Chapter 6: Can We Pretend It Never Happened?

Ren Huazhi never thought that her magical girl career would have a second season.

It’s okay to be a hero, but a morning children’s show only runs for a year. To ask a hero to continue fighting for longer than that is too much, isn’t it? The final form has already been released. What about stronger enemies in the future? It would have been fine to just pass the baton to the next generation and leave gracefully.

In order to achieve this graceful departure and to complete her magical girl career, Ren Huazhi had made many preparations.

For example, cultivating Mangzhong to be the second-generation host of the tea party;

For example, inspiring Meng Qiuxu to invest in the research of an anti-anti-civilization force field, so that ordinary people could also participate in the battle;

For example, turning her useless water ability to its maximum power and having a torrential downpour on the night of her fake death, to create a tragic atmosphere of a hero’s end—

The flower-making person was dead. The people who were connected to her, although sad, still embarked on the path she had pointed out for them. As a mentor-like character’s exit, it was a perfect score. Ren Huazhi was very satisfied.

Although the battle between the magical girls and the nightmares was not over, this was precisely the reason for a sequel in the same world!

She felt that it was about time for Mangzhong to be the protagonist.

A fire-type sword and shield user, wasn’t that very protagonist-like? The shield that the dark and reclusive Ren Huazhi had not used to protect others could shine in the hands of her successor…

But now, everything was ruined.

The damn character hadn’t died, had missed the best opportunity to sacrifice herself, and had instead become a burden to the plot. This was a major taboo in long-form novel writing. To be entangled with others like a cosmic female ghost, this would never end.

Frequent extreme weather, plagues raging across the globe, and a decrease in the number of bookstores—all the disasters caused by the overflow of nightmares, she had originally decided not to interfere with anymore—

Because all her clothes were one size too big, and there was a meaningful hole in her chest, the disheveled Ren Huazhi didn’t dare to take the subway, so she had to ride a shared bicycle back to her address.

She was not born in Nancheng. She was a country bumpkin who had followed her parents from the countryside to the city in elementary school. Ever since she had suddenly had an inspiration and started writing novels in junior high school, she had been submitting her work to various forums and magazines, and finally to a publisher. Now, she could earn enough money from this hobby every month to live independently from her family as a high school student.

Of course, she lived in a village in the city.

The village in the city, called Huangnitang, was bustling with people. It was not long after lunchtime. Under the sun, which had tilted from directly overhead, old men and women were playing cards on cardboard boxes under parasols.

At the entrance of the Shibuya Art Center (a 10-yuan barbershop), Ren Huazhi hesitated.

She gathered her long, golden hair from the transformation from her back to her chest. It felt a little cumbersome, but it wasn’t unacceptable. Most importantly, in the past, she would fight after transforming, and she would change back after the fight. She had never experienced the presence of long hair in her daily life.

Experience… that is, “gathering material.”

Gathering material is very important.

To write a novel that feels realistic, after removing the fictional settings, the difference of whether the author has personally experienced it is very large. To create only by imagination would be like those high and mighty, out-of-touch screenwriters and directors, who would make a joke of an emperor using a golden hoe.

…It would be like a certain great inventor, who would create a safety accident of a reinforced armor that did not reinforce its defense.

Ren Huazhi didn’t know how to tactfully convey this serious functional problem to Meng Qiuxu.

She must be thinking that her new invention is amazing, that it can let an ordinary high school student who can’t even truss a chicken kill a nightmare with a fire poker that has no magic support.

If it were only Ren Huazhi who was being tortured, it would be fine. But she was afraid that she would mass-produce and promote it with great enthusiasm…

She couldn’t imagine how many police casualties it would cause.

“Sigh…”

The more you meddle in other people’s business, the more business you have to meddle in. Thinking that the deadline for reviewing manuscripts was coming up soon, she decided to go back and focus on her main job first.

