After the apocalypse, everyone who had ever been beaten up by Jiang Mian came to understand one truth: during a fight, you absolutely must not get close to Boss Jiang when she is smiling.
That was because this big sister’s trigger was different from other people’s. The angrier she got, the brighter her smile became, and then, with that radiant smile on her face, she would beat her opponent into a pile of mush.
Especially after a fight ended, the sight of her face covered in blood while she smiled brilliantly was beyond perverted. It was practically enough to stop a baby from crying at night.
Unfortunately, this piece of common knowledge that was widely known in the apocalypse was something Chen Yufei and the others at present knew nothing about. They continued to look at the smiling Jiang Mian with disdain as she kept moving closer to them.
Watching Jiang Mian slowly walk over to the table that had been completely trashed, she leaned against the nearby railing as if her whole body had no bones. She glanced at the garbage on the table, then suddenly stretched out her index finger and crooked it at Chen Yufei.
Seeing this, Chen Yufei could not hold back a snort of laughter. “Heh, what is it, you still want to hit me? Let me tell you…”
Before the girl could finish speaking, she suddenly felt a sharp pain on her scalp.
“Ah!”
With a shrill scream, the remaining four girls stared in shock as Jiang Mian grabbed Chen Yufei’s freshly done hair, which had cost a thousand yuan, and rubbed it back and forth across the greasy table.
“Aaahh, Jiang Mian, you bitch #$%^&……”
After being scrubbed seven or eight times in a row, Chen Yufei, who had no strength to resist at all, could not help but start spewing filthy curses.
But the more loudly she shouted, the more enthusiastically Jiang Mian scrubbed.
It was only then that the other four finally reacted and hurriedly rushed forward to rescue Chen Yufei.
They had never known that Jiang Mian, who looked so gentle and weak and who usually acted as if running eight hundred meters would take half her life, had somehow become so strong. The four of them together could not pry Chen Yufei out of her grip.
“Aah, wuu wuu wuu…”
With her hair being yanked so painfully and her nose choking on plenty of chili oil, Chen Yufei, who had been hurling insults just moments ago, was already wailing in agony.
No one knew how long the scrubbing went on. Maybe Chen Yufei’s pleas for mercy sounded too pleasant to the ear, or maybe Jiang Mian saw that the tabletop had been wiped much cleaner and looked far more pleasing to the eye. In the end, she finally showed “great mercy” and let go.
At this point, Chen Yufei no longer had even a trace of her earlier arrogance. Her right cheek, which had been rubbed repeatedly against the tabletop, was flushed bright red. Her scalp throbbed with pain and swelling. Her once beautiful head of long, curly hair was now completely stuck together with chili oil and broth. Even the dress she was wearing was splattered with sauce, and her entire body reeked strongly of skewers and crayfish.
Seeing this, Jiang Mian blew away the strands of hair stuck to her hand, her expression innocent and pure. “Oh dear, I was really too careless. I was not paying attention and actually mistook your hair for a rag and used it. But…”
“Classmate Chen, you are such a good person. You definitely would not mind, right? We are friends, after all…”
Jiang Mian returned every single word to her, using exactly the same tone as Chen Yufei had earlier. Yet for some reason, when those words came out of Jiang Mian’s mouth, they carried an even stronger sense of mockery.
“Ahhhhhh! I am going to kill you! I will definitely kill…”
Once she snapped back to her senses, Chen Yufei flew into a rage, screaming shrilly without pause.
In all her years of growing up, she had never been humiliated like this before.
She would definitely make that bitch Jiang Mian pay the price.
“Bang!”
In her fury, Chen Yufei was just about to charge at Jiang Mian without caring about anything else and give her a proper beating when she saw something utterly unbelievable.
The girl who had always been soft and easy to bully wore the very same smile as before—the curve of her lips did not change in the slightest.
She casually clenched her fist and smashed the railing, snapping it clean off…
Completely… off…
That was stainless steel.
“…Ah, umm, uh, kyah!”
“…”
Seeing this scene, Chen Yufei came to a dead stop on the spot. Her eyes bulged wide in an instant, and the scream stuck in her throat braked too hard, abruptly turning into a sound like a duck being strangled. Then she fell completely silent, quiet as a chicken.
