Chapter 24 — No Longer Pure

Gu Mengyao was about to lose her mind. What on earth was going on? Hadn't Zhong Yongliang said no one used the bathroom at this hour? Then what was Wei Zhao doing in there? She clapped both hands over her eyes, spat out "Pervert!" and bolted.

Shen Yushu, though she let out a startled cry too, did not cover her eyes. Instead she stole two more curious glances before running off after Gu Mengyao, muttering to herself as she went: "So that thing on a man really is like the books say — it can grow and shrink. This morning outside it looked so stiff and huge, and now it's shrunk down so much. How bizarre."

"Xiaoshu, what are you talking about?" Gu Mengyao had caught her mumbling and asked, not quite following.

"Nothing..." Shen Yushu's face went red. If Gu Mengyao had heard what she just said, she would never live down the shame.

"I can't take it, I'm going to fall apart." Gu Mengyao ran all the way back to the classroom in one breath and stood there gasping. "How could it be like that? How could he show such a hideous thing in front of me? It's over, I'm finished, I'm no longer pure."

Shen Yushu pursed her lips. One look and you're impure? she thought. I took two looks — does that make me a slut? Looking won't kill anyone. If anything, Wei Zhao's the unlucky one, being looked at. Aloud she said, "Sister Yaoyao, that was the men's room, all right? We were the ones peeping."

"Ah." Gu Mengyao thought it over, and it was indeed so. He had been relieving himself in the men's room — that seemed fair enough. It was she who had gone snooping, and that was wrong. She frowned, then a thought struck her. "Wait — you were the one who dragged me there."

"Was I? Wasn't it Zhong Yongliang who said nobody uses the bathroom at this hour and told us to go?" Shen Yushu naturally shifted all the blame off herself and hauled Zhong Yongliang out to take the fall.

"Ugh." Gu Mengyao sighed and could only count herself unlucky. She felt her soul had suffered grave injury — never in her life had she seen such a revolting sight — but there was nothing to be done about it. It was like yesterday, when she drank from the bottle Wei Zhao had drunk from. She had no one to blame but herself.

But one thing was certain: this Wei Zhao had to go. Her life had been perfectly peaceful until this creature showed up. Only two days, and already she was no longer pure — she had lost her first kiss, and her eyes had seen things they should never see. If she let him stay in the house two months, who knew what else might happen?

Gu Mengyao made up her mind. When Daddy came back from his business trip, she would speak to him face to face. Even if it meant paying this wretch a termination fee, he could not stay by her side. He was simply too dangerous.

Zhong Yongliang's scream was nothing to Wei Zhao — if anything, it delighted him further. It was the shrieks of Gu Mengyao and Shen Yushu that gave him a real fright.

What the hell — what were those two girls doing barging into the men's room? Wei Zhao frowned at the thought. Spying on a man in the toilet and then screaming about it — no class at all when it came to peeping.

Peeping was supposed to be discreet. Scare the person you're peeping on, and it doesn't count as peeping anymore.

Wei Zhao pulled up his pants and swaggered toward the door.

"Don't you walk away." Zhang Naipao and Gao Xiaofu blocked his path at once.

"Your leader's in a sorry state — I'd advise you to take him and get him a change of clothes. The students will be back from morning exercises soon, and if they see him like this, his face will be on the floor." Wei Zhao glanced at Zhong Yongliang, groaning where he lay in the river of piss, and twisted his mouth.

Zhong Yongliang's backside was already swollen, and now he had landed flat on it, taking the full impact right on the same spot. The pain was so fierce he could not even stand.

"This..." Gao Xiaofu hesitated. Wei Zhao had a point, after all. In this school, face was everything. If people saw Zhong Yongliang come out of the bathroom soaked in urine, he would be a laughingstock forever.

"Hmph. This isn't over." Zhang Naipao also judged it was no time to tangle with Wei Zhao — there would be plenty of chances to deal with him later. "You just wait."

"Whatever." Wei Zhao shrugged indifferently and strode out of the men's room.

"What the hell are you two standing around for? Get over here and help me up!" Zhong Yongliang had not been too bothered before, but Wei Zhao's words had frightened him. He could not afford to lose face.

"Brother Liang, your body..." Zhang Naipao looked at the dripping-wet Zhong Yongliang with some disgust. This was not water, after all — it was urine. Helping him up would mean getting a handful of piss.

Gao Xiaofu felt the same. He reached out several times, only to stop short each time.

"What, too dirty for you?" Zhong Yongliang's brow furrowed at once. Annoyed, he shot out a hand and grabbed each of them in turn, and in an instant their clothes were smeared with urine.

There was nothing else for it. With bitter smiles on their faces, the two hoisted Zhong Yongliang up between them, one on each side. But in that state, returning to the classroom was out of the question; they would have to find somewhere to wash up, change into clean clothes, and only then come back.

The three of them had no choice but to slip out through the school's back gate. That feeling of the hunter hunted — of a scheme turning back on its own maker — left Zhong Yongliang thoroughly sour, and in his heart he swore a silent oath: he would teach that country bumpkin a lesson he would never forget.

Not for any other reason than the sight he had made of himself in front of Gu Mengyao. That was something he could not permit. It was as though another man had insulted what belonged to him. Gu Mengyao was not his woman yet, not by a long shot, but Zhong Yongliang was firmly convinced that the day would not be far off.

With his family's standing behind him and his own forceful ways, Gu Mengyao would surely give her heart to him in time. Soothed by this thought at last, Zhong Yongliang began to feel a little better.

When Wei Zhao walked back into the classroom, the between-class exercise session was still under way. It had been while living in the deep mountains that he first heard the term "between-class exercise." His immediate reaction then had been: surely not — a big city is a big city, but do the students in its schools really do that sort of thing during the breaks? And the school had the gall to declare it a legitimate, officially scheduled period, no less.

It was only later that Wei Zhao realized he had got the wrong idea. The so-called between-class exercise was nothing more than a little calisthenics on the field between lessons. This episode, however, proved that Wei Zhao had none of the guileless simplicity one might expect of a man from the mountains — if anything, he was a good deal more worldly and wicked than that.

Seeing Wei Zhao walk into the classroom, Gu Mengyao let out an audible "Hmph" and dropped her head. Moments before, she had been praying that Zhong Yongliang and his friends would give Wei Zhao the beating of his life, if only to settle the score in her heart. Now, finding Wei Zhao perfectly unharmed, it was obvious that the ones who had come off worse were Zhong Yongliang's side.

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