After The Web Novel Great God Transmigrated As A Scummy Online Dating Top - Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Saint and the Scumbag

Lin Muxue was jolted awake by the incessant pinging of WeChat notifications.

A sharp, rhythmic throb pulsed behind her temples, accompanied by a familiar dull ache between her brows. Her eyes were so dry and hot that even opening them felt like an ordeal.

She instinctively reached for the glasses on the bridge of her nose, but her hand met nothing but air. Only then did Lin Muxue realize something was very wrong.

Her current posture was wrong.

For the past few days, she had been rushing a manuscript, followed by a sleepless marathon with the production crew’s screenwriters in a hotel room to finalize adaptations. When the first draft was finally settled, everyone had reached their limit and retreated to their rooms to crash.

Lin Muxue remembered that although her vision had been swimming from exhaustion, she had successfully climbed into a bed.

So why am I waking up sitting in a chair?

She must have been sitting there all night; every bone in her body ached with a nagging soreness.

Lin Muxue struggled to open her eyes, expecting the familiar blur of her severe nearsightedness, but the world was startlingly clear. She dithered for a moment, then pursed her lips and sat up, turning to survey her strange surroundings.

This wasn’t her hotel room. Instead, it was a cramped, messy, unfamiliar little room with water stains molding on the walls.

She sat frozen, her clouded brain struggling to recall the date. She wondered if it was April Fools’ Day. But that was impossible it was clearly early summer, just after the May Day holiday when her uncle had dragged her to help “contribute” to the sea of heads at a tourist attraction.

As she was wondering, the sound of a man’s voice suddenly erupted from nearby a low, forced, “sexy” croon singing a love song. Lin Muxue didn’t mistake it for another person in the room; the space was barely ten square meters and completely open to view.

The sound carried the distinct distortion of a recording.

Confused, Lin Muxue rubbed her hair and followed the vibration to find a phone. Looking at the unfamiliar number on the screen, she didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she stood up to explore.

Small as the room was, it had a private bathroom. Standing before the sink, she looked into the mirror and froze again.

The person in the mirror was her, and yet, not her.

Due to years of burying her head in books and staring at screens, Lin Muxue’s nearsightedness was severe, necessitating thick, heavy glasses. Since puberty, she had never paid much attention to her appearance. She wore black-rimmed frames, and while her hair was long, it was only because she disliked going to hair salons; she usually kept it in a simple braid draped over her shoulder for convenience.

She didn’t dye her hair, nor did she wear makeup. At a young age, she had lived exactly like the “old spinster” her uncle often teased her about.

Yet, the person in the mirror had no glasses and wore hair with highlights of “Granny Grey,” “Smog Blue,” and “Mint Green.” Aside from the face, everything about this reflection suggested an extraordinary situation.

—She was no longer the “her” she used to be.

…

A flood of memories surged like a tide.

Lin Muxue leaned against the sink, breathing shallowly. She closed her eyes and sifted through the unfamiliar memories, eventually understanding her predicament.

These memories brought her own long-forgotten childhood and teenage years into sharp focus. This was the life of the “Lin Muxue” of this world twenty-two years of history. Half of it overlapped with her own, but the other half was entirely alien.

Comparing the two, “Lin Muxue No. 2” and the original Lin Muxue had reached a fork in the road at age sixteen.

Before sixteen, there was no difference: both were diligent students, lovers of books and films, the pride of their parents—the “model child” in everyone’s eyes.

But at sixteen, her parents’ marriage collapsed. The once-famed “loving couple” tore at each other’s throats over property and custody. Crucially, they fought for custody not out of love for their only daughter, but purely to spite one another.

Ultimately, her mother, Zhong Cuishan, emerged victorious. After gloating over her ex-husband, she quickly remarried, had another child, and started a new “happy” family.

With no maternal affection left for her grown daughter, Zhong Cuishan tossed Lin Muxue like a piece of luggage to her younger brother, Zhong Cuili a lifelong bachelor and “artist” who spent his days chasing a dream of becoming a director.

In the original Lin Muxue’s timeline, this upheaval led her to conclude that love was merely a “self-deception” created by the species for survival—a lingering biological illusion of unevolved animal hormones. Thus, her romantic awakening stopped dead. She prepared to live her life alone.

However, the “Lin Muxue No. 2” of this world had reached the opposite conclusion. Witnessing her mother’s second “happy” marriage created a contradictory cognition. She sneered at love on the surface, yet desperately craved to find her own “true love.”

Lin Muxue opened her eyes and looked at herself, correcting that thought: more accurately, No. 2 wanted to find an emotional anchor that could provide her with a sense of security.

In that regard, they truly were the same person. It was just that Lin Muxue had found her anchor in the world of literature, while her alternate self was still drifting like aimless duckweed.

…

The phone stopped ringing, leaving a moment of silence before it began again with stubborn persistence.

Lin Muxue didn’t rush to answer. She set it aside, took a comb, and patiently smoothed out her bird’s-nest hair, expertly braiding it into four strands. Her hair here was shorter only reaching her chest—and she pursed her lips, feeling slightly uncomfortable with the shorter length before tying it off with a hair tie.

By the time she finished, the phone was ringing for the third time.

She didn’t ignore it this time. She pressed the green button and spoke in a slightly hoarse, polite voice: “Hello? Who is this, please?”

…

On the other end, Xiao Yue known online as “Zhuyue” was absolutely livid.

Not long ago, she had met a “Number 1” (Top) who seemed decent on the famous GL social networking site “Zhizhi Mumu.” After chatting privately for a while, they had made their relationship official.

In this day and age, few people took online dating seriously, and Xiao Yue had entered the relationship mostly to pass the time. But finding out your online girlfriend had been exposed for dating dozens of girls on the same site? No one could tolerate that!

Worse, not long after they started “dating,” her girlfriend had made up an excuse to borrow money. Xiao Yue realized she had run into an “online scammer.”

She usually prided herself on her sharp eyes, but she had slipped up in the gutter. Furious, she tracked down the scammer’s phone number from the expose thread and called, ready to unleash her rage.

She knew she couldn’t do much over a few hundred yuan. According to the thread, this scammer actually knew a bit about the law; the amount she took from each girl was always kept under 3,000 yuan—the threshold for a criminal case.

But Xiao Yue just wanted to scream at her, or she would burst!

The first time was busy; the second went unanswered. Xiao Yue called again and again, wishing she could make the scammer’s phone explode!

She wasn’t even sure if the person’s gender was real. Though they had voice chatted, the thread mentioned the scammer likely had some professional voice-acting knowledge and could change her voice to suit her targets’ tastes. The thought that she might have been flirting with some middle-aged man made Xiao Yue want to vomit.

She hit the dial button again, prepared for a long battle. Unexpectedly, the call connected almost instantly.

Then, a magnetic, slightly hoarse, and strangely “proper” voice spoke with a polite, dignified tone: “Hello? Who is this, please?”