Our Entire Family Has Secrets [Transmigrated] - Chapter 7

Lin Shuanghuai has never told such a clumsy lie in his life.

It lacks any credibility, full of loopholes, utterly foolish.

But the person in front of him actually believed it.

A few minutes later, Lin Shuanghuai locked the door, leaned against the sink exhaustedly, and sighed, rubbing his forehead.

He rarely felt so flustered.

In the end, it was all because of the cat.

No matter how smart Lin Shuanghuai usually was, his brain seemed to malfunction after being startled by the cat.

He could only be grateful that the taciturn and simple-minded classmate was so easy to handle.

Until he left, the other person didn’t even glance at him more, let alone grab his hand to verify. He counted himself lucky.

Otherwise, if this matter leaked out, it would undoubtedly be a huge trouble.

Many people in school knew Lin Shuanghuai. The unexplained injuries on his body would spark widespread discussion in less than a day.

People always enjoyed gossiping about rumors that were hard to discern as true or false.

Then, Lin Shuanghuai would be overwhelmed by his popularity, and all sorts of unfounded speculations about the origin of his injuries would drown him.

He could imagine what would happen afterward—

Excessive concern from friends, frequent greetings from classmates, teachers taking turns to talk to him…

Perhaps someone would dig up something, or maybe nothing at all would be unearthed, and it would just become fodder for dinner conversations.

However, regardless, it wasn’t what Lin Shuanghuai wanted to see.

After a few deep breaths, his tense shoulders finally relaxed, and he walked slowly to the window, picking up his coat from the floor.

It was completely soaked and couldn’t be worn again.

His own T-shirt was also wet from being splashed when the cat knocked him down, wrinkled against his skin, very uncomfortable.

He was about to go to the office to fill out paperwork, it wasn’t possible to stay here for a day.

But going out would definitely attract onlookers.

Can one person deceive another, and also deceive a group of people?

If he told them he had fought with someone,

Yuyang En and Han Banlan could gather a group of more than ten sports students in three minutes, shouting to help him get revenge.

Or say he was robbed off-campus.

That would be even worse.

Teachers would inquire about his situation with concern and firmly demand he report it to the police.

Just as he was busy patching up his lies, his phone suddenly rang.

His thoughts were interrupted, and he couldn’t answer immediately.

He took out his phone to check the message.

The faint white light of the screen shone on Lin Shuanghuai’s face, making his already pale complexion look sickly.

[Message from-Chen Jin]

-Tonight at 8 o’clock, Yuezhou No. 12 yacht, be on time.

Lin Shuanghuai didn’t reply.

Anyway, the other party didn’t need his reply.

He locked the screen and threw the phone aside, turning on the tap.

A handful of cold water splashed on his face.

After a while, Lin Shuanghuai suddenly seemed to be in a daze, looking at the bites and bruises on his body.

He stared at them for a long time, not knowing what he was thinking.

When he looked up, he saw his own disheveled reflection in the mirror, and Lin Shuanghuai inexplicably felt his nerves on the verge of collapse.

Building a perfect tower is risky; once a link in the middle loosens, it will collapse immediately, and everything that has been achieved will be in vain.

For Lin Shuanghuai, his tower was already on the brink of collapse.

He felt very tired.

It’s exhausting to conceal, exhausting to disguise, exhausting to hide everything, exhausting to sit here in a daze, and even breathing is exhausting.

Suddenly, he had no strength left.

He slowly crouched down, sighed, and buried his face in his knees.

“What am I doing?” he muttered to himself, “Making a fuss over nothing.”

Click——

There was a very slight sound from the door handle.

Lin Shuanghuai’s body stiffened, his face pale as he stood up abruptly.

Luckily, he had locked it, so no one could see him in such a miserable state by opening the door.

No one knocked on the door, but someone must have touched the door handle.

Lin Shuanghuai quickly wrung out the coat in the sink, enduring the intense discomfort, and put it on.

“Wait a moment,”

He said to the person outside who might urgently need to use the restroom.

After a moment, Lin Shuanghuai had already composed himself.

He opened the door, all the words prepared in his mind—absurd, incredulous, utterly foolish words, he had already prepared his lines.

However, there was no one outside.

There was only a coat hanging on the door handle.

Apart from that, the entire floor was silent.

Lin Shuanghuai’s lips tightened into a tense line, his expression blank, carefully taking down the coat and hugging it to his chest.

His eyes were bewildered.

He could almost be certain that it was the boy from earlier who left it here.

But the other person ran so fast, he didn’t even catch a glimpse of his shadow.

