My Online Friend Can't Be This Cute Chapter 1

My Online Friend Can't Be This Cute

Author: Next Time I Won't Flake

Synopsis:

You find that there actually exists someone in this world completely on the same frequency as you.

She bookmarks all your obscure playlists and understands every unspoken thought of yours.

She stands by your side unconditionally, even liking those clumsy excuses of yours.

She is gentle and poised, yet in front of you, she smiles like a cat that has stolen the moon.

--This is by no means some predestined rebirth, but simply life offering you its most wonderful gift.

Chapter 1: After Rebirth, Group Members Are Very Worried About You

Struggling to open his heavy eyelids, what met his gaze was a familiar ceiling.

He hadn't expected that after going out to hustle for a few years following graduation, he would circle around and end up right back here again.

Despite the vastness of the world, only his hometown could accommodate a failure like him, couldn't it?

He would wash his face first, then check with the bank to see if the company had suddenly found a conscience and paid out his owed salary and severance compensation.

Oh right, there was also the unemployment benefit.

Though little, for someone who had been unemployed for a whole year, that was also life-saving money.

The netizens were right; civil engineering was a dog's job.

Yet who could have known that between 2017 and 2020, over the span of just a few short years, the public reputation of this major would undergo such a heaven-shaking, earth-upending transformation.

Mo Xiangwen sighed wistfully, hazily climbing out of bed and walking unsteadily toward the bathroom.

His head felt a bit dizzy; what was going on?

He was unemployed, so where would any banquets come from? Without banquets, he simply didn't drink alcohol.

Could he be running a fever? He had no money on him right now, not even enough to top up his phone credit, and if he really had to see a doctor for a fever by borrowing money from his parents, that would be far too humiliating.

After brushing his teeth, he casually grabbed the towel from the side and soaked it through with icy tap water.

The freezing towel pressed against his face, and that fever-like haziness finally receded quite a bit, allowing him to recover a modest capacity for thought.

As an adult after all, no matter what, it wouldn't do to ask his parents for money; he might as well go borrow a little from the shitposting group members later.

They were old friends of seven or eight years anyway, and with past borrowings always repaid, borrowing again shouldn't be difficult.

As long as he held out through this month, the manuscript fees issued next month should also be enough for his living expenses.

If all else failed, he would just do as the group members said and work for him.

Even if it was humiliating, it was still better than being unemployed.

...He still couldn't give up.

He put down the towel that had already grown warm, took a few deep breaths, and tried to expel the suffocating gloom in his chest.

He repeated the attempt several times, yet he didn't succeed at all.

How comical, this appearance of his in the mirror... wait.

This was... me?

Reflected in the bright mirror surface wasn't a sickly, decadent, unemployed youth, but a handsome youth with delicate facial features.

Full of vigor, with eyes clear to the bottom, what a handsome, youthful appearance of someone who had yet to experience the society's brutal beatings.

Youths in their prime, magnificent and flourishing; scholarly and untrestrained, they were bold and spirited. This poem flashed into his mind unconsciously.

Although his high school memories were long since blurry, he hadn't reached the point where he couldn't recognize his own high school appearance.

Had he really transmigrated back? Who was playing this kind of joke on him?

"Xiangwen, come eat breakfast." His mother's familiar voice came from the living room.

"...Okay, I'm coming right now." He replied, splashing a few more handfuls of cold water onto his face. "Is this really not a dream?"

At the dining table, the family had rarely gathered together.

His old man Mo Chenfeng was an ordinary construction worker, so he was actually home quite a bit.

But his mother Zhou Xiuqin was a factory worker, often working the night shift.

As for Mo Xiangwen himself, he was a senior in high school and a boarding student, spending most of his time at school and only coming home to rest for half a day on weekends.

The three of them rarely sat together eating breakfast at the dining table, yet not a single person spoke a word.

