spoke, the whole class went nearly silent, unable to resist glancing at the sunglasses on her face again, as if to confirm she had them on properly.
The situation made her frown irritably, curses hovering on the tip of her tongue, on the verge of spilling out.
“I just caught it out of the corner of my eye.”
She pushed the sunglasses before her eyes deeper up her nose.
“Another defective.”
Pitying looks converged on Mi Xiaoliu, even though the girl in the sunglasses hadn’t explained to them just where this “defect” lay.
To state to someone’s face that they were a defective, the way the girl in the sunglasses had, was already a deeply rude thing to do.
Unable to make sense of their expressions or words, Mi Xiaoliu went back to her seat, and accidentally knocked her ballpoint pen off.
Instinctively she reached to catch it, but her left hand didn’t seem quite so sharp.
From her left, a hand shot out and, reacting fast, caught the pen for her.
Which was how Mi Xiaoliu discovered that the deskmate to her left, absent yesterday, had come to class today.
Somewhat long white hair, grey eyes.
Dressed in a thin white-and-black casual outfit, though the temperature outside was only a little over ten degrees (fifties in Fahrenheit).
A very pretty-looking boy.
“Hey.
I’m Yiwen.” He lay across his desk, one cheek in close contact with the desktop, and flashed Mi Xiaoliu a radiant smile that, in the sunlight streaming through the window, looked especially dazzling—as if the sunlight had been born for the sole purpose of setting him off.
Like an angel.
His voice was somewhat feminine, but you could still tell it was a boy’s, and it didn’t sound like a deliberately lowered pitch.
“Here you go.
A pen with its clip snapped off falls awfully easily.”
To a student, the clip on a pen cap exists to be snapped off.
The boy called Yiwen sat up straight and handed the pen back to Mi Xiaoliu, in the process letting one see the rows of crib notes printed on his cheek—the ones that had originally been printed on his desk.
“Mm.” Mi Xiaoliu nodded and took the black pen sheathed in a red casing.