The small feet of a beautiful girl were certainly quite tempting.
This was especially true for a magical girl wearing an idol stage outfit and pink leather shoes.
Her feet, as perfect as fine art, were adorned with ribbons—a gift clearly telling you to unwrap and play with them as you pleased.
However, Fang Wei didn’t have the “om nom nom” urge to bite down on them.
He wasn’t some pervert from Zhouba!
But looking at Qi Qiancao’s long, fluttering eyelashes, he saw a playful tease in her eyes, mixed with a hint of youthful shyness.
Her body was visibly stiff.
Making such a request was, in fact, somewhat embarrassing for her.
Even with her severe mental issues, a girl was still a girl.
As long as he remembered that, Fang Wei could feel at ease.
Still, even though she was shy, her affectionate gaze carried a trace of yearning.
That was what it was like to like someone.
You resisted while being bashful, yet you secretly hoped the other person would actually do something to you—to shatter your reserved morals and accept you in a certain way, making you their property.
Meeting her youthful gaze, Fang Wei hesitated for a moment, figuring he shouldn’t be so pedantic.
He grabbed Qi Qiancao’s small pink shoes; they were a perfect fit in his palm and felt cool to the touch.
For some reason, he felt absolutely nothing toward ordinary women’s shoes, but if they were the style worn by magical girls…
Shaking off those intrusive thoughts, he took off her shoes and held her small, cute feet.
It wasn’t that he actually hung around Zhouba, okay? It was mostly because after a long day of work, a girl’s feet were bound to be tired.
He was just giving her a massage.
“Mr. Boyfriend, you’re making me feel all itchy~”
Qi Qiancao pushed her luck further, flirting and breathing into his ear, making him feel tingly and numb.
Fang Wei turned his head and gave her a deadpan look.
He had pretty much figured out Qi Qiancao’s thought process by now.
This girl was like a damp, gloomy virgin who had seen a pretty girl or fallen in love with a 2D character during puberty.
She hid under her blankets, dreaming unrealistic dreams of being loved.
The difference was that Qi Qiancao couldn’t distinguish between dreams and reality.
She chose to stay intoxicated forever, unwilling to wake up.
Thinking of it that way, her previous “episodes” seemed more like a defense mechanism for her delusions.
Fortunately, Qi Qiancao was a girl.
If the genders were reversed… she would just be a mentally ill creep!
Fang Wei’s eyes were full of complex emotions as he fell into thought, trying to remember that reality-warping matchstick.
But he was truly too exhausted.
Looking back at the past two days, he had helped Zhuge Yu fight against bullying yesterday, stayed on the phone with Xia Yuanhua until the middle of the night, asked Zhuge Yu for news about Qi Qiancao early this morning, and hunted familiars all day.
And now, at the very end, he was being sexually harassed by a magical girl.
The protagonist Kamijou Touma once lived a life of such incredible width and density throughout his massive light novel series—a pure labor-demon—that readers wished he would stay dead for a while just so he could get some rest.
Now, Fang Wei needed to rest too and clear his mind.
He suddenly thought of that [Excitement Cookie] that had caused him to overdraw his energy.
‘Damn you, Mianzi. You didn’t even warn me before I took the drugs. What if I died?’
He felt a sense of disdainful observation.
Scrolling back through his memories, he found his chat history with Mianzi.
[…!]
‘Oh, so you added an exclamation point after the ellipses to warn me.’
‘That wasn’t enough of a warning!’
The Cash organization reports the tragic news: Mr. Heixiao has ascended to the Planet of Stimulants…
“Mr. Boyfriend?”
However, the other person on the date was still full of energy.
After he had rubbed her feet for a while, he felt Qi Qiancao proactively pull them away.
She didn’t put her pink shoes back on.
Instead, she took the other one off as well, leaving only her asymmetrically designed stockings touching the ground.
“Heave-ho!”
Qi Qiancao jumped down from the ping-pong table, completely unconcerned about the dust on the playground floor.
Fang Wei didn’t pay attention to what she was doing.
His eyelids felt heavy, but he couldn’t sleep yet, lest the magical girl try to play some “forced” games with him while he was out.
Looking down, he picked up the small mirror again.
This monster was much better behaved now.
Perhaps to show its goodwill, it no longer reflected “fear,” but “truth.”
Being able to see your true self through a mirror was a common trope in urban legends.
In the crack-filled surface of the mirror, Fang Wei’s own reflection appeared.
It was different from reality; it was the face of a twenty-eight-year-old.
The corners of his eyes were sharper, and there was a hint of sorrow between his brows.
