Chapter 15: The One-Sided Girl

Chapter 15: The One-Sided Girl

The night was already deep.

Chen Shiyu, for once, didn’t feel the slightest bit sleepy. Instead, she rolled restlessly back and forth on her bed, unable to calm her nerves no matter how long she lay there.

From outside came the chorus of croaking frogs and chirping insects, their noisy racket only adding fuel to her irritation.

“It’s been almost a week now...”

And the past week had been nothing but bad news.

Even now, Chen Shiyu still couldn’t accept it. She still couldn’t get used to being a girl. A girl’s personality, a girl’s body, a girl’s social life—everything about it felt unnatural to her. Every night before bed, she was consumed by a suffocating anxiety, her head filled with strange, frightening thoughts.

What if her parents discovered that their daughter’s body was being occupied by a fox spirit?

Would they throw her out? Call the police? Hire monks or priests to exorcise her? Or—worse yet—burn her at the stake?

Every time her imagination wandered to those possibilities, she curled up and trembled in fear.

It wasn’t like she’d done anything wrong. The girl had already been on the verge of death. She herself didn’t even understand why she had ended up inside this body...

During the recent May Day holidays, Chen Shiyu had spent most of her time shut in at home, rarely stepping outside. Perhaps it was her lack of yang energy, but she often felt sluggish and sleepy, dozing off the moment her head touched the pillow, no matter how much she’d been overthinking.

But today was different. After dealing with so many people in one day, there wasn’t a hint of drowsiness left in her. Lying awake at midnight, her mind kept circling back to the worst possible endings, the anxiety clutching her chest until her whole body felt cold.

Honestly, being a fox has been easier.

Back then, her only concern had been finding a warm meal. She spent her days stealing chickens just to get by, without the luxury of worrying about anything else.

“Guess I just ate too much...”

With a sigh, Chen Shiyu reached for the phone beside her.

She had left the front camera recording, hoping to catch whether she turned into a fox in her sleep—and maybe find proof of where that suspicious red fur was coming from. But after an entire hour of lying there, she hadn’t felt even a shred of sleepiness.

It was already one in the morning...

Unable to sleep, she wandered to the window and, out of habit, glanced toward the third floor of the building opposite. As expected, the room was pitch dark. 

Shen Yan must have gone to bed already.

She pushed the window open and leaned half her body out.

The street below was silent and empty under the night sky. No cars, no pedestrians. Only swarms of insects clinging to the street lamps, clustering so thickly they looked like dark clouds drifting in the light. Every shop along the road had its shutters pulled down, the town completely asleep.

“I could use a drink right now...”

But if her mother caught her, she’d definitely get a beating.

And besides, it was already so late. The nearby convenience stores were all closed. The only 24-hour one was in the town center—way too far to walk.

Chen Shiyu leaned against the windowsill, then pulled out her phone and logged into her old Steam account from her previous life.

“Seriously? It wants phone verification...”

Most of her old accounts required some sort of security verification now, which meant she couldn’t fully log in. But the fact that her passwords still worked at least confirmed one thing: this was the same world as before.

Except now, she was a fox spirit.

Bored out of her mind, unable to sleep and with nothing better to do, she scrolled aimlessly through her phone until her finger stopped at Shen Yan’s chat window.

“Still awake?” she typed.

“Asleep,” came the instant reply.

Chen Shiyu blinked. Instant? Shen Yan was usually a snail when it came to messaging back.

“If you’re asleep, how are you typing?”

“Sleepwalking.”

A light flicked on in the third-floor room across from her. The curtains parted, and Shen Yan’s figure appeared in the window.

Chen Shiyu raised an arm and gave a small wave. She was just about to type another message when she suddenly realized—she wasn’t wearing any pants.

Her first instinct was to duck behind the wall, but then she hesitated. Even if he saw her legs... would it really be that big of a deal?

Besides, the window only came up to her waist—there was no way Shen Yan could see anything anyway.

“You can’t sleep either?” Finally catching someone she could chat with, Chen Shiyu plopped down on the edge of the bed, phone in hand, one leg crossed over the other as she typed away furiously. “We still have school tomorrow, you know.”

“I just laid down.”

