Join our Discord server and get release updates for every novel you follow.
Join the ServerThe train car was thick with exhaustion, smelling of sweat and cheap coffee.
Students were goofing off, and the tinny laughter of short videos from nearby phones buzzed in her ears.
Jiang Ciqiu leaned against the light-rail window, her head bobbing in a low, sleepy rhythm as the carriage swayed.
Twilight was shut out by the glass.
The transparent pane reflected a lifeless, androgynous face.
Heavy dark circles, skin dull from years of staying up late, and black hair hastily tied at the back of her head.
This was the face of a thirty-year-old wage s*ave.
After fourteen straight days of overtime, Jiang Ciqiu felt like her brain had turned to mush.
Her consciousness was fuzzy, as if wrapped in a layer of fog.
“How annoying. Why doesn’t everyone else just go and die?”
Jiang Ciqiu let out a barely audible sigh. She glanced at the other wage slaves around her. Their faces also carried work-induced fatigue, and they were probably thinking the same thing she was.
The display above the train door scrolled the inside and outside temperatures: 28°C, 31°C.
The ironic part was that the second number was the temperature inside the train.
In the middle of this scorching summer, the train’s air conditioning just had to break down.
And, of course, Jiang Ciqiu had to squeeze aboard one of the affected cars.
“Tsk. Should have waited for the next train.”
Humans are strange, she thought. They scream at a crowd of bugs, then deliberately pack themselves into a crowd of humans.
Buzz.
“Huh?”
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw a message from her boss.
[@Jiang Ciqiu: How are there two more BUGs in the version you submitted than in the original? Fix all twelve, including the original ten, and send it to me DE before tomorrow morning.]
Another request outside working hours. And twelve bugs in one night? Even Turing himself would have shaken his head. This heavenly parachuted expert of a boss was a real piece of work.
In her head, Jiang Ciqiu was already tracing a curse from the boss’s mother outward through his entire family tree. She typed back furiously.
[Jiang Ciqiu: Received.]
“…Sigh.”
What a lifeless, absurd life.
Carrying a laptop bag as heavy as a brick to the office every day, enduring the arbitrary orders of a clueless new boss, squeezing onto jam-packed trains like a worker ant on the commute… The more she thought, the more deflated she became.
Jiang Ciqiu turned off her phone and closed her eyes, letting her head empty.
A few minutes later, a scream came from somewhere in the train, followed by a cascade of gasps.
She followed the noise to the crowd, then followed the crowd’s eyes out the window.
Her gaze shifted, found the target quickly, and she understood what everyone was shouting about.
On top of a distant building, a colossal lobster-like monster was hanging there, brandishing a pair of claws as thick as the rooftop lightning rods.
Around the monster, several lights in different colors were weaving through the air.
“Look! It’s the magical girls!”
“Wow, they’re fighting disaster beasts today again!”
Middle schoolers with backpacks crowded against the window, gesturing excitedly at the sparkling lights in the distant sky.
The weary office workers also lifted their eyes, some out of curiosity, others out of sheer numbness.
Disaster beasts. That was what people called the beings that had suddenly appeared thirty years ago and gone on killing and destroying in cities.
Physical attacks couldn’t harm them. Even the most powerful conventional weapons couldn’t land an effective blow, and for a while, the government was baffled.
But in recent years, in Shanhai City, a disaster beast attack had stopped being something people worried about much.
The magical girls had appeared almost as if they had been born to counter the disaster beasts.
Who exactly had started calling them magical girls was nobody knew. Whether the name came naturally, or whether it came from those common children’s anime, no one could say.
Either way, these strong, mysterious girls had become heroes who purged the disaster beasts, and also a sort of strange idol industry.
There were even companies that produced merchandise based on each magical girl’s image. That was what those acrylic keychains hanging off the boys’ backpacks were.
Just two days ago, Jiang Ciqiu had seen a news story saying that the number one dream job among middle school students right now was magical girl. Across both genders.
Girls were one thing, but why did boys want to be magical girls? Did they want to carry a lifetime of sequelae they could never shake?
…Wait. When a disaster beast got this big and required several magical girls to take it on, what rank was it? Bug class? Pupa class?
Forget it. It had nothing to do with an ordinary office worker like her.
Jiang Ciqiu glanced at the window again, then let her eyes settle on the sword-and-shield school crests on the students’ uniforms.
Shanhai No.1 High School. Her old school.
At this hour on a Friday, school had just let out.
For students, school being over was the happiest moment of the day. And after seeing their favorite magical girls fighting on the way home, they’d probably be too excited to fall asleep tonight.
But none of that had anything to do with her anymore. Neither the magical girls, nor the easy lightness of the after-school hour.
After the summer Lin Xia died, all of that had become memories.
Jiang Ciqiu pulled back her gaze and shut her eyes again, letting fatigue swallow her whole.
She used to like that time of afternoon,too. Now she could barely remember why she had been happy.
A boy’s smiling face crossed her mind. It was Lin Xia, her childhood friend who had died thirteen years ago.
“Lin Xia… I must be tired out of my mind. I’m even thinking of your face.”
Jiang Ciqiu tapped her temple with a wry smile and shook her head.