Sometimes life is just so unexpected.

Just a moment ago, it felt like walking into a dead end, and now the crisis is resolved.

Lin Shuanghuai quickly took off his wet clothes and put on this clean one. Then he leaned against the door frame and stuck out half of his head.

He said towards the direction where there was no one in the corridor:

“Thank you.”

The coat wasn’t originally his.

He just took an abandoned school uniform from the infirmary on the ground floor.

After all, not everyone is like Lin Shuanghuai, wearing two layers of clothes in thirty-degree weather. It can only be borrowed temporarily.

As a precaution, Yuan Bozhu left a note in his pocket—

Return to the school clinic.

Yuan Bozhu helped Lin Shuanghuai not out of sympathy or concern, let alone the nonexistent camaraderie between classmates.

He could tell that Lin Shuanghuai didn’t want anyone to see the wounds on his body. Yuan Bozhu was familiar with that careful and secretive demeanor.

Although he hadn’t experienced Lin Shuanghuai’s plight, to some extent, Yuan Bozhu could empathize.

Keeping secrets was a long and boring mission.

The process didn’t bring any joy. And once the secret was exposed, it would cause various troubles and pains.

For this reason, Yuan Bozhu rarely intervened.

But he also had considerations.

Lin Shuanghuai interacted with many people every day. Yuan Bozhu must be the least remarkable among these people, the one least remembered.

Yuan Bozhu had great confidence in his weak sense of presence.

In less than three days, Lin Shuanghuai would forget what he looked like.

Getting closer, Yuan Bozhu finally returned to the classroom.

By this time, most of the students had returned.

The class teachers of each class were also preparing to watch over their students during lunch break.

As expected, in the lively classroom, there were no figures of different heights and builds.

Successfully avoiding them, Yuan Bozhu felt relieved.

In fact, these four were typical bullies who were afraid of tough ones.

For those they could easily manipulate, they would press them step by step without mercy.

But when faced with a large group or situations not conducive to their actions, they would definitely not cause trouble for themselves.

These people were quite interesting to talk about.

They valued the title of school bully more than anything else, enjoying the gaze of fear from others—although most of the time, this fear was accompanied by some disgust.

These people were not necessarily inherently evil.

Out of a dull and barbaric nature, they just enjoyed the pleasure of rebellion under the constraints of the school.

Of course, this explanation didn’t make them adorable.

The school bullies were a group prone to going astray if not paid attention to.

Yuan Bozhu’s evaluation of them was troublemakers who were not likable.

Their trouble level was comparable to the campus heartthrob Lin Shuanghuai.

They both belonged to the category of poison sources that would passively trigger the “attract attention” debuff once involved.

Now that the four poison sources were cleared, Yuan Bozhu was in a good mood.

But when he returned to his seat, he felt like there was another trouble silently approaching.

Where the specific trouble was, was not clear yet.

In short, everything was different from usual—

It started with the strangeness of his desk mate, Qin Rui.

Throughout lunch break, from Yuan Bozhu falling asleep to waking up, he always felt Qin Rui’s gaze.

Yuan Bozhu couldn’t understand the gaze filled with suppressed words and infinite sympathy.

Later on, it was the other classmates in the class.

When the class monitor Qin Jiao distributed the math exercise books to the classmates for the weekend, he specifically took a big detour from the podium and handed the first book to Yuan Bozhu.

Although they were all new exercise books, Yuan Bozhu didn’t understand why he had to give the first one to himself.

But he still reached out and took it: “Thank you.”

The class monitor, Qin Jiao, announced to the classmates on behalf of the class teacher that class fees would be collected next week. After finishing, he added while looking at Yuan Bozhu, “Those who find it inconvenient to hand in can talk to the teacher privately, no need to force it.”

Yuan Bozhu felt that this sentence shouldn’t have been directed at him.

In his first and second years of high school, he had never missed any payments.

But Qin Jiao’s gaze was fixed on him, making it hard to believe it wasn’t aimed at him.

Throughout the afternoon, several classmates behaved differently than usual in front of Yuan Bozhu.

However, he didn’t respond.

He knew something related to him must have happened.

But he was good at turning a blind eye.

When the school bell rang at the end of the day, the whole class cheered.

“Yay!!”

“Class dismissed, let’s have some fun!”

“Let’s have a party!” “Qin Rui, how many cars did you book? Can they fit all of us?”

Amidst the excitement, Yuan Bozhu silently disappeared.

He packed his bag while reminiscing about his weekend plans.