Using his peripheral vision, he secretly sized up his parents; his old man's expression looked somewhat exhausted, but his complexion was quite good.

His mother was the same, her eyes bright and her hair dark and thick.

How could there be such a huge change in just five or six years?

His father's varicose veins in his legs had always made him reluctant to go to the hospital for surgery, claiming he needed to save money to marry him a wife; no matter how much Xiangwen insisted he wouldn't get married, his father refused to take it seriously.

His mother had started saying that there seemed to be flying gnats before her eyes, making things a bit hard to see, and bottle after bottle of cheap hair dye was used, yet it still failed to mask the gray at her roots.

He wanted so badly to work hard and keep his parents from worrying about him as much as possible, yet that was nothing more than an extravagant hope.

Whether he was out doing manual labor on construction sites or now back home, they always felt uneasy about him, as if he were forever that child who needed to be fussed over.

A storm of mixed emotions raged in his chest; he put down his bowl and chopsticks, stammered as if wanting to say something, yet did not know where to begin.

"I heard from your teacher, she said some students get more and more nervous the closer they get to the National College Entrance Examination, and coming home to properly relax for a few days is a good thing," Zhou Xiuqin slowly said.

Because of family circumstances, his mother dropped out of middle school, but she always spoke in a measured, unhurried manner, very much like his middle school Chinese teacher, leaving him with the stereotypical impression of an old intellectual.

"Don't put too much pressure on yourself; the National College Entrance Examination isn't the only way out in life."

"Besides, the teacher said if you're lucky, you can still test into a third-tier undergraduate university." Mo Chenfeng also set down his bowl and chopsticks, patting him on the shoulder. "Your old man only has an elementary school education, yet didn't I still raise you this big? A third-tier undergraduate is still a degree, passing the exams for an undergraduate college is enough."

What was going on? It seemed they had all managed to gather together today precisely because of him?

The National College Entrance Examination? Relaxing? Were these two words that could possibly go together?

Wait! A sudden flash of light went off in his mind, and he finally fished this matter out from who-knows-what corner of his memory.

Back then, he had wanted to go home and play video games, so he put on an act of being unable to handle the pressure of the National College Entrance Examination.

And so, his head teacher contacted his parents and had him picked up and brought back.

Putting it into words made it sound a bit too trivial, but the high school he attended was the absolute worst ordinary high school in the city, and on top of that, he was merely a student in an "ordinary class."

What was more, with the National College Entrance Examination looming right around the corner, it was hardly uncommon to see students suffering from psychological problems due to pressure; his situation was far from unprecedented.

Therefore, after offering a few words of persuasion and comfort, the head teacher and the grade-level leaders let him go.

To tell the truth, back then there certainly had been pressure from the National College Entrance Examination, but it hadn't reached the point where he couldn't take it—the main thing was simply that he wanted to come back and play video games.

With the National College Entrance Examination practically upon him, he was still thinking about playing games. He fully deserved to spend his past life as a third-tier undergraduate civil engineering bro.

At this thought, he felt a strong urge to slap himself twice across the face.

"Mn." His mind was in a complete mess, and having no idea what to reply, he could only give a vague assent.

After finishing breakfast, he returned to his familiar dog kennel of a room and looked in a daze at his heavy schoolbag.

Good grief, with a backpack stuffed this full, he didn't even have the courage to pull open the zipper.

Beep, beep, beep.

A crisp electronic chime sounded; following the sound, he found the phone lying on his desktop and subconsciously punched in his eternal, unchanging universal password, successfully unlocking it just like that.

At the very top, a group chat named [RPG and Games] displayed glaring red text clearly notifying him that someone had mentioned him.

This was a group chat he had joined ever since he first started getting in touch with computers back in middle school.

The membership wasn't large, numbering no more than ten-odd people even at its peak.

It used to be a guild chat for some MMORPG, but as everyone quit the game one after another, the headcount dwindled down to five people.

