After Becoming a Spare Tire, I Got Together with My White Moonlight - Chapter 1

Country A, early autumn.

Jiang Xuehe sat by the riverbank, her easel propped up as she sketched the scenery.

The bridge nearby was bustling with people locals with golden hair and blue eyes, interspersed with many East Asian faces like her own. It seemed to be peak travel season.

Maybe I should find a quieter spot next time.

Her thoughts drifted idly until a sudden scream pierced the air from the bridge.

Looking up, she saw two children no older than ten leaning precariously over the railing. The older brother had one foot on the barrier, straining to peer down, while his little sister, barely six or seven, mimicked his movements. Before their parents could react, both children toppled over the edge.

“H-Help! Someone, please!”

“They fell in! Help!”

The parents’ first instinct was to shout in Chinese before frantically switching to other languages, their voices trembling with panic.

Jiang Xuehe frowned, set down her brush, and stood, pulling out her phone.

Just as she lowered her head to dial for emergency services, a shadow seemed to dart past overhead, followed by more gasps from the crowd.

She looked up just in time to see a girl fling off her coat, grip the railing, and leap into the river in one fluid motion.

Splash.

The girl clearly knew how to swim. She surfaced, wiped the water from her face, and immediately struck out toward the struggling children.

Others soon snapped into action some rushed to the riverbank, while a few even jumped in after her.

Jiang Xuehe called the hospital.

The lake water was already icy this early in the season. A fever could be deadly for a child so young.

The little sister was pulled ashore first, while bystanders reached out to help the others still in the water.

The parents finally sprinted down from the bridge. A stylishly dressed young woman collapsed to her knees by the bank, clutching her son as he was lifted out, sobbing uncontrollably.

The little sister sat dazed on the side, too shocked to even cry.

Jiang Xuehe walked over, shrugging off her own coat to drape it over the child.

Soon, the ambulance arrived. The children’s father finally appeared, bringing a doctor who performed a quick check on the spot. Aside from swallowing some dirty river water and being badly frightened, neither child had any visible injuries. The father planned to take them to the hospital for further examination.

In a mix of languages, the man stammered out his gratitude to everyone who had helped.

“It’s nothing,” Jiang Xuehe said, shaking her head as she watched him scoop up his daughter. “Just be more careful next time.”

Once the girl was in the ambulance, the father turned to his wife and son.

That side was far livelier between the still-hysterical mother and child, the rescuers had formed a small crowd. The girl who had jumped in first was wiping water from her face, waving a hand dismissively, likely saying something like, “It’s fine.”

Once the family was safely in the ambulance, the onlookers dispersed.

Jiang Xuehe returned to her easel, staring at the half-finished landscape sketch. The image of the girl leaping from the bridge flashed unbidden in her mind. Almost reflexively, she glanced up.

Their eyes met.

The drenched girl was back on the bridge, bending to pick up her coat. Her gaze swept downward, pausing briefly in surprise. She turned, waved at someone, then hurried down the bridge steps.

She appeared to be around seventeen or eighteen years old, with a tall, straight posture, a pretty face, and graceful demeanor.

Even after genuinely getting drenched like a drowned rat, she didn’t look the least bit disheveled.

What a pity to meet in a place like this.

Jiang Xuehe had just sat down when she heard footsteps behind her. Before she could turn around, she felt something drape over her.

A girl stood behind her, placing a coat over her shoulders.

“You don’t need to return this one, I have others.”

The girl spoke quickly, then hurriedly turned and ran up the path outside the grassy lawn, waving as she went. “Goodbye!”

On the bridge, several girls of similar age were dragging suitcases, panting and shouting in exasperation, “Yan Guiqiu! Can you hurry the hell up? The plane’s about to take off for the eight-hundredth time!”

The girl laughed as she ran toward her companions, reassuring them, “It’s fine, it’s fine! At worst, we’ll reschedule and stay another day, my treat!”

The one who had shouted rolled her eyes and flung another coat at her, grumbling, “Honestly, you’re something else even on a trip, you manage to play the hero. Are you some kind of Conan reincarnate? You’d better find a place to change first. I don’t want to have to nurse a sick person on the plane.”

The other friends burst into laughter.

Though they kept bickering, their steps never slowed. A gust of wind swept across the lake, swirling fallen leaves, and in the blink of an eye, their figures were gone.

Jiang Xuehe snapped out of her daze, her fingers brushing against her icy arms as she belatedly realized how cold she was.

After giving her coat to the little girl who had fallen into the water, all she had left was a thin, short-sleeved dress.

She looked down at the tag on the new coat, a high-end spring-autumn trench coat from “Xinglan,” clearly expensive and barely worn, though its owner didn’t seem to care much for it.

Yan Guiqiu.

From the Yan family?