Get home first. She still had to work on the code after getting home. And the fridge was out of beer, so she needed to stock up on the way…
With the train’s monotonous rattling, an absurd thought rose from the bottom of her heart.
If only she could go back to that summer.
Go back to the summer thirteen years ago, when Lin Xia was still alive, when nothing had gone off the rails yet.
Could she find real happiness this time? Instead of living a life filled with work, emptiness, cigarettes, and alcohol?
“Do you want to go back? To the happiest time in your life?”
A voice suddenly spoke in her head.
The voice had a sly, mischievous tone, like a girl full of pranks, or a cat flicking its tail back and forth.
Jiang Ciqiu didn’t even lift her eyelid. She simply gave a self-mocking twitch of her lips.
Had fifteen days of straight overtime finally given her auditory hallucinations? Maybe she should smoke a cigarette and have a drink after this.
Once she fixed the code, maybe she could try that new special cocktail at the bar downstairs. She’d heard it was made with mojito, Sprite, and Chocliz ice cream bars.
“Fine. Let me go back. Back to that summer,” she said offhandedly.
But the instant the words left her, Jiang Ciqiu felt her view begin to be swallowed by darkness.
The noise of the train, the roaring of the tracks, even the feeling of her fingertips against the fabric of her clothes all rushed away from her.
She tried to blink hard or shake her head, but her body no longer obeyed her. It slowly fell forward.
Oh no. Was she about to die of overwork? Was this a sudden death?
All those times she had joked at work, saying “I’m so tired my heart hurts, I can’t breathe, I’m going to die”… Why did it have to actually happen to her?
Jiang Ciqiu tried to open her mouth and scream, but no sound came out of her throat.
She tried to reach out and grab the handrail, but her body felt like it was dissolving into the void.
What was more desperate was that no one around seemed to notice anything wrong. She could only lose consciousness alone as the darkness and nothingness swallowed her.
…Ah, so this was death?
Lin Xia, back when he was in the hospital, he must have suffered even more, right?
In the second before she sank completely into darkness, her childhood friend’s face appeared in front of her.
She really wanted to see him one more time.
That thought crossed her mind, and then everything vanished into the black.
****
Bang!
“Damn, that hurts!”
The pain that shot through her body hit her brain in an instant, and Jiang Ciqiu gasped sharply.
It felt like she had fallen hard. Her whole body hurt.
Such a sharp, solid pain didn’t feel like something that belonged in the world after death.
She forced her eyes open. Her vision was blurry for a moment, then gradually focused.
What came into view wasn’t the dirty gray floor of the light rail. Neither was it her cramped apartment filled with beer cans.
It was the floor of a corridor paved with marble tiles.
The sounds around her had changed too.
There was no longer the sound of the train grinding along the rails. In its place came the chatter and laughter of boys and girls, along with the dull thud of a blackboard eraser hitting a lectern.
Jiang Ciqiu sat up in a daze.
Students in the blue and white uniforms of Shanhai High were walking by in twos and threes. Sunlight spilled in from the window, and chalk dust and the scent of summer floated in the air.
This was… the hallway of her school?
“Jiang Ciqiu?”
At the sound of someone calling her name, Jiang Ciqiu instinctively turned her head.
A tall, blue-eyed girl with golden hair came into view. A slender length of pale calf showed beneath her pleated skirt, and she had the kind of noble bearing that made you think of a foreign young lady from a drama.
“How did you manage to trip over flat ground?”
“…Ilya?”
“Mm? Yes, it’s me.”
Ilya watched Jiang Ciqiu, who was still on the floor looking up at her with a dazed expression, and her brows furrowed slightly in confusion.
“What’s wrong? Your face looks really strange.”
Jiang Ciqiu couldn’t believe her eyes.
Ilya Osipova Kovich. An exchange student from Hongdong City, a northern metropolis far from Shanhai. Also her old teammate, the magical girl, Shining Yellow.
Before her rusty, overworked, alcohol-soaked brain could process this, another familiar yet unfamiliar voice came from behind.
“Ah Qiu! Why did you fall?”
The voice was gentle and clear, like a breeze through a summer forest.
At the sound, Jiang Ciqiu’s crimson pupils shrank to the size of pinpricks.
Someone she could never forget. A voice she could never forget.
You are…
She turned her head stiffly.
Lin Xia.
Jiang Ciqiu’s childhood best friend, wearing the boys’ summer uniform exactly like hers, was bent over with a hand stretched out toward her.
The smile on the boy’s face was exactly the same as in her memory. It just lacked the weakness she had grown used to seeing.
The afternoon sun came slanting over from behind him, making his smile unbearably distinct.
So distinct that it seemed as if the desperate thirteen years she had experienced, and the summer night that had destroyed everything, had never existed.
Jiang Ciqiu stared at him blankly, forgetting to breathe.
“Hey.”
The boy lightly waved the hand he had extended, the curve of his mouth growing wider.
“Long time no see.”
Your next favorite story awaits! Don't miss out on Dressing as a Woman While Raising a Child—Junior Brother, Stop Disrupting My Cultivation! – click to dive in!
Read : Dressing as a Woman While Raising a Child—Junior Brother, Stop Disrupting My Cultivation!