The reason it hadn't completely disbanded yet was because the remaining individuals all shared overlapping interests to a greater or lesser degree.

For instance, tabletop RPGs like Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons & Dragons.

Or perhaps playing other games; naturally, playing League of Legends and Overwatch happened the most, but the group members also played plenty of standalone titles, and recently he even saw them playing mobile games.

Aside from that, they would also idle about shooting the breeze and chatting about daily life.

He had simply stayed in this group the entire time, remaining right there even after graduating and becoming a corporate drone.

This small group always maintained an abundant vitality, churning out 999+ messages for him every single day.

Sometimes he couldn't help but ask, did the group members really not have any classes to attend? Did the group members really not have to go to work?

Though it was a genuine and sincere question, what it earned him in return was nothing more than the group members' merciless copy-pasting.

Don't Play Holy Slash: @Human-Dragon Unity, I'll send you the boosting order you wanted in a bit; remember to finish it on time, oh.

Power-leveling? Right, it seemed he used to rely on this to earn a little bit of internet and living money.

After all, he was still just a student back then with no other avenues, and even the boosting orders came courtesy of the group owner.

The group owner was the old guild leader from back in the day, who must have been a college student or a corporate drone since he seemed to have played an endless variety of games from very early on.

Since this was a direct @ mention directed straight at him, the others didn't seem to have chimed in just yet.

Why had he chosen to pick up a boosting order at a time like this? It seemed to be because he had lost his living expenses and didn't dare tell his family?

No matter what, playing video games was out of the question at a time like this.

He hesitated for a moment, his right thumb dancing swiftly across the screen.

Human-Dragon Unity: @Don't Play Holy Slash, sorry bro, I have no way to take on orders lately.

Almost immediately, the other person's reply popped up on the screen.

Don't Play Holy Slash: What's wrong with you, little bro? I just found this order for you.

Even though he felt deeply ashamed, the National College Entrance Examination came first; he would just have to swallow his pride to ask his parents for living expenses, and then squeeze those living expenses to compensate the guy.

Human-Dragon Unity: I'm taking the National College Entrance Examination. My brain short-circuited the other day; sorry, let me pay you back the money instead.

Baibai: !!!

Flaked Out: !!!

Don't Play Holy Slash: !!!

A Seductress: !!!

Unexpectedly, a simple "he has the National College Entrance Examination coming up" blasted out the remaining few people who had been lurking.

Don't Play Holy Slash: This fucking exam is only thirty-odd days away, why are you still coming to me to take an order? What were you thinking?

Baibai: You were still playing Minecraft with me until midnight yesterday... I didn't know you were an exam candidate, Xiao Yi, I'm sorry.

Flaked Out: Young man, your heart's pretty big, huh.

A Seductress: I suggest shoving a ball gag in his mouth until the exams are over.

Human-Dragon Unity: My living expenses ran out, and I didn't dare ask my parents, so I just thought about taking a couple of orders to trade for some living expenses.

The great thing about netizens is that some things can be said casually, without needing to hide too much.

After all, the Celestial Empire is so big that you might never meet in a lifetime.

As for conflicts of interest, that's even further out of the question.

Ding-dong

Your friend [Don't Play Holy Slash] transferred 1,000 yuan to you.

???

The sudden pop-up message from Zhifubao gave him a start, and he quickly clicked in to check, only to find the balance genuinely had an extra thousand yuan.

Out of the blue, and it wasn't even a guild war—what was the guild leader going crazy for, transferring money to him? And such a large sum as 1,000 yuan at that.

Even now in 2017, a thousand bucks could by no means be considered a small amount; at least if you asked him to lend it to a stranger without hesitation, he wouldn't really be able to do it.

If not for knowing each other for so long in his past life, he'd genuinely suspect the leader was lusting after his kidneys and wanted to talk business with him about a three-hundred-thousand deal.

Human-Dragon Unity: Why did you suddenly transfer money?