Ren Huazhi first took a detour to the small commodity market and bought a black canvas guitar bag. She put the gunblade in it and slung it over her shoulder. After reducing the degree to which she was attracting attention, she felt at ease and walked into the village in the city.

When she passed by the pancake shop at the corner of the street, she bought two sweet pancakes with extra scallions as usual. She wrapped the plastic bag around her hands twice to warm them and to replenish the energy she had consumed in the fight.

The place she lived in was one of the hundreds of independent rental rooms in the village in the city. She turned in from the blue iron-skinned wall of the pancake shop, which was covered in all kinds of small advertisements, and walked up a steep slope that an electric scooter couldn’t go up. And she had to be careful not to step on the sewer cover—she was already very familiar with this road. Finally, she lowered her head and squeezed under the eaves of the house upstairs, where shoes were being dried, and returned to her courtyard.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t hers. Three families shared this approximately six-square-meter luxurious atrium. The clothes they dried were all strictly adhering to a certain boundary similar to a shared area.

Ren Huazhi hung the pancake on her arm, wiped her face at the sink in the corner of the atrium, and took out her keys to open the door.

She thought: I don’t think I lowered my head just now. Why didn’t I hit the eaves? She tried to pretend that she didn’t know the answer.

“Who are you looking for?”

A voice suddenly sounded, interrupting her.

Behind a plastic steel window on the left side of the atrium, a girl sitting on a bed was holding a clothes-drying pole, about to poke Ren Huazhi.

“The big brother who lives in that room didn’t tell me he had a foreign friend. What’s your relationship with him?”

“…You might not believe me if I tell you, but he’s actually dead. I just moved in today.”

Ren Huazhi said nonsense with a straight face.

There were only these few families in the atrium. Even a dark and reclusive person like her still remembered who the girl was. This ancestor, who was one year younger than her, was named Xu Panpan. She had moved in last year and was also living alone.

According to Xu Panpan herself, she had some rare psychological illness, and the doctor had told her to go to lively places to feel the “human atmosphere.” Her parents, who found it troublesome, had thrown her into the village in the city.

Ren Huazhi didn’t have a medical background, so even if the medical records were made up, she couldn’t expose her. But in the half a year they had been seeing each other every day, she really hadn’t seen what kind of illness she had.

Xu Panpan was not very satisfied with her answer and still looked at her with suspicion. She didn’t put down the long-handled weapon in her hand.

“Alright, I was lying,” Ren Huazhi sighed. “I’m Ren Huazhi’s sister, his real sister.”

As the saying goes, an excellent deception is 20% lies and 80% truth. Although her second explanation was also a complete lie, with the even more outrageous one before it as a contrast, it instantly seemed much more credible.

The temperament of the Chinese people is always to compromise.

“I haven’t heard of this either,” apparently, Xu Panpan, who was Chinese, did not fall for this and was still not giving up.

“Why does he have a golden-haired, blue-eyed real sister?”

“Because my hair is dyed,” Ren Huazhi, who had successfully diverted the topic, said without a blush or a flutter of her heart. “Isn’t it my freedom to dye it red or yellow?”

“What about your eyes?”

How do I know about my eyes? I was in such a hurry that I didn’t even have time to look at myself with my phone camera… but Ren Huazhi still had an excuse: “A British woman married into the family in my grandmother’s generation. The genes showed up in me. My brother’s eyes are also a little brownish, aren’t they?”

“Hmm? Is that so…”

Actually, no.

It was all made up on the spot.

But Ren Huazhi had already disappeared, and his existence could not be found anywhere in the world. Even if Xu Panpan felt that something was wrong, she couldn’t verify it—

Ren Huazhi saw that Xu Panpan had taken out her phone.

She opened her photo album.

She opened one of them. It was actually Ren Huazhi, who was looking at the camera with a strange expression while washing an apple. She zoomed in and zoomed in again.

“You’re lying! His eyes are clearly pure black!”

“…A sneak shot! There’s a sneak shotter here!”