It took Ji Shu nearly a week to complete all her math notes.
She used a new note-taking app, combining markdown syntax with mind maps. After an initial organization, she gradually transferred all her past exam errors into the notes. Once everything was synced across devices, she finally felt at ease enough to start her homework while occasionally refreshing her email.
In her inbox, she found a mass email from the student council containing the musical theater program list, along with a beta access code for a new version of the memo app she used.
Ji Shu downloaded and browsed the program list, settling on a few plays that were in English and had simple background storylines. She also logged in on the web to download the beta version of memo.
The app’s developer seemed to be a newcomer. After Ji Shu had purchased the app outright from the software market, she had provided some suggestions for improvement. Previously, the developer had been in touch via email to discuss the details. This time, he sent her the beta code for the new version along with several supporting projects.
After replying with a thank-you email, he immediately sent back a link to his developer interface and his LINE contact, expressing a desire to keep in touch.
It felt a little like a sales pitch.
Out of courtesy, Ji Shu added him on LINE. As soon as she refreshed, he accepted her request and promptly sent several independent projects along with a detailed user guide.
Before she could even extract the zip files, her phone started receiving multiple new friend requests.
She was a bit surprised.
…Among them was a friend request from Xie Zhoulin.
His profile picture was still the default gray. If it weren’t for the staggering number of followers displayed, she might have thought it was an impersonator’s fake account.
She swiped to accept. While she was typing a greeting, a pre-prepared message from him appeared almost immediately:
【Once you’ve chosen your group for World Music Appreciation, you can submit it here directly. I may not always check email. If you haven’t made a choice yet, I can also send you the current group rehearsal statistics for reference.】
Ji Shu exhaled quietly.
Xie Zhoulin mentioned nothing else.
She glanced at the time, already 12:30 a.m. She had been ready to sleep, but the student council chair was still diligently working at this hour. She couldn’t leave him hanging, so she organized her backup selections and sent them over.
Xie Zhoulin quickly responded, sending the detailed theater tour schedule for her chosen programs and the list of enrolled members from her class. He also informed her of the library’s yearbook section opening hours.
The preparation was meticulous, and Ji Shu felt a surge of gratitude.
She sent a thank-you sticker and added a message: 【Thanks for your hard work.】
After a while, the other party’s status finally showed “read,” but there was no further reply.
Ji Shu went through the rest of the friend requests one by one. Many of them had tracked her LINE ID from posts on the forum. Plenty of people straightforwardly commented on her bravery. Some invited her to join the dodgeball club from the sports society, but she politely declined each offer.
The girl from this afternoon’s music appreciation class was among them.
She was a sports-specialist student from Campus C named Cen Xuan. Soon after enrolling, she was selected for the national track and field team. Outside of training, she liked to try other sports, dodgeball being one of them. She excitedly invited Ji Shu to join the dodgeball training team she organized, painting grand dreams of winning the dodgeball gold at the next school sports meet.
Ji Shu declined: 【Sorry, I’m actually not interested in dodgeball.】
She didn’t dare explain the context behind the video, but the answer was truthful nonetheless. The girl, disappointed, sent a sticker of a crying puppy.
After turning down the request, Ji Shu’s thoughts shifted, and she opened the campus forum.
The Flandres campus forum was only accessible to Flandres students. Each ID corresponded to a unique student number, visible only through the user’s own or the administrator’s backend. Even after graduation, the account remained active for life. Therefore, there was no possibility of fake accounts or sockpuppet posts.
Upon entering the page, a thread with a bright red title immediately stung her eyes.
【The Young Duke Got Spilled Wine on by an Audacious Unknown Special-Admission Student in the Cafeteria!? Pictures & Witnesses】
Ji Shu checked the date, it was from last year. At the time, it had caused quite a stir. The post had over a thousand replies, and for some reason, it had recently resurfaced.
She clicked on the photos in the post. She saw the girl standing stubbornly with her back to the camera. Lu Mingxi, several heads taller than her, leaned back on a chair, legs crossed, chin raised, looking at her. A few uniformed followers anxiously wiped the wine from his clothes. The crowd formed a circle around them, the contrast between the numbers of people making the girl seem like she was standing against the entire world.
Soon, more photos of the girl’s face were uploaded.
