Lin Sanyuan didn’t even feel like wasting another word. She hung up the call decisively.
What kind of nonsense was this?
Are gay guys all this gossipy?
And weren’t key high schools supposed to ban phones on campus?
Then how did some little brat manage to film such a high-definition video of her fighting and upload it online?
Her mood was extremely complicated.
Lin Sanyuan didn’t dare keep scrolling on her phone.
Whenever she had nothing to do, her intermittent urge to clean would kick in.
To distract herself, she started tidying up, wiping and scrubbing everywhere. She didn’t even spare the old-style bedside cabinet in the big room, the kind where you could flip open the top. She cleaned every crack until it was spotless.
Right when she was getting into it, she noticed a pink little box lying quietly inside the cabinet.
It should belong to Qiao Lian.
Since it involved personal privacy, she hadn’t planned to touch it.
But the box looked strangely familiar.
It seemed like the thing Ke Tingyu had secretly slipped to Qiao Lian at school during the parent meeting. Back then, she had acted all mysterious about it.
It didn’t look like cigarettes.
The packaging was covered in Korean, with a drawing of a hand.
The more she looked at the promotional image, the stranger it felt.
Curious, Lin Sanyuan couldn’t help taking out her phone to do an image search.
Bang, the door slammed loudly, startling her so much she almost dropped her phone.
She turned her head and saw Qiao Lian standing at the doorway, her face flushed red, her expression almost frightening.
Lin Sanyuan froze. “Why did you slam the door so hard?”
This was an old house, the door wasn’t sturdy. If it broke, who would pay for it?
Qiao Lian was breathing rapidly, clearly flustered, as she walked over quickly. “Why are you touching my things?”
The question made Lin Sanyuan feel instantly guilty. She pushed the little box toward her.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to. I just saw it while cleaning. Wasn’t this what Ke Tingyu gave you that day? You even lied to me and said it was snacks.”
Liar.
There was no way something with such a weird design was edible.
Qiao Lian paused at her reaction. “You don’t know what this is?”
“It’s all in Korean. I was just about to look it up.”
Qiao Lian stared at her deeply.
Her eyes were bright in a slightly unsettling way as she repeated, “You really don’t know what this is?”
Lin Sanyuan bristled and tossed the box back at her. “I said I don’t know. Why would I lie to you?”
For some reason, Qiao Lian looked even more upset than she was, her emotions a little chaotic. “When Teacher Tang was with you, she never used this?”
That’s too much. Was Tang Hengzhi the kind of person who only cared about herself?
Lin Sanyuan was completely thrown off. “Wait, what does this have to do with Teacher Tang?”
Qiao Lian suddenly considered another possibility. She blinked. “You really don’t know what this is?”
“Forget it.” Lin Sanyuan was so frustrated she was trembling. She grabbed her phone. “I’ll look it up myself.”
Qiao Lian didn’t stop her. In fact, when Lin Sanyuan opened Taobao to search, she leaned in and looked together with her.
One minute later.
Lin Sanyuan frowned deeply, as if she couldn’t understand the words. She read it over several times, then glanced up at Qiao Lian before quickly looking away again, as if looking at her was somehow too much.
Qiao Lian pressed her lips together, finding her reaction oddly amusing.
She was already an adult, yet her face was thinner than a student’s.
Lin Sanyuan finally asked with difficulty, “So this is… an adult toy?”
Qiao Lian felt a sudden tightness in her chest at such a blunt statement. She slapped her own forehead. “It doesn’t have to sound that scary.”
Lin Sanyuan asked again, “Then why would she give you something like this?”
Because she was embarrassed, the last syllable came out soft and light, trying to sound mature but unable to hide the shyness.
Qiao Lian found her unbearably cute, almost unable to resist reaching out to ruffle her.
She played dumb. “I don’t know.”
In truth, she did know.
That night at the bar, when Lin Sanyuan had called her “husband,” those troublemakers had heard it. Somehow, the story reached Ke Tingyu.
For the past few months, she had been living at Lin Sanyuan’s place, and Lin Sanyuan often picked her up from school. These things couldn’t be hidden.
Ke Tingyu had a nasty personality and often used things like this to tease her at school. Who would have thought Lin Sanyuan would see it that day?
Lin Sanyuan spoke with difficulty. “Are you and her… that kind of relationship?”
After what happened at the bar, she had always thought Ke Tingyu was a bad kid who disliked Qiao Lian.
But that day at school, it didn’t seem entirely like that.
Some of Ke Tingyu’s small gestures toward Qiao Lian seemed oddly clingy.
She couldn’t understand the world of young people.
Anyway, when Lin Sanyuan made friends, she would never give something like this.
Kids these days were terrifyingly curious.
“No,” Qiao Lian denied seriously, her gaze falling on the little box. “I’ve never used anything like this.”
Lin Sanyuan found her reaction strange, frowning. “Then why didn’t you throw it away? You even hid it so carefully. Don’t tell me you were planning to use it someday?”
Qiao Lian’s flushed silence made Lin Sanyuan feel a sense of despair.
“You were actually planning to use it?!” Her voice jumped several pitches, her breathing turning uneven.
If a kid starts going down the wrong path, what is she supposed to do?
Panicking, she paced around the room, then rushed into the kitchen and grabbed a rolling pin, waving it with force.
