The chat exploded instantly:
"Holy shit, is this the streamer's oppressive aura?"
"One sentence and the whole class shuts up. Masked man, you've earned my follow!"
"What's presence? This is what fucking presence looks like!"
Under everyone's gaze, Qiji slowly got to his feet.
Huomu looked at him, and a flicker of hope he shouldn't have had involuntarily rose in his heart.
Could it be... he's going to help me?
But Qiji apparently just thought the classroom was too noisy.
He said nothing else, not even sparing anyone a glance.
With his hands in his pockets, he strode straight out of the classroom on his long legs as everyone watched.
Aside from "You're too damn loud," he didn't say another word.
Yet the entire classroom fell so silent that a pin drop could have been heard.
The chat immediately began scrolling again:
"Holy shit... he just left?"
"Brother Ji, don't go! Help Huomu!"
"The one above is overthinking it. Our Brother Ji only cares about sleep."
"Do you even understand how impressive the God of Sleep is?"
"Show's over, everyone. I bet fifty cents your Brother Ji went back to the rooftop to sleep."
Just as the chat had guessed, Qiji returned to the rooftop once again, as if he were returning home.
He settled down comfortably in his usual spot, as though everything outside had nothing to do with him.
He just slept.
"Your Brother Ji really is something else!"
"What enviable sleep quality!"
As everyone was commenting, a message suddenly flashed across the chat:
"Guys, let's go! Liuli's streaming!"
With that single message, more than half the viewers in Qiji's stream vanished instantly.
Looking at his suddenly plummeting popularity, Qiji couldn't help twitching his brow beneath his mask.
His money...
That was all his money!
After all, the popularity points settled daily for a personal channel were calculated from its average popularity during the stream.
Well, Liuli! You started streaming to steal my viewers?
Qiji silently put Liuli down in his little notebook.
He clicked into Liuli's stream and found that not only had she stolen his viewers, she was even secretly talking behind his back...
He promptly added another mark to his little notebook.
That was right. When Qiji entered Liuli's personal channel as a viewer, he could even hear her inner voice playing in the stream as part of the performance, just like an ordinary viewer.
Of course, this was still something only Qiji could do.
After all, the other characters didn't have a system. Their personal channels were merely operated on their behalf by the world's will.
-How annoying! He's always hogging the rooftop. He's really in the way.
Liuli stood at a corner of the corridor, shadows obscuring the upper half of her face.
Thin-framed glasses used to suppress her Echo rested on the bridge of her small nose, their lenses reflecting a cold light.
The girl still wore her usual gentle, well-behaved smile, but paired with such villainous words and the gloomy lighting, it suddenly looked somewhat sickly and sinister.
Seeing this, the chat cried out in shock:
"Holy shit?! Liuli, you..."
"Liuli, why did you suddenly change? Were you a villain all along??"
"Give me back the kind, harmless beautiful girl Liuli from just now!"
"Guys, doesn't this make her even better? I love bad women!"
"I knew it! There really was something fishy about Liuli ending her stream! The crystal thief has confessed without even being accused!"
Although she had revealed this character reversal so early, the number of viewers in Liuli's stream rose rather than fell.
After all, what had initially drawn viewers to Liuli wasn't her personality, but her maxed-out character model.
As long as her model wasn't nerfed, her core audience would remain secure.
On top of that, Liuli had just revealed this side of herself and had also ended her stream during lunch break. No matter how one looked at it, she was the prime suspect in the crystal theft.
As a result, a great many viewers from the main stream and Qiji's stream who had placed bets all came flooding in.
In the betting section of Qiji's stream, Liuli's vote count skyrocketed.
At that very moment, tensions in the classroom, too, reached their peak under Liuli's covert manipulation.
"Believe you? Why should we believe a sinner's son?!"
"You want us to believe you? Sure! Go jump off the rooftop right now, and we'll believe you!"
It was worth mentioning that during the earlier lunch break, there really had been students with tough physiques or partially awakened Echo abilities who had jumped straight down from the third floor.
