Chapter 11

Chapter 11

“Tutoring?”

“Yep. The private tutor my family hired for me before charged eight hundred yuan per lesson. For you, since we’re classmates and all, we’ll keep accounts clear. My old tutor had a PhD, and you’re still only a high school student, so I’ll give you a fifty-percent discount. Four hundred yuan. What do you think?”

“Tutoring you is just something I’ll be doing anyway. You don’t have to pay me.”

“That’s different. If you don’t take money, you won’t feel the urgency of having a job, so you won’t teach properly. If I don’t pay, I won’t feel the sting of spending money, so I won’t study seriously. The results would definitely be way worse.”

“Woruo, you don’t need to help me out financially. Really.”

“I’m not helping you out financially. I really can’t keep up with the lessons. It’s just… I have one little extra request. Could you tutor Yuan Lina too while you’re at it?”

The moment Zhao Linfeng heard me say that, she refused flatly. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Stop getting mixed up with someone like Yuan Lina.”

I tried to play dumb. “Aside from dating too early and not taking school seriously, Yuan Lina doesn’t have any major problems.”

“No. Her character is bad. With her grades, she never should have been able to get into our high school. Her family paid the school-selection fee for her. You can probably tell too that her family isn’t well-off. A family like that was willing to spend tens of thousands of yuan so she could attend a better high school, but she doesn’t feel the slightest bit grateful. All she cares about is her relationship. She’s completely wasting her family’s efforts. I can’t understand what she’s doing, and I don’t like people like that.”

“That’s exactly why we need to save this lost young woman!”

“What are you, the Virgin Mary? Saving lost young women now?”

I joked, “How did you know I’m the Saint of the Xu Family?!”

Zhao Linfeng said coldly, “Not funny. Woruo, stop messing around. I’m asking you seriously. Why are you being so nice to Yuan Lina?”

“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

Zhao Linfeng suddenly pinned me down and started tickling my sides. “Are you going to tell me or not?”

I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe, and my heart was pounding along with it. I was honestly afraid she was going to tickle me to death, so I hurriedly said, “Stop, stop, I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you!”

“Actually, I’m a transmigrator.”

Zhao Linfeng’s reaction was completely different from Yuan Lina’s. She said calmly, “And?”

“I’m also a transmigrator with a system.”

“Go on.”

“My system is called the Merit System. Basically, I have to accumulate as much merit as possible in this world. The more merit I accumulate, the more I can upgrade the system and exchange for higher-level items. The Xu family’s enormous fortune all came from my Merit System. If I can make Yuan Lina turn over a new leaf and get into college, wouldn’t that be a huge amount of merit?”

After listening, Zhao Linfeng commented, “Not bad. You should go write novels.”

“See? I said I wouldn’t tell you, but you insisted, and now that I’ve told you, you’re mocking me. Boohoohoo…”

Zhao Linfeng said, “Stop acting.”

“Then tutor us!”

“Woruo…”

I grabbed Zhao Linfeng’s arm with both hands and shook it. “Please. Let me earn this merit.”

Zhao Linfeng flicked my forehead. “Now you’re getting addicted to making things up.”

“Please, please. Just do it for me…”

“Fine. But I can’t guarantee she’ll actually study properly. I think everything you’re doing is useless on someone like Yuan Lina.”

“It won’t be. Trust me.”

And so, after school that afternoon, the three of us went with our backpacks to the two-bedroom apartment Aunt Li rented at the old beer factory: me, who didn’t attend evening self-study because I was sick; Yuan Lina, who didn’t attend evening self-study because she was lazy; and Zhao Linfeng, who was smart enough not to need evening self-study.

The whole apartment was probably only about fifty square meters. It had originally been a one-bedroom layout, but they’d put up a wall in the living room to make an extra bedroom, which meant the living room got no sunlight at all. When we opened the door and stepped inside, it was pitch-black.

The bedroom door beside the living room opened almost immediately, and a man wheeled himself out.

It was the height of summer, but the man was wearing a knit sweater with a vest over it. A blanket was draped across his legs. His cheeks were so thin they were sunken in, and his hair was so sparse that the color of his scalp was visible.

Zhao Linfeng turned on the light with practiced ease and said to the man, “Dad, these are the two classmates who asked me for tutoring, Woruo and Xiao Yuan.”

How strange. Why didn’t Zhao Linfeng look anything like her parents?

Could she have been adopted? Like in those stories where the daughter of a wealthy family gets switched with the nanny’s daughter or something.

I had to stop imagining things. If I kept going, I’d end up being the useless, vicious fake daughter supporting character-after all, the two of us really did fit the setup.

“Hello, Uncle Zhao.”

When Zhao Linfeng heard my greeting, she glanced at me awkwardly.

Her father smiled warmly and said, “Hello, hello. Come sit down. My health makes it inconvenient for me to entertain you properly, so I’m sorry about that. Linlin, your mom made dinner and put it in the fridge. Go heat it up.”

“Mm.”

“There’s lemonade in the fridge too.”

“I know.”

After Zhao Linfeng’s father greeted us, he went back to his bedroom. The three of us sat around the coffee table, looking at the braised beef, stir-fried braised pork with hot peppers, and tomato scrambled eggs laid out on it. It was obvious without even thinking that this wasn’t the usual dinner for a family of three like theirs.