He looked mature and steady, possessing the aura of a handsome older man.
‘Looking into a mirror at exactly midnight to see your truest self—I haven’t heard stories like that since I listened to girls chat in elementary school.’
If Fang Wei hadn’t been reborn ten years into the past, if that incident hadn’t happened, and if he didn’t desperately need money, money, money… he would have lived steadily until now and become a twenty-eight-year-old handsome guy.
But life was unpredictable.
If he weren’t interacting with these girls as an eighteen-year-old, would things still be the same?
“This mirror is way more fun than those ‘test your future’ apps from the past. Hey, Qiancao —”
Fang Wei looked up.
He was facing the evening glow, and golden light spilled down from the sky outside the elementary school.
It shone upon the tags above the girl’s head.
The fiery red color startled Fang Wei for a moment, though he immediately realized it wasn’t red, but the color of the sunset.
One side of the medium-sized playground was a wall, and the setting sun seemed determined to pour out all its holy light, staining the concrete path beneath their feet orange-red.
Even the tiny dust particles in the air weren’t spared; they floated before his eyes, clearly visible.
The shadows of the walls, trees, and basketball hoops were stretched long.
Looking through the dust and the tails of those shadows, one could see why the sunlight was so piercing.
It was because a girl stood there with her back to him.
The holy radiance of the afterglow stained half her body red.
A breeze slipped past the hem of her skirt, blowing her long hair.
In that golden brilliance, a flash of pink lit up.
Qi Qiancao held her [Mind Gem] in a prayer-like pose, shedding her magical girl form.
The pink leather shoes nearby reverted into white sneakers.
The girl, her black hair restored, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
Under the dazzling afterglow, she looked as pure as an angel.
The angel turned her head and looked back, just about to put on her black-rimmed glasses.
Click—
The girl, the sunset, the glasses, and the skirt hem lifted by the wind to her knees—everything was frozen in this moment.
It wasn’t a time-traveling camera, but a candid photograph.
It happened exactly at the moment she turned around, just as the glasses were about to settle on her face.
It was only after he pressed the shutter on his phone that Fang Wei realized, ‘Shit, why am I taking secret photos of a girl?’
‘How low.’
But the girl didn’t seem to mind.
She put on her black-rimmed glasses and stood with her hands behind her back, smiling foolishly at him.
Once again, a certain young man was left dazed.
‘This little auspicious beast… It’s a good thing we’re both college students. If I had known you back in elementary school and you hooked me like this, I would’ve had to buy you a whole pack of spicy strips.’
The young girl also had something to say.
“I’m very satisfied with today’s date. This is a precious little memory between me and Mr. Boyfriend, right?”
She held up her twin tails and grinned.
Fang Wei’s sleepy brain woke up completely.
He figured that if he had known her in elementary school and tried to give her spicy strips, she probably wouldn’t have wanted them.
Was she the type to crave your snacks? She’d probably want to buy the whole snack shop and give it to you!
Unfortunately, Qi Qiancao had said she never attended elementary school.
So… this truly was a memory belonging only to them.
It wasn’t a delusion, but a physical reality saved in his phone’s photo gallery—a beautiful piece of youth that he could brag about ten years later.
Even if this memory was something Qi Qiancao had intentionally performed for him.
He realized that Qi Qiancao had quite a few little tricks and schemes, and she used all of them on him.
The good ones and the bad ones.
“The ground is cold. Come over here and put on your shoes.”
Fang Wei handed her the white sneakers.
He had originally intended to show Qi Qiancao the mirror.
He was mostly curious about what the mirror would show if it reflected her… hm?
Under the reflection of the setting sun, the mirror showed the back of Qi Qiancao as she crouched down to tie her laces.
Then, the image melted into a sea of white.
White walls, white floors, a white bed.
Even the girl’s clothes were white.
She sat calmly on the bed, her gaze hollow.
One hand was hooked to an IV drip, while the other lay idly in front of her.
Even through the mirror, Fang Wei felt as if he could smell the thick scent of disinfectant.
His gaze swept across the image rapidly, and the logo of a certain hospital on the wall was etched into his mind. It was the only thing in the entire scene, besides the girl, that wasn’t white.
And then…
Crack!
‘[Tri-fold Mirror], you know a little too much.’
He squeezed the small monster into silence.
A seed of doubt and speculation grew in Fang Wei’s heart.
Fortunately, Qi Qiancao didn’t notice.
She boisterously pulled him over, and the two of them squeezed their faces together in the middle of the screen for a selfie.
This sweet girl was completely different from the girl in the mirror.
Those sparkling little eyes only had eyes for him.