GV – Chapter 93

The next day, Uncle Yu was surprised to discover that Song Zhiqing had actually left the house.

And she was going far.

She had gone abroad.

It was worth noting that ever since abandoning her second film halfway through production six months ago, Song Zhiqing hadn’t set foot outside. Aside from Ye Mo and the psychologist she had introduced, all other visitors had been turned away.

What’s more, she had eaten breakfast.

A glass of milk and two slices of toast with lettuce, ham, and a spread of mayonnaise in between.

Watching the sports car drive away, Uncle Yu couldn’t help but marvel. Are Daoist priests really that effective? Just thinking about it makes miracles happen.

Song Zhiqing traveled to the manufacturing site of the full-sensory virtual machine called the V527. After using some connections to contact a researcher on the project team, Song Zhiqing arranged to meet the person in a coffee shop.

The researcher was a woman named Fidel Lopez, of Spanish descent. Her tan face was covered in wrinkles squeezed out by a wealth of emotions, and one could tell at a glance that she was an easy person to talk to.

“Hi, Miss Song. Zhang told me you wanted to know more about the V527. I heard you were a beneficiary of it. Are you experiencing any side effects?”

“No, Miss Lopez. I want to ask if it’s possible for a virtual world to accommodate two consciousnesses at the same time. I’ve asked a few people before, but none of them had a definitive answer. However, I’m sure no one in the world knows the V527 better than you. I believe you can put an end to my confusion.”

Fidel’s expression turned to one of surprise. “Song, you’re the second person to ask me that question!”

Song Zhiqing’s heart leaped. The darkness that had been tormenting her felt as if it were about to be held over a fire.

“Was that person from Z Country?”

Fidel nodded. “She was a Chinese-descended student of a good friend of mine. She asked me that question five years ago, and I still remember it vividly. No one has ever wanted to enter a machine with someone else at the same time. As everyone knows, the virtual world is a place nearly as private as one’s inner world. After all, people always have some thoughts that can’t be made public, and they often appear in the virtual world.”

Song Zhiqing’s hands gripped the fabric on her thighs tightly. Of Fidel’s long speech, she had only caught one phrase: Chinese-descended.

It took a great deal of effort for Song Zhiqing to ask smoothly, “What was her name?”

“Ah, it was a very difficult name to pronounce. Ye—Wu—Hua.”

“Was it… Ye Yuhuan?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, I’m never very good at pronouncing Chinese names,” Fidel said, annoyed with herself.

But Song Zhiqing could no longer hear what she was saying.

Tinnitus washed over her from the intense emotional shock. Song Zhiqing felt the world spin, the walls rushing toward her. She trembled and hid under the table, murmuring that name, “Ye Yuhuan, Ye Yuhuan…”

When she came to again, she was in a local hospital. Fidel was sitting by her bed, her expression grave. “Miss Song, you should receive proper treatment.”

Song Zhiqing nodded distractedly, pulled her phone from her bag, found the official website for Ye Mo’s hospital, and pulled up Ye Mo’s photo.

“Fidel, is this the Ye Yuhuan you were talking about?”

“Song, now is not the time for this. Your condition is very poor…”

Song Zhiqing rudely interrupted her, her usually cool voice thick with pleading. “No, Fidel, please answer my question. This is very important to me.”

Fidel gave her a helpless look and brought the phone Song Zhiqing was holding out closer to her eyes. A moment later, she said, “Yes, that’s Ye.”

Song Zhiqing collapsed onto the hospital bed as if all her strength had left her, frightening Fidel into calling for a doctor. Song Zhiqing waved a hand to stop her.

“Fidel, I’m fine.”

“I’m just… very surprised.”

“Do you two know each other?” Fidel asked curiously.

Song Zhiqing’s expression was dazed. “I suppose we do.”

“Ah!” Fidel suddenly shot up from her seat. “You couldn’t be the lover Ye said she was going to wake up, could you!”

“Lover?” Song Zhiqing was even more bewildered.

“Lover.” Fidel’s Spanish accent made the word sound exceptionally tender as she pronounced it.

Oh. So, she could rule out the possibility that Ye Mo—Ye Yuhuan—was acting out of a doctor’s compassion, willing to sacrifice herself to play the part of her lover for a lifetime.

She had called herself her lover.

But Ye Yuhuan… assuming that was her final name, Song Zhiqing truly had no memory of it. The only reason she had come seeking the truth was because the dreams she’d been having for days had inevitably sparked a certain fantasy—could “Song Zhiqing” really exist?