“I’ve been in bed for an hour and still can’t sleep. You just finished gaming, didn’t you?”

“How’d you know?”

“What else would you be doing?”

Ahh, youth. Back in her previous life, she also had to be up at six in the morning for school, yet she could still stay up till three or four in the morning reading novels or scrolling on her phone, and somehow show up the next day barely tired at all.

She peeked toward the opposite building. Shen Yan was leaning forward against his windowsill. When he spotted her head poking out, he even raised his hand in greeting.

Hmm...

She was bored out of her mind anyway—why not test the waters about breaking up?

She was sick and tired of being teased like some little girl by him!

Of course, she could never say something like that face-to-face. But over text? That was a different story.

After some thought, she cautiously typed out: “I think... I might like someone else.”

She hoped Shen Yan would just reply with a neat “Then let’s break up” and be done with it, though at the same time she worried it might come off as too hasty, too blunt—like she was ruining her own character.

“Seriously? Who? Which class? What’s he like? You gonna introduce me sometime? Are you two official yet? What’s his personality like?”

—Why did that sound more like how a father reacts when his daughter starts dating? Or how a big brother reacts when he finds out his little sister’s seeing someone?

With all those questions piling up, Chen Shiyu didn’t even know where to start. After struggling for a moment, she finally typed: “I was joking.”

"You're only in your second year of high school, what's the point of dating?"

What Shen Yan actually wanted to say was: Don’t you dare mess around using my childhood friend’s body!

From his point of view, he was going to need to keep a closer eye on this fox spirit’s social life. After all, most legends painted fox spirits as lustful little creatures who seduced men left and right.

Looking at his reaction in the chat, Chen Shiyu frowned. A bold suspicion flashed across her mind.

In her memories, the two of them were basically in an unspoken relationship—never officially confirmed, but essentially boyfriend and girlfriend.

But... was that really just the original girl’s one-sided wishful thinking?

“Aren’t we... dating?” she typed.

“???”

Oh, come on! Case closed.

No wonder Shen Yan had always been immune to her “seductive advances.” She’d thought he was just a shy virgin, or maybe just too principled to “eat from the tree in his own backyard.” But no—the truth was, he never thought of Chen Shiyu as his girlfriend in the first place!

Thinking back, it all made sense. Shen Yan was way too passive. Most of the “intimate gestures” had always been initiated by the girl herself. To him, it must’ve just felt like a younger sister acting spoiled.

So then why had he been so forward tonight?

Chen Shiyu stared blankly at her phone, replaying every interaction with him in her head.

Was it because he still found her recent changes suspicious, and this was all just testing her?

It couldn’t be that... somehow, he liked her because her soul had changed, right?

Narrowing her eyes, she decisively typed: “Fine then. Let’s just leave each other alone from now on. Don’t contact me again. [crying in the rain.jpg]”

Breakup accomplished! It’s way easier than she expected!

Now she wouldn’t have to worry about this body getting drawn in by Shen Yan anymore.

“You’ve lost it. You’re acting weird again. That doesn’t sound like something you’d say at all.”

Her face froze. The thing she feared most was having her identity questioned, and now she was at a loss.

Too reckless!

She scrambled to cover it up: “Well, you don’t even like me anyway.”

“I never said that.”

Across the street, Shen Yan rubbed his chin thoughtfully. To be honest, he had never thought of his childhood friend in romantic terms. They were too familiar, too close. In his mind, there wasn’t even space for indecent thoughts about her.

As they grew older, their hobbies had diverged, their conversations dwindled, and little conflicts piled up. And since they knew each other too well, even when he noticed her feelings for him—when she’d tried to tempt him into making a mistake—he hadn’t had the heart to outright reject her.

But there was no way he could leave this fox spirit to her own devices. What if she really did go out and cause trouble—throw a wild party or worse?

“I’ve actually liked you all along. Be my girlfriend.”

“No no no! I was just joking!”

Crap!

Chen Shiyu’s face went pale as she reread her own earlier messages. To anyone else, it looked exactly like she’d been playing hard to get—pushing him into a confession.

Damn it all. She’d just helped the original girl complete her confession!

If you liked her, couldn’t you have confessed earlier?! Why did you make me fill in the blanks and walk straight into the trap?!