Baiyuyi 42

<Previous Chapter] [Index] [Next Chapter>

Chapter 42: A very normal college day

Monday found an exhausted Yuan Chenglei lying face down on a desk in the lecture hall, looking like death.

After a split second of silence, Nangong Wei regathered his wits and calmly made his way across the hall.

Only after he had settled himself down, pulling out his laptop and tucking his bag underneath his chair, did he ask, “Old Yuan, what’s up with you?”

“… …”

At first there was nothing, then the lifeless lump twitched before Yuan Chenglei turned his face towards his buddy.

Finally, after nearly a minute of staring, Yuan Chenglei opened his mouth and said, “Nangong Wei, you’re kind of a second generation rich, aren’t you?”

Nangong Wei made a sour face, pausing from where he’d been prepared to stuff his earbuds in his ears.

“What do you mean by that? Trying to start a fight?” he said sullenly, before deciding that Yuan Chenglei was a harmless idiot and wasn’t trying to be snide about anything. “Well, yeah. Technically. But my old man’s pretty stingy with me and my brother’s pocket money, so I’m nothing like those self-entitled pricks.”

“I didn’t mean that!” Yuan Chenglei sat up in a hurry, waving his hands in denial. “I just meant, well, like … … uh…” He closed his eyes and tilted his head, frowning as he tried to think through what he wanted to say.

“Like, does your dad ever take you through to meet people at parties or something?” he finally managed to fumble out.

“… I mean, for New Year’s greetings and stuff, but not really otherwise,” Nangong Wei said. “I’m the second son anyway, so there isn’t too much hope pinned onto me.”

“… …” Yuan Chenglei wondered if he’d shoved his foot in his mouth somehow.

Well heck, he’d probably be annoyed if someone started poking their nose into his personal, family issues.

Luckily Nangong Wei was a pretty chill dude when it came to this sort of thing, so he quickly put Yuan Chenglei out of his misery and straight out asked, “Why you asking?”

“Ah, so, see, apparently the bookstore owner I’m working for is actually a bigger person than I realized, and I went with him to a gathering, and somehow got mistaken as his apprentice…” Yuan Chenglei half-explained, half-lied.

In reality he wasn’t an apprentice but a disciple.

Nangong Wei laughed.

“So you were thrown into high society without any warning?” he teased.

“It wasn’t… high society… exactly,” Yuan Chenglei said lamely.

Honestly, he just really wanted someone he could complain to who would understand his pain, but the more he thought about it, the more Yuan Chenglei realized there was no way he would be able to explain a goddamn thing!

Nangong Wei slapped Yuan Chenglei’s back and laughed harder.

“You’ll get used to it!” he said, as if that was any comfort. “And if you have a bigshot behind you, all you need to do is act like you’re confident, and everyone will back off and let you be!”

“Ah… hahaha…”

Yuan Chenglei regretted that he even attempted to find someone who could relate to his experiences in attending the cultivators’ meeting.

It’s 1000 times worse when you can only half explain things than when you don’t explain anything at all!

Luckily, the rest of the students started filing in soon after Nangong Wei entered, and Yuan Chenglei was saved the sensation of only half-scratching an itch as the rest of their buddies taking the lecture joined them.

Other than Luo Jinwei, who had grown up in the same small town Yuan Chenglei and Tsu Huiling did, Yuan Chenglei had only met the others after first attending university.

Most of them were from middle class families, with only one or two from upper-middle class families, so it was a bit of a mystery why rich kid Nangong Wei chose to hang out with them rather than other rich kids, but if you didn’t pay attention to his high-end stuff, Nangong Wei often just blended in with the rest of them as idiot college boys who liked to mess around.

Of course, it’s not like Yuan Chenglei could say their group of friends didn’t have anyone who liked to try to mooch off Nangong Wei when it came to going out for a night on the town or going out for meals, but at the very least Yuan Chenglei tried not to.

