As Su Yubai pulled on his pantyhose, his mother pushed the door open while carrying a plate of watermelon and saw the son she had raised for seventeen years dressed entirely in female clothing. A dark blue pleated skirt paired with pure white pantyhose, and long black hair that was soft and smooth.
With a somewhat sickly pale complexion and overly thin shoulders, he looked completely like a delicate, sickly-type beautiful girl.
“…I’ll leave the watermelon at the door,” Mom said after remaining silent for several seconds, forcing out a strained smile as if she had eaten a sour lemon. “Have fun.”
After she finished speaking, she shut the door with a snap, and a series of dazed, dejected footsteps sounded in the corridor.
Su Yubai sincerely thanked his mother for her tolerance and understanding, but actually, no tolerance or understanding was needed. At this moment he was still a proper, upright man, with little interest in crossdressing or mysterious candies and the like.
The reason he was dressed in this pitiful, delicate appearance was purely because he had no choice.
Su Yubai pulled the pantyhose up to the appropriate height and glanced sideways at the phone on the desk.
The phone had a face-unlock feature and lit up as soon as it saw Su Yubai, reflecting a pretty face and long black hair, as well as the woman standing behind him.
The woman was several heads taller than Su Yubai, her head tilted and hanging over her shoulder, connected to her neck by only a thin layer of skin, as if she had been hit head-on by a speeding truck.
This young lady’s face was also as pale and twisted as if she had been in a car accident, her pitch-black eye sockets completely empty, yet her lips were painted with thick, vivid makeup, and her smile stretched all the way to her ears.
She was at most five centimeters away from Su Yubai, her sticky black hair plastered against the back of his neck, which was pure sexual harassment. In fact, Su Yubai would rather this person had designs on his body, but unfortunately, what she had set her sights on did not seem to be his weak, powerless body, but his life.
This was the reason he was crossdressing.
This strange young lady… let’s call her Miss Red Lips, had appeared without any warning eight days ago. At that time, Su Yubai had just woken up from his noon nap, muttering “Why do we still have to make up classes on Saturday” while dazedly reaching for his school uniform, only to touch Miss Red Lips’ red lips.
She was lying on top of him, hands braced on either side of his head, mechanically repeating “Classmate Su, good afternoon” over and over, her face wearing the same joyful smile as now.
An ordinary person would probably have screamed, but luckily Su Yubai had frequently encountered strange things since he was old enough to understand, and had now entered a seven-year itch with the weird entities. He no longer had the energy to scream and simply stared at her without a word. After a quarter of an hour, he blinked as usual, and when he opened his eyes again, all he saw was the ceiling.
Since then, she would appear near him punctually every twelve hours, harass him for a quarter of an hour, and then suddenly disappear, very punctual.
During those fifteen minutes, she would greet him in various ways, sometimes saying “Classmate Su,” sometimes calling him “Su Yubai” directly, and sometimes even calling him “Baibai” in a mushy way.
The ways she appeared also became more and more unexpected. At first she would straight-up pin Su Yubai to the bed, making it impossible not to notice, but later she would silently appear when he was concentrating on homework or playing games, and call out “Su Yubai” casually in the voice of a teacher or his mother.
Communicating with these guys never led to anything good, so Su Yubai had never answered her. At the same time, he took the opportunity to check recent news and discovered that several male high school students around his age had died unexpectedly.
Some had died in car accidents, some had fallen from buildings, but without exception they had broken their necks and lost both eyes when they died, and all the corpses had mysteriously disappeared not long after.
Su Yubai felt that if he responded to Miss Red Lips’ enthusiastic invitation, he would probably also have his neck twisted and his eyes gouged out, ending up in a similar outcome.
Even worse, recently Miss Red Lips had become increasingly hard to guard against, and no matter how careful and vigilant he was, he would sooner or later slip up. So he had no choice but to take some measures—such as wearing this female outfit.
No, this really was not an excuse he found just to wear female clothes.
Miss Red Lips seemed to be confirming Su Yubai’s identity by asking questions, and she wanted to twist his neck only after confirming that “the person in front of me is indeed Su Yubai himself.”
