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59. A broken measurement scale

  I woke up to the sounds of two people arguing.

  My vision was still blurry, but I could hear the voices as loud as day.

  “I don’t like this,” a woman said angrily. “Don’t lose sight of your priorities.”

  “I’m responsible for this situation, so it is one of my priorities,” Kang Jiesu retorted.

  The voices were arguing in Mandarin, but my brain was a little too foggy to comprehend exactly what they were talking about. My ex-childhood friend was talking to someone that I didn’t recognize, which was really quite strange given that there were exactly 22 students in my css, and eleven of them had appeared in the Hero Summoning Ritual.

  Where had this extra person suddenly come from?

  “We don’t know where Zhang Guiyu is right now,” the woman said. “For all we know, she could be in terrible danger. If a random NPC girl and Guiyu were both hanging off the edge of a cliff, who would you choose?”

  “That’s a stupid question — I’d obviously save them both,” Kang Jiesu replied.

  The unknown woman groaned and her clutched her head in frustration.

  “You just don’t get it!” She compined in exasperation.

  She pointed at me with her index finger.

  “This NPC girl is as bnd as a potato. She’s completely passive. She has no personality. She’s basically just a limp dakimakura that walks and sometimes talks. It’s insulting to Ming Lina and me if you put this type of girl on the same level as us. If you want a stuffed animal to masturbate with, I’m sure the King can get you a pstic homunculus instead. I’d feel much better about that.”

  “Hong Baiye, you’re misunderstanding something. I know that you’re concerned that I’ll form a special bond with this girl. However, You, Ming-Ming, and Guiyu are all a million times important to me than this maid. I just can’t abandon something that I already started.”

  —Hong Baiye.

  Why didn’t I recognize that name?

  And why did she seem to know the rest of my cssmates so well?

  I knew about Ming Lina. She was the girl who had been obsessed with Kang Jiesu ever since middle school, although her feelings had never been reciprocated.

  However, I definitely didn’t have any cssmates by the name of ‘Hong Baiye’.

  Although...

  An intense headache pounded inside of my skull.

  I knew Ming Lina was 0.82 units on my Standardized Personal Hatred Scale (SPHS), but… units of what exactly?

  It felt like my memories were a little jumbled up.

  There was something warm, sturdy, and comfortable wrapped all around me.

  + + +

  It took me almost a full minute before I betedly realized that I was sitting in Kang Jiesu’s p.

  By the time my vision cleared, I could see that I was positioned orthogonally, much like the way a princess might ride a horse sidesaddle, resting on Kang Jiesu’s torso with my face pressed against his chest. There were still handcuffs on my wrists, so my arms were awkwardly squished between us. It wouldn’t have been a very stable position if it weren’t for the fact that my childhood friend had his arms wrapped securely around me.

  He was basically hugging me in his p — which was really really disgusting when I thought about it.

  We were in the sves’ quarters and Kang Jiesu was sitting on the floor.

  I tried to push myself into a different position, which alerted Kang Jiesu to fact that I had woken up.

  “Awake?” He asked me in Mandarin. “You’re safe now. The prince is gone and nobody will hurt you here.”

  He patted me reassuringly on my head.

  A whisper appeared next to my ears and softly transted the sentence into Galuterican.

  I almost jerked up from surprise.

  Given my positioning, I hadn’t been able to see anyone who was behind me. Yuko, the bearkin (kuma), had been hovering right next us, and he provided a transtion after a small dey.

  Incidentally, this must have meant that Hong Rei was also here.

  I turned my head around, and I confirmed that the genderbent foxkin was also present with her luxurious fluffy tail. In her p, she was holding a cat-like creature that was commonly known as a nyrolepthe, which looked something like an espeon (Pokemon), except much furrier with some feathers on its ears.

  Lu Liwang, Ming Lina, Lisa, Stel, and a maid named Lucia were also sitting nearby.

  Finally, there was a stunningly beautiful girl with long bck hair and incomprehensible deep purple eyes — whom I assumed could only have been the mysterious person named ‘Hong Baiye’.

  She was the only one who was standing on her feet.

  + + +

  “This is the second time the Crown Prince has targeted you, isn’t it?” Kang Jiesu asked me.

  Yuko followed with a transtion.

  “I… I… suppose so…” I responded hesitantly.

  Everyone was watching me closely.

  “Do you know why he keeps going after you?” My ex-childhood friend inquired.

  “…I must have made him angry, somehow,” I said.

  I saw Lisa tilt her head in my peripheral vision, clearly perplexed by my words.

  “And why is that?” Ming Lina jumped in, trying to coax me into providing more details. So far, my responses really hadn’t been particurly helpful, and I recalled that they mainly wanted me to provide an alternative perspective to the heavily sanitized information they had been receiving from the Archbishop.

