Chapter 31: I Won’t Compete with You for Shu Lingchen

“Shu Shu, do you have a moment?”

“No.”

Shu Shu was mildly surprised for about half a second that Chu Lian had actually come to find her, but she didn’t care in the slightest what the girl wanted.

Leaving it at that, she gripped her two-thirds-eaten scallion pancake and smoothly walked right past Chu Lian.

Chu Lian froze for a moment, completely blindsided by how blunt and dismissive Shu Shu was. But then, as if a lightbulb had gone off in her head, she convinced herself she understood why. Her tense expression relaxed, and she quickly caught up to Shu Shu with a light, confident stride.

“Shu Shu, you don’t need to be so hostile toward me.”

Shu Shu: “?”

Chu Lian pressed her lips together and said, “I won’t compete with you for Shu Lingchen.”

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Fbw Fbw qkdyzzu nzwle kd.

—Chu Lian had completely catastrophically misunderstood her relationship with the little idiot.

Shu Shu’s expression became incredibly hard to describe.

Chu Lian pushed on. “Shu Shu, don’t worry. I won’t stand in your way. You can get as close to Shu Lingchen as you want.”

Shu Shu narrowed her eyes, playing along. “But didn’t you just say that the person Shu Lingchen likes is you?”

Hearing this, Chu Lian immediately assumed Shu Shu was softening up. Delighted, she said, “That just means you need to treat him even better to pull his attention entirely over to you! True love means looking after someone. Besides, Shu Lingchen is so broke; his life must be incredibly rough right now. This is the perfect time for you to shower him with care and affection.”

“Such as?”

“Such as making sure he eats well, dresses well, and lives comfortably. You need to improve his quality of life.”

Just like the way Shu Lingchen used to treat her—giving her his apartment to live in and letting her spend his cash.

A sharp, calculating glint flashed through Chu Lian’s eyes. This was practically an explicit blueprint. She let out a heavy sigh. “I heard that the place Shu Lingchen is currently staying in is incredibly broken-down, old, and just a crummy rental. He probably can’t even get a decent night’s sleep. Shu Shu, your family is clearly extremely wealthy, so resolving an issue like that should be a total breeze for you. It’s the absolute perfect opportunity to get close to him.”

Shu Shu raised an eyebrow.

So this was the angle Chu Lian was working.

The clicking of her internal calculator was practically slapping Shu Shu right in the face.

In order to keep bleeding Shu Lingchen dry, this girl was truly willing to use any underhanded tactic available.

“Chu Lian, aren’t you worried that if Shu Lingchen finds out you came to tell me all this today, it’ll completely break his heart?”

Chu Lian hesitated for a brief fraction of a second before saying, “It’s fine. He won’t care.”

Her casual tone carried an immense, unshakable certainty.

Chu Lian’s lips curved into a relaxed smile; she wasn’t panicked at all. Even if he did find out, it wouldn’t matter. That idiot was incredibly easy to manage and never stayed mad at her. All she had to do was soften her voice and throw a few sweet words his way, and he’d believe every single thing she said.

She didn’t care in the absolute slightest about trampling over Shu Lingchen’s genuine affection.

The warmth completely drained from Shu Shu’s eyes.

Chu Lian felt like the deal was practically sealed. She had practically laid all her cards on the table, and she figured Shu Shu would be overjoyed by her backing off.

She pressed, “Shu Shu, what do you think?”

“I think it’s garbage.” The remaining scallion pancake in her hand completely lost its appeal. Shu Shu pulled up the plastic bag, tied it shut, and tossed it directly into a nearby trash can. Her clear, piercing gaze looked straight through Chu Lian’s pathetic schemes. “I will never give Shu Lingchen a single cent.”

One sentence completely shattered Chu Lian’s delusions.

Chu Lian was utterly struck with disbelief. “Why? Don’t tell me you don’t want to be with Shu Lingchen—”

“Shut up.” Shu Shu swept a cold, expressionless glare over her. “Careful, or you’re going to get struck by lightning.”

Leaving her with that, Shu Shu swiped her key fob at the gate and marched directly into Royal View Gardens.

Chu Lian was left completely frozen on the sidewalk.

—“Chuchu! I’m going to get struck by lightning!”

—“Careful, or you’re going to get struck by lightning.”