Therefore, conversely, as long as he disguised himself as much as possible in the completely opposite direction of a soft woman, his chances of survival should be a bit higher.
“Classmate Su, shall we go to the seaside again? I’ll give you some orange-red candy.”
Miss Red Lips started chattering nonsense again. Su Yubai ignored her and combed his wig and smoothed his long skirt by himself.
He walked in front of the mirror and spun around once, his dark hair and skirt hem blooming like a black rose, which even made him a little moved. First he smiled at the beautiful girl (?) in the mirror, then looked up and met Miss Red Lips’ empty eye sockets with four eyes (?).
This young lady was stubborn, suspicious, and a bit yandere, and a small skirt alone could not completely send her off. However, weird entities were mostly reasonable good brothers and good sisters, and would not randomly kill without logic. They drew power from a certain story and therefore also had to follow the rules of the story.
In other words, as long as he figured out why she was clinging to him and what exactly she was… he could successfully break up with Miss Red Lips.
The time on the phone jumped to 18:34, the cold sensation stuck to the back of his neck quietly disappeared, and Miss Red Lips ended the date as scheduled. Su Yubai stuffed the phone into the pocket of the female school uniform and looked out the window.
In order to prepare for the college entrance exam sprint, his mother had rented a room near the school, and Dan’ao No. 2 High School where Su Yubai attended was only a few hundred meters away. As long as he glanced out the window, he could see the teaching building shrouded in the night.
Whether it was fate or bad luck, he recognized the clothes Miss Red Lips was wearing. She was wearing their high school’s uniform. Her story had happened there.
* * *
Ten minutes later, Su Yubai arrived at the school, greeted the security uncle in a fake voice, said he had left something in the classroom, and strode through the school gate.
Today was Sunday, the school had no make-up classes, the students in the competition class would stay at school to grind problems, but they should have finished class more than an hour ago, and the large school was cold and quiet.
The June evening wind blew across the playground, his skirt hem fluttered slightly, and a strange cool sensation came between his thighs. He silently pressed his legs together, stood in the center of the playground and looked up. Almost all the windows of the teaching building were dark, probably only a few teachers on duty were there, and maybe there were also human models walking around in the corridors.
In anime and movies, students often broke into the school at such eerie moments, telling urban legends with companions and holding courage tests. Su Yubai had no friends and no leisure, and if possible, he really wanted to act in broad daylight.
But in order to investigate clues about Miss Red Lips, he had to use some slightly cute magical little tools… and he was also wearing female clothes. If teachers or classmates saw him, his student career would probably end immediately.
Actually, when he was a child he had done similar stupid things, and as a result he was teased throughout his childhood as Jiahao who fought three hundred rounds with the air… even now when he thought about it he wished he could go back in time and slap his past self twice.
Su Yubai entered the teaching building, found a dark, empty corner, and took out a puppet the size of a forearm and a small glass bottle from his backpack.
The glass bottle contained a lock of hair secretly plucked from Miss Red Lips, and the bottle mouth was stuffed with a wooden stopper soaked in salt and wrapped with red thread, which was the seal of the small bottle. Body hair and skin were highly effective in the sense of witchcraft. Although it was still early before the next twelve hours, as long as he came into intimate contact with the hair, it was hard to guarantee that Miss Red Lips would not suddenly flash within a few centimeters.
Su Yubai pulled out the wooden stopper, used tweezers to pick out the hair, skillfully wound it around the puppet’s head, and finally placed the puppet on the ground. After waiting for a moment in the evening wind, he saw this little guy open its feet and slowly climb up the stairs.
He raised a victorious smile. The “Law of Contagion” was one of the five laws of witchcraft. As long as an object A had come into contact with another object B, it could in a certain sense represent B itself.
So if nothing unexpected happened, Miss Red Lips’ hair would help him uncover her secret—
“Classmate, what are you doing?”
A familiar voice sounded behind him. Su Yubai turned around in the dark stairwell, and the smile immediately froze on his face. His classmate and student council president was standing in the bright moonlight, examining his skirt hem and face with confusion.
Okay, student career ends here.