Jiang Xuehe pulled the coat tighter around her. The wind had died down, and the chill gradually faded.

On the bridge, people came and went in a hurry, wave after wave of unfamiliar faces, as if no trace of what had happened remained.

Four years later.

Yunhua City.

When her phone rang, Yan Guiqiu was buried under her blankets, dead asleep. The loud ringing only made her instinctively burrow deeper, until her bunkmate below finally lost patience and kicked the bed frame.

“Young miss! Your phone’s ringing!”

“Answer it for me, let me sleep a little longer, or I’ll die of exhaustion.” Yan Guiqiu mumbled, slowly rolling over.

Her bunkmate grumbled but eventually got up, grabbed the incessantly ringing phone from the desk, and placed it by Yan Guiqiu’s pillow before hitting the answer button.

Silence finally returned, and the bunkmate flopped back down to sleep.

Yan Guiqiu fumbled around for a while before finally grabbing the phone. She missed most of the rapid-fire speech from the other end, only speaking up when she sensed a pause. “If it’s nothing important, I’m hanging up. I need to sleep.”

There was a brief silence before the voice on the other end raised its volume sharply. “Young miss! Do you have any idea what time it is? Two in the afternoon! The sun’s roasted your backside eight hundred times over, and you’re still in bed?!”

Yan Guiqiu held the phone away from her ear, the yelling jolting her slightly more awake. Squinting, she glanced at the tightly drawn curtains, where a few slivers of harsh sunlight peeked through the gaps.

“I pulled an all-nighter revising my thesis,” she said, rubbing her temples. “I only got to sleep at ten after showing it to my advisor.”

At this point, she had only slept for four hours.

But her friend wouldn’t insist on teasing her so persistently for no reason. Yan Guiqiu mustered her energy and asked, “What’s going on?”

Song Anchen’s voice came from the other end of the line: “Jiang Xuehe is back in the country.”

Yan Guiqiu was still a little dazed: “Huh?”

Song Anchen: “Jiang Xuehe has returned. A week from now, the Jiang family is throwing a welcome banquet for her. Invitations have already been sent out, it’s happening right here in Yunhua City. Are you going?”

Yan Guiqiu’s first reaction was: “I’m not even close to her.”

Song Anchen: “If you’re not close, then why did you ask me to keep tabs on her and tell you the moment I heard anything? If I didn’t know you liked the type like Qin Xiangxi, I’d think you had a crush on her.”

Yan Guiqiu jolted awake at that.

Qin Xiangxi. Jiang Xuehe.

Putting those two names together was practically a keyword trigger.

“No! Don’t slander me my first love hasn’t even been given away yet,” Yan Guiqiu hurriedly said. “I’ll go, I’ll go. Get me an invitation, and I’ll definitely be there.”

The original plot didn’t include a welcome banquet probably because the female lead, Qin Xiangxi, wasn’t involved.

But for Yan Guiqiu, this was a reasonable way to get close to Jiang Xuehe.

As a transmigrator who had only recalled the plot in the last couple of years, Yan Guiqiu wasn’t looking to spark any romance with the story’s characters. In fact, it was quite the opposite, she was desperate to break free from the “plot.”

Unfortunately, Yan Guiqiu could be considered the second female lead in the story, the so-called official love interest.

And this official pairing wasn’t some childhood sweethearts, naturally progressing romance. Instead, it was a one-sided, self-sacrificing devotion bordering on obsession, with the sole guiding principle being: “The female lead is the sky, the earth, the brightest light in life, her entire world.”

And the female lead’s first love just happened to be someone else the white moonlight, Jiang Xuehe. Thus, the Yan Guiqiu in the plot became the most devoted of backup options.

When the female lead chased after the white moonlight, she provided money and effort. When the female lead quarreled with the white moonlight, she drove through the night to comfort her. When the female lead was hurt, she was the first to arrive. When the female lead hurled cruel words, she reflected on herself and continued to grovel. When the female lead married another man out of spite toward the white moonlight, she stepped back into the role of a best friend, silently standing guard.

The white moonlight never fell for the female lead and, in the end, ruthlessly brought down the female lead’s family due to various conflicts.

Unable to bear the disparity of life after her family’s bankruptcy, the female lead leaped from a tall building only to be granted a chance at rebirth.

After being reborn, “Yan Guiqiu,” the devoted backup who had spent half her life groveling, finally got her turn. But even after their relationship was established, she didn’t hold back instead, she doubled down on her devotion. If the female lead so much as frowned, she would agonize over it all day, unable to focus on work.

Of course, the ending was a happy one, the female lead genuinely fell in love with the backup, achieving success in wealth, status, and love, while also thoroughly humiliating the white moonlight.

For the “Yan Guiqiu” in the original plot, this might have been the perfect ending.

But for the current Yan Guiqiu, it was nothing short of a living hell.