Maybe the rich kid scene just made Nangong Wei uncomfortable, or maybe there was something else at play.

Either way, it was bad manners to pry into someone’s privacy, so Yuan Chenglei quickly tossed those types of thoughts to the back of his mind and began begging to copy the homework he had forgotten about.

Look, a lot of things have happened over the past few days, okay? It’s only obvious that few homeworks fell between the cracks!

It was a very normal college day, but it felt kind of surreal to Yuan Chenglei.

As he sat through his second lecture, he couldn’t help but feel like his life outside of uni and his his life inside of uni were mutually incompatible.

It was like one of them was real and the other was just a dream, but Yuan Chenglei couldn’t tell which one was the real one.

Maybe an ordinary person would say that the one with ghosts and cultivators was obviously the fake one, but Yuan Chenglei found it hard to entertain the thought.

As a boy who harbored dreams of becoming a superhero as a kid, he wouldn’t want that side of his life to be fake!

… Well, either way, it’s probably a pointless thing to be thinking about since he knew that both sides were real.

“Yo, let’s go get lunch.”

At the end of the third period, Yuan Chenglei’s good buddy Luo Jinwei appeared.

“Mm? Dog Jin, you don’t have second period. You didn’t head back to the dorm?” Yuan Chenglei asked, shoveling his laptop into his backpack.

“Dog Cheng, the aircon is broken, so why would I go back there to freeze my ass off?” Luo Jinwei snorted, hands in his pocket. “Besides, I haven’t been able to get a hold of you all weekend, so c’mon, buy me lunch!”

“How did it go from ‘let’s get lunch’ to ‘buy me lunch’?” Yuan Chenglei grumbled, but it was true that he had been preoccupied recently, and he didn’t have any good excuses not to buy his buddy lunch have to return to the bookstore until later, so Yuan Chenglei reluctantly decided to go along with Luo Jinwei’s plan.

“What about you guys?” Yuan Chenglei asked, turning to their other three friends who were also preparing to leave the lecture hall.

“Nah, I’m going to go in for office hours later, so I’ll eat back at the dorm,” Lu Hongjun said righteously, pushing his glasses up his nose, but his ‘good student’ aura was easily broken as Wang Mujiu threw an arm over his shoulder with a sneer.

“You know, Sir Lu hasn’t missed an office hour for that young, pretty Assistant Professor Su,” Wang Mujiu said suggestively.

Yuan Chenglei and Luo Jinwei exchanged looks before giving Lu Hongjun looks halfway between pity and disgust.

“Aiming too high,” Yuan Chenglei said.

“Delusional,” Luo Jinwei said.

“It’s best to go to the doctor the second you notice something wrong with your head,” Nangong Wei said, shaking his head with a sigh. “I have a video conference, so I can’t go either. Old Luo, bring me back something to eat!”

With a flippant wave, Nangong Wei headed out first.

“Well these two losers might not want to go out, but I’m starving. Where are we going?” Wang Mujiu said, disentangling his arm from Lu Hongjun’s shoulder.

“Chenglei should decide, since he’s paying,” Luo Jinwei said with a grin.

“Good point,” Wang Mujiu said with a nod.

“I don’t really mind,” Yuan Chenglei said, rolling his eyes, “but don’t you have a job in the dorm cafeteria, Mujiu? I’d think you’d mooch off the staff meals there.”

“It’s because I work in the cafeteria that I don’t want to eat there,” Wang Mujiu said, a disgusted look on his face.

“… That doesn’t make me feel good,” Luo Jinwei said with a grimace.

The guys who live in the dorm really don’t have it all that great… … Yuan Chenglei thanked his past self that he had unwittingly gotten a job at the bookstore with room and board.

Anyway, Luo Jinwei and Wang Mujiu were only joking, and although Yuan Chenglei had no problems paying for lunch, the other two weren’t seriously intending to mooch off him and had no problem with eating cheaply.

