Ye Jinyi booted up the computer and stared at the flood of junk games on her desktop, suddenly feeling zero desire to play any of them.
Just then, she noticed a livestreaming app.
A shameless idea suddenly popped into her head.
“What if… I became a welfare streamer?”
“No, no!”
Ye Jinyi quickly shook her head and rejected that terrible idea.
After wavering for a while, she managed to suppress the thought.
The reason was simple—her ID selfie wouldn’t match anymore.
She couldn’t even start a stream if she wanted to.
“No no no, what am I even thinking!”
Ye Jinyi finally realized that her brain was full of nothing but bizarre, nonsensical thoughts.
“Whatever,” she muttered, clicking into a card game and deciding to just play something chill.
Once the game opened, one particular screen caught her attention.
[Welcome Back]
…
Ye Jinyi suddenly felt a pang in her chest.
This had been her favorite game, the one that brought her so much joy during her college years.
“It’s been over a year, huh.”
After she started working, Ye Jinyi just never had time for games anymore.
At first, she kept saying: “Tomorrow… I’ll play tomorrow… tomorrow, tomorrow…”
Eventually, she even got too tired to make those excuses.
Maybe she’d just been too exhausted.
After claiming her welcome-back rewards, Ye Jinyi scrolled through the current game content and found a lot of new cards had been added recently.
But the compensation cards given to her were all outdated ones from two years ago…
So basically, it was like she got nothing at all.
Ye Jinyi flipped through the descriptions of the new cards, trying to understand how the meta had changed over the past year.
Just then, a friend sent her a game invite.
[Magical Girl Yingmeng-chan] has invited you to a 1v1 duel.
“What’s this?”
Ye Jinyi racked her brain trying to remember who this username belonged to, but she had no memory of ever adding this person.
She thought about it for a bit, then decided to accept the invite.
At least someone was around to play a game with her—that was something.
The moment she entered the room, she was ready to start playing.
“Master, where have you been this whole year?”
That totally out-of-nowhere question suddenly disrupted Ye Jinyi’s focused gamer mindset.
“Eh?”
Weren’t they just here to play cards?
Why this random question?
Wait a sec—Ye Jinyi suddenly remembered that she might’ve taken on a little disciple like four years ago…
To test the theory, Ye Jinyi quickly typed and sent a message: “Are you… Huimengyi?”
Within seconds, the other player replied excitedly: “Yeah yeah, Master! You’ve been offline for over a year! I sent you messages and you never replied—I thought you were ignoring me!”
“Oh, that… Mostly just work stuff, no time, you know. By the way, you changed your name?”
“I regretted using my real name back then! But I changed it to celebrate becoming a magical girl! Yingmeng is my code name—what do you think, Master? Cool, right?”
…
What’s the difference between your old and new names?
Ye Jinyi had no idea how to even begin roasting that.
Wasn’t the new name still clearly your personal info?
In other words, her little disciple’s “name change” was just swapping her real name for a fake name that still pointed right back to her.
What a waste of money!
She burned five yuan on a name change and still got it wrong.
While Ye Jinyi was busy grieving over that precious five yuan, Yingmeng sent another message.
“By the way, Master, I just saw on the Magical Girl official site that a world-class calamity, ‘Flame That Burns the World,’ was spotted in Guiyun City! I’m just a G-rank magical girl, but I’ll give it my all to face it!”
The moment Ye Jinyi read that, her brain short-circuited.
Guiyun City?
Wasn’t that exactly where she lived?
A world-class calamity—now that was even worse.
Everyone knew “world-class” was the highest tier of disaster.
In all of history, there had only ever been one disaster to reach that level.
Ye Jinyi immediately dropped the card match and started hammering at her keyboard, frantically typing her next message.
“Mengyi-chan, you’re not joking, right? I live in Guiyun City!”
Right after hitting send, Ye Jinyi realized—this game didn’t even support sending images.
“Ugh, fine, fine. Stop using this trash game’s chat. Let’s switch to QQ, we can send pictures there.”
She closed the game and opened QQ, where a red dot was already lighting up the top of her message tab.
Ye Jinyi opened it.
It was a gif of Beifang-chan hopping around with the caption: “Suddenly appears!”
Ye Jinyi had to hand it to her little disciple.
She’d never deleted her after all this time.
That was some real dedication—cyber-loyalty of the highest order.
Ye Jinyi typed and sent: “Enough with the useless memes—hurry up and send me a screenshot!”
“Okay, gimme a sec.”
After that, there was radio silence for a while.
Eventually, Yingmeng finally sent a long, heavily pixelated screenshot.
“HQ doesn’t allow us to share info from the official site, so a lot of it’s censored. I’m sorry, Master… Honestly, I’m already kinda overstepping by showing you this…”
“I get it. Let me look it over first—we’ll talk more after.”
Ye Jinyi opened the image and started scrolling through the content.
At first, nothing seemed too out of the ordinary… until she reached the photo from the Flame that Burns the World’s sighting—and froze completely.
A rear-view shot of a little loli with pale yellow short hair, lamb-fleece coat, and pleated skirt.
Why did that look so familiar?
“Wait a minute—that’s me!”
Only now did Ye Jinyi realize why the report had been posted at around 4 a.m.—wasn’t that exactly when she had rushed home?
It all made sense now—why there had been so many magical girls chasing her for no reason.
They had mistaken her for a calamity…
Thinking back, Ye Jinyi recalled everything that had happened since the Red Rose Ring appeared on her finger.
None of it really added up.
No—none of it made any sense at all!
Turning into a loli, waking up in the afternoon with a mysterious slip of paper in her hand—every single thing was just flat-out abnormal.
But if she was the calamity, then everything suddenly clicked.
Just sitting at home and getting blamed for the end of the world—classic.
At least there was one good thing: she no longer had to worry about some disaster killing her, since she was the disaster.
Of course, the bad news was that she’d probably starve to death instead…
Didn’t really make much difference, did it?
There was no need to keep reading the rest.
Ye Jinyi already knew what this “calamity” was all about.
No way anyone could fail to recognize themselves, right?
She closed the image and started typing in the chat again.
“Thanks for sharing the info. I’ve finished reading it. By the way, you said you became a magical girl, right? G must be a low rank.”
“If you ever run into a fight you can’t win, don’t hesitate—just run. Don’t try to force it. You’re still a kid. Life matters most, okay?”
After she sent the message, a reply came back quickly.
“Grk…”
“A magical girl of justice doesn’t run!”
“Besides, I can’t let others die just to save myself.”
“Even though… I’ve actually never completed a battle on my own before…”
As Ye Jinyi read through each of those messages, she realized—she didn’t really understand magical girls at all.
Maybe it was that very spirit that allowed generation after generation of magical girls to keep standing up to calamities and protecting humanity.
