After Transmigrating into a Novel, I Am in a Relationship with My Scummy Ex-Girlfriend’s Mother - Chapter 3

Soon, the person from before walked back in with a doctor.

Huo Qingzhuo cooperated fully, answering all the doctor’s questions. After the doctor finished the examination and left, she took an orange from the nightstand and turned her gaze back to the person sitting in the chair by her bed.

The person met Huo Qingzhuo’s gaze calmly and handed her a phone. “Hello, let me introduce myself. My name is Shu Yueqing. I was the one who hit you, and I am very sorry. Also, because your phone was broken in the accident, I haven’t been able to contact your family yet. Please use this to call them so we can discuss the settlement for this accident.”

Huo Qingzhuo’s eyes lingered on Shu Yueqing’s hand for a moment before she went back to peeling her orange, making no move to take the phone.

“There’s no need. The doctor said it isn’t serious, and I feel fine myself. Contacting my family would only make them worry.” Huo Qingzhuo flashed a well-behaved smile that suited her current age.

Thinking of the four elderly people at home, whose average age was over eighty, Huo Qingzhuo had no intention of troubling them. Besides, she had her own plans.

Shu Yueqing hesitated for a moment but eventually withdrew the phone. She nodded gently and stood up. “As you wish. However, please rest assured that I will cover all your medical expenses. Beyond that, feel free to stay in the hospital; I will handle all the costs. If you feel any discomfort, remember to tell the doctor. My assistant will arrive shortly to take care of you. You can raise any requests with her.”

Seeing that the woman was about to leave, Huo Qingzhuo thought about her own suspicions combined with a tiny bit of personal interest. She called out with a sweet smile and offered the peeled orange. “Wait, Sister, is it convenient to ask… do you have a lover, a partner, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a husband, or a wife?”

“Hmm?” Shu Yueqing narrowed her eyes slightly in confusion, clearly unaware of Huo Qingzhuo’s intentions. She took the orange with a look of bewilderment and shook her head honestly. “No. Is there anything else?”

“Then… Sister, how about giving me a ‘gay-ance’?” (Note: a pun on “chance”)

Huo Qingzhuo bet that the other woman understood her words, and that a certain ethereal, illusory Plot Correction mechanism understood them too.

One second, two seconds, three seconds passed. Nothing happened.

Shu Yueqing looked at Huo Qingzhuo for a moment as if she hadn’t heard a thing. She placed the orange back into Huo Qingzhuo’s hand. “Little one, get some rest. I’ll come to see you next time.”

Little one?

Huo Qingzhuo narrowed her eyes, watching Shu Yueqing’s retreating back. She gritted her teeth inwardly; she wouldn’t be a “little one” forever.

“Host! What kind of death wish do you have? Or do you want to two-time?”

The moment Shu Yueqing left, 007 jumped up instantly. God knows how scared it had been when Huo Qingzhuo said those words; it felt as if it had already seen the ending where it and its host were wiped out together.

“Wasn’t it fine?” Huo Qingzhuo leaned back against the headboard leisurely, looking regretfully at the orange in her hand. Since the other woman hadn’t taken it, she would have to eat it herself.

“Oh right, why was it fine?” 007 asked, realizing the anomaly.

A flash of understanding crossed Huo Qingzhuo’s eyes. The corners of her mouth curled up as she murmured in an ambiguous tone, “What needs to be repaired? Only a bug…”

As Shu Yueqing reached the hospital lobby, she happened to run into her assistant who had just rushed over. After giving instructions regarding Huo Qingzhuo’s ward, she noticed a small bit of orange pith stuck to her finger just before getting into her car.

She looked up toward the direction of the “little one’s” ward. Her brow twitched slightly as she flicked the pith away, got into the car, and left the hospital.

Huo Qingzhuo soon met the assistant Shu Yueqing had mentioned—a woman in a professional suit, looking every bit the social elite.

“Please help me process the discharge papers, thank you.”

As soon as the assistant finished her self-introduction, Huo Qingzhuo lifted the covers and got out of bed. Tomorrow was the start of school and a major turning point in the plot. As the main villainous female supporting character, how could she be absent? Moreover, this concerned her very life.

The assistant hadn’t expected the girl to demand a discharge immediately. She hesitated but eventually agreed. “Miss Huo, this… alright. However, you will have to bear the consequences yourself. Additionally, regarding the subsequent compensation, our side is offering 30,000 yuan, and also…”

“I accept the compensation. As for other matters, give me your boss’s business card; I will talk to her myself.” Putting on the coat left nearby, Huo Qingzhuo picked up the fruit basket from the nightstand and reached out her hand toward Shu Yueqing’s assistant.

