Chapter 95: Glitch Part 1

Xu Yinian and Shen Ruoshuang had shared the bunk bed ladder for so long that she had grown accustomed to the slight vibrations whenever the other moved up or down. Her first instinct, naturally, was that it was her.

Her heart was full of concern for that name.

That urgency almost eclipsed the alarm brought by her lingering dream and the phantom sensation of those trembling, warm fingers.

The moment the words left her lips, however, Xu Yinian snapped into full wakefulness.

Shen Ruoshuang hadn’t come back to the dorm tonight…

That movement wasn’t Shen Ruoshuang!

Her heart skipped a beat. The hair on her arms stood on end as the cold sweat that had pooled on her forehead during her nightmare finally rolled down her skin in the silence.

“Niannian.”

After an indeterminate amount of time, a voice rose from the dead silence of the darkness below the bed.

A husky, burning heat rushed toward her, mingled with the messy, ragged breaths of someone who hadn’t quite regained their composure. The nasal tone of her name sounded particularly thick and clingy.

Yet, the voice was so weak and frail that the speaker seemed barely able to force those two syllables out.

From the tone and the way she was addressed, Xu Yinian tentatively recognized the speaker as Bai Ran.

“Sister… Sister Ran?”

Perhaps it was because the voice sounded so strange, but Xu Yinian didn’t feel the slightest bit of safety from the usually close Bai Ran. Even the familiar nickname she had used countless times felt clumsy and disjointed on her tongue.

In the pitch-black room, she couldn’t see the sickly flush on Bai Ran’s pale face, nor the lingering, shimmering intensity in her eyes.

It was far from satisfaction. It was a raging fire, ignited from dry kindling, with no way to vent—held back only by the final shred of restrained logic.

Bai Ran had vastly underestimated Xu Yinian’s attraction. Originally, she had only intended to guide that hand to touch her.

Just a touch would have been enough…

But she hadn’t expected the sensation to be a cataclysmic disaster, one that nearly consumed her.

Having barely managed to pull herself back from the edge of losing control, she clung to her remaining rationality and dared not go any further.

Bai Ran was terrified that she might actually do something to hurt Niannian.

Furthermore, she was gripped by a dangerous, weakening palpitation, fearing that the person beneath her might wake up at any moment. Her frail heart felt as if it were being torn apart; the congestion in her chest made it difficult to breathe.

Paradoxically, this sense of suffocation only intensified the overwhelming sensation from moments ago.

With just a slight “mercy” from Niannian, her morbid obsession had been magnified to its limit. She felt as though she would never tire of the pain, wanting only to surrender to all the love that bloomed because of her goddess.

No matter how careful she had been, her weakened body had still alerted Niannian while she was descending the ladder.

Hearing that hated name had acted like a bucket of ice water, splitting her psyche in two.

On one side, her heart nearly stopped at its most violent pulse, fearing she had been caught and that her entire charade was about to crumble.

On the other side, she felt a poisonous, bone-deep ache because Niannian had blurted out that name before she was even fully conscious. The pain was so sharp that her entire chest convulsed.

It wasn’t until Xu Yinian’s hesitant, fearful “Sister Ran” reached her that Bai Ran snapped back to her senses, her panic and regret overshadowing everything else.

She had to dispel Niannian’s suspicions!

At any cost.

She could not allow herself to fall into a position where Niannian feared or loathed her…

Driven by a survival instinct etched into her very soul, Bai Ran’s voice remained weak, but she forced herself to maintain a gentle, worried lie:

“I heard Niannian talking in her sleep. You seemed very scared.”

“…I was worried, so I came to check on you.”

As she uttered the last syllable, a sweet, metallic taste of rust welled up in her throat.

Blood.

As if she had no sensation at all, Bai Ran swallowed it back down.

Hearing the familiar tone of concern, Xu Yinian finally relaxed. Only then did she realize her pajamas were completely soaked through with cold sweat.

“I… what did I say in my sleep?”

She remembered the fragmented, persistent nightmare and felt another jolt of alarm. She was terrified she might have said something she shouldn’t have, exposing those secrets to Sister Ran.

“You said… ‘It wasn’t me who said it.'”

The darkness in Bai Ran’s gaze was completely at odds with her hesitant, soft voice.

Xu Yinian froze. She hadn’t expected it to be that sentence.

“Niannian, what wasn’t you? Does this nightmare have something to do with what happened today?”

Under Bai Ran’s seemingly unintentional guidance, Xu Yinian considered a possibility.

Could she have been defending herself? Saying that the rumors Shen Ruoshuang faced in high school didn’t come from her?

Though it was a far cry from the dream she remembered, Xu Yinian often forgot her dreams the moment she turned around. Perhaps she had simply forgotten…

Thinking of this, Xu Yinian finally spoke, her voice inevitably muffled by the weight of the past:

“I… I don’t know.”

Although she felt guilty for brushing off Sister Ran’s kindness, she couldn’t let anyone know about those things.

Xu Yinian heard Bai Ran sigh. The older girl offered a few words of comfort, but her breath grew weaker toward the end, and her voice began to tremble.

At the same time, there was a slight, muffled clinking sound—one Bai Ran was clearly trying to hide.

Having spent so much time with Bai Ran, Xu Yinian immediately recognized what that sound was.

“Sister Ran, you… you’re taking medicine? Are you feeling unwell?”

Xu Yinian instantly recalled the strange, weak voice from earlier and finally understood. Her heart felt as if it were being squeezed.

“Waking up suddenly in the middle of the night causes some heart palpitations. It’s fine, Niannian. I’ll be okay once I take the medicine and go back to sleep.”