And Uncle Yu’s words had added weight to that hypothesis. Song Zhiqing admitted that her reputation back then had been as bad as a rat in the street, and two years of fermentation hadn’t improved it much. Yet under those circumstances, Ye Mo—no, she should call her Ye Yuhuan now—Ye Yuhuan had proactively requested to treat her. Moreover, Song Zhiqing had seen Ye Yuhuan’s resume. She had changed her field of research, and the timing of that change was right when her accident had occurred.

There are no absolute coincidences, only the absolute truth. If a “Song Zhiqing” truly existed in the world, then she could only be Ye Yuhuan.

On the other side of the ocean, Ye Yuhuan, who was airing out books on her balcony, suddenly let out a huge sneeze, and the book in her hands fell to the ground.

Hearing the sound, Si Zhen rushed over, distressed. She picked up the book and, seeing it wasn’t one of hers, her pained expression immediately eased. “The Interpretation of Dreams. Huanhuan, isn’t this the book you used to carry around and read every day in high school?”

Ye Yuhuan grunted in affirmation. Just as she was about to reply, Si Zhen bent down again and picked up a yellowed envelope from the floor.

She teased, “Ooh, a love letter!”

As she spoke, Si Zhen tapped the flamboyant pink—now faded to brown—heart on the envelope.

Seeing this, Ye Yuhuan quickly snatched both the book and the letter and hid them behind her back. “You’re mistaken!”

She said it with great conviction.

But Si Zhen ignored her completely and said directly, “It was for Song Zhiqing, wasn’t it?”

Ye Yuhuan pressed her lips together.

And pressed them together again.

Then she nodded.

Si Zhen let out an ambiguous “heh” and turned to lie down on the nearby rocking chair. The warm spring sunlight spilled down gently, but her words were laced with the chill of unmelted ice. “Huanhuan, it’s time for you to let her go.”

“I don’t see her often,” Ye Yuhuan tried to explain.

“You know that’s not the same as letting go.”

After so much time, watching her daughter’s brow furrowed with worry day after day, Si Zhen’s initial optimism had gradually faded. She had no choice but to act like the old-fashioned parents she had once despised and sever her child’s emotional ties.

A one-sided affection like this had no need to develop, Si Zhen convinced herself.

Ye Yuhuan bit her lower lip, nibbling from the corner to the center, still unable to think of a proper response.

It was simply the truth.

She could only admit, “I can’t.”

“You like her that much? Outside of that absurd dream, the two of you had no real interaction. It was just a dream. Huanhuan, you’ve studied psychology for so many years, you should know better than I do that none of it was real.”

Ye Yuhuan slowly shook her head. The day she first met Song Zhiqing reappeared before her eyes. She had been brilliant and brazen, speaking rudely to a group of people, but before she hit them—no, before she even started cursing—she had taken off her jacket and handed it to her.

“Even without that dream, I would have liked her this much.”

Just as she was now, lightly, so lightly, pinching the love letter that had never been opened.

Strictly speaking, the first time she saw Song Zhiqing was one morning. She had woken up late that day and was rushing to school, hastily pulling on her uniform and slinging her backpack over her shoulder, pedaling her bicycle furiously.

At the school gate, however, she saw a girl getting out of a sports car. She deliberately slowed down to take a few glances, and only after confirming there was a driver in the driver’s seat did the shock in Ye Yuhuan’s heart subside a little.

What followed was the Nth time she had felt the glaring wealth gap at this famous elite school.

Some people were late and pedaled their bike chains until they sparked; other people were late and made a cool entrance in a Maserati.

Ye Yuhuan took a deep breath and convinced herself for the Nth time, I’m here to study!

Gripping the handlebars, she planned to dash to the bike shed in under three minutes when a snail appeared in her peripheral vision—alright, it was a person walking like a snail.

To confirm that it was indeed snail’s pace, Ye Yuhuan very unwisely braked on the verge of being late, planting one foot on the ground and pretending to admire the scenery while secretly observing the girl who had just gotten out of the sports car.

And then she discovered: Wow, she’s so beautiful!

Ugh, Ye Yuhuan silently scorned herself. Is that the point?!

Then she confirmed it. It really was a snail’s pace.

Why would someone, five minutes before class, still be moving at a speed of less than two meters every ten seconds? Ye Yuhuan swore her grandfather on crutches could walk faster than this girl.

Then why was she in a sports car? Although nearly every student at Qinglin, except for the scholarship students, came from a family with a luxury car, it was rare to see someone so ostentatious as to drive a sports car directly to school.