They ended up heading to the foodie street that college students often frequented with prices that reflected the state of a poor college student’s wallet.

“I feel like I haven’t seen you much outside of classes,” Luo Jinwei said as as they sat on an outside table, gnawing on skewers and sipping soup.

“Mm, well, I’ve been helping the kid at the store with some tutoring,” Yuan Chenglei said vaguely, avoiding any mention of the cultivation training that he and Zhao Jinjing had been doing.

“Oh, that’s right, you said she was kind of behind for high school. When is she going to start going? Do you think she can get in?” Luo Jinwei asked.

“We’re going to wait until after midterms,” Yuan Chenglei replied.

“Midterms… come to think of it, are we going to have midterms?” Luo Jinwei mused.

Wang Mujiu and Yuan Chenglei stared at him for a moment before they both sighed.

“It depends on your professor,” Wang Mujiu said.

“If you don’t know which of your classes has, then I wonder if it’s already too late for you,” Yuan Chenglei said with a sigh.

He was beginning to think that Mama Luo was right to worry about whether Luo Jinwei would keep up on his studies without her supervision.

After gnawing on chicken wings, the three boys tossed their trash away and wandered the street to kill time before their afternoon lectures.

“… Hm? Hey, isn’t that Lingling?” Luo Jinwei suddenly said. “What are they doing here?”

Sure enough, up ahead was Tsu Huiling and several of her girl friends, which was a little strange since, although some of the girls would often accompany the boys to this rowdy, cramped street filled with the scent of oil and grease in the air, they often went to trendier shops when they went out with just the girls.

“Maybe one of the shops around here got featured in a magazine,” Wang Mujiu said wisely, gnawing on the leftover stick from his skewer. “Girls like that kind of stuff.”

“Girls and Lu Hongjun,” Luo Jinwei quipped.

“Should we go over and see?” Yuan Chenglei suggested. “It’s a hell of a lot creepier just standing here staring at them.”

“ “…” “

Luo Jinwei and Wang Mujiu had nothing to say to that.

As the three of them approached Tsu Huiling and her two girl friends, it didn’t take them too long to notice that something didn’t seem right.

It didn’t look like Tsu Huiling and her friends were there for food at all. Instead, they were standing in front of a table of guys, and seemed to be arguing.

It didn’t seem to be a small matter either, since both parties were getting more and more heated by the second.

“Hey hey, this isn’t looking good … ” Wang Mujiu said. His steps faltered for half a second as his habit of wanting to avoid trouble activated, and only the fact that one of the parties involved were his friends was keeping him from quietly slipping away from the scene of a potential fight.

“Yeah. Should we step in – watch out!”

Suddenly, one of the men the girls were facing raised his arm in anger, towering over the most petite, but also the most vocal girl in their group of friends, Shao Lingna.

Luo Jinwei shouted as he made to dash towards them, but he was beaten to it by their group’s ‘nice guy’.

Luo Jinwei and Wang Mujiu watched, dumbfounded as their friend disappeared from their side and suddenly reappeared next to the girls, a frown on his face as he grabbed the other man’s arm, preventing the other from bringing it down on Shao Lingna.

They knew Yuan Chenglei had been working out a lot more (allegedly), but was it possible for someone to move that fast? They’d almost think he was a superhero from a movie or something!

“What the fuck are you butting in for?!” the angry man yelled, his face turning a shade of red as he discovered that he wasn’t able to pull his arm free from this scrawny kid.

“Now now, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m sure that there are better answers than turning to violence, right?”

A chill ran down the man’s back as Yuan Chenglei smiled at him pleasantly, hand not budging in the slightest even as he tugged more and more forcefully at his arm.

“That’s right, what are you trying to do?” Luo Jinwei scolded. “Look at you, a big bad man bullying a group of girls. Even if they were in the wrong, the moment you hit someone else, aren’t you at fault? Haven’t you learned how to solve problems with your words instead of your fists? What kind of upbringing did you have? Ain’t you making your momma cry?”

