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Join the ServerEven though Little Fish’s attire today differed significantly from yesterday’s, Lin Qing still recognized her by the white skull on her head.
Compared to her sweet appearance yesterday, she wore no makeup now, and her glasses gave her a somewhat rustic, unpolished look.
While not entirely unattractive, she certainly wasn’t beautiful.
She was simply an exceedingly ordinary girl.
The kind who would disappear unnoticed in a crowd.
However, Little Fish was dressed in a high school uniform, clearly a student of this very school.
This observation sparked a flicker of doubt in Lin Qing’s mind.
If Little Fish truly attended this school, he couldn’t possibly have no impression of her. After all, she was a distinctive, even dangerous-looking individual with a skull on her head.
“Lin Qing, what are you looking at?”
Lin Qing’s abrupt halt was quite noticeable. Seeing this, Liu Hong, who had been walking beside him, immediately turned his head in confusion, following Lin Qing’s gaze forward.
All he saw was an ordinary-looking girl, carrying a backpack, walking alone through the school gates.
“Do you know that girl?”
Responding to Liu Hong’s query, Lin Qing simply raised a finger, pointing directly at the girl Liu Hong had just observed.
If he could ascertain Little Fish’s true identity, perhaps he could deduce her intentions.
“I have some impression of her… Hey, she’s in our class! Her name is Liu Ying!”
To Lin Qing’s utter surprise, they were actually classmates!
Lin Qing immediately swiveled his head, staring at Liu Hong in astonishment, unsure whether his words were true or false.
“I don’t have much of an impression of her.”
“Liu Ying took two weeks off recently due to illness and hasn’t been to school in a while. You’re a new transfer student, so it’s perfectly normal that you wouldn’t remember her.”
“I thought you just didn’t pay much attention to your classmates.”
“Actually, my memory is excellent! I’ve seen the class roster before, and besides, I’ve been in this class for almost a year. There’s no way I’d forget!”
As Lin Qing and Liu Hong spoke, they didn’t remain stationary. Instead, they stepped through the school gates and continued walking towards their classroom.
‘Little Fish’s real name is Liu Ying…’
At last, Lin Qing understood the familiar sense of déjà vu he’d experienced earlier.
It was because they were classmates.
And in the same class, no less.
“But Lin Qing, why are you so curious about Liu Ying? She’s not even pretty, not half as beautiful as my Little Fish. You can’t possibly be interested in this type of girl, can you? That’s really poor taste! I thought spending time with Su Yao would improve your aesthetic sense, but now…”
As Liu Hong chattered incessantly beside him, Lin Qing felt a wave of speechlessness wash over him.
‘The one with poor taste right now isn’t me.’
‘It’s Liu Hong.’
Liu Hong’s beloved Little Fish was walking right in front of him, a student from their very own class, yet he failed to recognize her. It was truly baffling.
Liu Hong’s ‘love at first sight’ truly seemed to be nothing more than superficial attraction to a pretty face.
The rumors about Liu Hong being a ‘sight-con’ – someone highly attracted to visual beauty – felt incredibly accurate.
Yet, despite only glancing at Liu Ying a few times, Lin Qing had observed her meticulously. He noticed that her bare-faced appearance held a faint resemblance to Little Fish.
If she were to apply exquisite makeup, they would be indistinguishable.
The stark difference between her two appearances was purely due to makeup.
While the school prohibited heavy makeup like smoky eyes, there weren’t strict rules against everyday cosmetic enhancements.
However, Liu Ying continued to maintain her bare-faced look. This suggested she wasn’t simply too lazy to apply makeup at school, but rather aimed to uphold two distinct images—one for school and one for outside—to avoid being recognized by others.
It was precisely for this reason that Liu Ying had only introduced herself as Little Fish, never revealing her true name.
Lin Qing, however, held no interest in Liu Ying’s disguise. At this moment, he wasn’t even considering her intentional approach. Only one fundamental question occupied his mind.
‘What exactly was going on with the white skulls on Liu Ying’s head?’
Even though Liu Hong had just mentioned Liu Ying’s two-week absence from school, Lin Qing himself had been a transfer student for nearly three months.
As classmates, even if Liu Ying was inconspicuous in class, Lin Qing must have seen her before.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have experienced that familiar sense of déjà vu.
Given this, he would absolutely not forget three white skulls atop Liu Ying’s head.
‘The number of skulls on Liu Ying’s head had changed in a short amount of time!’
If this impossible phenomenon had occurred before, Lin Qing would never have believed it.
Since acquiring his unique ability to see skulls, he had never witnessed the number of skulls on anyone’s head change.
From birth, the number of white skulls atop a person’s head remained fixed for their entire life.
They neither increased nor decreased with age.
Yet, this immutable number of skulls had suddenly increased, and it was happening right before Lin Qing’s eyes.
Liu Ying was a real person, a classmate who lived in his immediate vicinity.
Lin Qing could definitively state that when he first transferred, Liu Ying had only one white skull on her head.
That was why he hadn’t specifically remembered Liu Ying; she had been just like everyone else.
However, no one could have anticipated that in such a short span, she had transformed from having one skull to three.
This being the case, could Liu Ying’s desire to approach him somehow be connected to the change in the white skulls?
‘Wait…’
‘I shouldn’t think like that.’
Aside from himself, no one else knew about his supernatural ability to see skulls.
Even a woman as intelligent as Su Yao hadn’t guessed, so this girl named Liu Ying certainly wouldn’t know.
‘He was just being overly sensitive.’
