Cen Mingchan hadn’t been this nervous in a long time.
Not even that morning, when the debate host announced the results, had she felt anything close to this.
She refreshed the intimacy-relationship page, forcing herself to sound calm. “Sister, I sent the request.”
She knew she was being too eager, too rash.
It was that line the enemy marksman had dropped in all-chat last match—”carrying my girlfriend”—that had planted the thought. And when the game ended in victory, the thought had taken root and refused to leave.
She wanted to be impulsive, just this once.
Her sister was too mysterious. The personal details she let slip were always trivial—debated in college, has a job now, shares the same birthday, doesn’t eat cilantro. Too vague, too ordinary to piece together any real picture of who she was.
The moment she was unfriended, Cen Mingchan would never know who her sister truly was.
Like a kite slipping its string, the game felt like the only thread she could still hold.
She was gambling—gambling that her sister would soften, just for a moment. Gambling that they might feel the same way.
But her sister said nothing. She didn’t accept the request. The air curdled, heavy and still.
Cen Mingchan waited in silence for an answer.
“Mingchan.”
It was her sister who broke the quiet.
“Does it have to be this relationship?”
Cen Mingchan’s heart twisted hard. She stared at the intimacy request that still hung unanswered, and her nose began to sting. “These past days—you must have noticed, sister. I like you.”
Silence again.
“Sister.” The words came out with difficulty. “You don’t like me at all?”
If you didn’t like me, why would you treat me so well? Why stay with me, indulge me?
Her sister spoke slowly. “Mingchan, there are many kinds of affection in this world. Not all of them are love…”
She said it gently, but Cen Mingchan understood perfectly.
She lowered her head. Her vision blurred. She blinked and blinked, but the film of water stayed put. “Sister, I don’t want a consolation prize.”
Her sister answered with silence again.
After a while, she heard her ask: “If I don’t agree, will you delete me?”
Cen Mingchan froze.
Because her sister had hit the mark.
Cen Mingchan was in a difficult spot—and she felt she deserved it.
She knew herself too well. That was why she had always believed everything was under control.
When it came to love, she had always been a patient hunter, willing to pour endless time into winning over her target.
She only ever wanted people who didn’t want her at first. She savored the hunt, the slow swallow of the kill.
A formal confession, a demand to define the relationship—to her, those weren’t the charge of a bugle. They were the auctioneer’s hammer.
And she never dropped the hammer mid-bid, not without certainty.
Yet now she had done exactly that.
Which meant that if she handled this wrong, she would lose her forever.
Cen Mingchan knew her own ugly stubbornness all too well.
As a child, her parents had been busy with business and rarely home, leaving her in her grandmother’s care. So she treasured every moment she had with them.
And because she treasured it too much, something fierce and possessive had grown in her—a streak of aggression.
She remembered once, when her mother took her to visit her uncle’s house. She was a few years older than her cousin there.
By any reasonable measure, it was normal for her mother to hold the little cousin for a while. Yet jealousy had flared in Cen Mingchan.
To her, her mother—who spent so little time with her—was giving her precious time, her priceless love, to her cousin.
She couldn’t accept it.
What she couldn’t accept even more was this: she had swallowed her temper, over and over, and instead gone up to wheedle and beg her mother to hold her too—only to be told, “You’re so big now. Don’t cling to Mama like that. Let me hold Qingqing a while. Be good.”
Qingqing was her cousin’s pet name.
Cen Mingchan couldn’t make sense of it. She was a child too. She needed her mother’s arms too.
Her mother so rarely held her.
Why would her mother rather hold a cousin—someone bound to her by thinner blood—than her own daughter?
Cen Mingchan looked at her mother, and suddenly she had her answer.
Her mother didn’t love her anymore.
Her face went stony. She turned and walked out of her uncle’s house, retracing the road home the way they had come.
The road home was long and far, but familiar. She knew the way.
She was small then. A child striking out alone—it didn’t take long for her father to notice something was wrong and come after her in the car.
No matter how he called, she wouldn’t stop. She kept walking home in silence.
Her father drove slowly, crawling along behind her.
Until the young girl was too tired to move and squatted by the roadside, tears falling.
In the end, coaxed by her father, she got in the car and went back to her uncle’s house.
Now it felt like the past replaying itself. Her eighteen-year-old self stood before her, asking to be held—asking for her love.
And Cen Mingchan felt a flicker of relief. Relief that she understood herself this well.
Digging into her own heart, she had to ask: had she really needed her mother’s embrace that day? Had she wanted her mother to hold only her, forever?
No. That wasn’t it.
Because of the long separations from her mother, Cen Mingchan had always felt insecure. She had cast her cousin as an imaginary rival for her mother’s love.
What she wanted, always, was to be first in her mother’s heart. She wanted her mother to choose her over the cousin without a moment’s hesitation—to show favoritism, plain and clear.
Only then could she reinforce the belief inside herself: Mother loves me most. Mother loves me very much.
Much later, when Cen Mingchan was already an adult, some occasion brought the old story up again—as proof of how “stubborn” and “unforgiving” she had been since childhood.
And Cen Mingchan insisted on rehashing that day with her mother, analyzing it, because she had always believed there was a better way to handle it.
If she had been the mother, she would have set the cousin aside first. She would have taken her young daughter into her arms, praised her, kissed her cheek.
She was just a child then, restless and playful. Hold her a little while, and she’d wriggle free on her own, skipping off, delighted, to find her other cousins and play.