“This is my business card. Miss Huo, if you need anything, just contact me.”

Naturally, the assistant wouldn’t dare give out her boss’s contact information without permission. She took her own card from her pocket and offered it to Huo Qingzhuo.

Huo Qingzhuo withdrew her hand and didn’t take it. “You can call your boss to ask for instructions.”

“Very well then, Miss Huo, please wait a moment.” The assistant felt a bit of a headache coming on, but she could only go and call Shu Yueqing.

Huo Qingzhuo checked the time and stood in place patiently.

A moment later, the assistant returned. “I am very sorry, Miss Huo. Here is my card; if you have any questions in the future, just contact me. This card contains 30,000 yuan. There is no password; it is your compensation.”

She had been rejected.

Rejected twice in one day by the same person. Huo Qingzhuo felt she was truly making progress.

“It’s fine, then there’s no need.” Huo Qingzhuo didn’t take the assistant’s card either; she only took the bank card. After all, she was very poor right now.

Having taken the card, Huo Qingzhuo didn’t dawdle. “I’ll go handle the discharge papers myself. Sorry to have made you come all this way. Goodbye.”

“…Goodbye.”

The assistant stood there watching Huo Qingzhuo walk away with gauze wrapped around her head. It was the first time she had seen someone so carefree, but after a thought, she called her boss to report the situation.

After Shu Yueqing hung up the phone, she looked at her hand again for some inexplicable reason. “Nowadays, the minds of these youngsters are getting harder and harder to fathom.”

After leaving the hospital, Huo Qingzhuo took advantage of the bank being open to get a new card. She transferred the 30,000 yuan and the remaining hospital deposit refund to her new account.

She also bought a new phone. As for a bicycle, she didn’t plan on buying one yet. She didn’t plan on going home either; she had been an orphan in her previous life and had little experience living with family. Her current family situation was special, consisting only of her grandparents and great-grandparents. Facing four elderly people whose ages totaled over 350 years, Huo Qingzhuo wasn’t confident she could act the part perfectly.

It was currently the start of the senior year. Items needed for school had already been sent there, and some students had already returned. Huo Qingzhuo called the elders at home and told them she had already returned to school to bluff her way through.

At this hour, there would be no one to open the dorms for her. Huo Qingzhuo thought about it and simply rented a private room at a nearby internet cafe. She bought some food to fill her stomach and used the computer to learn about this world.

The original host’s grades were decent, but due to her family background, she was insecure, sensitive, and extreme. The knowledge in her memory was too narrow, and she knew little about the general environment.

Huo Qingzhuo didn’t want to follow the path in the plot, nor was she willing to be mediocre for the rest of her life, so she needed to plan early.

After spending the night in the internet cafe and gathering the information she wanted, Huo Qingzhuo curled up in her chair and slept for a while. When dawn broke, she got up and returned to school.

After confirming her school memories repeatedly in her mind, Huo Qingzhuo first returned to the dormitory.

Shengguan Middle School was a boarding school. The dormitories for Senior Class Nine were all on the second floor. Huo Qingzhuo found her room; it was empty, as no one else had returned yet.

She packed the luggage she had moved in earlier and headed to the classroom with her books on her back.

Having to go through the senior year of high school again, she felt a bit nostalgic.

In her previous life, Huo Qingzhuo had finished high school. During her senior year, the old orphanage director who had been sponsoring her passed away. Huo Qingzhuo was forced to work while studying, and her grades plummeted. In the second semester, she ended up studying at home, working odd jobs during the day and frantically grinding through textbooks and mock exams at night.

She had always felt it was worth it, but she never expected that when the college entrance exams arrived, she wouldn’t receive any notification. After asking at the school, she found out she had missed the registration period because her teacher hadn’t informed her.

When she confronted him, the teacher simply said dismissively, “For a student like you, it’s the same whether you take it or not. There was no need.”

That one sentence had effortlessly brushed aside twelve years of Huo Qingzhuo’s hard work.

Many years had passed, and as she walked through the high school campus with her senior year books again, she only let out a soft sigh, as if time truly could smooth over everything from the past.

By the time she reached the teaching building, students were gradually returning. Passing the first floor, she noticed the “Straight-A Class” was almost entirely present, engaged in morning reading.

The sound of reading was clear and resonant. Huo Qingzhuo paused for a moment before continuing upstairs.