Oh… she probably just liked it.

Tsk, a rich kid.

Stifled by her own conclusion, Ye Yuhuan started pedaling again. But because she had wasted two minutes observing the beautiful snail, she was unfortunately late. And even more unfortunately, the punishment of standing in the hall that the teacher announced was, at the instigation of her classmates, changed to cleaning up after school.

Ye Yuhuan calmly sat down at her desk, opened her heavily graffitied textbook, took out a clean notebook from her bag, and listened attentively to the lecture.

In any case, it had always been like this here.

But the descent was always a gradual process. When all sorts of indirect humiliations failed to elicit the pitiful expression they wanted from Ye Yuhuan, that group of bored people decided to use a more direct method.

It was another afternoon of being assigned to clean after school for some trivial matter, but this time, Ye Yuhuan was cornered in the utility closet where the cleaning supplies were kept.

Utility closets everywhere are messy, even at Qinglin, which prided itself on being a garden-like school.

The malicious shoves of the others made the already messy closet even messier.

“Don’t you act so high and mighty?” a girl Ye Yuhuan didn’t really know poked her on the shoulder.

Ye Yuhuan had no idea where the term “high and mighty” came from. If she meant that Ye Yuhuan hadn’t been servile enough, then there was nothing Ye Yuhuan could do. It was just a pity that the doctrines of slavery were not part of her education.

But it seemed this person really wanted her to kneel right now.

Not far away, two boys let out malicious laughs.

Ye Yuhuan closed her eyes and began, “If I’ve offended you in any way, I’m very sorry…”

Before she could finish, she was shoved forcefully into the depths of the closet. Brooms and mops came crashing down on her.

The girl’s sharp voice was like a snake slithering across Ye Yuhuan’s trembling skin. “I really hate the way you are.”

The girl took a step forward, apparently about to show Ye Yuhuan just how much she hated her.

Just then, a new voice entered the scene.

“Tsk, Zhao Qi. I asked you for a fight and you said you were busy. So this is where you were.”

“Weren’t you sick?”

“You seem pretty full of life.”

Ye Yuhuan silently corrected in her mind: it was a pleasant voice.

The owner of the pleasant voice walked in. She was a beautiful person.

So beautiful that even in a simple school uniform, she made Zhao Qi, who was decked out in five diamonds, look like she was crawling in the mud.

Eh? It was the sports car girl.

Perhaps it was a case of the wicked being tormented by the wicked, but Zhao Qi in front of the sports car girl was not much different from Ye Yuhuan in front of Zhao Qi. “Song Zhiqing, don’t you go too far!”

Ah, so her name was Song Zhiqing—a nice name, too.

Song Zhiqing ignored Zhao Qi’s blustering. She walked straight past her, pulled Ye Yuhuan up, sat her on a nearby chair, and took off her own jacket to cover Ye Yuhuan’s disheveled skirt.

Then she turned around, tied her hair into a ponytail, and lazily beckoned to the group with her finger. “Let’s fight. Me against all of you. One, two, three, four… five of you.”

“Whoever loses has to bow and call me ‘Boss’ whenever we meet from now on.”

However, before the others could react, Song Zhiqing lunged forward, raised her leg, and swept the two boys to the ground. The remaining three girls, whose fighting skills were generally limited to the simple and crude technique of ganging up on someone to pull their hair and tear their clothes, were already doing well not to scream in terror, as was expected of them as members of Qinglin’s notorious campus bully group—Girls’ Miracle.

The three of them scrambled to grab nearby brooms and swung them wildly. It looked somewhat intimidating, but Song Zhiqing didn’t even pause. She seized a broom with one hand and kicked out with her leg.

It was over quickly, even faster than the time it took Song Zhiqing to lay down her threats. Five people were lying on the floor. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the strength to get up, but getting up would just mean getting hit again. And this woman, Song Zhiqing, loved to hit people in the face. So it was better to lie there, humiliated but safe.

After beating them up, Song Zhiqing clapped her hands and prepared to leave. Just then, Ye Yuhuan mustered her courage and called out, “Your jacket…”

Song Zhiqing turned her head, let out an “ah,” and smiled faintly. “It’s a gift. It just so happens you need it, and it just so happens I don’t like clothes that other people have worn.”

Ye Yuhuan: “Oh.”

“Um, thank you…”

“Don’t mention it. Oh, right, let me tell you something. From now on, the boss of this school is Black Sanctuary.”

“Ah… oh.”

So chuunibyou.

Just what you’d expect from a girl who takes a sports car to school.