Two completely different places, two completely different people, yet they had spoken the exact same words with the exact same meaning.

Wednesday.

Right after the third period of the morning, Shu Lingchen couldn’t wait a second longer to ask Shu Shu how much money he had saved up.

Shu Shu flipped open her ledger and announced, “Fourteen thousand.”

“Ah…”

Shu Lingchen felt completely drained.

He had busted his ass for nearly half a month, and he had only racked up fourteen thousand yuan.

Shu Shu then opened up a brand-new “revenue stream” for him—memorizing classical poetry and classical Chinese prose.

However, the unit price wasn’t particularly high.

Memorizing a classical poem from the textbook netted twenty yuan, while memorizing a piece of classical prose was worth one hundred yuan. Additionally, if he successfully memorized the footnotes and annotations alongside it, the payout doubled.

The poetry was manageable since the verses flowed rhythmically.

But the classical prose was an absolute nightmare. Not only was it incredibly tongue-twisting, but it was also absolutely packed with archaic phonetic loan characters!

To make matters worse—whether it was intentional or completely accidental—the teachers had stopped cold-calling students during class entirely over the past few days. This caused Shu Lingchen’s primary source of quick cash to plummet off a cliff. Since the midterm exam scores wouldn’t be released until next week, his only option was to hunker down and memorize text.

Shu Lingchen scratched his scalp raw, his brain throbbing as he tried to digest a grueling piece of classical prose.

As he was memorizing, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Shu Shu was once again using her phone to search for arts and culture news.

Her search terms were: Beijing, female, young violinist.

For quite some time now, Shu Shu had been heavily keeping track of information in this specific realm, following an absolute mountain of official accounts and Weibo pages.

Shu Lingchen asked, “Mom, are you… looking for someone?”

Shu Shu’s hand froze over her screen.

She was indeed looking for someone.

She was looking for her daughter.

She had a daughter—or rather, she used to have a daughter.

A daughter who was the exact same age as Shu Lingchen.

Back then, Shu Shu had been pregnant with fraternal twins. She carried them to full term, but the labor had been incredibly traumatic; she spent almost the entire delivery in a state of semi-consciousness.

By the time she finally woke up, the bassinet right beside her hospital bed only held one tiny, fragile bundle—her son.

As for her daughter.

The female obstetrician who delivered them had informed her with immense sorrow that the baby girl had already stopped breathing by the time she was brought into the world.

Shu Shu had discharged from the hospital carrying a healthy baby boy in her arms and a piece of her heart that had already left this world.

She had personally taken her daughter to the crematorium.

For a very, very long time after that, Shu Shu had been buried in a profound, silent grief.

But in the dream Shu Shu had right before her death, her daughter was actually still alive in this world, growing up under her father’s care. She was a violinist, and in the original timeline, her hand would eventually be ruined in an accident.

Given that the parts of the dream involving her son had already been proven to match reality perfectly…

That meant there was an incredibly high probability that her daughter was truly still out there, alive and well.

Shu Shu felt a surge of pure joy and intense excitement, but at the very same time, she was terrified—terrified that the dream might just be a dream after all.

On the scratch paper sitting right next to her hand, she had unconsciously filled the page with a single name.

A three-character name.

—Pei Muyin.

This was her daughter’s name from the dream.

Her daughter took the surname Pei.

Shu Shu had instinctively thought of that person almost instantly.

She had tried searching for news related to him. The helmsman of the number-one commercial empire, the Pei Corporation, did indeed have a daughter, but specific details like her age and name were entirely locked down and unsearchable.

Thus, Shu Shu could only start with the key pieces of data from her dream.

A violinist.

Yet, she still hadn’t found a solid lead.

Searching “Pei Muyin” brought up countless individuals with identical names, but combining “Pei Muyin” with “violinist” returned absolutely zero relevant results.

The only real lead she had managed to uncover was an announcement for early next month. An international orchestra called the Berlin-Su Orchestra was hosting an audition in Beijing to recruit new members for their youth strings division. Supposedly, this was a massive, unmissable opportunity that every single aspiring young violinist in the country would scramble to attend.

So… would her daughter be there too?

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Sansukini: Hey Chu Lian, how about get a job instead of relying on Shu Lingchen.

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