“Let… let go… You, you need to… loosen your grip…! I… I can’t breathe…!”
Su Yuqing beat futilely against Zhi Ai’s arms, which felt like bands of iron.
Involuntary tears overflowed from her eyes, mixing with humiliation and fear as they slid down her flushed cheeks, finally dripping onto the cold back of Zhi Ai’s hand.
She could clearly feel the suffocation of her windpipe being compressed.
Ominous black spots began to dance at the edges of her vision, and the roar of her own heart — thumping frantically with terror — echoed in her ears.
After clearly feeling the violent trembling of the girl’s throat and that primal fear born of life’s instincts under her fingertips, a trace of almost pleasurable, morbid satisfaction flashed through Zhi Ai’s glassy eyes.
It was as if she had finally had her fill of watching her prey’s deathbed struggles.
Only then did she slowly release her hold, as if granting a mercy.
“Whew… whew… You… you finally let go…”
As the pressure abruptly vanished, Su Yuqing felt as if every bone had been sucked out of her body.
She slid weakly down the cold tiled wall until she was sitting on the floor.
She gasped greedily for the air rushing back into her lungs, which caused a burning pain in her throat and windpipe.
This triggered a violent fit of coughing, as if she were trying to hack up her very internal organs.
Zhi Ai simply stood there, looking down at her from above.
Her gaze was like that of someone admiring a work of art she had just personally branded with her own exclusive mark.
She slowly raised her hand and straightened the hem of her clothes, which hadn’t even been messy to begin with.
Her movements were as elegant as if she were attending a high-end banquet.
Then, as if suddenly remembering some trivial matter, she spoke in an extremely nonchalant tone.
She dropped a bomb on the still-shaken Su Yuqing that was enough to shatter her newly rebuilt world once again:
“Oh, by the way.”
She slowly crouched down, forcing her line of sight to be level with Su Yuqing’s.
A smile — sweet to the extreme yet cold enough to nearly freeze the blood in Su Yuqing’s veins — bloomed on her doll-like face.
“I forgot to tell you.”
“This cat… also, happens, to, have, a, performance, this, weekend.”
Her gaze was like the thickest spider silk, tightly entangling and locking onto Su Yuqing’s face, which had instantly turned as pale as paper.
Then, word by word, as clearly and coldly as a judge reading a final sentence, she said:
“And you, as my ‘exclusive’ manager…”
She deliberately emphasized the word “exclusive,” as if chewing on its full meaning.
“You should know where you… have to be at that time, right? Meow?”
This sentence wasn’t a discussion or a question; it was an indisputable proclamation.
It was like a high wall rising instantly, completely blocking the only exit Su Yuqing had toward that “Weekend Appointment” — an event carrying her tiny hopes and complex emotions.
It ruthlessly trampled the flicker of hope named ‘perhaps I can start over’, which she had just carefully ignited in her heart, into the cold bathroom floor.
A few seconds of dead silence passed.
Su Yuqing’s brain struggled to process this sudden information, trying to find a loophole amidst the chaos.
“No… that’s not right,” she said.
She looked up, her voice still raspy and trembling from the near-death experience.
“What performance? As your manager… how could I not have received any notification at all? This weekend is empty on the schedule!”
Hearing this, the smile on Zhi Ai’s face deepened.
“Because I… requested it at the last minute~”
She drawled her words like a cat licking its paws, enjoying the final confusion of her prey.
“I might as well tell you the truth! While you were hiding in this little corner, making that ‘secret’ phone call to that blue-haired girl…”
She leaned close to Su Yuqing’s ear and whispered with a breathy voice, like the murmur of a demon:
“This cat also took the time to… make a call to Little Paw’s Manager Huang~”
She straightened up and clapped her hands, as if she had just finished a trivial task.
“Calculating the time… the email or call notifying you of the work arrangement should be arriving just about now, right?”
As if to prove her words, Su Yuqing’s phone — which had fallen to the floor — began to vibrate violently like a dying fish.
A familiar number flashed on the screen.
Su Yuqing acted as if she were grabbing at a final lifeline.
She lunged forward to pick up the phone and pressed the answer button with trembling fingers, her voice urgent and frantic:
“Hello?! Yes! Yes! This is Su Yuqing!”
However, what came from the other end was the formulaic voice of an administrative staff member, clearly delivering devastating news.
“What? A Special Idol Performance?! And it’s for two days in a row?! Saturday and Sunday, all day long?! No… have you people completely lost your minds…!?”
