Ex-Girlfriend – Chapter 5

Breaking the Cage

Escape 05

Legal Hunting

Xin Lan had never actually understood what kind of entity their headquarters truly was. Back when she was a newcomer, she had been curious; later, she had wanted to know more about its core secrets.

            

But there were no results; no one knew.

No one knew why they had come here, or why they had been assigned to their respective departments. Missions were simply delivered directly into their Systems.

If one asked a System how they had been made, they would merely reply that they were simply made that way.

            

With Systems coming in all kinds of personalities and appearances, and after traversing too many worlds, Xin Lan had eventually given up pursuing the matter.

It was meaningless.

Completing a mission yielded rewards, and one could choose the form these rewards would take.

            

Some were physical enhancements, memory boosts, or wealth; some were a set period of vacation; others were a return to reality.

One of Xin Lan’s colleagues continuously took on missions solely to spend a little more time with their family in reality.

It was not only human souls that ended up here; among Xin Lan’s colleagues, there were also mountain spirits, demons¹, vampires, and other entities, each with their own eccentricities.

            

Xin Lan had only used her rewards once—to return to her original interstellar world to see how things had turned out for the Empire.

That war had severely depleted the Empire’s strength, but at the cost of her life, she had also heavily damaged the enemy’s flagship. The Empire had ferreted out the traitors and was currently recovering its national power. Her name, Xin Lan, had been inscribed into the imperial annals. As such, there seemed to be no further reason for her to remain.

She had used the rewards earned from subsequent worlds to enhance her own abilities, though she was subject to certain restrictions once she entered a mission world.

            

As for the real-world Xin Lan, her physical fitness was already comparable to that of a superhuman. When she entered her first world, her power was suppressed; she used thirty percent of her strength to beat up the scumbag, and even then he was only severely injured.

Had she been at thirty percent of her original, unsuppressed strength, that scumbag would have been pounded deep into the wall, and no one would have been able to scrape him out.

Zero Nine: “Host is amazing! But where are you going?”

            

Xin Lan: “During the legal hunting period, to hunt, of course.”

Xin Lan’s figure dissolved into the night, vanishing at the end of the path.

Zero Nine smacked her lips, filled with endless lamentation.

            

She thought of her previous two hosts, who were entirely different from this one. As expected of someone from another department, her style was incredibly direct.

Xin Lan: “What are you clicking your tongue for?”

Having someone sighing and clicking their tongue inside her head in the dead of night was a rather thrilling experience.

            

Zero Nine: “I was just thinking about my previous hosts.”

Xin Lan had already walked to the teaching building. It was pitch black, with no lights turned on.

The campus at night held a peculiar sort of terror. The wide-open doors of the teaching building resembled a gaping mouth, filled with a spine-chilling aura.

            

Xin Lan climbed the stairs while pressing close to the wall. Hearing Zero Nine’s comment, she prompted her to elaborate.

Zero Nine: “My first host was a delicate, soft fox spirit². That girl could seduce anyone she targeted with perfect accuracy, slapping faces in a matter of minutes. She could latch onto a better man at any moment to have him take revenge on her behalf. But in the end, she overplayed her hand.”

Xin Lan: “How so?”

            

Xin Lan was slightly intrigued. Transmigrators were not omnipotent within these worlds and faced many restrictions. Did “overplaying her hand” mean she had accidentally destroyed a world?

That was a major work error, and one would be heavily penalized upon return. Not to mention having their pay docked and being forced to work for free, they would also undergo mandatory psychological counseling and other supervisory measures.

Xin Lan had always remembered who she was, and she had never done anything of the sort. She had no interest in destroying worlds, but a colleague of hers had, which was how she knew about the disciplinary regulations.

            

Zero Nine: “Well, she was a fox spirit, you know. Her nature was rather wild and unrestrained—hooking one man and dumping another. She spent all her rewards on enhancing her peerless beauty. In one mission world, she was tied up by a few natives. The restraint they used could lock her soul, and even I couldn’t save her. She had no choice but to remain there.”

Zero Nine spoke with some melancholy. In truth, she did not quite understand why her host had insisted on courting death, acting as though she could not survive without a man. This had led to a cognitive bias for the System; when she saw her second host refusing to seduce men, she had found it very strange, until her second host eventually corrected her outlook.

Zero Nine: “My second host was a human. In human terms, she had severe misandry. She relied entirely on her own tough-as-nails attitude to slap faces, excelled at scheming and plotting, and was incredibly ruthless.”

            

Xin Lan: “Then how did you switch to me?”

Zero Nine: “She fell in love and voluntarily stayed in that world. I became a hostless System, and since you had just transferred over, I took over.”

Yet on her very first day, she had suffered a crushing defeat, setting a record for the fastest failure in her System life and leaving her shivering in terror of her host.

            

Xin Lan: “In love? With a woman?”

Zero Nine: “No, a man. She really hated men, but for some reason, she didn’t hate that one. She said it wasn’t easy to meet someone who caught her eye, and maybe she would never get another chance, so she said goodbye to me.”

She, too, was a broad-minded and decisive person.

            

Xin Lan sighed inwardly after hearing this; she had already walked up to the third floor.

Zero Nine: “Host, what are you doing here? There’s no one around.”

Xin Lan gestured for her to be quiet and climbed in through a window.

            

On this second day, everyone was still quite timid; not a single person had come to the teaching building.

