Chapter 63 Offline If You Were Me

Wen Han finally understood where that sense of familiarity came from. Generally speaking, criminals would have their names blurred or changed, but who would have thought that the protagonist of the crime of passion had moved into the apartment above theirs and had been living with them for so long!

What a coincidence that the bug in the space caused them to be brought here. Wen Han remembered that this case was so famous because of the unexpected incident that happened later, but he was in a hurry when he watched it and couldn't remember the specifics of what happened.

Jingyu noticed his anxiety and comforted him, "Maybe the police came to ask about the situation, and the house is too messy, so they won't let you go back."

"It can't be that simple." Wen Han's right eyelid kept twitching; this kind of mystical phenomenon always seemed to apply to him.

Before she even reached the bottom of the building, Wen Han spotted a familiar figure.

"Wen Ruo, what are you doing standing at the bottom of the building?" Wen Han asked curiously. "Didn't Dad also tell you not to come home?"

"Why are you back?" Wen Ruo was shocked to see him. "Quick, let's go!"

There were no police cars parked in the residential area, so they weren't police. Wen Han frowned and asked, "What exactly happened?"

Wen Han had a sudden realization. He knew it! How could five thousand yuan support three high school students? Could Wen Qingke have secretly accumulated a huge debt?!

A dull thud came from the stairwell. Wen Han saw a tall man with a long scar running across his brow bone, giving him a menacing look. Anyone who didn't know better would think he had several lives on his hands.

"Jingyu, run!" Wen Han grabbed Jingyu and ran away, only to bump into Wen Ruan who was returning, causing them to fall over.

Wen Ruan bumped her spine: "Wen Han, why are you running?"

Wen Han bumped her bottom and was in so much pain that she couldn't stand up.

As the other person approached step by step, Wen Han noticed that his hair was somewhat gray, making him look like he was in his fifties or sixties.

"You must be Wen Han?"

Why ask him instead of Wen Ruo and Wen Ruan? Wen Han remained silent.

The man took out a crumpled envelope, the handwriting on it rough and uneven as if it had been stained with many tears. He then took out several hundred yuan from his pocket and handed it to Wen Han.

Wen Han: "?" He thought they were here to collect a debt, so why are they giving him money?

Wen Han shook her head; something was definitely fishy.

"Take this, my daughter asked me to give it to you."

The few hundred yuan note was crumpled and looked quite old. Wen Han asked curiously, "Your daughter?"

"It's the woman with the child upstairs from you."

Wen Han froze on the spot.

Crimes of passion are not uncommon; news of murders caused by relationship conflicts is commonplace. However, the significant impact of this particular case has nothing to do with the intensity of the relationship itself, but rather because it is linked to another case.

The case in the drama was originally reported as follows: when the woman was desperate, she sought help from her neighbor, but was ruthlessly turned away. So she went to the man to ask for child support, but the two got into an argument, and the woman accidentally killed him. In despair, she threw herself into the river.

When the woman's father found out, he shifted some of the blame onto the neighbor, believing that if the neighbor had offered some help, the tragedy wouldn't have happened. So, when the neighbor returned home from work, he waited in the stairwell with a knife and quickly slit the man's neck.

However, the couple moved upstairs from the Wen family, and the heartless neighbor naturally became Wen Han.

"Thank you for introducing her to the job," the woman's father said. "She knows it was your idea, and she really wants to thank you, but she's too shy to say it."

Wen Han seemed to be still in a daze, standing motionless in place.

The child was taken away by his maternal grandfather. When Wen Han went upstairs in a daze, Wen Qingke was arguing with Aunt Wang. When she saw Wen Han return, she immediately closed the door guiltily.

"Hanhan, why are you back?" Wen Qingke asked in surprise. "Didn't I tell you not to come back?"

"What's the deal with that man?"

“It was a misunderstanding.” Wen Qingke sighed. “He heard it from somewhere and thought you were the one who harmed that girl, so he wanted to settle accounts with you. Luckily, I left a letter, and after he saw it, he realized it was a misunderstanding.”

