Chapter 199: The Ones Who Can’t Be Shaken Off (18)
Rong Rong carefully tasted the cold dish in front of her. Just as the other dishes in the restaurant hadn’t been served yet, she took the opportunity to quickly type a sentence on her phone:
“No, I’m not.”
After thinking about it, she casually replied again, “It’s just that I found a new idol, so I’ve temporarily shifted my passion there. Don’t worry, I’ll come back in the future.”
Yu Wu: “?”
New, idol?
She hadn’t believed it before when others said that it was difficult to retain fans, especially after seeing Rong Rong’s focused and passionate love for her. She thought that even if all her other fans left, Rong Rong would definitely stay by her side forever.
But what was she seeing now?
Yu Wu calmly thought about the possibility that Rong Rong’s account had been hacked. But after thinking about it again and again, just as her assistant came to tell her about her schedule for the next day, she suddenly switched out of her phone’s page, looked at the plane tickets, and then confirmed with her assistant, “My magazine shoot isn’t until the afternoon tomorrow, right? Then I need to buy a plane ticket for the four o’clock flight that evening. Help me book it.”
Assistant: ?
She looked at Yu Wu with a bewildered expression, not understanding why she had suddenly decided to take a red-eye flight in the middle of the night. At first, she thought that it was because the work pressure had been too high recently, which made Yu Wu want to go to a place with nice scenery to relax.
After all, even the celebrities who were currently working on set would give themselves some time to relax during their free time. But after seeing the destination of the flight, the assistant was even more amazed—
“This is…” Her expression changed again and again. Of course, she knew that Yu Wu had an extremely crazy fan who was studying in this city.
And every time the top star had a schedule in the other person’s city, she would arrive early. She would even specially take some time to accompany her if she wasn’t too busy. “Why are you in such a hurry all of a sudden?”
The assistant remembered that Yu Wu’s relationship with this person had been quite stable.
Especially since she could still see the works that the other person had created each time a business deal was officially announced, and even the flower edits for Yu Wu’s new drama hadn’t been missed.
It wasn’t surprising that the assistant felt strange. After all, Rong Rong, as a player, only needed to read the words to complete her homework in this world. Not to mention completing her daily tasks of supporting a celebrity, which was only a matter of minutes for her.
The reason why she had her current frequency was because Rong Rong had been deliberately lazy.
If she had really been diligent, she could have been even more crazy than what the original owner had set her up to be. Unfortunately, she wasn’t interested in Yu Wu.
“If I don’t hurry, she’ll run away.” After hearing her assistant’s words, Yu Wu replied faintly. But because her voice was too low, she wasn’t heard clearly.
But she didn’t care about that and instead gave a very calm order, “Alright, hurry up and book the ticket for me.”
On the other side.
Although Tang Yiyi hadn’t explained the situation to Po Er, based on Po Er’s understanding of her, she knew that she wasn’t the type of person who would waste time listening to gossip.
So after briefly talking about her interactions with her girlfriend, Rong Rong, she hung up the phone. The more she thought about it, the more she felt that something was wrong. She simply started looking for Rong Rong’s whereabouts.
If there were any doubts—
It would be best to ask Rong Rong about them face-to-face.
And for Tang Yiyi, after listening to her “ex-girlfriend’s” interactions with Po Er, a very outrageous guess had formed in her heart. To confirm this, she flipped through the information that her assistant had collected again.
Sure enough, she found information about that distant relative in an inconspicuous place. It was indeed as Rong Rong had said, that she had psychological problems, but it wasn’t like what Rong Rong had said, that she wanted to “give her the best treatment.” This distant relative was receiving treatment at a public hospital in this city.
And the doctor wasn’t someone who was particularly famous.
Was this what she called the best?
Or was it that…
From the beginning, the relative’s illness, and her exorbitant request for money, were all just a disguised excuse? Then what was her real purpose?
Thinking of this, after the unpleasantness from last time, Tang Yiyi, for the first time, threw away her so-called pride and dignity and took the initiative to send Rong Rong a message. Even the content had been edited repeatedly so that it wouldn’t make her seem too fierce, but also wouldn’t make her seem too humble.
After going back and forth, the only sentence that she had typed when she had hit confirm was, “Do you have any time recently?”
But even this sentence, which didn’t have any orders or instructions and rarely wanted to listen to the other person’s opinion, wasn’t sent.
“You are not yet a friend of him/her. Please add him/her as a friend before sending a message.”
Tang Yiyi: “…”
Looking at this system reminder, she rarely revealed a smile on her face, but it didn’t have any gentleness to it. It was completely cold, and the coldness had even gathered in the depths of her eyes.
“Achoo.”
Rong Rong, who was eating spicy boiled fish, was completely unaware of all of this. She wouldn’t have even been able to predict the scene that she would face after leaving the restaurant tonight. After covering her mouth and sneezing quietly, she hastily grabbed some tissues, thinking that she had just been affected by the spiciness of the dish.
Su Mingxiu, who was across from her, was watching with great interest. She hadn’t ordered this dish in the first place. But after someone else at the table next to them had ordered it, Rong Rong had smelled it and thought it smelled particularly good. So she had asked the waiter to add one, and now she was eating it while wiping her nose and crying.
