025 A Dangerous Budding
Walking into the Golden Arches restaurant, Pei Ningle tried to appear calm and collected, but she couldn’t suppress the smile on her face.
“One Big Mac combo, and…” Standing at the counter, the girl suddenly turned her head and asked, “What are you having?”
Wang Heng shook his head. “Just order what you want. I’m not hungry.”
Pei Ningle was a little surprised. “You’re not eating? You’re the one treating, and you’re not eating at all?”
“Yeah, I don’t have much of an appetite.”
Wang Heng was telling the truth. He really didn’t have much of an appetite; he just felt a stomachache.
The encounter with Pei Ningle couldn’t even be called a coincidence. It was clearly the administrator’s doing. This time was one thing, but what about next time?
Wang Heng had a premonition that no matter how hard he tried to hide, that fatal assassin girl group was bound to assemble. Since he couldn’t escape, all he could do was resolutely prevent these ill-fated relationships from escalating. As long as he remained single, there shouldn’t be another battlefield of love, right?
In short, he had already figured out what he should do in the future. But looking down at the little hamster in his palm, he really couldn’t feel completely at ease.
But the girl across the table was the exact opposite. While eating nonstop like a hamster, the corners of her mouth couldn’t help but curve upwards, looking very content.
After a long silence, Wang Heng asked, “Are you very happy?”
The girl, who had just finished a big hamburger, nodded vigorously, bit down on the straw, and took another sip of Coke. The stimulus of the iced Coke going down her throat made Pei Ningle let out a low “Ha,” and she squeezed her eyebrows together.
Then she said, “Because today was super, super unlucky. Luckily I met you, otherwise I would have been really doomed!”
“Oh, unlucky?”
After another sip of Coke, Pei Ningle explained, “I got lost the first time I came to Rongdu, lost! Brother Song had already made arrangements with me, but my phone ran out of battery this morning… and then I couldn’t… there were too many people at the train station…”
Wang Heng had long anticipated this girl’s jumbled way of speaking and quickly summarized what she was trying to express: she had come to Rongdu by train for the first time, but because her phone was dead, she couldn’t contact anyone. Unable to find the Brother Song who was supposed to pick her up, Pei Ningle could only walk out of the train station on her own and then got lost in the unfamiliar city.
As for getting lost, Wang Heng thought it was the least surprising thing to happen to Pei Ningle. But he was a little curious as to why this girl had come to Rongdu.
So he asked, “You don’t have money, so it can’t be for travel. So what did you come to Rongdu for?”
Pei Ningle put down her Coke cup and said with some melancholy, “Because it’s really too hard to make a living in the Imperial Capital. There are no opportunities there, only singing in bars. Brother Song found me online, and his studio is in Rongdu, so I came over.”
Wang Heng nodded thoughtfully. “So, Brother Song happened to notice you and invited you to Rongdu to join his music studio?”
At this point, Pei Ningle remembered to show off. “Yeah, I can not only sing, but I can also write lyrics and compose music. How about that?”
“Amazing, amazing. I’m impressed.”
“But being amazing isn’t that useful. Being a Beijing drifter is really too hard. Just this one month… sigh, you can’t even imagine, really.”
Wang Heng shrugged. “Can’t be helped. Life is always full of ups and downs, downs, downs, downs.”
The girl smiled. “Haha, well said. But at least there’s an ‘up’ at the end, right? I met a kind person like you!”
“Uh-huh… But speaking of which, since you lost contact with that Brother Song because your phone was dead, why don’t you charge it now?”
With Wang Heng’s reminder, Pei Ningle suddenly had a realization.
“Oh, right!”
Pei Ningle finished the last sip of Coke and rummaged through her bag for her phone. Like Wang Heng’s, it was also a black-and-white keypad model.
“Even this kind of phone can run out of battery. How long has it been since you charged it?”
“Eh, I forgot…”
The girl found the charging cable and plug and bent down to look for an outlet under the table.
However, embarrassingly, the sportswear she was wearing was a bit short, and when she bent over like that, the fair skin of her lower back was exposed. Wang Heng glanced at it, immediately averted his gaze, and stared down at the tips of his own shoes.
Of course, Pei Ningle didn’t know about his subtle psychological activity. She was only concerned with being glad that there was actually an outlet on the wall under this table. She plugged in the charging cable and sat up with her phone.
“Is it charging?”
“Mhm!”
Pei Ningle long-pressed the power button. After the startup animation, she saw a series of missed calls and unread text messages. After glancing at a few, her face immediately became a little flustered.
“I have to make a call!”
With that, Pei Ningle dialed a number. A dozen seconds later, the call connected.
“Hello, is that Brother Song? I’m sorry… I’m not at the train station. Are you still there? No, I’m with a new friend… Where am I now? But I don’t know either.”
Hearing this, Wang Heng casually reminded her, “This is Guanghua Avenue, near the Second Ring Road.”
Pei Ningle: “Really?”
Wang Heng: “Of course.”
So the girl quickly changed her tune. “I’m on Guanghua Avenue, Second Ring… mhm, and I’m with a friend!”
Just like that, Pei Ningle finally got in touch with that Brother Song from the music studio.
After hanging up the phone, she said happily, “Brother Song said he’s going to drive over to pick me up and told me to wait for him at the entrance of a big shopping mall on the edge of the Second Ring Road to meet up! I won’t talk anymore. I’m going to the restroom, and then I have to head over. Do you want to come with me?”
Wang Heng shook his head. “The place you’re meeting is very close to here. You probably won’t get lost again. So there’s no need for me to go with you.”
“Alright then. He said he can get here quickly by car, so I have to hurry too. I can’t stand him up again!”
With that, Pei Ningle hastily got up and headed straight for the restroom in the Golden Arches.
At that moment, Wang Heng suddenly heard the hamster’s voice: “This is a dangerous budding…”
He sneered, “So you admit you were setting me up just now?”
“No, the danger I’m talking about isn’t aimed at you. Think about what happened with Han Yixuan. Don’t you understand yet?”
Wang Heng frowned, realizing that things were more complicated than he had imagined.
He quickly asked in a low voice, “What do you mean? Is Pei Ningle also going to be in danger?”
The hamster: “I’ve already explained the worldline’s correction mechanism to you. Because you came to Rongdu instead of the Imperial Capital, their trajectories must also change accordingly. But without me keeping an eye on them, they wouldn’t be able to escape the heaven-sent misfortune. I took the initiative to arrange this chance encounter between you and Pei Ningle not to set you up, but to prevent you from having any regrets.”
Wang Heng immediately understood what it meant. If something irreversible happened to Pei Ningle, and he only found out about it afterward, his mentality would definitely explode…
He tilted his head back, looked up at the bright ceiling, and was speechless for a moment.
