Chapter 8
[A Girl Genius Falls from Grace in One Month]
Provoked by me and unable to let it go, Zhao Mingzhu wrote up the story of me skipping school for a man and posted it online.
At least half the people online agreed with her.
[There’s always a reason pathetic people are pathetic. She’s that poor and still wants to love a man?]
[Serves her right for getting conned! Can’t stand women who lose their brains over romance.]
With the Zhao family’s deliberate steering, opinion quickly began turning against me.
My mother sent me an icy text. [What exactly are you thinking? You think you’re strong enough to take on people with money? You’re an adult now. Deal with your own problems. Don’t bring me any trouble.]
I looked at it without expression and deleted her from my contacts.
My mother had always wanted to climb into high society.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t had much luck. For her first marriage she’d chosen my father. Within a few years, the family went bankrupt and was buried in debt.
My father jumped to his death. When he died, the debt ended.
I was abandoned at home to fend for myself.
I’d always wondered what high society looked like through her eyes.
Now I could see that having power and money really did feel good.
Zhao Mingzhu’s slander of me rose to the trending list.
The post that had drawn thousands of insults against her vanished without a trace. She’d almost recast herself as an innocent wealthy heiress whose relationship had been wrecked by another woman.
The Shen and Zhao families had long exchanged favors. Naturally, neither would speak up for a nobody like me.
The day the entrance exam results came out, everyone who knew about the affair was waiting for my score.
In the class group, I saw that Zhao Mingzhu had done unusually well and passed the cutoff for first-tier universities.
She made no effort to hide her hatred. She deliberately tagged me. [Star student, what did you get?]
Classmates who couldn’t stand her spoke up for me. She didn’t care.
She only wanted to watch me fall from grace.
[Not lower than me, surely? You only got five hundred and something last time.]
She jeered.
Nosy people online were also waiting to see my results.
I looked at the row of zeroes on my screen and closed the computer.
There was no cap on my score, and I couldn’t have underperformed. Unless another candidate had also come close to full marks, I should be first in the province.
How could the future be bleak for someone the top universities were fighting over?
A week later, I gave a media interview in my sixty-square-meter apartment.
[An actual goddess has descended.]
[Holy shit. Both parents dead? That’s a protagonist’s backstory.]
[“To save my beloved Li, I left my home; who knew I’d top the imperial exam?” If I were a princess and my husband looked like that, I’d be fine with it too.]
[That face? Those grades? She must get plenty of love letters.]
[I’m in her class. Loads of people secretly like her. But she’s an ice queen. Who’d dare go after her? That seducer got lucky!]
[What does the seducer look like? Curious!]
At that very moment, one such “seducer” was kneeling before my legs in the white shirt I liked.
His clothes and expression were a good seventy percent like Shen Zhuo’s when he’d been acting.
The boy who’d once said he would make me kneel and lick someone’s shoes now begged for my affection like an abandoned dog.
“Am I not doing it right? Whatever kind of boy you like, I can be that.”
“Do you still like that bastard Shen Zhuo—that… liar?”
There was sorrow in Li Changqing’s eyes. I felt nothing.
His love had come too easily and would fade just as quickly. To me, it had no value.
“Li Changqing. I know what you and Zhao Mingzhu said outside that café.”
One sentence shattered all his hopes.
His voice became shrill with disbelief. As though finally understanding, he clutched my sleeve. “So you knew all along. You always knew we were lying!”
This time, he really cried.
It wasn’t his usual act.
Tears pattered onto the floor.
“Your eyes really are beautiful,” I complimented him.
He stopped crying and looked at me with hatred. “I should’ve seen through your sweet talk long ago!”
I crouched and told an easy little lie. “I didn’t know at first. Mingzhu told me. She said you were only playing with me. That’s why I threw away your paintbrush that day.”
One little lie. If it could tear those cousins apart for good, it was worth it.
I held out my hand. “I’m sorry. I bought you a new one afterward. Think of it as thanks for telling me the truth.”
Smiling, I offered him a brand-new paintbrush.
As he took it, the brush fell to the floor.
I went on.
“Let’s stop seeing each other. I don’t like boys with bad grades.”
“Thank you for buying the apartment. I don’t need it anymore.”
As I shut the door, his tearful voice came from behind me. “I’ll change, Mianmian. Whatever you like, I’ll change.”
I left him with one sentence. “I don’t like your cousin. And I don’t like you.”
The poor couldn’t fight wealth. But they could work on people’s hearts.
After ending Li Changqing’s pestering, I heard from the Shen family.