After Transmigrating Into a Book, I Was Hooked by the Protagonist Gong - Chapter 1

The early May weather in Nancheng was oppressive, heavy with suffocating, overcast heat. Inside the classroom, students were slumped over their desks in various states of exhaustion.

Physical Education class had miraculously skipped its usual cancellation, but after a symbolic two laps around the track, everyone had scrambled back to the classroom to hijack the air conditioning.

In the second to last row by the wall of Class 1, Grade 11, a girl with a high ponytail suddenly sat bolt upright. She grabbed her phone, her thumbs flying across the screen. The frantic clack clack clack of her nails tapping the glass grew faster by the second.

Over on the school forum, public outrage was reaching a boiling point.

401L BigBossTong: Does anyone upstairs even have a conscience? Calling Tang Yu a cheating scumbag? Did you completely miss how close he and Bai Yuenian used to be? Childhood friends since forever! That’s an unbreakable bond, ok? UNDERSTOOD???

402L Irrelevant Student: Wake up and smell the reality, OP! Keyword: “used to be.” A source from Class 1 told me Yue god changed seats last week. They used to be desk mates, but now there’s an entire galaxy between them. If Tang Yu hadn’t done something unforgivable to Yue god, would he really go that far?

403L Irrelevant Student: Their relationship has been rocky lately anyway. It’s always been Tang Yu clinging to Yue god.

405L Irrelevant Bystander: Spilling real tea here: Tang Yu is 100% a player. Word on the street is that while Yue god has been away for the math olympiad, Tang Yu has been lurking around Class 2 looking for Qin Zhan. The two of them were looking all lovey-dovey eating lunch in the cafeteria. Tang Yu even asked Qin Zhan to walk him home! He’s seventeen, who needs an escort home? He’s clearly flirting.

408L BigBossTong: Don’t make things up, look at the facts! Stop spreading rumors!

409L BigBossTong: Replying to 402L: I’m literally in Class 1. Let me tell you, they’re just having a minor disagreement! Yue god will be back tomorrow or the day after, and they’ll make up immediately.

413L Irrelevant Bystander: Uh, quick question… what if Tang Yu just couldn’t stand Bai Yuenian’s human-refrigerator personality anymore and walked away?

The moment that comment dropped, the forum united. A barrage of identical replies filled the screen: IMPOSSIBLE.

On the Nancheng High School forum, threads about Bai Yuenian and Tang Yu were a regular fixture, constantly bumped back to the top for debate. This time, however, with rumors of a rift circulating, the majority assumed Tang Yu was the problem. The consensus was that he had chased Bai Yuenian, gotten rejected, and immediately hopped to a new target.

As the forum finally quieted down, the ponytail girl put her phone face down and stretched her wrists.

She glanced back at the desk diagonally behind her. The textbooks and exam papers there were stacked with mathematical precision; even the black gel pen lay perfectly parallel to the edge of the desk.

Then she looked across the aisle at the desk paired with it.

This one was the polar opposite. The solitary textbook left on the surface was badly creased, bearing a couple of dried, wrinkled water rings unmistakable evidence of its owner using it as a pillow and drooling all over it during class.

The girl scoffed at the forum’s dramatic description. “An entire galaxy between them,” she muttered. It was literally just an aisle and one empty seat!

Though, that comment about Bai Yuenian having a “human-refrigerator personality”… Yeah, that part was accurate.

There was also a secret that only the students inside Class 1 knew. Despite being classmates for nearly two years, Bai Yuenian couldn’t remember a single person’s name.

It wasn’t because he was arrogant. He looked like an ethereal, unearthly prince, and he rarely spoke, but he genuinely cared about the class and helped others. He was the classic “cold exterior, warm interior” type.

Over time, his classmates realized his inability to match names to faces wasn’t intentional. He simply suffered from a severe case of face-and-name blindness. No matter how extraordinary his academic memory was, names just wouldn’t stick. Genius always came with a quirk.

But… Bai Yuenian remembered Tang Yu’s name. If that wasn’t proof of true love, what was?

As for Tang Yu dumping Bai Yuenian to hit on Qin Zhan? The girl shook her head. No way. Tang Yu isn’t that much of a scumbag. Absolutely not.

Meanwhile, three streets away from the high school, a tattoo parlor sat drenched in dim shadows. The owner adjusted a warm-toned shadowless lamp, focusing intently on her work.

The teenager lying face-down on the leather table possessed a lean, toned back. His skin, clearly pampered and pale as porcelain, took on a soft honey hue under the warm light. Because his skin was exceptionally sensitive, the shop owner had to use a laser for the removal process.

Laser removal meant no numbing cream. It was excruciating.

