The Bottom of the Class and the Top of the Game
Xia walked through the gilded gates of Xinghua High with a face carved from ice. Her uniform was spotless, hair tied back, gaze dead ahead. But the moment her feet touched the tile floor of the entrance hall, the air turned sharp.
"Did you hear? The Zhou family threw her out."
"She wasn't even their real daughter."
"She's at the bottom of the class. Probably here on pity."
The voices weren't whispers—they were knives. Deliberately loud, deliberately cruel.
She didn't flinch.
In the middle of the quad, Wei Zi, her ex-fiancé by arrangement, stood surrounded by his usual entourage. Regal, perfectly dressed, with a face carved in icy arrogance. One of the girls—his old friend, clingy and curious—slinked up beside him and asked with a titter:
"Zi-ge, is it true? That stray girl got kicked out?"
Wei Zi's reply was mechanical, bored. "Don't care. Don't know her."
That hurt more than any rumor. But Xia didn't even blink. If betrayal burned, she'd already turned to ash.
At lunch, the crowd buzzed in the canteen. She was heading toward a table alone when Yu Fei stepped in her path. Hair bouncing, face full of sugar-coated poison.
Yu Fei lowered her voice just enough to feel dangerous. "You still here? Shouldn't you be begging for a job somewhere?"
Xia paused, glanced at her lazily. "Still trying to impress Zhou Ren? Desperate."
Yu Fei's lips curled. "You're the bottom of the grade list. I'm second-topper. Want to prove you're not as dumb as your record says?"
Xia dropped her tray and tilted her head. "Science and math. Next exam. If I win, you disappear from my face."
Gasps. Whispers. Shock.
Yu Fei laughed like she didn't care. But her hand clenched around her fork.
"Done," she said. "Don't cry later."
That afternoon, Xia returned to her classroom and sat down. Her seatmate, Li Won, was growling at his tablet.
"Ugh! I can't pass this stage. Who makes a game this hard?!"
Xia peeked over. The game was ChronoDoom 9. The world's hardest, highest-grossing RPG. Made secretly by her company.
"You're under-leveled. Switch to a twin-blade build and use venom buffs in wave two."
He blinked. "What?"
"Also your loop function's glitched. Let me fix it."
She tapped rapidly. A few seconds later, the impossible boss disintegrated into pixelated ashes.
Li Won's jaw dropped. "That… was insane. Who are you?"
Xia just smiled faintly.
Later, when her homework mysteriously vanished and she sat in silence, Li Won noticed. He quietly passed her his notebook.
"Use mine. Also… you're pretty cool. I was wrong about you."
A small friendship bloomed in that silent moment.
That night, in a high-rise far from the noise of high school, Li Fan leaned on the balcony railing. His phone was to his ear, voice deep and amused.
"So. You actually made a friend?" he asked his nephew.
"Yeah!" Li Won's voice crackled with enthusiasm. "She's nuts smart. Like alien-level. Even beat ChronoDoom 9. She's kind of…"
"A monster in disguise?" Li Fan said, swirling the wine in his glass.
His mind flashed back to the girl from the previous night—leaping onto her balcony like a whisper, cat in her arms, moonlight on her hair.
Li Won laughed. "She's called Xia. Just transferred. People are mean to her though."
Li Fan's eyes narrowed, the corners of his mouth twitching upward.
So it was her.
"The girl with eyes like silence," he murmured.
His gaze drifted to the skyline, to the apartment across from his, still faintly lit.
"She's... something else."