Chapter 858: Nothing We Couldn't Talk About
I was entangled by Jiang Ruoxue.
This entanglement was really strange.
She was clearly a girl, yet she forcefully barged into my social circle with a thick-skinned, borderline harassing attitude.
Didn't she know that I was also a girl?
No, I should say, it was a good thing she was a girl—if a guy had done the same things and said the same words, I might have already used "Duo Xin Po" to make him run into a wall.
But I had no idea how to shake her off. Every time I appeared in this city, Jiang Ruoxue would be standing right in front of me.
As I said, Jiang Ruoxue had made a terrible first impression on me. She practically hit every single one of my pet peeves.
I didn't like people who talked too much. I didn't like people who were overly intimate. And I especially didn't like people who kept prying into my secrets.
So for a long time, I never initiated a conversation with her. I thought my cold attitude would make her back off, but she just kept following me as if nothing had happened.
She would occasionally start chatting with me, completely acting like she wasn't an outsider. But I was clearly giving no response—why couldn't she sense it?
If our roles were reversed, I would definitely have backed off and never spoken to that person again.
But unfortunately, she had a completely different personality from mine.
What made it even more troubling for me was that she was always by my side. How was I supposed to continue carrying out the tasks Bai Yang had given me?
"Wife, did you take care of your leg hair before you came here?"
Jiang Ruoxue asked me out of the blue, leaving me speechless once again.
I turned my head and shot her a glare, then sighed. This place had turned into this kind of mess, and she was still concerned about her leg hair?
"I should have dealt with my leg hair before I got captured..." Jiang Ruoxue rolled up her pant leg, revealing her calf, and pointed at a few sparse strands of leg hair as if sharing a little secret with a friend. "Look, it grows back every time I reincarnate... It's so annoying... I bought new depilatory cream but never got to use it before I got trapped here. Why can't this place record the state after I shave my legs? So frustrating..."
She looked up and met my speechless gaze. After three seconds of silence, she asked:
"What brand of depilatory cream do you use?"
I couldn't take it anymore!
This person had absolutely no sense of boundaries...!
I was about to curse her out when a flash of a scene suddenly crossed my mind.
I remembered my college dorm. My other three roommates used to often talk about similar topics.
They acted as if I didn't exist at all—every conversation just skipped right over me.
Because I had to work part-time jobs, I was always out. Even when I wasn't working, I spent my time in the library.
As time went on, the other three girls grew much closer to each other than to me.
There were so many topics that girls could talk about among themselves, but I had no one to talk to about them. So they were considered good friends... and I wasn't?
Because I couldn't play games or shoot short videos with them, and I didn't have the money to travel with them... did that mean we weren't good friends?
I always comforted myself, telling myself that I didn't need to care about these topics, that I just needed to stay focused on my own goals... but in the end, I was still human.
If I truly didn't care, then why would I have gotten "YNA" tattooed?
I also wished I had a good friend I could talk to about anything.
"Depilatory cream... does it work well?" I asked quietly.
"Ha!" Jiang Ruoxue's eyes lit up when she heard me speak. "If you don't use depilatory cream, how do you usually handle your leg hair?"
"I... I use tweezers."
"Pluck it? That works too, but it hurts your skin and might cause inflammation, you know."
That was the first time I remembered actually talking to Jiang Ruoxue. I never imagined that "dealing with leg hair" would be the topic that brought us together.
No, I should say I never imagined I could ever become close with her at all.
I used to think that only people with similar personalities could become friends, but now it seemed that wasn't the case. Jiang Ruoxue and I had completely different personalities and ways of thinking, yet I didn't find her repulsive.
Even though her first impression on me was terrible, everything she did afterward kept adding to her score. She could say the things I didn't dare say, do the things I didn't dare do—she had always been that kind of person. In the days that followed, she was no different from that "first impression."
Those days I spent very happily. For the first time, I learned what it meant to have "nothing we couldn't talk about." "Nothing we couldn't talk about" meant you could say anything to her, including things you could never bring up with your parents.
She was like a friend who had arrived far too late.
"Jiang Ruoxue... You came to be friends with me, but why don't you leave any room for boundaries?" I asked her curiously one day. "With that kind of first impression, wouldn't a lot of people run away?"
"No, wife, your logic is off." Jiang Ruoxue shook her head. "It's precisely because I knew we would end up as good friends that I treated you like a good friend from the very start."
"Here you go again..." I sighed. "Whose logic is really off? Which comes first and which comes after?"
Thinking about it carefully, she wasn't wrong. From the very beginning, she had already seemed to treat me like a good friend. The things she said and did were nothing like how you'd treat a stranger.
"Your logic is definitely the one that's off," Jiang Ruoxue said. "Wife, I am 'Cause and Effect'—how could my logic be wrong?"
"Stop calling me 'wife.' My name is Yan Zhichun." I introduced myself to Jiang Ruoxue very seriously. "Zhi as in 'knowing,' Chun as in 'spring.'"
"Oh?" Jiang Ruoxue smiled and nodded. "One swallow heralds spring—what a nice name."
"What about me?" I said. "Is your name any less nice?"
"Jiang Ruoxue—the first thing that comes to mind is probably 'a lonely boat, an old man in a straw cape, fishing alone in the cold river snow,' right?" Jiang Ruoxue said with a wry smile. "Sounds like a fate of solitary hardship, doesn't it?"
"Not if you've studied enough classical poems," I shook my head. "Ma Zhiyuan's 'Shou Yang Qu' says: 'Dusk falls, snow swirls wildly, half-plum blossoms, half-willow catkins. On the river at evening, it's a scene worth painting—a fisherman in a straw cloak rows home.'"
"Oh..." Jiang Ruoxue nodded slightly after hearing this, then grinned mischievously and reached out to touch my chest. "I didn't know you were so learned..."
I quickly dodged to the side. Even though she was now my friend, I still couldn't handle this kind of overwhelming intimacy.
That evening, I took Jiang Ruoxue to the building where I had first come into being. I felt that after these days together, it was time to tell her what I was doing.
"Jiang Ruoxue, what I'm about to say might be dangerous. If you feel uneasy after hearing it, you can leave at any time."