Wen Han broke out in a cold sweat. If she had truly been heartless and hadn't helped her, and if it weren't for that letter, she would probably be the one dead. Now that things had come to this, Wen Han simply couldn't believe it was some kind of accidental bug in the spatial dimension.

*

"I've already asked the homeroom teacher for leave." Jingyu brought him a cup of hot milk. "Take a good rest tomorrow."

Wen Han's mind was in turmoil. If the woman in the drama went to the scumbag for child support because she was desperate, she had already found a job! Why did she still die in the end?

If these changes don't alter the outcome at all, then all his efforts are completely pointless!

“Host,” the system suddenly spoke up, “I asked the teacher, and he said this was probably not an accident, but most likely intentional on the part of the space.”

"Why?" Wen Han asked, puzzled. "When we first met, you said you were here to change my fate. Isn't this contradictory? You want me to change my ending, but you're also trying to get rid of me by doing this."

"The space wants to change your destiny, but only if you listen to it and follow the script it gives you." The system showed him its page, "Look, this is the space mall."

Invisibility potion, rewind pill, smart candy, precognitive mirror... like Doraemon's pocket, it has all sorts of gadgets.

"In theory, you can use all these items as long as you have enough points. However, this page turned gray the day after I met you, host."

"Why?"

"Do you remember when I first advised you to get along well with the protagonist?" The system sighed. "The original script the space gave you was that the villainous cannon fodder would repent and become a good person after learning the ending. As long as you completed the small tasks assigned to you by the space, you could get reward points to exchange for items. But your attitude of refusing was very firm, so the space mall went gray."

The task list was simple; it was nothing more than no longer targeting the protagonist, but providing assistance at certain key points. Wen Han even saw Jing Yu's name.

"I didn't make a move against you originally because I thought you weren't capable of posing a threat to the main character. I didn't expect you to actually cause the main character a lot of trouble, so I decided to get rid of you."

"Because I didn't follow the script they gave me, they want to get rid of me?"

“Hmm.” The system muttered, “My teacher was originally a mission system, and the host it was responsible for was the same. The space would initially set traps under the guise of missions, deliberately hindering the host’s actions, and even changing the plot to bring the main storyline forward.”

"Then what should I do?" Wen Han felt utterly hopeless. "This time it can drag me into a case, and next time it might just cause me to get into a car accident. What's the use of being careful then?"

"It's alright," the system said, trying to sound more active. "Space can't attack you directly; it needs a medium. While placing the smaller systems in various worlds, it also opened communication channels with those worlds. As long as I log off, it can't do anything."

"I'm logging off." Wen Han asked, "Will you come back?"

"It might take a while," the system reassured us. "The teacher said I can't reveal too much... but we'll definitely meet again."

"How long will it take?" Wen Han suddenly regretted that she should have treated it better usually.

"It might be short, it might be long." Or it might never come back. The system used its accumulated points to exchange for a spoiler list, which was not supposed to be revealed to the host, but since it was about to disconnect, violating the rules didn't matter for now.

——

A light drizzle began to fall. Wen Han, carrying a bouquet of flowers, and Jing Yu had gotten up early and gone to the outskirts of the city. This was a public cemetery, and the woman's father didn't have much savings; he couldn't afford to buy a burial plot.

"You idiot." Wen Han put the flowers on the ground and muttered, "What use is his bank card to you? The stolen goods will eventually have to be handed over. It's not worth it for someone like him."

After the system gave him that list last night, Wen Han called it again but there was no response.

The list above contains the names and addresses of the remaining five children. Wen Han usually finds the system's constant chatter annoying, but without it, he feels incredibly lonely and isolated. He's gotten used to chatting with the system whenever he has free time.

Is what I'm doing really meaningful? Wen Han stared blankly at the tombstone. Besides making me more miserable, what has this brought me?

Jingyu silently handed him the handkerchief. Seeing that he was motionless, she could only gently wipe away his tears.

"Wen Han," Jing Yu said, "if you're really too tired, then change schools."

"Jingyu, do you still have nightmares now?" Wen Han suddenly asked him.

"Um."

"Didn't you ever think about giving up?"

"No," Jing Yu said softly, "never."