The Class Nine she was in was famous throughout the school for being a mixed bag. They were bad at everything except studying, but “talented” in everything else. To prevent Class Nine from affecting the academic enthusiasm of other classes, the school had simply thrown this “tumor” onto the fourth floor.

The entire fourth floor only held Class Eight and Class Nine. These two equal “tumors” harmed each other, and the teachers turned a blind eye, treating it as free-range parenting.

When Huo Qingzhuo reached the fourth floor, she found it empty. The classroom doors were wide open, and the messy desks and chairs, along with scattered textbooks and blank test papers, perfectly fit the reputation of the two classes.

Returning to her seat, she casually flipped through a textbook. With the original host’s memory and her own accumulated knowledge over the years, Huo Qingzhuo felt that maintaining the original host’s grades wouldn’t be difficult.

With a plan in mind, she checked the time and waited quietly for the plot to arrive.

The original host didn’t have a good reputation in class. She used to be like a ghost, but since she started dating Shen Junfu at the end of the last semester, she had instantly become a target of hostility.

After all, there was an unofficial tradition at Shengguan Middle School: Shen Junfu was the undisputed “School Beauty,” and her girlfriend was the default “Second Beauty.”

This time, Shen Junfu had actually chosen a plain girl like “Huo Qingzhuo” to be her girlfriend, which was absolutely shocking. People either thought Shen Junfu had gone blind, or that she had grown tired of delicacies and wanted a bit of “plain greens” to change her palate.

Regardless of what they thought, everyone found “Huo Qingzhuo” incredibly eyesore. Among them, Shen Junfu’s ex-girlfriends—all prominent figures in school—were particularly resentful. This made the original host’s situation even more difficult.

Time ticked by. It wasn’t until an hour past the scheduled class time that the people of Class Nine finally trickled in. They were slumped over like freshly planted onions, lacking any semblance of order.

“Hey, have you heard? Shen Junfu turned seventeen this summer. Her mom gave her a whole villa. They had parties for ten days straight, went totally wild. But, you know, someone was nowhere to be seen. Tsk tsk, being a girlfriend to that extent is pretty pathetic. I bet the replacement is coming soon.”

“Isn’t that the truth? Just wait, it’ll happen in the next couple of days. But honestly, it’s not just her. With Shen Junfu’s family background, probably no one in our school could actually set foot in her house. It’s all just for fun.”

“Who says it isn’t?”

…

The surrounding discussions made no effort to avoid the person involved. They might as well have pointed at Huo Qingzhuo’s nose, fearing she wouldn’t hear.

Huo Qingzhuo flipped through her math book intermittently, indeed hearing everything they said.

If there was one thing different between this world and her previous one, it was that this was a world of “universal similarity.” Same-sex marriage was legal. While male-male and female-female relationships were still in the minority, they were no longer considered abnormal and were accepted by the public. Couples could walk hand-in-hand in the sunlight without receiving strange looks.

For Huo Qingzhuo, who had confirmed her sexual orientation in her previous life, this was practically heaven.

“Shen Junfu is here!”

Someone shouted, and the classroom, which had been like a boiling pot of oil, instantly fell silent.

Huo Qingzhuo also turned to look. This was her first time seeing Shen Junfu clearly outside of her memories, as she had been too busy escaping for her life yesterday to take a good look.

Shen Junfu indeed lived up to her reputation as the top figure at Shengguan Middle School. Aside from her unrivaled family background, she possessed naturally gifted looks and a figure. A simple long-sleeved white T-shirt and black sweatpants looked like high fashion on her.

Tossing her backpack—which didn’t contain a single book—onto her desk, Shen Junfu gathered her loose long hair, ran her fingers through it, and walked over to Huo Qingzhuo. She reached out and pulled the hair tie from Huo Qingzhuo’s hair.

As her long hair cascaded down, Huo Qingzhuo’s hand flipping the textbook paused. She looked up at Shen Junfu, who was standing righteously in front of her. The latter had already used Huo Qingzhuo’s hair tie to pull her own hair into a simple high ponytail, making her look even more heroic and spirited, fully highlighting her sharp, exquisite features. She was beautiful in a piercing way.

Shen Junfu looked into Huo Qingzhuo’s eyes and reached out to knock on the desk of Huo Qingzhuo’s seatmate.

“Beat it.”

Just as Huo Qingzhuo almost thought Shen Junfu was talking to her, the seatmate—who had just been giving her dirty looks—scrambled away nimbly.