She had startled her.
"N-no, no, no, no, no, no, no need—" Wang Meiyu quickly snatched her hand back like a startled rabbit and waved both hands frantically. "M-my-my-my-my sexual orientation is completely, completely, completely normal..."
"T-that, um, the coffee—thank you so much. I-I'll be going now!"
She sprang to her feet, bowed deeply, and hurriedly fled.
"...So you're a lesbian?" Kamuro Masumi suddenly blurted out beside them.
Watching Wang Meiyu stumble away in a panic, taking wrong turns several times and nearly bumping into other students, Sakayanagi Arisu gripped her cane with all her might and gritted her teeth.
"I! Am! Not!"
Her sexual orientation was perfectly normal too!
Damn it, damn it, damn it! Hadn't she just spent an entire month being a laughingstock in the other person's eyes, confirming the answer in her own head and then declaring victory all on her own?!
And in everyone else's eyes, wasn't she just some lesbian who'd inexplicably approached another girl and tried to confess to her?!
"Flip, flip—" Just as Sakayanagi Arisu was so furious that her chest had begun to ache a little, the sound of pages turning came from beside her.
Almost instantly, Sakayanagi Arisu realized what had happened.
The diary had updated.
"..." Silent and expressionless, wearing a face like a corpse, Sakayanagi Arisu turned away. She no longer watched Wang Meiyu disappear into the distance, instead extending a hand toward Kamuro Masumi without a word.
The meaning was obvious: help her.
Kamuro Masumi could clearly tell that Sakayanagi Arisu was starting to get a little angry. With no intention of teasing her any further, Kamuro Masumi promptly stood up and helped her little princess back to her seat.
The coffee in front of Wang Meiyu had barely been touched, and Sakayanagi Arisu's coffee was hardly touched either. The only cup that had been drained by great gulps, more than halfway, was the one Kamuro Masumi herself had ordered not long ago.
Turning back, Kamuro Masumi saw that Sakayanagi Arisu had no intention of drinking her coffee after sitting back down. She was simply sitting there in silence, brooding. Kamuro Masumi took another sip of her coffee and pursed her lips. "It's pretty good. What a waste."
"..."
Sakayanagi Arisu wasn't brooding.
When she felt her chest begin to ache a little, she'd promptly closed her eyes and calmed herself down.
As a frail girl born with a slight physical disability, she knew very well how much emotions could harm her body. Most of the time, she was quite good at keeping them under control.
She'd only lost control a little just now.
The reason she looked angry to Kamuro Masumi was simply that she'd opened the diary.
The words in the diary were still appearing bit by bit. At that very moment, its owner was wielding their pen and writing whatever they pleased.
Sakayanagi Arisu already had a good idea what today's entry would say.
Since she'd gotten the person's identity wrong, they would surely seize on that sore spot and press their advantage.
So, although she'd opened the diary, she wasn't in a hurry to read it. Instead, she closed her eyes and sorted through her thoughts.
Back to yesterday's entry.
Yesterday had been the thirty-first day since the diary appeared, and the final day of the Behavioral Norms Exam.
There was no need to go over the entry in detail; it had been nothing but taunts.
The important part had come afterward: the newly unlocked "comments" feature, and the message she'd left, which had been covered in all sorts of nonsensical annotations.
That was the real reason she'd gone to see Wang Meiyu again today.
At first, she'd thought that Wang Meiyu—or rather, the person behind the diary—had given up after doing nothing for a month. In fact, the other person had explicitly written "I surrender" in the diary, which was why they'd done nothing all that time.
But it turned out that they hadn't surrendered at all. They'd merely been holding back until the day Class D reached its zero-point ending.
Those brazen words were proof. The outrageous red annotations left on her message were a taunt.
...Damn it.
She'd only left a question mark, yet those glaring red words had added a whole bunch of nonsense to it.
It had absolutely been deliberate—a blatant show of defiance, trampling her dignity underfoot.
And that wasn't even the worst part.
Fine, they could add annotations. The difference in text color was obvious, so surely nobody would be stupid enough to think that the added words were something she'd written herself.
What she couldn't stand was the number displayed beside her message on the comment board.
"Likes."
Sakayanagi Arisu knew what that meant.
A clenched fist and a thumb held high: the unmistakable symbol for a like.
The number displayed above the symbol was "7."
She no longer doubted what that number meant, because it clearly wasn't something the Recorder could change at will.
In other words, at least seven other people could see the diary and its comments, watching the diary make up all sorts of rumors and perhaps believing them...
It couldn't possibly get any worse.
Chapter 65: Shinomiya Kaguya Was Troubled
Shinomiya Kaguya.
The young lady of the Shinomiya Group, the ice-cold beauty known to everyone at Shuchiin, whose grades were always at the top and who excelled at every sport—she was the ideal in everyone's eyes.
By all rights, someone like her shouldn't have had a single worry.
But in truth, she'd been extremely irritated for the past month.
"...It still isn't writing."
The reason was the diary in her hands.
A month ago, it had appeared out of nowhere. Nobody else could see it, and it stuck to her like a stubborn plaster, refusing to leave her alone.
When she woke up, ate, went to class, or traveled to and from school, the diary would inexplicably appear in her hand whenever she reached out.