"I don't have any either." Wen Han came back to his senses, and suddenly he had a lot to say.

“I recognize this place,” Wen Han said. “This is plot number 17, and Wen Ruan’s parents live at plot number 8. Since we’re already here, let’s go take a look.”

I thought you would hate them.

“No.” Wen Han’s gaze was calm. “Even if I hated them back then, it doesn’t matter now. They are not the ones I should hate.”

“My dad’s abilities were limited, and he didn’t earn much money. My mom earned most of the family’s money. She was an engineer, so she often worked overtime,” Wen Han recalled, standing in front of Wen Ruan’s parents’ graves. “When I was in second grade, my mom came home from work one day looking terrible. She had a fever. She thought she had caught a chill from working late, so she took some fever reducer and went to sleep. The next day, her fever subsided, and my dad tried to persuade her to stay home and rest for a day, but her boss wouldn’t allow it and kept urging her to go to the company to finish the project.”

Tears welled up in Wen Han's eyes, and she sniffed, "I said at the time that I could just quit my job, but my mother said she would switch jobs as soon as she got her salary this month. As a result, she had heart pain again when she got home that night, and she was rushed to the hospital, where she found out that it was fulminant myocarditis."

The rain intensified. Jing Yu tilted the umbrella further, raindrops hitting his side. Wen Han rested her head on his shoulder, not wanting him to see her tears: "Back then, my father's boss was also urging him to go on a business trip, but he had to handle my mother's funeral. In the end, the business trip fell to someone else. The road to the place he was going was prone to landslides, and it happened to be nighttime, so the accident happened... That person was Wen Ruan's father."

“When Dad brought Wenruan’s mother and the others home, Wenruo and I were very angry. Why did he bring strangers home? So we secretly played tricks on them. Later, Dad explained to us that if Wenruan’s father hadn’t gone on a business trip for him, he would have been the one who died.”

“During that time, we actually got along quite well because Wen Ruan and his mother had very good tempers, except for that Wen Hao who was very annoying. The company originally gave Wen Ruan’s family a compensation fee, but his grandparents took it all for various reasons.”

What happened next?

“His family has a genetic disease.” Wen Han paused for a moment before saying, “It’s a kidney problem. Wen Ruan was lucky that she didn’t inherit it, but her father passed it on to Wen Hao. Wen Hao developed the disease six months after he started living with us.”

“The treatment cost a lot of money, but the family still had savings at the time, so I didn’t know the money was spent. Since a matching kidney could not be found, Wenruan’s mother had to donate one of her kidneys to Wenhao, and as a result, she developed chronic renal failure. Because the family spent a lot of money on Wenhao’s treatment, she just endured her discomfort. By the time she could no longer bear it and went to the hospital for a checkup, she already had uremia.”

“My dad kept it from me because he was afraid I would make a scene. One day I came home early from school and ran into the seller’s real estate agent. That’s when I found out that we had run out of money and had to sell the house.”

“I strongly disagreed and made a huge scene. My dad even lied to me, saying that we were going to move to a bigger house. I said I didn’t want a bigger house, I just wanted this house. Later, when he realized he couldn’t hide it anymore, he forcibly dragged me away.”

“She’s pitiful too.” Wen Han gritted her teeth, letting the tears stream down her face. “But I have no choice. I absolutely cannot endure a life of poverty. Besides, Wen Ruan’s grandparents are still clinging to that compensation money. Why should they sell my house? Just because they can’t get the money from there, they’re going to take my things directly?”

"If you were me."

With her vision blurry, Wen Han looked up and asked, "Jing Yu, if you were me, what would you do?"

Jingyu touched his face, but even after wiping away his tears, they kept flowing out.

Amidst the pattering rain, Wen Han only heard a faint, indistinct sigh.

-----------------------

Author's Note: While surfing the internet lately, I discovered that Green River (a Chinese online literature platform) has evolved to the point where high school students shouldn't even think about defining their relationship, let alone kissing. The villainous young couple I initially envisioned was definitely not a pure and innocent couple at all! [Clown]

For now, all I can do is flirt a little and remain innocent until the end of high school.