Ji Shu scrolled down the comments.
【She offended the Young Duke, now she’s doomed】
【Using such an old-fashioned approach to get close, is she stupid? A special-admission student wants to get near the Duke family, how many lives does she think she has to risk?】
【Her face is still innocent-looking, but her mind is sneaky】
Ji Shu didn’t want to read any of it. She flipped through more than ten pages, eventually skipping ahead. As time passed, the style of the comments began to change.
【Report! Today I saw Jiang Zhaoming give that special-admission student flowers again, same as always, a ridiculously expensive Dewdrop Rose, and she threw it in the trash without even looking!】
【Never thought this day would come last year, yet she actually got close to him. Why wasn’t I the one spilling the wine that day in the cafeteria, grrr】
【Daydreaming. In all these years, the Young Duke has only ever been to the cafeteria that one day, and just happened to run into her】
【First time seeing the Young Duke chase someone so seriously, huh? Every month, an air-shipped fresh rose without fail, even digging up her background, learning she was bullied before, and making things right for her…】
Ji Shu suddenly felt short of breath and didn’t want to look anymore.
If this was the love story of the male and female leads, then she was just a catalyst in their path. The male lead had to torment her to prove his devotion to the female lead in order to win her heart.
…How ridiculous. Her painful memories and past had actually become part of someone else’s campus romance. Maybe by graduation season, it would even be recorded in the yearbook, blessed by the entire school.
Ji Shu exited the thread.
Scrolling further down, most of the trending posts were about the student council heads. Things like Xie Zhoulin winning another gold medal in a math competition, placing in the top three of a city tennis tournament, or taking first in a piano competition, it was all there, but there was no gossip or scandal about him.
Most of the comments simply marveled at how extraordinary he was.
【Crazy. Is there anything he’s not good at? Academics, sports, arts, he maxes out every field. What window did God even leave open for him!?】
【Recently, the Democratic Party election has been a hot topic. His mom is on TV giving speeches all the time. Too bad I’m not of voting age yet.】
【My mom’s in Parliament. She hasn’t said it outright, but the implication is that the next Democratic Party leader is a foregone conclusion.】
The other hot threads were about the remaining two council heads, Chi Yaoxing and his older sister Chi Nianxing.
Chi Nianxing was a year ahead of everyone else. She decided to pursue the arts in her first year of high school and went abroad for an exchange program in her second year to work as a model. She represented several high-end luxury brands, and Lotus even collaborated with her. At a young age, she had already appeared on the covers of several top fashion magazines. She was now developing her career in the southern hemisphere at Lays, aiming to reach even higher levels in the fashion industry.
Compared to this internationally recognized model, the rest of the Chi family maintained a remarkably low profile.
Their mother was the current director of Landon’s National Security Bureau, responsible for the country’s critical information security affairs. Their father was one of the founders of a rising IT company, focused on artificial intelligence and large language model research. With rapid technological advancement, his wealth had climbed to the top tiers of the industry within a few short years. Both parents rarely appeared on front-page news, and their movements were seldom reported.
Even so, compared to the century-old ducal families on the East Coast, this family represented the most prominent new aristocracy in present-day Landon.
Perhaps inheriting their parents’ discretion, Chi Yaoxing, as a council head, was usually like a phantom on campus, rarely seen, rarely photographed in headlines. Even for school publicity, he rarely showed his full face.
The forum couldn’t find a single full-face photo of him.
【Asked classmates who share his class, they all say Chi Yaoxing is elusive. He hardly ever attends class, and when he does, he lies down to sleep. You can’t see his face and he doesn’t talk to anyone. Yet despite missing so many classes, his grades are surprisingly good.】
【Not everyone is like the Young Duke, skipping exams entirely.】
【Good grades don’t mean much. This guy supposedly has no respect for rules. He once twisted the wrist of a boy who tried to grab his hat while he was asleep, breaking the bone. The boy stayed home for a few days, then returned to class, while Chi Yaoxing faced no punishment. Instead, the other student ended up dropping out.】
【Well, that person deserved it, didn’t he?】
【I heard she looks really scary, with scars on her face from past fights. No wonder she doesn’t like showing her face.】
【Too bad. Maybe we’ll only get to see Chi Yaoxing’s real face in the yearbook at graduation.】
Ji Shu flipped through a few more pages. There were still some posts asking about course selection and forming groups for the music appreciation theater projects. On the fifth page, she finally saw the dodgeball video post that Cen Xuan had mentioned.
