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Join the ServerMorning sunlight slipped through the gap in the curtains and landed right on Lin Ci’s face.
Lin Ci opened her eyes in a daze and shifted a little.
The extra tightness around her chest felt awkward, but the long-lasting ache from the binding was gone.
She was about to rub her eyes when a strange smell reached her nose.
A slightly burnt wheat aroma drifted over from the desk.
Lin Ci pushed herself up and looked toward Gu Mianmian’s bed.
Gu Mianmian’s bed was already empty. She had even folded the blanket into a neat square before leaving.
‘Does this girl have OCD or something?’
Lin Ci climbed down the ladder. The first thing she saw on the desk was a clear plastic bag, with an unopened carton of plain milk beside it.
She shuffled over in slippers and opened the bag.
Inside lay a sandwich with a crooked, mangled shape.
The edges of the bread were burnt black, and the fried egg inside was scorched in a wide ring.
A note was pressed under the milk carton, the handwriting neat and thin.
“Senior, I borrowed the microwave from the auntie at the convenience store to make this. If it doesn’t taste good, just throw it away.”
Lin Ci laughed at the note and shook her head.
This girl actually went to all this trouble for breakfast.
She opened her mouth and took a huge bite.
The bread was dry, the yolk had dried into crumbs, and it was so choking she rolled her eyes.
Just then Gu Mianmian pushed the door open, hugging an old green thermos.
She saw Lin Ci chewing the burnt sandwich, cheeks puffed out, and stopped in the doorway. She lowered her head.
“Senior, you… you’re awake.”
Lin Ci grabbed the milk and took a big gulp. It took real effort to swallow the dry bread.
“Yeah. Your skills are hardcore. The bread is almost burnt.”
Gu Mianmian had been looking down, and now she lowered her head even more, voice tiny.
“If it’s not good, don’t eat it. I’ll go to the cafeteria and buy something else.”
“Who said it’s not good?”
Lin Ci took another large bite, chewing noisily.
“The looks are a little rough, but the taste is okay. I like it.”
It was actually dry enough to scrape her throat, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw a young girl’s effort into the trash.
Gu Mianmian’s head snapped up, and light sparked in her deep eyes.
“Really?”
Lin Ci brushed the crumbs off her hands and grinned.
“Really. But next time don’t cook the egg so long. Softer is better. If you could make one with a runny yolk, that would be the best. Too bad the convenience store only has a microwave.”
Hearing that, Gu Mianmian reached into her old coat pocket, pulled out a palm-sized black notebook, uncapped a pen, and started writing.
Lin Ci leaned over curiously and glanced at the page.
On the paper, clearly written: [Fried egg no more than two minutes. Senior likes them soft with a runny yolk.]
Lin Ci’s hand moved on its own and flipped back two pages.
Her smile froze.
The yellowed pages were crammed with tiny details about her life.
[Senior wakes at 7:30 but stays in bed five more minutes.]
[Senior chews White Rabbit candy with her right teeth. Hates mint.]
[Senior’s shampoo smells like lemon. Her ends always tangle.]
A thin layer of sweat crawled down Lin Ci’s back.
‘Is this girl running some kind of spy surveillance on me?’
‘No, seriously?’
‘This is way too creepy.’
Gu Mianmian noticed her stiff stare, panicked, and shut the notebook, hiding it behind her back. Her eyes reddened.
“Senior, my memory is bad. I was afraid I wouldn’t remember what you like.”
She bit her bloodless lower lip, looking pitiful.
Lin Ci looked at her thin frame, and the awkwardness in her heart faded.
Forget it. This girl had been bullied in the orphanage since she was little. She was starved for affection. She probably treated friends as her only support and tried desperately to please them.
“All right, why write this stuff down? I’m not some difficult rich girl.”
She reached out casually and roughly ruffled Gu Mianmian’s bangs.
Gu Mianmian obediently ducked her neck. From an angle Lin Ci couldn’t see, a sick satisfaction flickered in her eyes.
