Miss Wheelchair - Chapter 18

The police station was brightly lit deep into the night.

By the time Gu Ci and Lu Ran finished the paperwork and stepped out, the officer in charge was still repeatedly cautioning them: “You got lucky this time; the other party didn’t cause any substantial harm. Next time you encounter a similar situation, protect your own safety first and call the police immediately.”

Gu Ci stopped her wheelchair, turned around, and nodded to the officer. “Understood. Thank you, Officer. Sorry for the trouble.”

Lu Ran shook hands with the officer with a smile. “Thank you, Officer. We’ll definitely be more careful next time.”

She then turned her gaze toward the lobby. Tan Xin and Zhang Huiqian were sitting upright on the row of waiting chairs, staring straight ahead without blinking.

How to describe them?

Imagine a vase at home has been shattered into pieces, and you’re about to interrogate your two Huskies, demanding to know “Who did this?” The two dogs would look exactly as stiffly correct and obedient as the two girls sitting there right now.

As the wheelchair ground to a halt right in front of them, Tan Xin squeezed out a forced smile, trying to sound helpful and eager to please. “Is everything handled? Wow, you’re amazing.”

Zhang Huiqian immediately chimed in as her hype-woman: “Well, obviously! What did you expect from our brilliant President Gu? She can handle anything. It’s getting late, let’s head out. Oh, by the way, Tan Xin, thank goodness you were there today to handle that creep. I’ll treat you to dinner another day!”

Tan Xin blurted out, “How about today?”

A burst of color floated over Gu Ci’s head.

Red +20.

Red = Anger.

If she went back alone with Gu Ci tonight, she wouldn’t survive to see tomorrow.

Gu Ci stared directly at Tan Xin, who clearly had a guilty conscience. “Weren’t you feeling unwell?”

Tan Xin clutched the stainless-steel edge beneath the bench, keeping her head low, looking as though Gu Ci weren’t sitting right in front of her but rather lying flat on the floor. “U-Unwell. Right, yeah, I was feeling unwell.”

Zhang Huiqian was clearly much better at lying on the fly: “Um, she did say she was feeling unwell earlier, but didn’t we just make a trip to the hospital? She’s all cured now.”

Now it was Tan Xin’s turn to play hype-woman: “Exactly. Spot on.”

Gu Ci questioned further, “Where’s the wheelchair?”

Tan Xin’s first instinct was to say: The wheelchair turned into a butterfly and flew away.

She managed to swallow the words just in time. This system might be fictional, but the characters weren’t as gullible as those in an old, naive soap opera. Besides, even in those dramas, the Emperor never believed those ridiculous excuses anyway.

“The wheelchair, we accidentally left it at the hospital,” Tan Xin murmured.

“So, your leg is completely fine? You can walk now?” Gu Ci pressed on.

Who on earth would fake a leg injury at home all day and night, and who would constantly try to chat her up about wheelchair-related topics?

Zhang Huiqian stepped into the line of fire to rescue her once more: “Well, the thing is, I carried her over on my back. As the saying goes, ‘When sisters unite, they can cut through metal.’ But President Gu has a point. Tan Xin, even though your cast is off, the doctor explicitly warned you not to walk around on your feet. Tell you what, don’t go home yet. Go straight back to the hospital, get an X-ray, and have it checked out.”

Her explanation flowed smoothly like water, but Tan Xin didn’t dare lift her head. The rhythmic ding, ding sound signaling changes in Gu Ci’s emotional stats kept chiming above her head, and she didn’t have the courage to look at how high the anger meter had peaked.

Fortunately, the system materialized in a flash, temporarily granting her a reprieve.

Gu Ci’s favorability -10. Current favorability score: [-10].

Well, look at that. After working so hard for so long, she was right back to the same baseline level of dislike reserved for the general public.

“Um, don’t be too discouraged,” Zhang Huiqian comforted Tan Xin as they walked out the door.

Tan Xin stared straight ahead, completely unbothered. “I’m not discouraged.”

“You’re not?”

“Yeah. It only dropped by 10 points. At my absolute worst, I was at -20, and I survived that fine. What is there to fear now? She just doesn’t like me yet; it’s not like she genuinely loathes my existence.”

Hearing this, Zhang Huiqian felt a sudden surge of profound respect for her. She gave her a thumbs-up. “I’m starting to admire you, babe. With a mindset like yours, forget about romancing a game character—you’d succeed at absolutely anything you put your mind to. If I were your Fairy Godmother, I’d grant you whatever you wanted!”

“Then could you split your money—”

“I was just paying you a compliment. Don’t push your luck.”

Tan Xin fell silent.

So, her favorability score had fluctuated a bit. No big deal. At least she didn’t have to keep pretending to use a wheelchair anymore. Walking openly down the street felt pretty good, too.

The only downside was that she could no longer strike up conversation using wheelchair-related topics, which meant losing a bit of common ground with Gu Ci.

But it didn’t really matter. Back when they did share that common ground, her favorability score hadn’t exactly skyrocketed either.