She still couldn’t handle spicy food.
She had indeed tasted this fish. The ingredients were very fresh, and the flavor all came from the chili peppers. Nothing like the particularly irritating capsaicin had been added. So she didn’t pay attention to Rong Rong’s appearance and instead thought about ordering some milk-based desserts.
Rong Rong was eating in a mess. In her heart, she regretted how she had suddenly had the idea of ordering this dish that would make her look foolish.
Especially in front of such a beautiful woman, she moved her chopsticks a few times and had to keep grabbing tissues. In the end, in order to save her precarious image, she could only say the words of surrender with her lips red, “I… I’ll just pack this fish to go. I’m full.”
Su Mingxiu rarely sensed her idol baggage and decided to tease her a bit, “It might not be so fresh after it’s packed up. It’s okay. You can eat slowly. I have plenty of time.”
Or rather, all of her time was revolving around Rong Rong.
Rong Rong: “qaq”
But she really didn’t want to eat anymore!
She stalled for a while, and after feeling that the spiciness and flushing on her face had dissipated a bit, Rong Rong, in order to not continue embarrassing herself in front of this goddess, changed the topic, “You… you weren’t able to appear next to me for too long before, right? Why are you…”
“Mm?”
When she was asked a question, Su Mingxiu didn’t insist on continuing to tease her. She propped up her cheek with one hand, picked up the teacup in front of her, and took a sip of the refreshing Longjing tea. Then, she replied slowly, “I was also very free before. It’s just that I saw that you looked very rushed, and I felt that you probably didn’t want to be bothered and disturbed too much, so I left quickly.”
The implication was that, because Rong Rong hadn’t shown any signs of impatience or of wanting her to leave today, she had stayed for so long.
Under the spherical lights, the girl who was sitting across from her was staring blankly. She hadn’t expected that answer. But after thinking about it carefully and remembering her first meeting with Su Mingxiu, it had been when she was bouncing between the various “girlfriends” that this broken game had set up for her. At that time, she had suffered a double kill. All of her attention had been on those difficult girlfriends. She hadn’t had any time to care about anyone else.
She had even been trying to bargain with the system when she had first seen the bug Su Mingxiu, trying to get more survival strategies for herself.
“I’m… I’m sorry…”
Rong Rong apologized subconsciously.
But Su Mingxiu raised her eyebrows, not knowing where her apology had come from. So she didn’t respond, and instead, she brought up another matter, “You’ve been looking at me very intently recently. Why? Has there been a change in my appearance?”
Oh right.
Now that she mentioned it, Rong Rong remembered the time that she had told her that her pixels were low. She had originally not planned to say much about it.
But under the gaze of those eyes that were as gentle as autumn water, she still subconsciously spoke the truth, “A little… your pixels aren’t low anymore. They’ve become very high definition.”
High definition?
Su Mingxiu chuckled at her accurate description, understanding where her changes had come from.
When it came to this, Rong Rong suddenly had an idea. While the system wasn’t stopping her, she very abruptly started talking about her thoughts on this world, “Have you ever thought about… well, about the essence of this world?”
As soon as she had started a topic, Rong Rong felt that her beginning was too philosophical. After almost biting her tongue, she tried to make up for it, but she didn’t know how to change it for a long time. Fortunately, Su Mingxiu gave her face and replied, “Oh? What is the essence of this world?”
“It’s just that, the encounters between people might not be accidental. They might be some kind of inevitable arrangement—like a large game.”
Rong Rong could probably guess that in this kind of interactive game, the players couldn’t reveal the truth of the world to the NPCs inside.
After all, it was such an intelligent game, and it had even produced a bug as big as Su Mingxiu, who could travel across the entire map and had such a beauty that far surpassed the other strategy targets.
If she was watching someone else play this game, Rong Rong would have definitely thought that Su Mingxiu was the final boss, and she would probably end up using the player—
But after knowing the other person for so long, and even being helped out of danger several times, now that she was about to say goodbye to her last strategy target, Rong Rong could no longer hold back her urge to confide in her.
And Su Mingxiu had also very seriously taken up this outrageous topic, “So in this game, what kind of roles do we play, and what kind of tasks do we have?”
Rong Rong was about to open her lips when the system, which had always been silent when she and Su Mingxiu had met, as if it was completely nonexistent and had a knack for reducing its presence, suddenly started shouting in her mind:
[Warning! Warning! Players are forbidden from revealing the essence of the world to the characters in this game!]
“Ah!”
She covered her head, and the sharp pain made her almost fall off her chair.
Su Mingxiu, who had been watching calmly from across the table, because of her sudden change, instantly got up and headed in her direction.
Before she could fall onto the ground, she pulled her into her arms. Looking at Rong Rong’s furrowed brows, she asked very gently, “What’s wrong?”
“My head… hurts…”
Su Mingxiu lowered her eyes, looking at the paleness of her face and the way that she was having difficulty speaking a complete sentence. The shadows of her eyelashes fell into her pupils, making her deep black eyes look like the sky over a sea that was about to give birth to a storm and a raging tide.
A headache?
—So the system that she had been searching for for so long was right in front of her.
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