Chapter 55 Obedience made her an empty shell.

That night, Ye Yuying didn't know how she got back to the Cheng family home.

Like a lost soul stripped of all worldly memories, she mechanically boarded the bus, forgetting all the scenery along the way. She ate and washed like a walking corpse, then locked herself in her room.

Those two gold medals, which represented supreme glory, were originally hanging on the wall, but she took them down and casually threw them in a corner of her desk. They were dull and lifeless, as if they were just two pieces of scrap metal.

Just when she thought she would heal from this overwhelming grief by spending a sleepless night, her phone screen suddenly lit up.

It was a new email. The sender was the name she missed most at that moment, and also dared not think about—Cheng Mingdu.

This is his reply to her "pre-match check-in" email.

Ye Yuying's heart felt as if it were being gripped tightly by a hand, the pain almost making her curl up in agony. Just a week ago, she had eagerly awaited this letter; but now, it felt like a belated, ironic consolation prize.

With trembling fingertips, she opened the email.

[Re: Arrived in Jiangcheng]

[You did very well in the preliminary rounds. Also, I already know you won two gold medals. Congratulations on your victory!]

Brief, calm, and as always. But it's clear that Cheng Mingdu not only received her pre-match email, but also learned of her ultimate victory through other means.

As Ye Yuying looked at those words, the frozen, numb ice field in her heart seemed to crack open with a tiny fissure, letting in a sliver of faint light.

She was like a fish swimming beneath the ice, desperately trying to absorb the sunlight that occasionally peeked through the cracks in the ice. In the brief moment of sunlight, she greedily tried to stay a little longer in order to survive.

She had a strong urge to confide in him.

Her fingers flew across the screen, typing a line of text—a mixture of helplessness and pleading—that appeared clearly in the chat box:

Brother, what should I do if... my only friend betrays me?

However, just as her fingertip was about to touch the "send" button, she suddenly stopped.

He was in his own world, fighting for a grander goal. How could I, with my girlish, pathetic pain, bother him and waste our precious time talking about such trivial matters?

Ye Yuying closed her eyes and deleted the entire line of pleading, filled with vulnerability, word by word.

Then, she typed another line, a polite yet almost cold reply that revealed absolutely no emotion:

Thank you. Good luck in your match too.

send.

After doing all this, she felt as if she had used up all her strength. She threw her phone aside, buried her face deeply in the pillow, as if trying to completely isolate herself from the world.

*

For Ye Yuying, the days that followed were a long, silent torture.

Ji Zi never came to school again. Her sick leave, which started as a short-term sick leave, turned into a long-term sick leave.

This news completely confirmed Ye Yuying's last guess and shattered her last glimmer of hope for that friendship.

She became completely silent, keeping to herself like a lone island.

Ge Jie, on the other hand, began her victorious and cruel revelry.

She and her group of friends used Ye Yuying's stolen letters, filled with her private thoughts, as their biggest pastime during breaks.

After school, they pulled her to a corner of the back playground and deliberately read aloud excerpts from the letter in a loud, rhythmic tone.

"Today, let's appreciate the literary work of our provincial champion," they began with an exaggerated aria, like a theatrical performance. "Everyone should study this carefully and see how our great writer describes her 'individualistic soul'!"

Ge Jie leisurely played with her nails, watching as her henchmen humiliated Ye Yuying in public in an attempt to please her.

A girl cleared her throat and read in a shrill voice:

"[Before me lies a dazed body, and a soul, unable to dissolve itself after being detached from the body, drifting and repenting in this midnight...]"

"Hahahaha!" The girls around immediately burst into ear-piercing laughter.

"Oh my god, what is she writing? A ghost story?"

"She's even confessing? What crime did she commit?"

Ye Yuying stood quietly without saying a word. Her body was ramrod straight, like a tree that would never bend in the cold wind, but her fingernails were digging into her palms so hard they were almost bleeding.

Ge Jie was very satisfied with the result.

The girl reading the letter grew increasingly malicious with her smile:

"Don't rush, everyone, there's more to come! Listen to how our champion defines himself—"

She drawled out each word, emphasizing each syllable:

"【I don't like you, I clearly don't like you, I'm just like a hopeless madman, using you as my anchor—】"

"She's insane! Did you hear that? She herself admits she's insane!"

"Anchor, my foot! Even a love letter is so incoherent!"

Those words were written in her own heart, with her hottest blood, during countless sleepless nights. They were her most intimate dialogue with her own soul, her painful self-examination and struggle.