Fortunately, after recalling the plot, there was no system popping up, nor any mysterious rules like “punishment for deviating from the storyline.” Yan Guiqiu could leave her family and live independently, avoiding the role of the domineering CEO in the plot. She even managed to save her mother, who was supposed to die early in the story due to her naturally cautious nature as a child.

The plot wasn’t unchangeable, but it seemed to have a certain inertia.

Without her memories, Yan Guiqiu felt no fondness for the female lead, Qin Xiangxi. On the contrary, she found her troublesome and uncomfortable to be aroundsomeone who would never make it onto her list of friends.

Yet, despite this, all sorts of coincidences kept intertwining their fates.

In elementary school, Yan Guiqiu attended school in the main city of the plot, and Qin Xiangxi was her classmate.

In middle school, Yan Guiqiu transferred to a provincial key school in another city yet Qin Xiangxi was still her classmate.

For university, Yan Guiqiu switched provinces entirely, only to bump into Qin Xiangxi on the first day of school.

Yan Guiqiu: “…”

Not to mention the countless minor coincidences in daily life. Qin Xiangxi was like a fixed-trigger NPC wherever Yan Guiqiu went, she would inevitably run into her, and most of the time, Qin Xiangxi was being bullied.

Though Yan Guiqiu had no particular liking for Qin Xiangxi, the latter hadn’t done anything wrong and somehow always attracted troublemakers. Yan Guiqiu couldn’t just stand by and watch.

Over time, not only did Qin Xiangxi deeply favored by the plot start to suspect Yan Guiqiu’s feelings, but even Yan Guiqiu’s own friends often wondered if she had a crush on her.

This was the one thing Yan Guiqiu couldn’t explain away. After years of experience, she concluded that the only way to free herself from the plot’s influence was to help Qin Xiangxi achieve a happy ending with someone else.

The plot could orchestrate coincidences, but it couldn’t manipulate emotions.

For efficiency’s sake, the easiest approach was to start with the person Qin Xiangxi liked.

According to the original plot, Qin Xiangxi’s rebirth was supposed to happen two years later. Judging by the final outcome, it seemed the “white moonlight” had once harbored some affection for Qin Xiangxi, but due to interference from villainous cannon fodder families and other obstacles, they ended up as enemies.

Now, before any of those conflicts arose, if Yan Guiqiu could bring them together before the plot officially began, perhaps even the rebirth wouldn’t happen.

The female lead and the white moonlight would find love, and Yan Guiqiu would gain a peaceful, undisturbed life.

A win-win situation.

But currently, Qin Xiangxi harbored serious misunderstandings about her. Bringing it up rashly would only make her seem scheming, and Qin Xiangxi herself was hard to communicate with. After much deliberation, Yan Guiqiu decided to break the deadlock through the white moonlight.

Previously, the white moonlight had been studying abroad, and the plot didn’t specify her exact location. She only returned to the country a year or two before the story began.

At this point, aside from Yan Guiqiu who was supposedly “secretly in love” with her, the relationships among the three were still clean and untainted, not yet dragged into the whirlpool of melodramatic angst.

Yan Guiqiu had waited two years for this perfectly logical opportunity, and now that it had arrived, she was momentarily stunned.

After hanging up her friend’s call, she sat frozen on her bed for a while before pinching her thigh hard to snap out of it. She quickly scrambled off the bed.

By the time her bunkmate woke up and casually lifted the curtain, the sky outside had already darkened completely.

She turned her head again and saw the desk lamp still on, with Yan Guiqiu hunched over, scribbling furiously.

“Guiqiu? You’re not still revising your thesis, are you?” Her roommate yawned as she climbed down from her bed, holding a toothbrush cup as she circled behind Yan Guiqiu. “Didn’t Professor Zhang say it was fine? He even approved my draft, how could yours have issues? Besides, the semester just started, there’s no need to, pfft!”

“What on earth are you writing?” Her roommate gaped at the towering stack of books beside Yan Guiqiu.

None of them were related to their coursework. A quick glance at the spines revealed titles like Love for Beginners, How to Win Them Over, 38 Essential Dating Techniques, Matchmaking for Dummies, Helping Others, Fulfilling Yourself, 108 Successful Blind Date Stories.

Beneath those were a few more, like Introduction to Psychology and Handbook of Emotional Fluctuations in Romantic Relationships.

Yan Guiqiu slowly turned her head to look at her, dark circles under her eyes, yet her gaze brimming with unwavering determination.

“Just drafting a few small strategic plans for my lifelong happiness, that’s all.”

The roommate glanced at the thick stack of papers under Yan Guiqiu’s hand. The bottom sheet had a crossed-out “Plan B,” now revised to “Plan 002.”

The top sheet was already numbered “049.”

Roommate: “…”

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