But that was an entirely different matter from jumping off a rooftop eighteen stories high.
"What? You don't dare?"
"Scared? That means you have a guilty conscience!"
"Yeah, exactly!"
Cruel words stabbed at him like knives.
Huomu gritted his teeth, his eyes reddening from the provocation.
Under Liuli's constant influence, the thread of the boy's rationality finally reached the breaking point.
In the corridor, Liuli leaned against the wall.
The curve of the girl's smile grew sweeter, and at the same time, her inner voice sounded softly in the stream:
Huomu, I really envy you... You have the right to decide whether you live or die.
How wonderful.
Then let me help you...
Help you find release.
Help you go to that... place I can't go.
Chapter 5: But That's an Idiot's Way of Thinking
Hearing that inner voice, the viewers cried out, "Holy shit."
The girl's gentle, harmless smile contrasted sharply with the dark words in her heart.
"Liuli, no, you can't!"
"I'm a fan now! Bad women are the best!"
"You like bad women? You're something else!"
Liuli took off her glasses and activated her Echo with all her strength. Fine patterns lit up in the girl's pupils, forming Heart Patterns like golden threads.
Several thin-winged butterflies fluttered around her fingertips.
The next instant, inside the classroom-
Huomu felt all the grievances, loneliness, and resentment he had accumulated over the years surge into his heart at once.
As a sinner's child, he was subjected to strange looks no matter what he did.
He had tried so hard to fit in and please everyone...
He had done everything he could to prove himself...
His father was his father, and he was himself. Why did they have to pin all his father's sins on him?
The main stream flashed back, unfolding Huomu's bleak childhood memories-
The production was so well done that a large portion of the audience became immersed and put themselves in his place without even realizing it.
They couldn't help feeling sorry for Huomu.
"Fine! If I jump, will you believe me?"
"Of course."
"Don't, Huomu! Don't do anything stupid!"
"What? The protagonist of this anime is way too weak, isn't he? A couple of taunts and he wants to kill himself?"
"The one above, it's easy for you to say, isn't it? You call that a couple of taunts? Liuli's obviously manipulating his emotions!"
"Exactly! That bad woman is way too bad!"
"Don't talk about my Liuli like that! Liuli just wants to help Huomu. What did she do wrong?"
"Wow, Liuli already has brain-dead fans?"
While the chat split into several camps and tore into one another in an endless argument, Huomu had already rushed up to the rooftop.
But just as he was about to leap to prove his innocence, he saw Qiji lying on the rooftop, taking a nap in the sun.
Qiji seemed to have been awakened by the sound of his arrival. He turned his head with some impatience, his gaze beneath the mask falling on Huomu.
Huomu opened his mouth, and, feeling the oppressive presence coming from Qiji, hurriedly gathered his words. "...Sorry, I want to be alone here for a while. Could you... let me have this place? Please."
"No." Qiji refused outright. "This is my spot."
Eager to "prove himself," Huomu grew anxious. "You were in the classroom just now too, weren't you?"
"Yeah, and?"
"Do you even know about me? My father is Yanyi, the fire thief everyone despises!"
"So? What's that got to do with me?" Qiji's tone was utterly calm.
"Now someone's destroyed the device the class used for testing, and the Echo Crystal inside has vanished. Everyone thinks I did it!"
"Everyone?" Qiji tilted his head slightly and corrected him. "I don't think you're qualified to speak for me."
Huomu froze, looking at Qiji in disbelief.
Ever since he was little, because he was a sinner's son, whenever anything bad happened around him, everyone would immediately conclude that he had done it.
Everyone!
He had been caught up in countless baseless rumors.
But the person before him actually...
"Haven't you heard the rumors about me?"
"I hear them all the time."
Qiji seemed to find his question utterly boring, and his tone even sounded a little angry.
"But those are just rumors. Attacking someone without even checking whether they're true is way too stupid! Do you take me for one of those idiots in the classroom?"