And at this moment, these most precious and fragile things are being treated as a joke by them so wantonly and contemptuously, exposed to the elements in broad daylight.

Ye Yuying's face gradually turned pale, but her eyes remained lifeless.

She didn't look at them; her gaze was fixed on the distant sky at the end of the playground, as if dying right now would be the best option, her soul going straight to the sky, and everything else becoming irrelevant to her.

Her calmness infuriated Ge Jie. What she wanted to see was Ye Yuying's breakdown, her tears, and her pleas for mercy!

Ge Jie stepped forward, almost pressing the letter to Ye Yuying's face, looking down at her with a venomous gaze, and questioned:

"Ye Yuying, how disgusting are you?"

Ye Yuying remained silent for a long time before she came to her senses, looked at her coldly, and said, "Stop reading."

"Fine, then beg me," Ge Jie said jokingly.

Ye Yuying pursed her lips, strode forward, snatched the letters from their hands, and tore them to shreds, expressing her resistance and anger.

But this time Ge Jie wasn't intimidated at all. She casually said, "Go ahead and take it. I've made a thousand copies."

Then, lowering her voice, she said in a tone only Ye Yuying and she could hear, "Ye Yuying, you better behave yourself. I know who those love letters you wrote to..."

Ye Yuying's body was instantly drained of blood, and she withered into a dried-up corpse.

Ge Jie called her aside to the big banyan tree, completely away from everyone's sight.

"I knew it! There's no need to be so superstitious about liking Lin Zhiyan. Ye Yuying, you like Cheng Mingdu! Your stepbrother! You're just as shameless as your mother!"

"You... talking nonsense!" she tried to retort, but her voice trembled uncontrollably, lacking any strength, like the last struggle of someone on their deathbed.

Seeing her utterly terrified state, Ge Jie finally let out a triumphant laugh, the kind of hearty laughter only a victor can muster.

This was exactly the effect she wanted. She wanted to see Ye Yuying's proud and hardened exterior completely shattered, revealing her most wretched and vulnerable core.

To avenge the loss she suffered back then, she would absolutely not choose such an easy way as beating Ye Yuying up.

She wanted to kill him by destroying his spirit!

"I'm talking nonsense?" Ge Jie's laughter stopped abruptly. She strode forward and stared at Ye Yuying with a vicious look in her eyes. "Then why are you trembling? Your face is as white as a ghost. Are you feeling guilty?"

She reached out and forcefully pushed the already distraught Ye Yuying to the ground.

Ye Yuying staggered and fell unexpectedly onto the hard, muddy ground under the banyan tree.

Her palms and knees were scraped raw by the rough gravel, oozing traces of blood and stinging with pain. But this physical pain was nothing compared to the excruciating agony of her heart being pierced by a thousand arrows.

Despite being the newly crowned provincial champions, they were so easily defeated.

She lay sprawled on the ground, feeling like a lowly worm trampled into the mud.

Ge Jie looked down at her, her eyes filled with the pleasure of revenge and the lust for power to control everything.

She slowly crouched down, pointing her bright red nail polished fingers at Ye Yuying's nose, her tone unusually gentle yet cruel:

"Ye Yuying, I underestimated you before. You're quite tough. But from now on..."

Her voice was even lower, like a cold, venomous snake flicking its tongue against Ye Yuying's ear:

"You are my lapdog."

"You have to do whatever I tell you to do. If I tell you to go east, you can't go west."

“If you don’t listen to me…” Ge Jie chuckled softly, a laugh that sent chills down Ye Yuying’s spine, “…I will scan all of your love letters, one by one, then pack them up and send them to Cheng Mingdu’s email address.”

“Oh, right,” she added, as if remembering something, “there’s public information about him online, as well as official materials about his participation in the ICPC competition. I think finding his contact information should be… a piece of cake, right?”

These words, like a final verdict that determined her future fate, completely destroyed Ye Yuying's last possibility of resistance.

She can disregard her reputation, the ridicule of others, and even physical beatings.

But she couldn't, she absolutely couldn't let Cheng Mingdu see these things. She couldn't let him know that she harbored such despicable and forbidden thoughts.

That was her last and only bottom line.

Now, Ge Jie has firmly grasped this bottom line.

"How was it? My provincial champion," Ge Jie said with satisfaction, looking at Ye Yuying's eyes, which had completely lost their luster due to fear and despair. She straightened up and dusted herself off.

