"Okay."
Zhang Zhaomu opened his QR code, and Duan Chan'er raised her phone to scan it.
Probably thanks to his height advantage, Zhang Zhaomu could see Duan Chan'er's phone screen, where a new message notification happened to pop up at the top.
"Have You Complained About Bing Chan Today? (13 new messages)..."
Duan Chan'er swiped the notification away at lightning speed, and Zhang Zhaomu caught nothing more in that fleeting glimpse.
It seemed to be a QQ group chat notification?
The group name was pretty strange, too.
"I've sent the request." Duan Chan'er put her phone away. "Class is about to start. I'll head back to my seat."
Zhang Zhaomu nodded and saw the notification pop up on his screen.
"'Duan Chan'er' requests to add you as a friend."
She actually used her real name online!
Zhang Zhaomu rather wanted to snoop through her Moments, but blatantly playing on his phone at the classroom door was a little too brazen, so he casually tapped accept and walked into the classroom as well.
He pulled out his chair and sat down. His deskmate, Xiang Qing, barely reacted, her head still lowered. Zhang Zhaomu glanced over. The newly distributed textbooks sat on her desk, and she seemed to be previewing the material.
The very picture of a model student.
Zhang Zhaomu felt she was completely out of place in Class Nine, and she didn't look like an outgoing person either, so he abandoned the idea of offering a polite greeting.
Propping his chin on one hand, he took out his phone with the other and placed it inside his desk compartment, his eyes flicking downward. This was Zhang Zhaomu's most familiar way of using his phone.
At the slightest rustle of wind or stir of grass, he could instantly hide his phone in the backpack inside his desk.
He opened Duan Chan'er's Moments, but there was very little there.
There was only a small line of text: "This friend only displays Moments from the past three days."
Her profile picture wasn't a photo of herself either, but Tom Cat wearing a hippo costume.
Zhang Zhaomu was a little disappointed. He had been wondering whether she shared pieces of writing on her Moments every day, or posted casual selfies or something.
It wasn't that he had any other ideas. Mostly, the desire to pry was human instinct, and a literary girl like Duan Chan'er, someone ordinary people could gaze at but never reach, only made him more curious.
Probably because of that mindset, Zhang Zhaomu found himself opening QQ and searching for the group name he had accidentally seen on Duan Chan'er's phone.
[Have You Complained About Bing Chan Today?]
There really was such a group. It was even a supergroup, with over eighteen hundred members already.
Zhang Zhaomu applied to join and discovered that he had to answer a verification question.
"Who was Lu Zhaoheng's first time with?"
What the hell?
Was this group verification question serious? Who was Lu Zhaoheng? Some celebrity?
Zhang Zhaomu scratched his head and entered the name "Lu Zhaoheng" into a search engine.
There was no Baidu Encyclopedia entry, so he could confirm it wasn't a celebrity. The results below were a complete jumble, and he really couldn't make out any useful information.
Zhang Zhaomu refined his search to "Lu Zhaoheng's first time."
Clearly, the search engine favored the last two words of that query. After he clicked a few links at random, the images on Zhang Zhaomu's phone screen were already becoming unfit for viewing.
Startled, he hurriedly backed out and cast a guilty glance to his side.
Fortunately, Xiang Qing really was studying very diligently and hadn't noticed what he was doing at all. Only then did he breathe a sigh of relief and secretly bookmark the pages he had just visited.
"Now isn't the time. I'll give them a thorough critique tonight!"
Returning to the original search page, Zhang Zhaomu stubbornly refused to admit defeat. This was no longer just about his desire to pry. He wanted to find out who this damned Lu Zhaoheng was, and why over a thousand people knew who his first time had been with!
Remembering the group name, he entered the search terms "Lu Zhaoheng Bing Chan."
Only one link matched both search terms exactly. Zhang Zhaomu clicked it and found himself on a fiction website. The keywords had come from a comment in the comments section:
"I'm so jealous of Lu Zhaoheng. Bing Chan, update more! This is great, I love it! This is exactly the kind of satisfying harem novel I like! By the way, does anyone have the group number? I heard there are bonus side stories in the group?"
The corner of Zhang Zhaomu's mouth twitched slightly.
Oh, he was a webnovel protagonist. That explained it.
Following the comments section, he found the webnovel. Its title was pretty down-to-earth.
"All I Wanted Was to Get Ahead, but Now I'm Surrounded by Beauties."
Naturally, Zhang Zhaomu had read webnovels before, but he preferred the fighting-and-killing sort. Webnovels were supposed to be satisfying. You checked your brain at the door, then immersed yourself in the unrestrained plot of "you glanced at me, so I'll slaughter your whole family," and a whole class period would fly by.
As for titles like this one, which screamed urban harem novel at first glance, he had always treated them with disdain and couldn't be bothered to click.
Would a decent person write harem romance? There were multiple female leads already. Could someone who wrote this sort of book be a decent person?
But out of curiosity about the group verification question, Zhang Zhaomu opened the first chapter anyway.
The opening was quite direct. The male lead, Lu Zhaoheng, was just about to enter university when he awakened a "Book of Regrets." As long as he made up for the regrets in the book, he could earn rewards.
And the first regret came from not getting into university.
"My son brought me plenty of pastries when he came home for New Year. I opened them and tried some, and they were delicious. Brand-name pastries really do live up to their reputation. I could never make anything that tasted like that. I was too poor for the first thirty years, completely focused on working to earn money. Now I'm not poor anymore, but my blood sugar is high, and I can't eat sweets. There's nothing to be done about it in this lifetime."
"If I'd managed to get into university back then, maybe everything would have been different."
The male lead naturally completed this regret, which was practically a newbie gift pack, and then received a skill that let him get an extra reward of one to ten times the amount whenever he earned money from someone, based on customer satisfaction and the nature of the transaction.
Next, in order to make money, the male lead pretended to be a senior and pitched a freshman daily necessities package to the female lead, Zhao Si. In pursuit of higher customer satisfaction, the male lead pulled out every trick he had, gradually causing the female lead to develop a hint of an unusual feeling toward him-
The bell rang for class, forcibly dragging Zhang Zhaomu's attention out of the book.
Before he knew it, he had actually reached chapter seven! And if he hadn't been interrupted, he probably could have kept reading.
This book... was kind of interesting.
Unlike the sickeningly lovey-dovey content Zhang Zhaomu had expected, the sort that was obviously some shut-in's fantasy, the author's prose flowed exceptionally well and built anticipation effectively. And unlike most webnovel authors, this author's writing had a literary flavor-not the pretentious kind, but just the right amount, with a line or two occasionally piercing deep into the reader's heart amid the unadorned prose.
He resisted the urge to keep reading and opened the author's profile.
The author's pen name was Bing Chan. He couldn't see any other works, so he didn't know whether this was a debut or whether the author had other accounts. Still, the results were quite good. The "Adored by Ten Thousand" badge hanging on the work's page was enough to prove how popular the book was.
"That group must be Bing Chan's reader group, right? I didn't expect Duan Chan'er to read webnovels too."