Only after the noise disappeared did Jiang Mian lift her head again with a smiling expression. Her pitch-black eyes made the five people present feel as though they had been locked onto by the Grim Reaper’s scythe, to the point that they could barely even breathe.
“Oh dear, I am really too stupid. How did I go and accidentally break the railing again? I really am far too careless!”
Jiang Mian’s voice sounded sweet and soft, gentle and tender, as if she were acting coquettish toward someone.
Yet the sight before them, Lin Daiyu uprooting a weeping willow by brute force[1]Lin Daiyu is a classic female character from Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels. She is traditionally associated with fragility, delicacy, and refined beauty, … Continue reading jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1657301_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1657301_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, made it impossible for anyone present to associate it with coquettishness.
Hearing this, the five people in front of her, including Chen Yufei who was drenched in sauce, all swallowed stiffly, their expressions frozen.
‘Ahhh, Mom, there is a monster!’
All five screamed this in their hearts at the same time, yet not the slightest hint showed on their faces.
“But no one should mind, right? We are friends, after all!”
Jiang Mian repeated herself.
Hearing those words again, the five people present froze for a moment, then hurriedly nodded one after another, afraid that if they were even a second too slow, the fate of that snapped stainless steel pillar would be theirs.
“Just knew you were the best!”
Jiang Mian smiled until her brows and eyes curved sweetly.
She had been smiling like this just moments ago when she grabbed Chen Yufei’s hair and used it to wipe the table. So when they saw that same smile again, the five girls could not help but shudder all at once.
“Oh right, speaking of which, this might be a bit embarrassing, but I am a little short on cash right now. So could you return the money you owed me from before?”
The words sounded exactly the same as before. In the past, when Jiang Mian said them, they would only make the girls laugh, and even make them want to vent their anger from losing at games on her. But now, hearing Jiang Mian say them with a smile, the girls present felt an overwhelming urge to immediately take out all the money in their wallets and hand it back to her.
One of the girls did not have any cash and could only transfer money by phone. But because she had not added Jiang Mian on WeChat and did not dare to ask to add her now, she was so anxious she was on the verge of tears.
In the end, after scraping everything together, they actually managed to recover one thousand five hundred yuan of the debt.
So hungry that she could barely stand knowing straight, Jiang Mian looked at the money in her hand and smiled in satisfaction.
“Thanks! As for me, your big sister here is going to eat now. I know my roommates have always been the most well-mannered and the cleanest people, right? I do not mind you using my table, but since you used it, you should help clean it up afterward, shouldn’t you? Leaving it like this really does not look good. When I come back later, I hope to see this spot, this spot, and this spot all restored to how they were before, exactly the same as originally. I believe you can do it, right?”
Jiang Mian smiled until her eyes narrowed into crescents.
Fail to do it, and die.
The five people instantly grasped the unspoken meaning behind Jiang Mian’s words and hurriedly nodded in perfect unison.
Only then did Jiang Mian clutch the money and walk out of the dormitory with complete satisfaction.
Looks like her roommates were still pretty reasonable after all.
She really liked people who reasoned things out.
Little did she know that, after watching her head downstairs and out of sight, the five people in the dorm who had just narrowly escaped death immediately collapsed onto the floor. Trembling, they huddled together and then burst into loud sobs, with Chen Yufei, who had been the most arrogant earlier, crying the loudest of all.
“Did you see the post on the Evergreen Tree forum? Someone posted tonight that Zhai Feiyang from the neighboring Finance and Trade Vocational College—Lin Qian’s boot-licking backup—is planning to confess downstairs in our girls’ dorm. To Jiang Mian from your dorm, no less. Who knows what he’s thinking, you guys…”
The girl from the neighboring dorm did not even knock. She shoved the door open in a rush and charged in, only to be stunned by the sight of the people inside looking as if their entire families had just died.
Her revelation caused the crying inside the room to halt abruptly. For a moment, none of the five even cared who was doing the confessing. A single thought flashed through all their minds at the same time.
Confessing to that freakishly strong King Kong?
How desperate do you have to be?