The boy gritted his teeth, letting out a sharp, ragged breath. He was incredibly sensitive to pain, but he loathed the idea of carrying a stranger’s name on his skin even more. It felt like being branded without his consent.

As the pain spiked, his sweat-slicked spine twitched slightly, a slow, undulating movement that looked like a cinematic slow-motion shot dangerously mesmerizing to anyone watching. His lower back, narrowing sharply down to his hips, dipped instinctively by an inch.

“Stop moving,” a voice commanded. A hand with long fingers and bright red nail polish tapped his back lightly.

The owner was a glamorous woman in her early thirties. Puffing a cloud of white smoke from the cigarette resting between her lips, she sighed. “If it hurts this much, you shouldn’t have gotten it in the first place. I swear, you kids are exhausting. When things are good, you’re ready to die for each other. The second things go south, it’s all ‘who the hell are you?'”

A bead of sweat rolled rapidly down Tang Yu’s forehead, tracing the bridge of his sharp nose before lingering for a second on his upper lip and dripping onto the blue-and-white school uniform jacket draped over his elbow.

The lady’s logic made sense, but in his case, he was completely innocent.

Tang Yu released his heavily bitten, reddened lower lip. “Sis, if I told you this tattoo has absolutely nothing to do with me, would you believe me?”

The woman let out a soft laugh. She was either amused by the handsome boy’s sweet use of “Sis,” or she simply thought his excuse was absurd. “Kid, this is literally written on your own body.”

In other words: It’s on you, but it’s not yours? Who are you kidding?

But it was the absolute truth. Tang Yu had transmigrated into a book.

Three nights ago, he had been in a catastrophic car accident. He thought he was a goner, but when he opened his eyes, he was sitting in a high school examination hall.

The proctor monitoring the room happened to be his homeroom teacher from his real life, Mr. Cai. But here, Mr. Cai was the head of Class 13 the absolute worst academic track in the grade and the original “Tang Yu” was the undisputed king of the bottom tier, trailing at the absolute tail end of every exam.

In his past life, Mr. Cai despised affluent, lazy trust-fund kids who refused to study, and he never gave Tang Yu the time of day. Seeing him stir, Mr. Cai had snatched the exam paper stuck to Tang Yu’s face, glancing at the header. “Tang Yu? So you’re Tang Yu.”

Accustomed to Mr. Cai’s creative lecture styles, Tang Yu hadn’t bothered to reply. He had packed his things and walked straight out of the room.

His sleep addled brain hadn’t been firing on all cylinders yet. It wasn’t until he reached the sports field that reality hit him like a freight train.

Wait. Why did Mr. Cai repeat his name? And why did he say, “So you’re Tang Yu”?

It sounded like he was meeting him for the first time. Mr. Cai had been his homeroom teacher for two years in the real world, always screaming his full name whenever he messed up. Why act like a stranger now?

It was bizarre. And the anomalies kept piling up.

“Tang Yu!” someone called out, throwing an arm around his neck. “I’ve been yelling your name for five minutes! Ignoring me now? What, did you catch love-sickness because Bai Yuenian isn’t at school today?”

Bai Yuenian?

Tang Yu recognized that name. Bai Yuenian was the main love interest the “gong” in a popular web novel currently serialization on a major fiction site.

Tang Yu was a 100% certified straight guy who didn’t read romance novels. He only knew the name because the girls in his old class gossiped about it non stop. Since he spent most of his days pretending to sleep on his desk, his classmates assumed he was entirely unconscious and openly discussed the plot right in front of him. In reality, he was usually playing games or reading manga under the desk.

As a result, he had indirectly absorbed the entire plotline of the novel. To make matters weirder, the protagonist who occupied the submissive “shou” role shared his exact name: Tang Yu.

Standing on the basketball court, hearing that name out loud made Tang Yu’s pupils contract. A blinding flash of white light replayed in his mind the last thing he saw before his car flipped.

The two distinct sets of memories collided violently, leaving him dizzy.

“Whoa, man. I joked about love-sickness, but are you actually fainting on me?”

“To hell with love-sickness,” Tang Yu muttered, his vision stabilizing as the vertigo passed.

The round, chubby face of his childhood best friend, Xie Tianyi, came into focus, filled with genuine concern.

What was happening? Had a fictional character manifested in reality? Or had his real world fused with a novel while he was unconscious?

Feeling a strange, persistent itch near his shoulder blade, Tang Yu pulled his friend over to a corner of the bleachers. He pulled down the collar of his shirt. “Check my back. What’s on it?”

“Bro! We’ve been friends since diapers, but there are people everywhere. I don’t want to get murdered by the Yue god Fan Club. Besides, you need to watch your reputation these days,” Xie Tianyi sputtered, immediately squeezing his eyes shut and turning away.

Tang Yu: “…”

The world had officially gone mad. The guy he used to line up with at the restroom to compare sizes was suddenly acting like a blushing maiden.

