Chapter 150: [Passing the Imperial Examination] Conversation in the Dead of Night
Finishing her study problems, Bai Cha washed up and went to bed without engaging in any further conversation with Mother Han.
Switching off the light and closing her eyes, the familiar sensation of a lingering gaze from directly above her head materialized right on cue once again.
This time, she snapped her eyes open directly.
A bloody, mutilated face hovered merely an inch away from hers—a true face-to-face jump scare.
The moment she opened her eyes, the livestream view also shifted to the first-person perspective seen through her eyes.
The bullet chat room suffered a collective mini heart attack in an instant:
[Can this sis give us a heads-up before opening her eyes next time?!]
Bai Cha exchanged glances with the floating figure before her for a moment.
She suddenly hesitated before whispering, “Han Yingying?”
That mangled, shattered face twitched slightly, a blob of fresh blood mixed with bits of flesh plop-dropping right onto Bai Cha’s cheek.
Bai Cha reached up and wiped it away casually, utterly unbothered by the occurrence—anyone who didn’t know better would have assumed a stray drop of water had fallen.
“Is there something you want to say? Or do you want to kill me?”
“Did you jump off a building to commit suicide? Because of the pressure?”
Her voice was kept extremely low, barely above a whisper.
Han Yingying, floating before her, shifted her arms.
Those arms—twisted and deformed from a high-altitude fall—struggled with immense effort to extend a similarly mangled finger toward Bai Cha’s forehead.
An icy cold sensation touched the center of Bai Cha’s brows.
A flurry of memory fragments unfolded before her eyes.
Working hard at her studies every day yet somehow perpetually unable to concentrate, her mind groggy and hazy, Han Yingying grew increasingly anxious and miserable.
Her mother’s crushing pressure, her teachers’ biting scoldings.
During the final mock exam before the college entrance exam, she scored the lowest mark she had ever received in three years: 221 points.
Chinese: 82. Math: 31. English: 14. Physics: 23. Chemistry: 27. Biology: 55.
Staring at a report card so shockingly abysmal, she didn’t even dare go home.
Yet the teacher had already summoned her parent directly.
A full hour-long denunciation session.
Her mother wept in bitter agony, displaying the array of scars and injuries covering her body, declaring she hadn’t slept properly in a month, that she had lost her job and was now doing backbreaking manual labor just to put her through school.
The teacher berated her with exasperated disappointment, claiming she was mere days away from the college entrance exam yet remained in such a state, failing her mother, failing her teachers, and failing society as a whole.
They said so many poor people couldn’t even afford an education, yet she stood here able to attend school without showing an ounce of gratitude.
They said her mother suffered so bitterly, yet she refused to work hard, demonstrating sheer unfilial disrespect.
They said, they said, they said—!!!
The memories shattered into pieces like a fractured mirror.
Han Yingying skipped class.
Standing atop the soaring roof of the building, she leaped off into the void.
She left behind a suicide note, writing that she was sorry, that it was all her fault, that she had failed everyone and failed her hard-working mother, and that she wished to atone for her sins with death.
Her soul floated out of her body, yet it did not vanish.
She watched as her mother pushed frantically through the surrounding crowd, running over in a complete breakdown.
“Yingying—!”
That heart-wrenching, blood-curdling cry brought sorrow to all who witnessed it and tears to all who heard it.
Han Yingying had originally wanted to go over and comfort her.
Yet she suddenly watched as her mother delivered a harsh strike straight onto her corpse.
“How could you be so unfilial?! How could you die before me?! How could you be so utterly unfilial—do you really hate me that much?! I was so good to you, how could you do this to me…”
Han Yingying froze in place.
She looked around in sheer bewilderment.
The onlookers were all pointing fingers and whispering among themselves.
“Sigh, youngsters nowadays commit suicide over the slightest thing. They don’t even know how to feel bad for their own mothers.”
“Exactly, kids these days are just way too selfish, never considering their families. Look at how hard her mother is crying…”
“Sigh, poor thing. Raising a child to this age with so much hardship, only for them to vanish just like that. What will she do when she gets old!”
“If you ask me, kids just need to be beaten! If one beating doesn’t work, give them two! Beat them a few more times and they’ll change. Suicide? Tui!”