Thrown off by Luo Jinwei’s machine-gun mouth, inherited from Granny Luo herself, the man and his friends glared fearfully at the newcomers, then at all the staring passersby.

Quickly deciding this entire ordeal wasn’t worth it, the man pulled his arm away from Yuan Chenglei’s grasp, or rather Yuan Chenglei finally allowed him to pull his arm away, and he and his friends shot one last dirty look at the girls before hurrying away down the street.

As the hustle and bustle of the street went on around them, the boys and girls looked at each other for a second before Shao Lingna’s legs gave out under her and she grabbed onto Tsu Huiling as she exclaimed, “Oh my god, that was so scary!”

“What were you doing, pissing him off so badly?” Tsu Huiling said with a sigh, but she was also a little pale.

“What, like you were going to keep quiet after seeing how he hit Rongrong,” Shao Lingna snorted.

“Whatwhatwhat?” Luo Jinwei said, looking from Tsu Huiling to Shao Lingna and back. “What happened, who hit who?”

Tsu Huiling sighed, being tugged this way and that between Shao Lingna’s unsteady legs and the other girl, Ying Xia, who had been cowering fearfully behind her the entire time.

“Well, first of all, thanks for coming to help us,” Tsu Huiling said, reaching an arm around to awkwardly pat Ying Xia’s hand. “This morning, Ning Meirong came to class with a big welt on her face, and apparently her boyfriend hit her.”

“She came to school like that?” Wang Mujiu asked. “Wouldn’t it be better for her to stay at home? If he hit her that hard that it left such a big mark.”

“She lives with her boyfriend so… Anyway, she’s in our dorm right now. She said she was too scared to see him, but obviously we weren’t going to let it go, and so, well, you saw what happened…” Tsu Huiling sighed again.

“Rongrong’s boyfriend does boxing, so I don’t know what we were thinking,” Ying Xia said, voice trembling.

Yuan Chenglei frowned, flexing his fingers thoughtfully.

“If she’s living with him, doesn’t that mean she knew him fairly well?” he finally said.

“Not everyone makes good decisions…” Wang Mujiu said, but Tsu Huiling shook her head, cutting him off.

“No, it’s true some people don’t know what they’re getting into, but Meirong and her boyfriend knew each other pretty well. At least, he’d never shown signs of domestic violence before. He’s not like Chenglei, but I remember he was a decently nice guy when we met him before.”

… What was that supposed to mean? Yuan Chenglei didn’t know how to feel about being used as a measurement of ‘nice guy’ ness.

“At least, he wasn’t the type to hit people in public, right?” Shao Lingna said, looking at her girl friends for confirmation, and Ying Xia nodded rapidly.

“It was a little strange.” Tsu Huiling furrowed her brows as she thought back to what had just happened. “His friends didn’t really try to stop him either.”

“What assholes,” Luo Jinwei said, scowling. If one of their friends was acting like a scumbug, he’d like to think the others wouldn’t just sit by and watch.

“One or two of them did try to say something, but um, how to say it…” Shao Lingna tilted her head, thinking about how best to explain it.

“It was like they were scared of him too,” Ying Xia said, her voice still a bit quiet from the fear she’d just undergone.

“That’s it!” Shao Lingna nodded emphatically. “It’s almost like he became a completely different person, and no one really knows what to do about it!”

Yuan Chenglei frowned, slowly curling his fingers into a fist.

He wished it was his imagination that he’d felt some sort of turbulent, dark qi curling off the Ning Meirong’s boyfriend.

It was particularly worrisome, since the man didn’t seem to have any formal cultivation training.

---

<Previous Chapter] [Index] [Next Chapter>

<a/n: I forgot I scrapped the chapter I had finished super last minute, so my ‘I’ll update in a day or two’ was under the assumption that I already had the chapter done, which was WRONG orz . So it took a little longer than first foreseen, but I’m going to be trying to update regularly from now on.>