Chapter 47: Little Pitiful One Grows Taller – 1

The past is like quicksand, slipping through one’s fingers, never to be chased again.

The high fever and torment of her rut cycle made Gu Xizhou shut herself in her room, weeping bitterly for several days. It wasn’t until the early morning of the fourth day that her monthly tribulation ended. She emerged from her room, went to the research lab with red-rimmed eyes.

Seeing her approach, Lin Ling immediately went to greet her, expression tense: “Boss, has your fever gone down? Don’t you want to rest and sleep a bit more?”

Gu Xizhou waved her hand and walked straight towards the pod: “No need. Connect it, continue.”

Compared to rest, she needed to see Su Zhiyi even more right now.

Lin Ling couldn’t sway her, so she had no choice but to assist her into the pod, into another world.

Younger Gu Xizhou woke up amid a severe leg cramp. She curled up her body, clutching her calf, letting out a pained hiss.

Gu Jing, carrying takeout, entered the hospital room doorway and immediately saw her daughter hugging her legs, writhing and hissing on the bed in pain.

Her heart tightened, and she rushed over, hands full of bags: “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?”

Gu Jing casually put the things on the bedside table, spreading her slender hands over Gu Xizhou, wanting to hold her but not daring to.

Gu Xizhou shrank her body, tears squeezing from the corners of her eyes from the pain: “Leg… leg cramp.”

Gu Jing let out a sigh of relief. One hand covered her daughter’s thin back, the other landed on her calf, soothing carefully: “Relax, relax… slowly lower it. It won’t hurt after a while once it eases.”

Gu Xizhou gasped for air and followed her instructions to slowly relax her leg muscles. After stretching, the pain indeed significantly lessened.

She let out a long breath sitting on the bed. Beside her, Gu Jing patted her shoulder and smiled reassuringly: “It’s nothing serious, just growing pains, muscle spasms. Very normal.”

The doctor had previously briefed Gu Jing on the precautions: after a secondary differentiation, an alpha’s physical functions would undergo earth-shattering changes.

Because the body is growing, it requires a large amount of nutrition. During this year, the child must be supplemented with a lot of high-quality protein.

Gu Jing got up, opened the takeout boxes beside her, and said to Gu Xizhou: “Since you’re finally awake, let’s eat something first.”

“I bought Pork Bone Congee. It’s very delicious.”

Having burned with fever for four days, Gu Xizhou had been surviving on Nutrient Fluid. Now awake, she was ravenously hungry.

It was just that such a high temperature had also made her lose all memory of her surroundings. Sitting on the bed, she stared blankly at Gu Jing’s busy back, somewhat puzzled: “Mom, why are we here?”

Gu Jing turned her head, looking at her strangely: “You don’t remember?”

Gu Xizhou shook her head; her mind had absolutely no impression of what this place was. Her gaze swept around the room, her expression confused: “Is this… a hospital?”

Why was she in a hospital?

Seeing her daughter’s expression, Gu Jing remembered the after-effects of secondary differentiation the doctor had mentioned and understood immediately. Her daughter indeed didn’t remember why she had come to this place.

Gu Jing sighed, pulled open the small table next to the hospital bed with a creak, set it up in front of Gu Xizhou, and placed the congee on it: “You underwent a secondary differentiation.”

Gu Xizhou looked utterly bewildered: “Secondary differentiation?”

Gu Jing dragged the small chair nearby over to sit down, opened her own box of Pig Trotter Rice, poked the chopsticks out of their packaging, and explained: “It means you differentiated again, you’ll grow taller.”

“Your legs will hurt quite a bit during this period; you’ll be fine once you get through it.”

“Oh…”

Gu Xizhou nodded, scooping a spoonful of congee into her mouth, but inwardly a little happy: Can grow taller, huh? That’s a good thing.

Gu Jing picked up the roast duck from her bowl and placed it on the plastic lid of Gu Xizhou’s congee container. Taking a bite of her rice, she said to Gu Xizhou somewhat indistinctly: “The doctor says you can’t do any strenuous exercise this month. Don’t go to the military training.”

“Bones are relatively fragile during the growth period. It’s best to stay in the hospital for two weeks.”

Gu Xizhou nodded and answered with a single word: “Mm.”

She didn’t talk much. Gu Jing just chattered beside her: “I’ve arranged with a nurse sister. She’ll bring you breakfast and lunch. I’ll come see you in the evenings.”

Gu Xizhou thought for a moment, then turned her head to ask Gu Jing: “Won’t that be very tiring?”

Gu Jing sighed, her tone a bit helpless: “It is a bit tiring, but someone has to watch over you, right?”

Gu Xizhou said nothing more. She drank a couple more mouthfuls of congee before saying after a long while: “Actually, I can be alone in the hospital too. You could just come on the weekends.”

Gu Jing narrowed her eyes in a smile, not directly answering the question: “Eat the roast duck, eat more meat, grow taller.”

After the meal, Gu Jing called the doctor over to give Gu Xizhou a check-up. The doctor prescribed her many nutritional supplements and told her not to move around carelessly.

Lying in bed at night, Gu Xizhou felt the pain from her growth period, but secretly felt a little happy.

Well, even though being alone in the hospital wasn’t great, being able to have a quiet place to think over her mother’s recent attitude and her gains at school gave her a rare moment of contentment.

But she wondered, how was Su Zhiyi doing?

Late at night, when all was still, this thought surfaced, startling even herself.

But soon, 0820’s voice appeared in her mind, sounding very surprised: “Why are you in the hospital?”