They respected him as a real man.
Wuwuwuwu…
*
Unaware that such news had spread after she left, Jiang Mian headed straight for the Third Cafeteria, the one closest to the dormitory building, the moment she got the money, without the slightest hesitation.
“Hello, everyone. I am Xiao Ni. Today, Xiao Ni is taking everyone to eat at the Third Cafeteria of our Yanjing Film Academy, the place famous for producing dark cuisine. Those so-called dark dishes that went viral online before, like mooncakes stir-fried with chili peppers or pomegranate stir-fried with green beans, all came from the Third Cafeteria of our Yanjing Film Academy. So today, let Xiao Ni show everyone what kind of bizarre new dishes the legendary Third Cafeteria has come up with!”
Holding up her phone, a girl in a denim mini skirt stood at the entrance of the cafeteria, smiling brightly as she livestreamed.
Nowadays, all kinds of livestreaming platforms were springing up like bamboo shoots after the rain.
And traffic was exactly what students at Yanjing Film Academy needed most. As a result, nearly every student currently enrolled ran a livestream or filmed the occasional vlog.
Whether it actually gained them followers or how many didn’t really matter—no matter how small the payoff, it was still something.
This food blogger, Xiao Ni, was one of them. Relying on food-hunting trips around the university town, she had gained a bit of fame.
At first, viewers were still joking around with the food blogger in the livestream. But very quickly, sharp-eyed netizens caught sight of Jiang Mian standing not far behind Xiao Ni, recharging her meal card.
The girl had a slender, tall figure. Her fair, delicate skin looked as though it had been nourished with milk, so tender it seemed it could be broken by a breath. Her eyes were like the mountain mist of an early autumn morning, carrying within them a sorrow that could not be dispelled. One look at her made people uncontrollably want to place all the best things in the world before her, just to coax a smile from her face.
With just that one glance, huge numbers of netizens went crazy in the bullet comments, furiously spamming titles like “beauty” and even “fairy.”
The commotion among the viewers naturally caught the attention of the food blogger, Xiao Ni.
She turned her head to take a look. Sure enough, she was beautiful.
She did not feel jealous. After all, there were far too many beauties in the entertainment industry. If she wanted to make a living in this line in the future, jealousy was something she could never afford.
Instead, she could take advantage of the opportunity to ride on the beauty’s popularity and, at the same time, draw more people into her livestream.
While she was still lost in these various schemes, Jiang Mian’s side had already finished recharging the meal card, and she took off toward the cafeteria at the speed of a hundred-meter sprint.
Seeing this, the girl in the denim skirt hurriedly followed after her.
Jiang Mian was too fast. By the time Xiao Ni arrived, the other girl was already holding a tray and standing at the very front of the line.
Because Jiang Mian’s looks were far too outstanding, the livestream’s bullet comments were basically all focused on discussing her.
[Beauty, beauty! I wonder what kind of food a beauty likes. Does it match my taste? If a married couple cannot eat the same food in the future, that is not good for the relationship.]
[The one above, what are you thinking? Someone bring some yellow pee and wake him up.]
[I keep feeling like this beauty is pretty, sure, but she also looks kind of familiar.]
[Stop right there. Fairies do not eat food. Fairies only drink dew. I bet this pretty sister will definitely only eat cucumbers, leafy greens, and tomatoes. That keeps her figure and improves her complexion.]
“Auntie, hello. I want one serving of braised pork knuckle!”
Bullet comments: ?
“…And this, this, this, and that one. Oh, this stir-fried oranges with chili peppers and durian stewed with eggs are fifty percent off. Give me two servings of every dish. And rice, give me one jin (1 kg) first. If it is not enough, I will add more. Thank you, Auntie!”
Coming from the apocalypse and having gone a long time without eating proper food, Jiang Mian enthusiastically ordered dishes one after another. Smelling the aroma of the food, she felt like her saliva was about to start flowing.
Bullet comments: ???
References[+]
The image of “Lin Daiyu uprooting a weeping willow by brute force” is a well-known Chinese internet meme and rhetorical exaggeration, used to create sharp contrast between an appearance of extreme softness and an act of overwhelming physical strength.
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