“Hey, hey, hey? Yao Yao, are you listening?”
“Ah! No! Wait, wait, I mean yes! I… I am listening!”
Su Mengyao suddenly snapped awake. White Snow curled her lips, her face full of disbelief.
“Then why don’t you tell me, Yao Yao, what was I just talking about?”
“Um… Were you saying… something about wanting to eat desserts?”
Su Mengyao hadn’t been listening at all. After hesitating, she said tentatively.
“So you really weren’t listening at all!”
The angry girl reached out and poked Su Mengyao’s forehead hard.
“Do I look like some kind of glutton who only knows how to eat, eat, eat?”
“Um… Y-yeah, you kind of do?”
Imitating White Snow’s mannerisms, Su Mengyao stuck out her little tongue and tapped her own head.
“Being cute won’t work! And Yao Yao, your attempt at being cute is nothing like the real thing, you know. You have to tilt your head~ And when you tilt your head, you also have to meow like a cat!”
“Honestly…”
White Snow let out a sigh. Hearing the girl sigh, Su Mengyao panicked. She didn’t know what she had done wrong, or perhaps she had done everything wrong.
After all, she was just a gloomy shut-in girl, someone with such social anxiety that even talking to others was difficult.
In any case, she was terrified—terrified of seeing White Snow look disappointed, which would remind her of those abandoned children.
Then, she heard the girl say:
“Yao Yao, I was just saying that I’ve been busy with some things on Cat Star recently, so I might not be able to come see you for a while.”
Seeing her frozen still, the girl thought she was spacing out again.
“Hey, hey? Yao Yao, are you spacing out again?”
But what the girl didn’t expect was that Su Mengyao suddenly dropped to her knees and hugged her waist.
Thud—
Hearing the sound of the girl’s knees colliding with the floor, White Snow grew anxious.
She was about to ask Su Mengyao if it hurt, but then she heard the voice on the verge of tears, which forcefully pushed the girl’s concern back down her throat.
“Don’t! Please don’t leave me!”
“Is it something I did wrong? I can change! I can change anything!”
“Even if you want to find more girlfriends, that’s fine! I can accept it!”
“I can cook! I can do laundry! I’ll become braver! I know… you don’t like how timid I am… I… I will… I’ll speak loudly to others!”
“If you really hate me… then hit me! Hit me! I’m not afraid of pain, I won’t… I won’t cry out…”
The girl’s voice grew increasingly choked with sobs, until it finally dissolved into muffled whimpers.
But she was still holding onto the girl, clinging tightly without letting go, completely looking like she was at White Snow’s mercy.
“That’s it!”
Her voice suddenly grew louder, as if she had thought of a solution.
“I have a lot of money! My dad is rich! Whatever you want, White Snow! You can have everything I own! If that’s not enough… if that’s not enough, I’ll sell my organs too! No matter how much money you want! I… I’ll give it all to you! Just don’t leave me…”
White Snow finally found a chance to interject and hurriedly shouted to stop her.
“Wait, wait, wait… Hold on!”
“I’m not leaving for good! I just have some things to take care of! After a month or so, I’ll definitely come back!”
After those words fell, the girl could clearly feel the trembling girl pause for a moment, as if processing her words.
Su Mengyao was still holding White Snow’s waist, carefully looking up at the girl.
“…R-really?”
Under the cleansing of tears, the girl’s eyes were dark and glistening, so clear that they could reflect White Snow’s features.
And so, White Snow filled her entire vision, roughly shoving aside everything else unimportant around her.
As if her eyes had always only held that adorable white-haired loli.
Looking at the shimmering light in those eyes, looking at the reddened corners of the girl’s eyes, White Snow’s heart ached for no reason.
This was the first time she had looked down at Su Mengyao from above, the first time she had seen such a pitiful, fragile Yao Yao.
That delicate, frail feeling was simply too pitiful.
There was simply no way to resist…
She quickly admonished herself.
‘Jiang Cheng, you must prioritize the bigger picture. You absolutely cannot get trapped in romantic entanglements!’
“Really!”
White Snow gritted her teeth and nodded firmly.
“But in TV dramas, couples become strangers after just one separation!”
Su Mengyao suddenly became agitated again.
“If we don’t see each other for a month, you’ll forget about me! You’ll get together with some other girl. No! No… that’s not what I mean… At the very least, I have to be with you too!”
White Snow had a bit of a headache.
This was the first time she had seen Su Mengyao defy her like this, or even go against her.
It wasn’t like she was really abandoning Yao Yao—she was just genuinely busy, and she’d come back once she had some free time.
But she still needed to grind levels, and using the unlimited-duration cat form was very taxing on her energy.
After all, under normal circumstances, ordinary people recover energy while expending it, even while working.
But the cat form couldn’t recover energy; it only kept consuming it. With one side declining and the other rising, she’d become more and more exhausted, and then she wouldn’t have the energy to practice music theory.
“How about I come once a week, okay?”
White Snow tried to negotiate.
“No!”
“Then… once every three days… that should be fine, right? There was a period before when I came every three days…”
“Don’t! Don’t do that…”
Seeing the girl about to cry again from anxiety, White Snow quickly changed her approach and added half an hour of daily cat-form time, which finally shut Su Mengyao up and successfully soothed the girl.
“Alright… get up first.”
‘Finally managed to calm her down…’
White Snow breathed a sigh of relief.
“No.”
The girl buried her face in her stomach and replied in a muffled voice.
The girl rubbed her head, feeling a headache coming on.
‘She’d never noticed before that Yao Yao was such a clingy child—hugging on and not letting go. What a handful…’
‘But, hmm… this feeling was really strange.’
‘Although somewhat annoying, it also brought a strange sense of satisfaction, or perhaps accomplishment?’
‘It was like watching a big cat burrowing hard into her arms.’
‘So this was what it felt like to be needed?’
‘Actually, it wasn’t bad at all…’
‘It was just…’
Looking down at the girl, she now had her face pressed tightly against White Snow’s stomach.
From the girl’s perspective, she could only see her ink-black eyelashes trembling gently with the girl’s hot, moist breath.
Moisture condensed on the girl’s eyelashes, forming fine droplets of water.
Sunlight streamed in through the window, falling upon those glistening droplets, refracting into tiny rainbow prisms.
This faint, tiny brilliance caught White Snow’s eye, yet it made her heart sink slightly.
She suddenly realized that it was becoming difficult to view Su Mengyao as merely a game account for farming experience.
Or rather, it was hard to treat her as a passerby with no connection to her own life.
At the very least, she could no longer bring herself to make the decision to abandon the account.
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