In the middle of the night, suddenly hearing a voice in her head—even though she was used to 0820’s voice—it still gave Gu Xizhou a fright.

The shock made her calf twitch, and she clutched her leg, gasping in pain.

0820 quickly read the situation from her brain waves, sounding delighted: “Not bad, congratulations. Muscle spasms—you’re going to grow taller.”

Gu Xizhou responded with an “Mm,” saying irritably: “Why are you still here?”

0820 chuckled and spoke nonchalantly: “I’m your guardian deity, so of course, I’ll always be by your side.”

Very well, this time it wasn’t a system, it was a guardian deity.

Definitely not a proper system; what system spoke in such a human-like way?

Gu Xizhou muttered to herself. In that time, 0820 roughly read her brain wave data, somewhat surprised: “You had a secondary differentiation?”

Younger Gu Xizhou was in great pain and couldn’t help being sarcastic: “Aren’t you my guardian deity? How come you don’t even know I’d undergo secondary differentiation, and act so surprised?”

0820 was a dramatic genius, fabricating excuses on the spot: “Every world has different developments.”

“Do you know about Schrödinger’s Cat?”

Gu Xizhou didn’t understand why the topic jumped so quickly but still answered honestly: “Yes.”

0820 said: “That makes it easy.”

She began to hoodwink the child: “When I arrived in your world, the future I could foresee became different from your world’s. Although major directions, like landslides, earthquakes, or plane crashes, won’t change…”

“But for tiny individuals, like you, it can bring about big changes.”

Gu Xizhou looked thoughtful. 0820 pressed on, speaking profoundly: “A person’s fate is just this extraordinary—so minuscule, yet so monumental.”

Gu Xizhou responded with an “Oh,” pulled the blanket over her head, and said in a muffled voice: “I’m going to sleep, I’m not talking to you.”

0820, however, didn’t want to let her off: “It’s not even eleven, why sleep? Didn’t you miss your little Zhiyi? It’s been four days since you saw her. Is it so hard to send her a message?”

“You’ll be staying here for a whole month.”

Gu Xizhou poked her head out from the covers at the sound of that name, feeling extremely awkward: “Why should I send her a message?”

0820 very bluntly pointed out the current situation: “You miss her. If you miss her, go find her.”

Gu Xizhou admitted she was a little tempted, but suddenly messaging Su Zhiyi out of the blue would seem too strange.

She thought for a moment, took her phone from under the pillow, and opened WeChat.

In the long night, the faintly glowing screen illuminated the young alpha’s youthful face. She tilted her head up, staring at that silent profile picture, hesitating for a long time without tapping into it.

0820 offered advice from the side: “Tap in, send her a message, say what you want to eat for lunch tomorrow. If she replies, just tell her you sent it to the wrong person.”

Gu Xizhou thought this was a terrible idea, but her hand, out of her control, tapped into Su Zhiyi’s profile, typing a line: “Tomorrow for lunch I want to eat Sweet and Sour Ribs.”

After quickly sending it, she clutched her phone, eyes wide, holding her breath, waiting for Su Zhiyi’s reply.

At this hour, Su Zhiyi should have just finished military training and returned to the dorm. If she could use her phone, she would definitely see this message.

Gu Xizhou waited several minutes before finally getting Su Zhiyi’s reply: “??????”

“Gu Xizhou ??????”

In the dormitory, Su Zhiyi had finished washing up, put on her pajamas, and was sitting on the bed playing with her phone. Seeing this message, she was puzzled: “Are you feeling better?”

On the other end of the phone, Gu Xizhou saw these three messages, her eyes wide, her heartbeat nearly stopping.

0820 coached from the side: “Don’t reply yet, wait!”

“After a bit, tell her you sent it by mistake.”

Gu Xizhou silently counted to twenty in her mind before typing a line: “Ah, sorry, I sent the message wrong. I meant to send it to my mom.”

Su Zhiyi smiled and replied to her message: “Thought so. So, are you feeling better?”

Four days after that awkward incident happened, the students were all discussing Gu Xizhou’s “heroic” deeds. Now, rumors were flying all across the grade that she and Gu Xizhou were involved.

Not long ago, Su Nanfeng in the hospital had even called to interrogate her, asking what her relationship with Gu Xizhou was.

Su Nanfeng was furious to death, wishing she could hop out of the hospital and beat Gu Xizhou up.

Su Zhiyi, besides the initial embarrassment, eventually learned to accept and take it calmly. The incident had happened, and anyway, the one socially dead was Gu Xizhou, not her.

Besides, the way Gu Xizhou had cried and yelled wanting to hug her looked more like a child looking for its mother than an alpha seeking an omega. It was hard for her not to see it that way.

But she didn’t know if Gu Xizhou herself found this matter difficult to face. These past few days, she hadn’t felt right actively asking about the other party’s situation.

Now that Gu Xizhou had come to her first, she could show a little appropriate concern.

Gu Xizhou’s message came back very quickly: “I’m fine now.”

Su Zhiyi asked her: “So when are you coming back?”

Gu Xizhou answered: “Next month.”

“?”

Gu Xizhou explained: “The doctor says it’s a secondary differentiation, my bones are fragile. Shouldn’t do strenuous exercise.”

Su Zhiyi understood: “Then take care of yourself well. See you next month.”

Gu Xizhou: “Mm, mm, mm.”

Su Zhiyi thought for a moment and added some advice: “The growth period after a secondary differentiation should be very uncomfortable. You need to sleep more. Go to bed early, I’m going to sleep too, good night.”

Gu Xizhou was satisfied and replied: “Good night, Su Zhiyi.”