“You’re still in high school. Don’t let your curiosity run wild or you’ll go down the wrong path. You can’t be curious about everything. That Ke Tingyu is clearly a problem child. Although I’m relieved you haven’t been going to bars with her lately, as your guardian I’m very satisfied.
But you can’t think that just because I’m setting boundaries, you should push back by trying dangerous things with her. The college entrance exam is in two months. Your priority right now is studying hard and preparing for the exam. This is not the time to think about relationships or anything like that.”
Facing Lin Sanyuan’s intense and earnest lecture, Qiao Lian tilted her head and smiled slightly.
“If I behave for the next two months and seriously prepare for the exam, and then get good results, does that mean I can try some dangerous things afterward?”
Lin Sanyuan froze mid-swing with the rolling pin.
Was this child really this easy to teach?
That made her weapon completely useless.
Lin Sanyuan knew that during rebellious teenage years, forcing things would only backfire.
When it came to Qiao Lian’s outlook on life and relationships, she was ultimately just a friend, not a real guardian, so it wasn’t her place to interfere too much.
After the exam, once she went to university, adult relationships would no longer be something she could interfere with anyway.
After thinking it through carefully, she nodded and made a serious promise. “Okay.”
Qiao Lian smiled, lightly spinning the pink box between her fingers. “Alright, Mom.”
That shocking form of address nearly made Lin Sanyuan throw the rolling pin at her head. “What are you calling me?”
She realized Qiao Lian’s skin had gotten thicker.
Qiao Lian curved her lips into a friendly smile. “Was it wrong? You were the one who told me to call you that.”
Lin Sanyuan sensed she was being teased, like a cat that had sniffed out a trap, her nose scrunching. “Have you been looking at weird stuff online?”
Qiao Lian looked completely innocent. “What counts as weird?”
Lin Sanyuan shivered, her gaze lingering on her for a long moment before saying, “Qiao Lian, you’re a good kid, right?”
Qiao Lian didn’t answer. Instead, she glanced sideways at the silently vibrating phone on the bed behind her. “You have a call.”
Lin Sanyuan paused. After getting bombarded with calls earlier from Lin Shengsheng and He Ye, she had gotten annoyed and muted her phone.
She turned over, picked it up from the bed, and looked at the screen. It was her Puka editor.
A QQ voice call.
Her heart skipped a beat.
She had been friends with the editor for three years, and the editor had never once called her first.
A bad feeling immediately rose in her chest.
Holding the phone with both hands, she bent slightly at the waist, instinctively adopting the posture of an overworked employee facing their boss as she answered.
“Hello, Editor.”
“Yeye, did you forget something?” The editor’s voice sounded young. She didn’t bother with pleasantries and went straight to the point.
“Huh?”
The editor took a deep breath. “The second volume of ‘The Imperial Preceptor’ comic is about to be published. Yeye, do you not want your payment or what? If the character design isn’t done, it’s going to delay the release.”
The first volume of “The Imperial Preceptor” had already been published for some time and performed fairly well, earning Lin Sanyuan a decent sum.
Back when the platform was struggling, this was one of her few works that had some traction among many that were otherwise lukewarm.
Unlike her other works, “The Imperial Preceptor” was her only long-form girls’ love comic, telling the story between a female imperial preceptor and a fake emperor.
It also had a novel version, updated simultaneously on a fiction platform.
Perhaps because she herself was naturally inclined that way, her storytelling in heterosexual romance was noticeably weak, whether in writing novels or drawing comics, she couldn’t quite achieve the emotional resonance readers wanted, so those works remained mediocre.
But with “The Imperial Preceptor,” which involved a girls’ love theme, she found it much easier to write. Combined with strong character settings and Tang Hengzhi’s involvement, it was starting to gain real popularity.
The main character design for the first volume had been drawn by Tang Hengzhi herself, and once released online as promotional art, it immediately caught attention.
The second volume’s main character art wasn’t for the imperial preceptor, but for the other female lead, Li Fujin.
Lin Sanyuan lowered her head. “Editor, didn’t I already submit several versions of Li Fujin’s design?”
None of them had been approved.
“Are you joking, Yeye? Didn’t the group already set the rule? Promotional character art has to be high quality. It’s not the same as comic art that focuses on storytelling. Only the platform’s lead artist can handle it, and your assigned lead artist is Teacher Qiufeng.
Everyone’s style is different. The first volume’s imperial preceptor design was also done by Teacher Qiufeng. No matter how many versions you submit for Li Fujin, the stylistic difference is too big. The publisher won’t accept it.”
“In the end, you’re just an amateur when it comes to drawing. You don’t seriously think you can match Teacher Qiufeng’s level, do you?”
The editor had already put it quite tactfully.
In truth, she didn’t need the reminder. When it came to talent, Lin Sanyuan knew there was a world of difference between her and Tang Hengzhi.
It wasn’t something she could compete with. Even if she studied professionally for another ten years, she might not reach even a fraction of Tang Hengzhi’s level.
She was a born artist, possessing artistic instinct and inspiration that most people could never match.
Lin Sanyuan had actually been avoiding drawing this kind of high-detail promotional art.
This kind of work demanded extremely fine control over details and brushwork, and her right hand had been injured before. She simply couldn’t produce something that refined and intricate.