  To be honest, I didn’t really understand the Crown Prince’s motivations that well either. I had a surreal experience with the Holy Sword in an alternate reality, but this was very difficult to expin. For some reason, I had a lot of inexplicable amnesia regarding the the arson incident from two nights ago, and the Crown Prince had randomly gotten upset when I said I didn’t remember anything about it.

  In some ways, I was just as confused as everyone else.

  Furthermore, I knew that the maids were silently listening to everything that I said. Even though Lisa and Stel were my friends, the Majordomo would surely ask them ter to provide a report on everything that they had heard. It definitely wasn’t safe to be fully transparent when there were so many people eavesdropping.

  “…I think… he desires my body,” I finally ended up saying.

  It was really the only data point that I felt was non-controversial.

  This caused my cssmates to awkwardly go silent.

  On Earth, we were all just a bunch of high school seniors, so it wasn’t exactly the most comfortable conversation topic. Of course, we weren’t completely oblivious about NSFW topics — but we weren’t so degenerate that we’d enjoy talking about it in the open.

  “Shouldn’t we just give her back to the prince then?” The girl named Hong Baiye suddenly asked Kang Jiesu.

  …..

  I immediately decided that I did not like this girl.

  “Seriously, it only makes sense,” Hong Baiye illustrated her logic out loud. “If you keep the girl that the Crown Prince likes, he’s only going to despise you and it’s going to make our lives very difficult. Since you say that you have no romantic feelings for the girl, then you should just get rid of her right away.”

  The reasoning was objectively and indisputably correct— but it was a little too cruel.

  She clearly had zero concern for anything that happened to me.

  “No.” Kang Jiesu was adamant. “That’s not happening. She’s just going to be raped.”

  Hong Baiye only sighed.

  “Hana,” my childhood friend addressed me. “I think you should stay away from the Crown Prince. At least for now, I think you shouldn’t wander around on your own. We don’t know when you might be targeted again, so it should be safer if there’s someone with you at all times… temporarily, I mean.”

  “I’m not going to babysit a random NPC girl around the clock,” Hong Baiye snorted disapprovingly.

  “No. Actually, I’ll do it.” Kang Jiesu announced with a fairly serious expression on his face.

  Ming Lina took off her gsses and rubbed her eyes.

  Somehow, Hong Baiye had made the interpersonal drama even worse.

  “…Can’t the two sves stay together?” Ming Ming asked, trying to find a solution that would put some physical distance between me and Kang Jiesu.

  However, Hong Rei objected to that suggestion.

  “I’ll be taking Yuko tonight, so he won’t be avaible.” She refused on behalf of the bearkin sve. “Besides, I doubt that two sves together would be enough stop the Crown Prince from doing whatever he wants.”

  She received a few questionable stares from Lu Liwang and some of my other cssmates, but no one said anything about her exact pns for the evening. To begin with, her gender change was already an awkward subject, and my cssmates were polite enough that they didn’t pry into the exact reasons why she had wished for such a thing. For the better or worse, Hong Rei was already in ‘weird’ territory, and it seemed like my cssmates had already decided that they wouldn’t question her too much for requesting a bearskin sve.

  In either case — Yuko and Rei’s transtion abilities were quite pragmatic and valuable as a pair.

  “I already said that I would do it,” Kang Jiesu repeated.

  “But…”

  “Ming-Ming, I’m not going to do anything to Hana,” Kang Jiesu said. “I wouldn’t try anything weird like that.”

  Ming Lina looked rather devastated by this arrangement, but it was difficult for her to challenge Kang Jiesu directly. Ultimately, she gave up on her opposition and buried her face in her knees.

  She obviously wasn’t very happy with the outcome.

  + + +

  I noticed Lisa and Stel exchanging gnces between each other in the background.

  Obviously, they had heard bits and pieces of the conversation that was being transted, but it wasn’t their pce to interject. In most circumstances, royal maids were supposed to be totally invisible. If they had any opinions, it wouldn’t be shared unless their masters explicitly requested their advice.

  For simir obvious reasons, there was no way for Lisa or Stel to speak with me directly.

  Kang Jiesu turned around to face the maids.

  “I’m going to stay in this room tonight. Can you bring some bedding here so that it’s more comfortable?”

  He was essentially decring that he was going to sleep in the sve quarters.

  It was a rather ridiculous proposition that completely vioted Galuterican common sense, but it was the third day ever since the my cssmates arrived from another world. The royal maids had already seen a number strange and bizarre demands from the Otherworlders, so they were a little more experienced with handling unusual requests.

  There weren’t nearly as many misunderstandings as before.

  Lisa, Stel, and the other maids discussed amongst themselves for a brief minute, and then ultimately Stel stood up and left the room. Presumably, they had been told to accommodate the Otherworlders as much as possible.

  It seemed like she was going to get some linens from a nearby supply closet.

  At the st second, Ming Lina also spoke up.

  “Me too,” she announced. “I’m going to sleep here tonight too.”

  ?

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