And after that, her mother could hold the cousin as long as she liked. She wouldn’t mind. She wouldn’t be jealous.
Her mother listened, then pressed a thumb to her brow and scolded her, laughing: “Completely unreasonable.”
And today—it was the same.
For some reason, her eighteen-year-old self had been seized by a sudden, intense sense of crisis. She was insecure.
Cen Mingchan was certain: in all their time together, she had never mentioned anyone unimportant. So she didn’t know who her younger self had cast as this invisible target.
But it didn’t matter. She already knew how to handle it.
What the eighteen-year-old Cen Mingchan wanted, still, was to be first. If this intimacy relationship had to be established in the game, then it had to be with her—no one else.
What she needed was reassurance. To be chosen. Not some real, confirmed romance.
If this time she didn’t get her way, she certainly wouldn’t keep up the pretense of friendship. She would leave, decisively—the way she had left her uncle’s house that day.
She couldn’t cut contact with her eighteen-year-old self.
She had to change her. Change the course of her life.
At the very least, she had to steer her younger self away from that car accident seven years from now.
She wanted her parents alive.
So Cen Mingchan had reasons she couldn’t help but compromise.
Facing her eighteen-year-old self, she chose to yield again. And in that moment she recalled her mother’s verdict and smiled bitterly to herself.
Unreasonable, all right.
Then she clicked Accept.
[Congratulations. You have established a romantic relationship with Deep Grace Betrayed.]
Cen Mingchan stared at the system notification, then at the newly formed relationship. Joy and sorrow, sourness and bitterness, all rose at once.
She heard her sister say gently, “Mingchan, I truly can’t lose you.”
Cen Mingchan kept her head down, watching the water droplets on her phone screen. The room must be leaking, she thought.
She read the system announcement of their relationship over and over. What a terrible person she was.
She had used her sister’s reluctance to place a bet, forcing her to agree.
Her voice caught. “Sister… will you hate me?”
“No.” Her sister answered, “I only want you to feel safe. But you know—even bound together like this, it doesn’t mean anything.”
Something seemed to land and shatter. Cen Mingchan stared hard at the words feel safe.
In the end she only said, “I know, sister. I just like you too much.”
*
Binding the game relationship did, to some degree, bring them closer.
And Cen Mingchan finally learned her sister’s name—Jiang Jingque. That name only deepened her conviction that fate had tied them together.
Her own name, Mingchan, came from the line “The bright moon leaves the branch, startling the magpie; the clear wind, midnight, the cicada sings.” Her father had chosen it.
She guessed her sister’s name came from the same verse.
The bright moon leaves the branch, startling the magpie; the clear wind, midnight, the cicada sings.
Jingque and Mingchan. She murmured the two names to herself, delight blooming in her chest. They sounded like a couple’s names.
She and her sister were made for each other.
And as if that weren’t enough, the surname Jiang—rare enough to stand out—was another thread of fate. Her mother’s surname was Jiang.
So Cen Mingchan secretly changed her sister’s contact name to “Jingque.”
Though binding the relationship in the game, in the end, hadn’t changed much either.
Their dynamic stayed exactly the same. She still chattered and left long messages; her sister, once free of work, still picked out the important ones to answer.
Only now, when they queued together, that little pink heart marking them as lovers made her secretly, giddily happy.
The debate draw had come out. They were up against the Department of Physical Education, and the topic favored them—Should college students date during their studies? They had the affirmative side, arguing that they should.
Cen Mingchan threw herself back into the frantic drafting stage.
And her sister, as before, stayed on voice with her, discussing which angles to argue, which points the opposition might raise.
“They’ll probably dig up cases of suicide or crime caused by failed relationships, to argue the harms of dating in college.”
“And they’ll bring up the impact on studies.”
Cen Mingchan had anticipated both. She wasn’t worried at all. “Both are easy to handle. If dating in college hurts your studies, then what about dating during a master’s or doctorate—does that hurt too? The argument is absurd. On the contrary, love drives people forward, makes them strive to become better versions of themselves. A couple can study for grad school together, sit the civil service exam, pursue a doctorate.”
“As for extreme behavior caused by breakups or whatever—we call that overgeneralization, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It comes down to individual mental resilience, not something that happens to the whole group.”
Her sister laughed softly on the other end. “I’ll be waiting for your good news.”
Cen Mingchan propped her chin on her hand, jabbing at the paper with her pen, on and off. “I wonder who the Department of Economics and Management is up against this time. My senior said their department is our sworn rival. Ours has won two years running—this year we’re going for a three-peat.”
“Want to make a bet, Mingchan?”
She perked up. “What kind of bet?”
Her sister answered, smiling, “A bet on the finals—whether your side wins or theirs.”
“I’m only in the first qualifying round. We’re not even at the finals yet.” Cen Mingchan hadn’t seen the other departments compete, so she wasn’t fully confident, and a little worry crept in. But she didn’t want to dampen her sister’s mood, so she said, “I’ll take the bet.”
“I proposed it, so you choose first.”
Cen Mingchan was competitive by nature. Without thinking, she answered, “Then I bet on myself to win.”
Her sister didn’t mind. She only laughed. “Then I suppose I’ll have to bet on someone else winning.”
With the bet settled, it came to the question Cen Mingchan cared about most.
Curious, she asked, “What’s the stake, sister?”
What came next was like the song of the Sirens drifting across the Strait of Messina—impossible to resist.
She heard her sister say, word by word: “The stake is—the loser grants the winner any request.”
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