Chapter 109 - Deja Vu

<<Back to the present time>>

Li Chunhua heaved a sigh when she remembered the past. She still remembered their promise as if it had happened yesterday, but Li Caiyi must have completely forgotten about it. 

Of course, she would. After all, no one would like to stay with a sickly person like her. Once Li Caiyi got to know the taste of freedom, she would fly far, far away, leaving Li Chunhua behind in the tall tower. 

She felt betrayed and angry whenever her sister brought up the matter of leaving; she kept doing things that made Li Caiyi even more disgusted with her. If she came to know what Li Chunhua planned with Meng Renshu, would she even look at her again? 

Li Chunhua smiled bitterly. She had a hunch but dared not to believe it. 

Even if it was a lie, Li Chunhua was happy when Li Caiyi said she would take her too when she was leaving. However, Li Caiyi easily forgot about her whenever her friends or Dai Shenqiang were nearby, so how could Li Chunhua believe that? Her sister had already betrayed their promise once, so it wouldn't be weird if she broke her other promise, too.

Li Chunhua had no choice but to fight for her own happiness. She knew well that Li Caiyi would hate her for this, but she didn't mind. The hope Li Caiyi had shown her when they were just little kids, she wanted to protect it at all costs.

To do that, she had to investigate the sly guy whom Li Caiyi had a crush on. Li Chunhua had to make him completely give up on her sister so she could earn her rightful place again. 

Li Chunhua scouted around the area but stopped when she accidentally saw a few big men smoking in the dark alley. They seemed to spell trouble, so she didn't want to go anywhere near them. 

Li Chunhua turned away and was about to leave when someone shouted behind her.

"Hey! You were the little girl from that time! Stop there!"

Uh-oh. Why did this scene feel so familiar? Li Chunhua recalled this also happened to her before, so instead of stopping, she hastened her steps. It would be best to pretend not to hear anything and just walk away.

Li Chunhua planned to take the shortest route to return to the school. When she took a turn, she crashed onto a wall that suddenly appeared in front of her. 

No, it was not a wall; it was flesh. Li Chunhua opened her eyes to see an extremely scary-looking gangster standing in her way. The man's height was at least 2 meters, so Li Chunhua, whose height was only around 160 cm, looked like a dwarf in front of him. 

The man stared at her in an uncomfortably sticky gaze that made people uncomfortable. Li Chunhua shivered and subconsciously looked away. "I'm sorry. Excuse me." 

She wanted to go around the man, but the man blocked her way again. Li Chunhua had a bad feeling about this, but she didn't want to look like she was afraid of him, so she raised her head while glaring at him vigilantly. "What do you want? I already said sorry, didn't I?"

The man casually threw the cigarette trapped between his fingers to the ground and smirked playfully. "Now, don't be so hasty. Why don't we talk some more?" He said in a hoarse and dangerously low voice.

"I'm busy. Please get out of my way." Li Chunhua retorted.

The man chuckled. "I gotta say you have some guts talking like that to me after what you have done. Thanks to you, my subordinate was captured. What are you going to do about that?"

Li Chunhua's guts faltered when she felt the murderous aura from the man's sinister smile. She felt like this man could crush her skull with only his grip strength based on how big his hand was. The thought made her shiver in fear. 

"W-what are you going to do?" Li Chunhua took a step back while secretly slipping her hand to her pocket, intending to call Meng Renshu. In case of something emergency happened, and she needed to contact help as soon as possible, she put Meng Renshu's number as her number 1 emergency call. 

However, the man's sharp eyes caught her movement, so he slapped her hand away from her pocket, causing the phone in her hand to fly out and fall to the ground.

Li Chunhua quickly bent down to take it, but the man caught her wrist and held her in place. He smiled in amusement, looking at her pale face. "It's been a while since we last met. How about we continue our conversation from where we left off?"

***

"Ouch!" Li Caiyi exclaimed when her hand accidentally scratched the piece of paper she was holding. 

"What's wrong? Oh, your finger is bleeding!" Zhou Ya, who noticed the red liquid on Li Caiyi's finger, quickly pulled out a band-aid from her pencil case. "Use this."

"Thanks."

"Be careful next time. Paper cuts can be painful sometimes. What's that paper, anyway?" Feng Nian asked. 

"Ah, it's just something Shao Jingfei gave me," Li Caiyi said as she wrapped the band-aid around her finger.

"Is it related to the book you want to make? Come to think of it, how is your talk going with Shao Jingfei? Is Shao Jingfei going to recommend you to his family's company?" Chen Ruolan also chimed in with a curious expression. 

"Nothing is certain yet. We are still in the middle of discussing it, and I still need time to prepare my novel, anyway."

"I'm so jealous of you. You have a talent in you. I don't even have one thing I'm especially good at."

"But you had one. A movie maniac," Feng Nian said playfully.

"That's my hobby, not my talent," Chen Ruolan pouted. "It would be good if I could work in the entertainment industry someday. I want to be a part of the film crew, so I can look at the process of film-making up close."

The four of them chatted while walking to the front gate as usual, but Li Caiyi was unsettled for some reason. She kept having this nagging feeling that she shouldn't leave just yet. Even she couldn't fathom why she would feel like that. 

'Did I leave something behind in the classroom?' Li Caiyi thought. 

If there was anything she learned from her previous life, it was that she should never degrade her own opinion again. So instead of continuing walking, she told her friends to leave first and went back to the school building. The more she walked, the more agitated she became. Li Caiyi had a bad feeling.

The last time she felt like this was when Li Chunhua was in trouble. At that time, she also looked around for her without resting, fearing that something might happen to her. 

'Wait. Don't tell me something happened to Xiaohua?'

Li Caiyi aborted her plan to check on her class and checked on 2-A class in a hurry instead.. She didn't see her sister anywhere when she arrived, but she spotted Dai Zhiqiang, who seemed like he was about to leave the classroom.