Han Yingying shook her head in a total breakdown.
No, it’s not like that! It’s not! It’s not—!!!
She had only wanted her mother to be freed from a burden like her because her heart ached for her mother; she had only wished to vanish so her mother could live a slightly better life, or else her mother would remain trapped in agony forever. She wasn’t unfilial, she wasn’t…
The memories shattered once more.
Han Yingying discovered numerous other students like herself—they had arrived in this game.
Here, someone would fulfill their parents’ expectations for them.
Everything came to an abrupt halt.
Bai Cha heard her speaking with immense difficulty, stumbling over her words.
“Your grades are so good… I’ve never seen her smile so gently. I beg of you, please make her happy…”
“And tell her that I love her.”
Bai Cha knitted her brows. “That’s going to be very difficult.”
Those words caused the ghostly aura around Han Yingying to surge violently.
The next second, however, she heard Bai Cha’s follow-up sentence:
“I need your cooperation.”
“How?”
Bai Cha reached out and touched her lightly.
[Parasitize Host · Han Yingying?]
Yes.
“I need you to cooperate with me in putting on an act. Simply telling her that you love her won’t necessarily make her believe it,” Bai Cha said at the same time.
Recalling her mother’s words after her death, the ghost aura churned around Han Yingying as she bought into Bai Cha’s words.
If simply telling Mother Han could solve things, she had sought out other players in the past.
It didn’t work at all.
Her mother wouldn’t listen; she would simply say, “Then study hard.”
But it wasn’t like that…
She didn’t know what answer she wanted from her mother…
In any case, it wasn’t that…
“How do I cooperate?”
“Answer a few questions for me first. I need to get a clear picture of your mother’s situation. Besides, I can tell you upfront—if you simply hope to satisfy your mother in terms of test scores, I was a top exam scorer in reality, admitted to university at sixteen.”
A municipal top scorer was still a top scorer.
Han Yingying’s eyeball popped out on the spot.
Literally popped out and landed right on Bai Cha’s face.
Bai Cha closed her eyes in pained resignation.
“Can you please not stand face-to-face with me?”
Han Yingying turned her body slightly sideways, retrieving her eyeball and shoving it back into place while apologizing repeatedly.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to! I was just too excited…”
Bai Cha wiped her face with the blanket. In truth, she knew there wasn’t actually any real blood—it was all residual ghost aura that would dissipate from view shortly.
However, having an eyeball land on her face was still far too ahead of its time, feeling exceptionally bizarre.
“You… you’re a top scorer? That’s amazing! No wonder you could make my mother so happy. If only I could be that amazing too, but unfortunately I can’t…”
Bai Cha paused slightly and let out a sigh.
“But I am not your mother’s child. Only you are—Han Yingying is your mother’s only child.”
Han Yingying instantly burst into tears, blood-red tears flowing along with her eyeball, plop-dropping onto the edge of the pillow.
She shook her head.
“No, I don’t deserve to be her child. She works so hard every day, yet I can’t achieve what she wants at all. If her child were as amazing as you, she wouldn’t have to suffer so much.”
Bai Cha let out another sigh.
Rolling over slightly, she faced Han Yingying once again.
This time, however, she pulled the distance slightly further apart.
Looking at her bloody, mutilated appearance, Bai Cha hesitantly helped her pick up her eyeball and stuffed it back into what appeared to be her eye socket.
“Even if you managed to become the top scorer, your mother would suffer just the same. The reason your mother suffers isn’t because of you—it’s because of herself.”
“Look, she stands there every day monitoring your studying. In reality, she could be using that time to sleep, couldn’t she? Would you stop studying hard just because she isn’t watching you?”
Han Yingying looked ready to cry again, so Bai Cha reached out and held her eyeball in place.
“Don’t cry. So if you really want to make your mother happy, you have to listen to me completely from here on out. Now, I’m going to ask you some questions.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
Han Yingying had now developed immense trust in Bai Cha.
A top scorer! Furthermore, having observed for an entire day, Bai Cha truly knew how to solve everything. She had default-upgraded Bai Cha to a national top scorer in her mind—young in age, she was precisely the kind of person Han Yingying longed to be most.
Therefore, she was extremely willing to listen to Bai Cha now.
“First off, where is your father?”