The reason Xin Lan had come was to see what might be hidden in the classrooms.

Classes were held during the day and there were too many people around, making it impossible to search through things at will.

            

Although there might not be any clues, she was idle anyway, so she might as well treat this as scouting the terrain before her hunt.

Xin Lan did not turn on the lights. Using the moonlight from outside, she surveyed the classroom’s layout.

An ordinary classroom, ceiling lights, fans, a blackboard, a whiteboard, and the slogans above the classroom…

            

Xin Lan’s gaze paused on the slogans. During the day, they should have read ‘Heaven rewards diligence³’ and ‘strive constantly for self-improvement⁴’. Now, however, the other side was ‘strive constantly for self-improvement’, with one character altered—or rather, it was not so much an alteration as a conversion from simplified to traditional script.

No one remained in the classrooms after school hours. This was definitely not the work of any of the 399 students here; it could only be the so-called ‘rules’ or perhaps an NPC.

Zero Nine: “Host, I-I-I’m a little scared.”

            

Within the System space, Zero Nine clutched her little yellow chicken pillow tightly. Though she was a materialist, the sudden alteration of a single character in an empty classroom’s slogan in the dead of night was bizarre no matter how one looked at it.

Xin Lan remained perfectly calm. She went so far as to drag a desk and chair over, stepped onto them to reach the character, and slowly peeled back one of its bottom corners.

Something dropped into her palm. Xin Lan caught it, pressed the character back into place, and returned the desk and chair to their original positions. After wiping away her footprints, she sat down and examined the object in her hand by the moonlight.

            

It was a stiff paper card with a texture very similar to children’s game cards.

On it was printed a line of text:

[Clue Card]: Silently recite to use during legal hunting time to obtain one matching clue.

            

Xin Lan used it immediately. The card vanished from her hand, replaced by a clue fragment.

Xin Lan pulled out her other two fragments. As expected, the patterns on this new one aligned with her original pieces.

She tried piecing them together but could make nothing out.

            

It resembled a damaged map, but the paper was highly unusual—it was incredibly soft, yet impossible to tear.

Xin Lan slipped the three clue fragments into her pocket and retraced her steps.

She had originally just wanted to see if anything would happen tonight, ideally to hunt down some stray prey, but everyone was huddled together very cautiously. Still, at least she had an unexpected pleasant surprise.

            

There was definitely more than just this one surprise hidden in this school; if not for her habitual observation, she probably would have missed it.

She just did not know whether this was the mercy of the ‘rules’ or a deeper trap.

Xin Lan’s original plan had been to look over all of these places, but she had not expected this unexpected discovery.

            

She did not know if other classrooms contained similar items. Her intuition told her they did, but years of experience warned her against going.

Xin Lan was not a greedy person; she felt that if she collected several of these things all at once tonight, she might die suddenly tomorrow.

The character ‘qiang’ from which she had retrieved the clue had already reverted to its original form.

            

Seeing this, she decided not to wait around until midnight.

The hunting end time was twelve o’clock. Xin Lan felt that some change would occur after twelve, but she had already obtained a clue, and the place hiding it had reverted to its original state.

To be safe, Xin Lan decided to leave.

            

Xin Lan jumped down from the corridor to the ground once again, always giving Zero Nine the terrifying feeling that her host was jumping off the building.

Xin Lan returned to the dormitory and knocked on the door.

Xiao Chun opened the door. The moment she saw Xin Lan, it was as if she had laid eyes on a savior, and she was almost weeping with joy.

            

Xin Lan picked up her washbasin and brought it inside, where she spotted the girl sitting on a chair, wiping blood from her head.

No wonder Xiao Chun had made that face; she was probably afraid this person would try to snatch her things again.

That girl glanced at Xin Lan, but didn’t dare show any resentful look anymore. With lowered eyes and a submissive manner, she minded her own business.

            

Xin Lan put her things away one by one, picked up her basin, took her laundry detergent, and prepared to go wash her clothes.

Xiao Chun, hands trembling, held her basin and followed closely behind Xin Lan. Xin Lan did not mind her, but as she closed the door, she said something to her.

“Are you that scared?”

            

Xiao Chun nodded, clutching the basin in her hands tightly.

“She’s already injured. You don’t need to be so afraid of her.”

“I’m afraid she’ll go crazy. She doesn’t have any clues left on her, so I’m afraid she’ll want to snatch mine,” Xiao Chun said honestly.

            

“Aren’t you afraid that I’ll want to snatch yours?”

“I…”

Xiao Chun hesitated for a moment, yet she still did not pull away from Xin Lan.

            

“Giving it to anyone is fine, just not to her. If you want it, I can give it to you, as long as you don’t beat me.”

Xiao Chun said after thinking for a bit, but her last sentence was very quiet.

Zero Nine: “Pfft.”

            

Did her host really look that brutal?

“Keep it yourself for now.”

Xin Lan concealed the dark look in her eyes and walked to the water room.

            

Deal with the vicious dogs in the crowd first, and there would be no need to worry about the remaining sheep being disobedient.

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The author has something to say:

Zero Nine’s shifts when bickering on the System network ↓

            

Initial: “There are plenty of men crazy for my host! Your hosts are just weaklings!”

Later: “What’s so great about seducing men? My host has high-class misandry; she’s nothing like your hosts!”

Now: “What’s there to be proud of when men go crazy for her? My host can beat up ten of those men at once. Hmph!”

            

Other Systems: “???”

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