You have a real-time choice event. Please choose from the following options: 【Meet Gu Ci’s parents】【Take Gu Ci to meet your parents】【Start a business together with Gu Ci】

Tan Xin stared at the two lines of text on the holographic screen, completely silent for a full five minutes.

Meet Gu Ci’s parents meant facing Gu Ci’s family.

Take Gu Ci to meet your parents meant introducing her to her own family.

As for starting a business together, while it was a great opportunity to showcase her photographic memory, genius brain, and sharp business insight, wouldn’t it be far too exhausting for Gu Ci?

Gu Ci already had to manage Sun Moon Biopharmaceuticals, and a mountain of responsibilities at the hospital was waiting for her attention. If they started a new business, she would essentially have three companies under her name.

It would either work her beloved wife to death, or Gu Ci would just be a figurehead while Tan Xin did all the heavy lifting, working herself to death instead.

Weighing the options between working her lover to death or working herself to death, Tan Xin made a decisive choice—no new business.

“I choose 【Meet Gu Ci’s parents】.”

They hadn’t met yet anyway. What if Gu Ci’s parents took a liking to her and helped her romance Gu Ci from the inside? Even if her parents ended up disliking her, surely her grandparents would love her. As the saying goes: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The moment she locked in her choice, a crisp double-knock sounded at her bedroom door.

It was Gu Ci.

The door had been left slightly ajar, so Gu Ci knocked twice to signal she was there. Her wheelchair stopped at the doorway, her breathtakingly beautiful face betraying no hint of emotion. She still looked entirely cold and aloof, as though she viewed the entire world as one giant trash heap.

“Is something the matter?” Tan Xin asked, playing dumb. Yet, she couldn’t help but feel a flutter of joy just from the fact that Gu Ci had actively sought her out.

“Are you free tomorrow?” Gu Ci asked.

“Yes, I am. Why?”

“My father saw the news online. He said, he wants to meet you. Do you want to see them?”

Ding!

The casual exchange instantly triggered a shift in Gu Ci’s emotional value.

Cyan-green +10.

Cyan-green = Insecurity / Low Self-Esteem.

At the mere mention of her biological family, Gu Ci’s immediate reaction was a surge of insecurity?

In that split second, Tan Xin suddenly didn’t want to go anymore. It wasn’t because she wanted to avoid a toxic family dynamic that even Gu Ci found difficult to handle. Rather, she simply realized that forcing Gu Ci to go back and face that kind of environment would make her unhappy.

She absolutely hated the idea of making her dear wife unhappy.

“Are they easy to get along with?” Tan Xin asked gently, once again playing dumb.

The cyan-green value above Gu Ci’s head ticked up from 10 to 20.

The answer was staring her right in the face.

“Not really,” Gu Ci replied. “My mother passed away when I was twelve, and my father remarried shortly after. Since then, things have been distant between us.”

What an absolute tragedy.

A deep wave of sorrow welled up from the bottom of Tan Xin’s heart. To think her precious wife had to endure that kind of upbringing at the hands of her biological family—it was utterly heartless.

But it was fine. From this moment on, she, Tan Xin, would heal every single wound and scar from the first half of Gu Ci’s life.

As the saying goes, a stepmother brings a step-father. If that was the case, they just shouldn’t go see them.

So, she opened her mouth to say, “I see. In that case, let’s just—”

She wanted to say, let’s just forget about it.

To her horror, the word “forget” refused to come out of her throat. Instead, a voice that sounded identical to her own suddenly rang out through the air: “I’ll go back with you.”

Tan Xin: “?”

Wait a minute, she hadn’t spoken just now! Who on earth had said that for her? Was this system haunted? Had this even passed censorship? No ghosts or supernatural entities allowed after the founding of the modern era—didn’t the system know such a basic, fundamental rule?

Later, when Tan Xin confronted the system to demand an explanation, she was finally informed of the catch: once a choice event was locked in, there was absolutely no backing out. Even if she tried to pull back at the edge of the cliff, the system would fabricate a voice to accept Gu Ci’s prompt, effectively throwing her over the edge anyway.

“Alright, I’ll let the driver know. We’ll head out tomorrow morning,” Gu Ci said. “If all goes well, we should be able to head back right after lunch.”

The cyan-green indicator of low self-esteem vanished from above Gu Ci’s head. Presumably, after that brief moment of vulnerability, she had activated her battle mode, calculating exactly how she was going to deal with that middle-aged couple tomorrow.

Like wife, like partner.

That night, Tan Xin also activated her ultimate scholar mode. She fired up her laptop and split the screen down the middle. On the left side, she searched for “How to clap back at toxic relatives,” and on the right side, she copied and pasted the tactics into a text editor. She then neatly categorized them by conflict type into an eight-chapter master document.

It compiled into twelve thousand words, spanning a whopping twenty-four pages of pure, unadulterated comebacks.

Tan Xin began to memorize them line by line.

Tremble before me, you wicked in-laws! I’m about to show you exactly how powerful a woman who protects her wife with her life can truly be.