Since his best friend was useless, Tang Yu finally discovered the truth in the boys’ bathroom mirror. Etched onto his skin in elegant, stylized calligraphy was the name: Bai Yuenian.

It was the exact relationship tattoo from the novel, used by the main couple to flaunt their bond.

He hadn’t just changed dimensions; he had replaced the novel’s protagonist. But why were his best friend, his teachers, and his classmates all here too? It was as if his entire reality had been copied over, with the sole addition of this guy named Bai Yuenian.

He seriously suspected he had transmigrated into a cursed fanfiction version of his own life.

And Bai Yuenian was someone Tang Yu absolutely could not afford to ignore. The original novel was a sugary, maximum-sweetness romance. Furthermore, Bai Yuenian possessed the ultimate, reality-bending trait characteristic of certain fictional tropes: he could get another man pregnant.

And Tang Yu was currently occupying the body destined to carry that child.

He vividly recalled the girls in his class squealing over the recent updates: “Omg, Bai Yuenian is so attentive! He installed non-slip mats in the bathroom!” “Our baby Yu is so dense, he didn’t even realize he was pregnant. He just thought Bai Yuenian was overfeeding him!” “Bai Yuenian secretly downloading an app to generate baby photos is so precious!”

Screw that, Tang Yu thought, his knuckles tightening. He couldn’t listen to another word.

Back in the present, Tang Yu zipped up his school jacket and lightly touched his abdomen. It was perfectly flat, firm, and lined with a solid six-pack. The mere thought of a straight guy like him falling for a man let alone growing a belly sent a shiver of pure terror down his spine.

Fortunately, the novel’s timeline placed the pregnancy arc well after university graduation. He was currently seventeen. He had plenty of time to rewrite his destiny.

Step one of his master plan: Get away from the male lead.

Tang Yu had skipped physical education to get the laser treatment, and the upcoming period was chemistry. In this novel universe, to maximize the romantic drama, the author had placed Tang Yu in Class 1 the top honors class right alongside Bai Yuenian.

Missing chemistry wasn’t a big deal academically, but the period right after was homeroom. The strict homeroom teacher always arrived early. If the chemistry teacher locked Tang Yu out for being late, he would be caught standing in the hallway like a delinquent.

He needed to maintain a clean record so he could successfully request a transfer down to Class 13.

As he neared the school, a light drizzle began to fall, cooling the oppressive heat. Tang Yu picked up his pace, heading toward the western perimeter wall. The school had recently upgraded the old, low brick walls into three-meter-high iron security bars to prevent students from sneaking out.

It was intimidating to most, but to Tang Yu, it was an easy hurdle. Without even needing a running start, he launched himself upward, gripping the top iron bar with clean precision. With a practiced twist of his torso, he prepared to drop down into the schoolyard undetected.

RIIIP.

A loud, violent tearing sound echoed in the quiet corner.

Tang Yu froze mid-air. His pants pocket had snagged perfectly on a sharp iron prong. The force of his jump had torn a massive, gaping hole right down the side of his thigh.

If he dropped now, the fabric would shred completely. Worse, his back was throbbing from the laser treatment, preventing him from pulling himself back up to unhook the fabric manually.

He was literally stuck, dangling from the fence.

Just as panic began to set in, a flash of a blue-and-white school uniform caught his eye near the corner of the building.

“Hey! Classmate! A little help over here!” Tang Yu called out quietly. This secluded spot rarely saw foot traffic; if he missed this person, he’d be stranded.

The student stopped and turned. Instead of rushing over, however, the boy halted a few paces away, standing completely motionless.

Tang Yu looked up, and for a fraction of a second, his brain short-circuited. The guy was ridiculously good-looking.

But his expression was incredibly intense his brow slightly furrowed, his lips set in a rigid, solemn line. He radiated an aura that was completely detached, pristine, and freezing cold. His narrow, upswept eyes gave him a striking, almost virtual-model-like perfection.

Stunning, Tang Yu thought, but a bit of a blockhead.

The boy simply stared at him, his dark gaze drifting down to the massive tear in Tang Yu’s uniform pants.

The cold rain misted across Tang Yu’s exposed skin, making him shiver. Only then did he realize the tear was positioned directly over his upper thigh, offering a completely unobstructed view of his underwear which happened to be patterned with bright, ridiculous cartoon teddy bears holding little red hearts.

Tang Yu cleared his throat mentally. Whatever. We’re both guys. Who cares?

“Hey, bro!” Tang Yu flashed his most brilliant, dazzling, sunshine-filled smile. His eyes sparkled with pure, unadulterated desperation as he pleaded like a trapped puppy. “Be a lifesaver and unhook me from this thing, will you?”

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