"To show your sincerity, tomorrow morning, finish all my homework and put it on my desk. For the mock exam, fill in the answers and give it to me. You'll have to control your own score; it's best if you fail..."

After saying that, she didn't look at Ye Yuying on the ground again, and with the arrogance of a victor, she turned and strode away.

Ye Yuying was alone for a very long time, unable to move an inch.

News of Cheng Mingdu's team securing a spot in the global finals by winning the ICPC North American qualifiers with an absolute advantage has dominated the internet.

In the publicly released photos, he and his team are full of vigor and radiance, receiving praise from all over the world.

But her life, which had just begun to improve, was pulled back, and more thoroughly, into that quagmire of despair and filth.

She felt as if her soul had truly been detached from her body at that moment, floating in mid-air, coldly and sadly watching the absurd and cruel farce unfold before her.

Looking at the pale-faced body of "Ye Yuying" surrounded in the middle, who was on the verge of death in a second.

How could a teenager think about the word "death"? Is fourteen years old an age when one is not worthy to talk about death? But at this moment, amidst such torment and excruciating pain, she felt that dying immediately would be quite nice.

Once she's dead, no one will hold her accountable.

From that moment on, Ye Yuying's most dangerous and suffocating nightmare of junior high school years began...

*

The glory of being a provincial champion is like a dazzling firework; after shining its brightest light, it quickly cools down and turns into endless ashes.

Ge Jie was not a very skilled animal trainer, but her methods were completely effective.

She firmly put a collar on Ye Yuying, this "beast" that had just begun to show its power.

The next morning, a pile of homework notebooks that didn't belong to her appeared on Ye Yuying's desk. She hadn't slept all night, her eyes were bloodshot, and before the morning reading class began, she silently and mechanically completed the homework assigned by Ge Jie and all her followers.

The first mock exam became her first public execution. Following Ge Jie's instructions, she deliberately filled in most of the multiple-choice questions incorrectly on the math and English answer sheets, and only wrote the beginning of her essay. When the results came out, her name plummeted from eleventh in the grade to outside the top two hundred.

The homeroom teacher spoke to her, her tone filled with disappointment and anger: "Ye Yuying! What are you doing? You got arrogant just because you won a provincial championship? Don't you know who you are anymore? Look at your grades this time, they're absolutely terrible!"

Ye Yuying lowered her head and remained silent.

On the eve of a relatively unimportant regional competition, Ge Jie found her.

"Tomorrow in the 400 meters, I want you to come in fourth." Ge Jie casually painted her nails, her tone nonchalant. "You can't get a medal, but you can't do too badly either, understand? Anyway... you know the consequences."

That day, Ye Yuying stood on the track she knew best and felt the pain of a broken heart for the first time.

The starting gun fired, and she rushed out, her body instinctively craving victory, but reason, like a venomous snake, tightly coiled around her limbs.

On the final straight, she watched helplessly as three competitors overtook her, and she had to deliberately and painfully slow down.

That feeling was ten thousand times more painful than losing the game itself. It was a betrayal of her talent and a desecration of her hard work.

After the race, Coach Yang looked at her with unprecedented disappointment and confusion in his eyes: "Ye Yuying, were you taking a walk in the last 100 meters?! What's wrong with you lately! You've been so distracted during training."

Ye Yuying remained silent. The close trust that had just been established between her and her mentor had thus been severely damaged.

She became Ge Jie's personal servant. Every morning, she had to buy breakfast for her and her friends; after PE class, she had to screw on bottle caps for them and hand them towels; after school, she had to carry both of their schoolbags and follow behind them.

Her eyes were numb as she did all this.

She became the laughingstock of the entire school. The former provincial champion now acted like a lackey, blindly obeying the ringleader of the school bullying.

The way people looked at her changed from initial awe to pity, disdain, and finally indifference.

Her world had completely lost its sound. She no longer spoke to anyone, nor looked anyone in the eye.

She wandered through the campus like a zombie, silently enduring it all.

This time, no one could save her, and Cheng Mingdu was also at a loss.

Her world was, in the end, completely dead.

She never replied to Cheng Mingdu's emails again.

She dared not, nor was she worthy. Because of the delusions in her heart, she no longer dared to touch that pure and bright world that belonged to him.

She was unwilling to accept defeat. She studied hard and trained diligently late into the night, but she could not break into the top ten in her grade and thus failed to live up to her track and field abilities.

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Author's note: 50~

There are two more chapters from junior high school.