The first morning class was a major course.
To avoid attention, Lin Ci put on the widest, most old-fashioned gray hoodie she owned, tied her long hair into a low ponytail, and dug out a pair of black-framed glasses for her nose.
In this getup, she could vanish perfectly among engineering guys.
But the moment she pushed open the lecture hall door, the noisy room went quiet for two seconds.
Then hushed whispers surged in from every direction.
“Is that the senior who got photographed on the forum last night?”
“She looks even better with glasses. That cold vibe is lethal.”
Lin Ci’s head buzzed.
These straight guys couldn’t even understand calculus, but now their eyesight was sharp as hell.
She steeled herself and walked to a corner in the last row, grinding her teeth.
With nothing better to do, she opened the campus forum, and her heart sank.
The post about carrying someone through the rain that night had over ten thousand views.
In the comments, even her dorm room, Building 5, Room 302, had been dug out.
What the hell.
During the break.
Chen Jia, the rich playboy, wanted another look at Lin Ci.
He had been craning his neck around for a while. When he saw Lin Ci in the last row, he straightened his collar and walked toward her.
But after a few steps, he stopped.
Gu Mianmian sat beside Lin Ci, quietly turning pages.
Her thick bangs covered most of her face, but a gloomy stare shot through the hair and nailed the space right in front of Chen Jia’s toes.
Chen Jia swallowed. His scalp went numb. A strong will to survive made him turn sharply and slip out the back door.
Lin Ci noticed nothing. She assumed Chen Jia couldn’t hold it in and went to the bathroom.
She turned to Gu Mianmian.
Gu Mianmian was focused on a criminal psychology book.
Her thin, pale fingers were almost crushing the corners of the pages into creases. She was turning pages abnormally fast.
“Mianmian, what’s wrong?”
Lin Ci looked at the creased page corners, confused.
Gu Mianmian turned her head. The gloom around her vanished completely. She curved her lips obediently.
“Nothing, Senior. This book is interesting.”
At the same time.
A budget hotel in South City.
In a dark room with thick curtains drawn, a professional woman in gold-rimmed glasses sat before a computer.
A database scrolled rapidly on the screen.
Gender: Female.
Age range: 19-21.
Social relations: raised by welfare institutions.
When she hit Enter, seventy-three results popped up.
The woman picked up the eighteen-year-old cord blood file beside her, sealed with the Capital Gu family’s top-secret stamp, and began comparing them one by one.
When the mouse pointer reached the forty-first name, she stopped.
On the screen was a girl with thick bangs, her gaze gloomy and pale.
The name field read: Gu Mianmian.
The woman picked up a red pen without hesitation, circled the name on the list, then made a call. Her tone was calm.
“Notify the genetic testing team. On-site sampling in South City.”
“Target locked. Jiangcheng University, sophomore, Gu Mianmian.”
At noon, the class bell rang.
Lin Ci pulled Gu Mianmian up and ran all the way to the cafeteria, afraid of being stared at again.
They found a remote corner in the second cafeteria and sat down.
Lin Ci pushed the bowl of rib noodles with more meat toward Gu Mianmian.
“Eat more. You’re all bones.”
Gu Mianmian lowered her head and obediently picked up the noodles.
Lin Ci had just split her disposable chopsticks when a shadow fell over her eyes.
A tray landed firmly across from her.
A boy in a white shirt and rimless glasses sat down, wearing a standard social smile.
“Hello, Senior Lin Ci. I’m Zhou Yan’an, vice president of the student council. You don’t mind if I share the table, right?”
Lin Ci froze.
Vice president of the student council?
What did he want with her?
Across the table, Gu Mianmian stopped eating completely.
She slowly raised her head and stirred her chopsticks in the soup.
Under her bangs, those dark eyes lost all warmth in an instant, cold enough to suffocate.
You think this chapter was thrilling? Wait until you read How a Reincarnated Villain Wins the Audition! Click here to discover the next big twist!
Read : How a Reincarnated Villain Wins the Audition
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