First, after school, he would go pick up his glasses to retire his overburdened eyes.

Then he would go home, change clothes, and head to the outskirts dozens of kilometers away to retrieve his treasure.

The express station was so far because online merchants dared not accept his order for fear of trouble.

He planned to practice with the replica of a famous sword from the Union Museum, which might attract unwanted attention.

Hence, Yuan Bozhu had to use intermediaries from the black market.

The entire process was highly secretive, even the pickup point for the delivery was extraordinary.

After dark, the most crucial moment would arrive.

Yuan Bozhu would climb Mount Xuantian alone at two in the morning to test the cherished sword he had been longing for as a means of physical exercise.

It was a perfect weekend plan, seeming so wonderful from the moment school ended on Friday.

However, an unexpected event occurred as Yuan Bozhu finished packing his bag and zipped it up.

He had never experienced such treatment before:

The whole class blocked him in the classroom, looking at him with loving and eager eyes.

Unanimously saying, “Yuan, let’s go to Nightless Continent together!”

At that moment, Yuan Bozhu didn’t think about why they were doing something so irrational and embarrassing.

Instead, he thought that more than half of them couldn’t remember his name and lazily called him “Yuan” instead of his full name.

In those few seconds of wild thoughts, today’s birthday star, Qin Rui, broke out of the crowd and grabbed Yuan Bozhu’s hand, emotionally inviting him,

“Don’t worry, even though it’s my birthday today, I just want the whole class to have a meal together. It’s not about receiving gifts or anything else… oh, forget what I just said!

Anyway, Yuan, you always avoided group activities in the past, and your absence in every class photo was noticeable. Now we’re in our final year, and our chances to gather are dwindling. Today, just join us and have some fun!”

Yuan Bozhu withdrew his hand expressionlessly.

He was good at refusing.

He didn’t need much explanation, complicated excuses, or fake apologies.

He simply said, “Sorry, I’m not going.”

For Yuan Bozhu, group activities were always at the bottom of his priorities, something he wouldn’t participate in unless necessary.

Regardless of the disappointed expressions of his classmates, he walked out of the classroom without looking back.

However, one surprise followed another.

The four people he didn’t encounter at lunch were now blocking the path at the corner of the corridor.

Tall or short, they stood there lazily, yawning, while the fat or thin ones were playing games on their phones.

They seemed impatient, occasionally looking in his direction.

Yuan Bozhu stood at the classroom door, frowned, and took half a step back before they noticed him.

His usually simple high school life seemed to encounter such a dilemma for the first time.

With dangers looming both ahead and behind, Yuan Bozhu found himself unable to make a decision all of a sudden.

Meanwhile, his classmates behind him continued to plead with him, arguing back and forth:

“Don’t be so antisocial, it’s rare for us to gather like this.”

“It’s Qin Rui’s 18th birthday, show some face, Yuan!”

“It’s Nightless Continent, you’re really not coming with us?”

Yuan Bozhu pondered seriously, weighing whether it would be more troublesome to deal with the four school bullies in front of him, who seemed difficult to shake off, or to handle the group of classmates behind him, who, though unfamiliar, were striving to pull him into unity and friendship.

Half a minute later.

Just when his classmates thought he wouldn’t agree, thinking he was so antisocial, Yuan Bozhu turned around.

He spoke, “Let’s go.”

Everyone was still stunned, “Huh?”

Qin Rui asked, “Where are we going? Are you going to Nightless Continent with us?”

Yuan Bozhu nodded.

Actually, upon careful consideration, this wasn’t a very difficult choice.

His classmates probably just had a whim to have a class gathering and were persuading Yuan Bozhu to join.

But they weren’t interested in Yuan Bozhu himself.

When they reached Nocturnal Island and dozens of people sat at the table, their attention would be captured by the extravagant and bustling environment, and they would immediately forget about Yuan Bozhu.

At that moment, Yuan Bozhu could quietly leave without directly conflicting with anyone.

It was a foolproof plan.

Qin Rui was very happy when he agreed, and he put his arm around him and said, “Great! Then you and I will take a car together. Come on, let’s go downstairs!”

Yuan Bozhu resisted the urge to push him away.

In this way, Yuan Bozhu, under the crowded “escort” of the whole class, swaggered past four school bullies and headed to Nightless Continent.

Author’s note:

Introduction of the protagonist Yuan Bozhu:

Male, 18 years old, 185cm (still growing).

Good at keeping secrets, pretending to be ignorant, refusing, turning a blind eye, and getting rid of trouble.

But not good at seeing others without wearing a coat.