At first, she'd thought she was simply sick and hallucinating.
But after trying several times, she realized that this wasn't an illusion, but some kind of incomprehensible supernatural phenomenon.
After much hesitation, she eventually chose to open the diary.
And then she saw the... "nonsense" inside?
A jumble of incoherent words that seemed to be addressed to students at another school, with the school in question apparently being... Advanced Nurturing?
Of course Shinomiya Kaguya knew about Advanced Nurturing. The school served to train up expendable assets for the people in power, and it was fairly well known among their circles.
But it was obvious that no true member of the upper class would actually attend school alongside those expendable people who were destined to become their underlings.
...Unless they were like the Koenji Group, seeking to forge closer ties between their conglomerate and the politicians behind Advanced Nurturing.
Otherwise, Shinomiya Kaguya couldn't think of any reason why students like them would choose Advanced Nurturing over Shuchiin.
Everyone knew which mattered more: the dispensable "privileges" or the connections found everywhere.
At least among the major families she knew, almost none would send their heirs to that high school.
Although Advanced Nurturing had nothing to do with her, Shinomiya Kaguya had still carefully read the diary for a few days, driven by a little curiosity and a basic respect for the supernatural.
Most of its contents concerned people at Advanced Nurturing. Since she wasn't there, she found it hard to understand what it was talking about. On top of that, besides what seemed to be targeted exposés of certain people's embarrassing pasts, the diary was full of strange remarks that were difficult to make sense of.
After reading the diary for three days in a row, and seeing no other unusual effects besides its contents, she realized that attempts to destroy it had no effect, and that neither her mind nor her body had been affected by reading it. She also didn't feel as though she'd gained any special powers.
She'd thought the diary really was just as it described itself: something that existed to let its Recorder expose things about others.
Then she saw the entry for the fourth day.
"I still can't forget that thing the Shinomiya young lady said: 'I want to become a photographer.'"
...?
Who?
The Shinomiya young lady, the Shinomiya young lady...
Wasn't there only me?!
Everyone knew that Shinomiya Gan'an, the head of the Shinomiya Family, had three sons. But there was only one person who could be called the "young lady."
That was her, Shinomiya Kaguya.
Shinomiya Kaguya had never imagined that the diary at Advanced Nurturing might suddenly mention her, and she certainly hadn't expected it to contain something that would pique her curiosity so thoroughly.
"Photographer"... What was that supposed to mean?
She couldn't help wanting to cry out, wanting to demand an explanation.
But the diary wouldn't respond to her.
She'd already confirmed that long ago.
The only feedback the diary ever gave her was the cold voice that rang in her ears after she finished reading each day's entry, telling her that she'd received one Reading Point.
There was no way to satisfy her curiosity.
Normally, the quickest and most direct way to satisfy her curiosity would be to rush into Advanced Nurturing, find the owner of the diary, and grab them for questioning.
Whether the diary's owner really was a first-year student at Advanced Nurturing was beside the point. The key was...
She couldn't do it.
Although she was the young lady of the Shinomiya Family, she had no real power.
She was like a super doll, carefully dressed up and showered with affection, but that was all it was.
Though she looked down on Advanced Nurturing whenever she spoke of it, she really couldn't interfere with anything happening there.
The only thing she could do was send the one useful person at her disposal: her super maid, Hayasaka Ai.
"Milady, you don't really expect me to be able to do anything, do you? I'm a maid, not Doraemon." Though Hayasaka Ai had said this expressionlessly, in the end she still brought her a list of the students entering Advanced Nurturing that year.
She knew Hayasaka Ai could do it!
She wasn't expecting her to infiltrate Advanced Nurturing. Making Hayasaka Ai go to all that trouble to get in and find someone who'd left no clues behind wouldn't be a task; it'd be a punishment game.
But as long as she got the list, she believed that with her intelligence, she could spot a slip in the diary's later entries and uncover the person's true identity!
That was right: she was going to join the Hide and Seek Game the other person had announced on the very first day!
As an outside observer.
Shinomiya Kaguya's fighting spirit flared.
On the first day, Shinomiya Kaguya was full of confidence. On the second, Shinomiya Kaguya wavered a little. On the third, Shinomiya Kaguya's brain stalled.
Ever since the other person had mentioned her on the third and then said something about letting things settle for a while, they'd seemed to suddenly calm down and started writing entries that were nothing but perfunctory filler.
For more than ten days straight, the entries had been things like "Nothing happened today," "I want to touch legs," "What should I eat tomorrow morning?" or "Should I have a late-night snack?"—all sorts of stupid nonsense.
The writing had none of the bold, imposing air the other person had shown when they first declared war.
...There was no way anyone could figure out their identity from clues like these.
The more she read the later entries, the more Shinomiya Kaguya realized that hoping to discover the other person's identity was pointless.
So she changed her strategy.
As a member of the Shinomiya Family, she shouldn't spend too much energy on meaningless things.
Rather than wait for the other person to slip up, she might as well hope they suddenly had a brainwave and started furiously writing out the whole story behind that "I want to become a photographer" remark, as if she were controlling them.
And so, today, Shinomiya Kaguya was still eagerly waiting for the diary to write about her.
...Oh, no.
She was troubled by something else.
"Why won't you let me leave a comment?!"
Before you continue