Su Yuqing’s voice rose sharply due to extreme shock and anger.
“How is it possible to coordinate such a last-minute arrangement? What about the venue? The promotion? The band and backup dancers’ schedules?! This shouldn’t even be — “
Her questions were like stones sinking into the ocean.
The other party was merely giving a routine notification and did not give her any room for rebuttal or discussion.
“Hello! Hello?! Listen to me! Hello!!”
The only thing that responded to her was the dial tone after the call was hung up.
Beep… beep… beep…
The phone slipped from her limp hand again, falling onto the floor as the screen went dark.
“He just… hung up…?”
She muttered to herself, her eyes hollow, as if unable to comprehend what had just happened.
The last trace of luck had been ruthlessly snuffed out by reality.
Zhi Ai admired the expression of total collapse on her face, like someone watching the climax of a carefully choreographed play.
She tilted her head slightly, her tone full of innocent confirmation:
“Now, you should finally believe… what this cat said just now, right?”
These words were like a fuse, instantly igniting all of Su Yuqing’s suppressed grievances, anger, and despair!
“Believe you? Like hell I do!”
She snapped her head up, a flame of desperation burning in her eyes.
“No! Why?! Why do you have to keep making my life miserable!? Time and time again! Was destroying my career not enough? Now you have to take away… even a little bit of my private time? Even a tiny… tiny chance for a fresh start? You have to strip it all away!?”
She practically screamed, her long-accumulated emotions bursting forth like a flood breaching a dam:
“Between me and you… is there really some kind of blood feud that can’t be settled…!?”
Facing her hysterical questioning, all of the playfulness and mockery vanished from Zhi Ai’s face in an instant.
She answered quietly, with a calm tone that sounded like she was stating a simple fact:
“Yes.”
Her voice wasn’t loud, yet it was like a giant boulder dropped into stagnant water, stirring up a heart-wrenching echo.
“Between us, of course there is a grudge.”
She took a step forward, her shadow looming over the slumped Su Yuqing.
Her gaze was like the coldest ice pick, stabbing directly into the other girl’s heart.
“Furthermore, this cat can tell you very clearly right now — “
Each of her words felt like shards of ice fished out of an arctic abyss, carrying bone-chilling hatred and unquestionable obsession:
“As long as this cat is still here, as long as I am still in this world… then you, Su Yuqing, should never even dream of… being able to leave my side! Not even a single step.”
This curse-like declaration left Su Yuqing feeling chilled to the bone, as if she had fallen into an ice cave.
She opened her mouth, wanting to argue or lash out, but she found that all words were pale and powerless in the face of such heavy and distorted hatred.
“You…!”
In the end, she could only squeeze out that one word through the gaps in her teeth, filled with helplessness and despair.
Zhi Ai raised an eyebrow slightly, her face once again donning that mask of innocent cruelty:
“Hmm? What about me?”
She seemed genuinely curious.
Looking at her like that, all of Su Yuqing’s surging emotions eventually condensed into a massive sense of defeat that was beyond repair.
“I — !”
Ultimately, she couldn’t say anything.
All her anger and grievance turned into a low growl of extreme suppression:
“Dammit!!”
Just then, the bathroom faucet suddenly made a strange gurgle-gurgle sound.
Immediately following that, the long-stagnant water gushed out, breaking the suffocating silence.
Zhi Ai seemed to be reminded by the sound, and her face instantly returned to its usual air of detached laziness.
She stretched, revealing her curves, as if the intense conflict just now had never happened.
“Ah~ the water is back.”
Her tone was light.
She glanced at Su Yuqing, who was still slumped on the floor, and lightly tapped the girl’s calf with the tip of her toe.
“Stop dazing off. Hurry up and go clean the kitchen~ That pile of ‘semi-finished’ cans and the soup splashed everywhere are waiting for you.”
She turned and walked toward the door with an elegant, cat-like stride.
Without looking back, she waved her hand, tossing out a final command like a master to a servant:
“This cat… is going back to sleep~ Don’t bother me if there’s nothing important, meow~”
The door was gently closed, leaving Su Yuqing alone, sitting on the cold floor amidst the sound of rushing water and her own silent world.
The stinging pain in her neck, the dark phone screen, and those two performances appearing out of nowhere like shackles for the weekend…
Everything was like an invisible net, binding her tightly, pulling tighter and tighter until she could barely breathe.