Wanting to Tell Prince About Prince

"Did he really strip him?"

Lin Er shook her head, unwilling to say any more.

"Who knows? Rowling didn't write it. Time for our lunch break."

The bell rang, and they each went back to their seats, still talking about what would happen to Snape.

Xu Duoduo looked left and right before finally returning to her own seat.

Shi Meng put the book back the way it was, then lay on her desk and spoke quietly to Lin Er.

"Have you become such a devoted fan that you've circled back around to hating him?"

Lin Er rested her chin on the desk, staring at the words on the book's spine. Her eyesight really was good when she was young.

"He really was pretty awful when he was young. There aren't many good people among the Death Eaters, and he joined them of his own free will. That's an indisputable fact."

"Would you still like him even so?" Shi Meng tried to put herself in her shoes, but couldn't. She wasn't much of a fan of anyone; she couldn't even understand the alternative fashion that was popular now.

Lin Er couldn't understand it either. She didn't think she counted as a fan. She just liked reading novels, and among countless novels, she had come across him as written by a fanfiction author.

Reading novels was the one hobby she had kept up the longest in her life. People had asked her why she liked reading them.

She had once seen a comment under a short video: Because novels have a love I can only envy, unabashed devotion, and the kind of salvation rarely found in this world.

She herself had never been in love, and had experienced little familial affection, either. As for friendship...

Lin Er rested her left cheek on her arm, looking at the soft short hair at Shi Meng's temple.

She had once had a wonderful friendship. They had pulled her out of her shell, told her she could say no to things she didn't like, and taken her on spring outings with them. Only then had she learned that you could receive birthday gifts from friends.

She shut her eyes. This was what happened when she forced herself to sleep: her eyes filled with tears, but she couldn't fall asleep.

Lunch naps in middle school were only thirty minutes long. It felt as if time was up the moment she closed and opened her eyes. The classroom was noisy again, and Shi Meng had already gone back to her seat.

Her deskmate now respected the dividing line of his own accord, so there was no need to draw it anymore. And while she was still asleep, they knew to show some consideration and had lowered their voices quite a bit.

Lin Er stuffed her school uniform into her desk, took a sip of water, opened the magic book, and sent over a question mark. No one replied for a long time, so she figured he was asleep.

She put the magic book away, took a pad of letter paper from the bookshelf, and tore off a sheet. If she couldn't send a message, she could just send a letter.

These days, they both left their magic books open under their pillows when they slept, so any small objects sent over could be received promptly. If a large object needed to be sent, it could also wake the recipient.

At first, she had even thought that if she really couldn't learn English, she could just have the person on the other end learn Chinese.

Later, after learning that he was only a seven-year-old child, she had subconsciously taken the task of learning another written language upon herself.

She tried to write anything she sent him in English. When she had the chance, she used a computer to translate; when she didn't, she pieced things together from textbook vocabulary.

And if she wanted to tell him stories, she still had a long way to go.

When she got the chance, she had to track down an English copy of Harry Potter. How could a child not have a storybook?

She had translated a tiny bit of the book he had sent her. It seemed to be about medicinal ingredients and the like, with an enormous number of technical terms. One look was enough to tell it wasn't a children's storybook.

And so, after the letter paper had been sitting out for ages, she finally put the blank sheet back when the history teacher entered the classroom.

What could she write? At her current level, discussing Snape's standing and accomplishments among wizards with him was simply impossible.

She could tell the child was also very interested in Potions. Just look at how he was reading specialist books at seven.

Talking about Snape so suddenly today had made her want to recommend him to her young pen pal. He could make Snape his goal and become a Potions Master himself someday, and then she could cling to his thigh.

Unfortunately, the language barrier was still a major problem. For now, neither of them paid any attention to grammar or sentences when they communicated. They kept things as simple as possible, basically sending one word at a time.

Then they guessed the meaning from that word.

But this wasn't the first time she had wanted to talk to her pen pal about Snape.

Her pen pal had chosen the pen name Prince. There had once been a Potions Master who, as a boy, had written the name Half-Blood Prince in his Potions book, although that "Prince" had more to do with his mother's surname.

They both liked Potions, both liked calling themselves Prince, and both had unhappy childhoods. But she hoped her young pen pal could also break through the gloom like Snape and grow into a Potions Master who lacked neither glory nor status.

As for the wrong path the Potions Master had taken along the way, her young pen pal didn't need to follow that. Just wait-once her English was good enough, she would translate everything she had learned in ethics and law over the years into English and send it to him.

There was no future in joining a terrorist organization, especially when the person in control of that organization was mentally unstable.

At that thought, it suddenly occurred to her what she could discuss with her young pen pal next time.

If he didn't like talking about family, that was fine. They could talk about society instead. From the few things he had said, she could tell that the environment he lived in really didn't seem very good.

It wasn't as though there were no slums abroad. It was just that she kept wondering whether things like real magic and the supernatural existed in this world at all.

If they didn't, then was her pen pal's world really the same one as hers?

If they did, was this world still the same one she had lived in before?

But everything was exactly as she remembered it. She had lived for more than twenty years in her previous life and had never seen anything unscientific with her own eyes.

Besides, she couldn't really be considered a wizard. All she could say was that, thanks to the magic book and wand that had suddenly appeared, she could use skills as if she were playing a game.

The history teacher was at the front of the classroom, teaching about early agricultural life, while Lin Er sat behind the bookshelf with her head down, lost in thought.

Did they really appear out of nowhere? It didn't seem so. Her death in her previous life was quite hazy to her; she didn't remember how she had died at all.

Surely she couldn't really have been reborn because of a dream.

In that dream, she seemed to have spoken with something, which had said these things were compensation for her.

And so she had been reborn, and had gained this golden finger and her young pen pal.

Dreams didn't hurt. She was certain of that. She was the sort of person who could watch a dream like a television show, and sometimes even take control and enter the action herself.

But that was risky, because sometimes she would talk and talk until she woke herself up.

And it was very hard to pick the show back up in a dream, especially when she had to get up for work as soon as her alarm rang. There was no time to continue it.

After she washed up, the dream would vanish without a trace. She might remember a few fragments, but not what had actually happened.

It was like following an author's updates only for them to suddenly stop updating. It was awful.