The video was silent and blurry, probably because the content was too shocking. Still, it had gained a fair amount of attention. In just a few days, the thread had already grown five or six pages, mostly filled with astonished comments and polite inquiries.
Although Ji Shu had been bullied under Lu Mingxi’s instruction for a while, the scope hadn’t been very wide. At this moment, not many people at school really knew her. Even if someone posted her Line ID in replies, no further personal information was revealed.
Ji Shu let out a small sigh of relief.
But before she could fully exhale, she refreshed the page, and immediately saw a new comment.
As soon as she read it, her head buzzed and she felt dizzy and lightheaded.
【I know this girl! She’s in our class, the one who angered the Young Duke before. They say she did a lot of bad things in middle school, what a bitch. Now she’s just our class punching bag hahaha.】
Her breathing quickened, cold sweat poured down, and her vision blurred. She almost couldn’t hold her phone steady.
Ji Shu had faced insults before, but this was the first time she directly saw unmasked malice online.
She knew the power of the internet. Once this message was sent and the post got bumped up, more people would curiously inquire. The situation would instantly escalate into a storm. The forum was school-wide, what had been class-level bullying could quickly spread across the entire campus.
Ji Shu took a few deep breaths, trying to steady her trembling hands.
She clicked into the profile of the comment’s poster, intending to ask them to delete it. But the account, whether out of habit or design, had disabled private messages from strangers.
Ji Shu backed out. In less than a minute, the perpetrator maliciously replied again.
【How did she anger the Young Duke? Well, it’s a long story. That red-highlighted wine-spilling post got bumped again recently, though the attention doesn’t seem to be on her. If anyone wants to know, I’ll post the full story there.】
Ji Shu hurriedly exited the thread and returned to the homepage, then clicked into the wine-spilling post.
If this incident really got blown up… it would be truly over. She would face the “death ending” even earlier than the original storyline, and all just because she had defended herself against her bullies.
Her vision almost went black.
She anxiously jumped to the last page of the wine-spilling thread and refreshed. She knew what kind of accusation she was about to face, but inexplicably, she couldn’t stop herself from personally witnessing the arrival of this tormenting moment.
Refresh. Again. Refresh.
But then, in the next second—
—404 Not Found.
Ji Shu froze.
…What just happened?
She reloaded the forum page. The massive thread, which had over a thousand replies, had completely vanished.
Without any warning.
Before she could even process it, she exited the page and clicked on the dodgeball video post.
The second 404 Not Found.
Ji Shu stared blankly for a few seconds. Before she could react, she clicked into the account page of the person who had left the comments. Upon refreshing, the profile picture had turned into a gray, cracked placeholder, and all posts and comments were gone.
【This account has been deactivated.】
Like a drop of water evaporating, everything related to her had disappeared from the forum.
Ji Shu sat back in her chair, stunned. Even though a wave of relief swept over her, she still hadn’t fully grasped that the crisis, which hadn’t even properly begun, had already been wiped out before it could take hold.
The browser, left on the 404 page, automatically returned to the forum’s homepage. The missing hot threads seemed to attract no attention from others. Other posts rose to the top, and the campus forum continued buzzing as usual.
Soon, her phone chimed: “Ding.”
Under the warm pale yellow glow of the desk lamp, the Mac’s screen, untouched for a long while, gradually dimmed, while her phone screen lit up.
Ji Shu moved her still-stiff fingers and instinctively picked up her phone, swiping to open the Line app.
This time, it wasn’t an impulsive command or order from the Young Duke.
It was the developer she had left waiting for a long time.
Ever since sending her the zip file, he had been patiently waiting for her reply, eager for feedback and communication. After several hours, seeing that she hadn’t even downloaded the files, he finally couldn’t help but send a message.
Unlike emails, which rely solely on text, Line felt more like a face-to-face conversation. The status “typing…” had lingered for a long time, and finally, all he sent was a dynamic sticker of a little cat peeking out.
+_+：【Are you busy? .jpg】