‘That’s why he subconsciously linked this matter to his supernatural ability.’
Nevertheless, Liu Ying was no simple person, regardless of the cause.
He could no longer deliberately discriminate against her as he had before.
‘Su Yao was right.’
Since Liu Ying harbored ulterior motives for him, and her attempts to approach him seemed somewhat rushed, it clearly wouldn’t drag on for too long. He would simply wait patiently for her to reveal her true colors.
“Brother Liu, good morning!”
“Lin Qing, you and Brother Liu are going to school together again today! Wuwuwu, ever since you came along, Brother Liu has abandoned us.”
As Lin Qing gravely pondered the change in the skulls on Liu Ying’s head, the cheerful voices of Zhou Lin and Wang Jian suddenly rang out.
Immediately, Wang Jian put on a pouting, aggrieved expression, looking as though he was about to pull out a handkerchief and bite it.
Zhou Lin, standing beside him, played along perfectly, feigning a dizzy spell from envy and jealousy, his face etched with a mournful expression. This prompted Liu Hong to laugh and playfully kick both their behinds.
‘So cheeky first thing in the morning!’
“Why are you two coming to school so early today?”
“Early? Brother Liu, it’s you who used to come too late!”
After their playful banter, Zhou Lin and Wang Jian joined Liu Hong and Lin Qing, forming a formidable quartet marching grandly towards their classroom.
Other students they encountered along the way scattered like they had seen a ghost, quickly making their escape.
Liu Hong and his two companions paid no mind to this, having grown completely accustomed to it.
Lin Qing, on the other hand, was momentarily speechless, receiving sympathetic glances from afar. He realized that the other students in the school likely perceived him as a victim of bullying.
Despite the harmonious atmosphere among the four of them, in the eyes of others, it appeared as if Liu Hong’s trio were maliciously tormenting Lin Qing, inflicting severe physical and mental anguish upon him.
Yet, even so, others could only ignore it.
After all, that was Liu Hong, a mad dog capable of beating someone into the hospital.
‘A chase scene.’
‘He wouldn’t stop until he’d maimed them.’
“Lin Qing, can I put my arm around your neck?”
“?”
As Lin Qing silently reaffirmed to himself that he was not being bullied, Zhou Lin suddenly blurted out a seemingly nonsensical question.
This caused Lin Qing to look up at him in confusion, wondering why Zhou Lin wanted to put his arm around his neck.
‘Does he want to fight?’
“Well, you see, putting an arm around someone’s neck like this is a sign of brotherly affection. Wang Jian and I often do it. I wanted to do it back when you resolved the Li Dong assault incident, but our relationship wasn’t close enough then. Now, seeing how much Brother Liu wants to be friends with you, I want to get in there first!”
Upon hearing Zhou Lin’s earnest explanation, Lin Qing understood.
Still, their relationship wasn’t exactly intimate yet.
“Whatever.”
“Hehe.”
Upon receiving Lin Qing’s tacit approval, Zhou Lin’s face lit up with a joyous smile. Then, braving Liu Hong’s murderous glare, he promptly raised his arm and hooked it around Lin Qing’s neck.
In that instant, a glorious feeling, akin to a triumphant general returning from battle, made Zhou Lin feel as though he was being applauded by countless people.
‘Pure exhilaration!’
Zhou Lin had indeed wanted to do this before, but hadn’t. It wasn’t because he wasn’t familiar with Lin Qing.
After all, Zhou Lin was so naturally friendly that he could easily sling an arm around a stranger.
However, having personally witnessed Lin Qing’s ‘episode,’ Zhou Lin had come to see Lin Qing as a fragile glass doll, one that might shatter even with the slightest touch.
It was better not to touch him.
Still, he wondered if it was due to a recent improvement in diet, but Lin Qing seemed to have grown a bit sturdier.
He had also grown taller.
He must be around 1.7 meters tall now, no longer the shorty he was at 1.6-something meters.
Yet, Zhou Lin’s action of slinging his arm around Lin Qing’s neck with a brilliant smile, when viewed by others, only further solidified his image as a bully.
Lin Qing was too lazy to think about it anymore. As long as he knew he wasn’t being bullied, that was all that mattered.
“Don’t cling to Lin Qing’s neck, you heavy brute! What if you crush him!”
Zhou Lin’s arm-hook, however, didn’t last long, immediately interrupted by Liu Hong.
At Liu Hong’s obvious envy and jealousy, Zhou Lin chuckled incessantly, thinking how adorable their Brother Liu could be.
“Brother Liu, I heard you’re going to see a movie with Little Fish this weekend?”
However, recalling the events of yesterday, Zhou Lin instantly adopted a serious demeanor.
That woman named Little Fish was clearly a bad sort. No matter how pure and beautiful her appearance, it couldn’t conceal the desire brimming in her eyes.
Only Brother Liu, it seemed, had blindly stumbled into a web of infatuation, unable to discern what truly lay around him.
As his younger brothers, they absolutely had to intervene, preventing Brother Liu and Little Fish from becoming a couple.
Otherwise, there was no telling how Little Fish might ruin Brother Liu.
Upon hearing Zhou Lin mention the weekend ‘date’ outing, Liu Hong immediately grew worried. If Lin Qing didn’t agree, he would have to find an excuse to decline.
‘Wuwuwu, he really wanted to go on that date with Little Fish.’
“I’m free. Let’s go together!”
Yet, just as disappointment settled in Liu Hong’s heart, Lin Qing’s sudden words made Liu Hong’s eyes widen in surprise!
‘There’s a chance!!!’
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