It became quiet. After Hisaki’s footsteps disappeared at the end of the corridor, the room fell silent again.
Rinna leaned against the head of the bed. Before Xiao Lian went out to discuss matters with Lao Die, she always arranged her medicine in the order it should be taken.
‘This person is really…’
Rinna couldn’t find a precise word to describe this feeling of being cared for, so she simply gave up and reached over to pick up her phone from the nightstand.
She didn’t use her phone much. The last time she charged it was Thursday night.
Rinna pressed the power button, and the screen lit up…
The battery icon in the upper right corner showed: 32%.
It could last a little longer, but she’d need to charge it soon.
Rinna was about to put the phone back on the nightstand, but her finger stopped above the screen.
She stared at Hisaki’s curved eyes on the lock screen for two seconds, then swiped her thumb across the screen, unlocked it, and tapped the green messaging app.
The three pinned contacts were still in their usual spots.
“Best Friend,” “Mother,” “Dad.”
Her finger scrolled down the screen until she found the note—
“Kikyo (Partner).”
Rinna sank the back of her head deeper into the pillow and stared at that line of chat history for several seconds.
A flood of words swirled in her head, but she didn’t know where to start.
Hisaki’s matter.
Hisaki was right.
But the matter itself was precisely about Hisaki.
Kikyo was the only person her age in her life she could talk to about this kind of topic.
She needed someone to talk to.
So Rinna typed a line.
“Kikyo, are you free right now?”
After sending it, she flipped the phone over and placed it face-down on the blanket, staring at the washi paper hanging lamp on the ceiling, feeling her heartbeat quicken just a little.
About ten seconds later, the phone vibrated.
She flipped it over and saw Kikyo’s reply.
“What’s wrong, Rinna? I’m free right now.”
‘That fast.’
Rinna even wondered if Kikyo was holding her phone watching some anime, or…
Like that math class on Friday morning…
Huddled somewhere playing on her phone.
Her finger hovered above the input box, hesitating for a long time.
This wasn’t the kind of everyday conversation that could be phrased in three seconds; she had to choose every word carefully.
Typed a few characters, deleted them.
Finally, she took a deep breath, pushed the stone that had been weighing on her heart for days from the deepest part of her chest, and quickly typed a line on the screen.
Sent.
“I’ve fallen for a girl. I don’t know if I should tell her how I feel… I’m a little scared…”
The message slid into the chat with a whoosh.
At the same time, twelve kilometers from the Yangjian Town Shopping District, in the center of Banyanfield District.
Skyscrapers stood tall; this was the true “city center” of Mountainsea City.
Glass curtain walls reflected the midday sun, blindingly bright, and the streets were crowded with more than ten times the number of pedestrians than in the “countryside” where Rinna and the others lived.
Among these uneven clusters of buildings, one apartment tower stood twenty-four stories high, one elevator per floor.
On the twenty-third floor, walking through the genkan led to a rectangular living room about nineteen square meters—3.9 meters by 4.9 meters, roughly the same size as Hisaki’s room.
To the left of the living room were two bedrooms and one bathroom.
The master bedroom door was closed; the secondary bedroom door was half open.
The secondary bedroom was Kikyo’s room.
The decoration of this room matched her hair color…
All pink and cute, filled with traces only a girl who loved adorable things would leave.
Above the desk was a three-tier bookshelf. The top two shelves were packed with manga and light novels of various art styles, and the bottom shelf held Kikyo’s treasured collection that she had spent a fortune on—
Game discs.
At that moment, Kikyo was not on her bed.
She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the bookshelf, wearing only white athletic shorts and a black tank top, her hair unbound, her pink locks casually draped over her shoulders.
The air conditioner in the room wasn’t set very high.
She was bent over, rummaging through the bottom shelf.
That shelf was crammed full of her game discs.
Her fingers slid over the CD cases.
Parasitic Symbiotic Love
A modern yuri version of “Romeo and Juliet,” the story revolves around two girls forbidden to love each other due to a grudge from the previous generation.
Zero: Crimson Butterfly
A classic psychological horror game. The survival story of twin sisters in a strange village.
The older sister, Tiancang Jian, injured her foot from a fall into water when she was young, leaving her with limited mobility—frail, dependent on her younger sister, gentle and quiet.
Allena
A Japanese-style horror game.
Combines yuri, incest, and a yandere, sickly older sister.
Fragile Feelings
A gentle, slow-burn yuri school story.
A kind young teacher is drawn to the school’s cold head nurse, Anne Clemence, who suffers from a terminal illness—a congenital neck tumor that cannot be operated on, and who has been told countless times she wouldn’t live to adulthood.
Lonely Girl’s Yuri Story
The mutual redemption of two lonely souls.
There were also some more niche doujin and indie games that Kikyo had bought physical copies of, and for almost every game, she had both the standard and collector’s editions.
Her collection criterion was only one—
It had to be yuri.