Su Mu kept walking forward.
Suddenly, a man blocked her path. As she looked up, she saw him staring at her with a grin.
The moment she raised her head, the young man with the dyed yellow hair froze. What a stunning girl! Her nose was petite and upturned, and her peach-blossom eyes seemed like they could melt into water; the slight curve at the corners of her eyes was absolutely enchanting. Her fair skin shimmered under the moonlight, giving her the ethereal beauty of a moon goddess.
The blond youth swallowed hard and stepped closer.
Su Mu wrapped her arms tightly around herself and turned to leave, only to find a man with blue-dyed hair standing behind her.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. You’ve got a sharp eye, kid. This is the first time I’ve ever seen such a juicy little thing," the blue-haired punk said, clearly emboldened by the alcohol. He grew thirstier as he spoke. "How about it, little sister? Why don't you come and have a few drinks with us?"
Su Mu shook her head frantically. The overpowering stench of alcohol coming from them made her feel increasingly terrified. With her path forward and backward blocked, she had no choice but to retreat against the wall.
"Don't be afraid. We'll show you a good time. You'll enjoy it."
As they closed in, Su Mu’s face turned pale. Just as the blue-haired punk reached out to grab her coat, he suddenly rolled his eyes and collapsed to the side.
The blond youth was stunned, but a split second later, a brick slammed into his head.
"Damn it, a bunch of scumbags."
Su Mu looked up and saw a man spit on the two unconscious men on the ground.
"Are you okay?" Ye Ge felt a bit nervous, his hand still trembling as he held the brick. It was his first time doing something like this.
The young girl looked up and shook her head, her face still pale.
"Su Mu?"
When Ye Ge recognized her, he froze, silently calling out her name.
At that exact moment, a look of terror flashed in Su Mu’s eyes, and she lunged forward, violently pulling Ye Ge aside. The moment he was pulled away, the flash of a blade grazed past him.
"Holy crap!"
Ye Ge’s scalp went numb. Instinctively, he raised the brick to retaliate, but as he focused, he saw it was a girl wearing a Linhai No. 1 High School uniform. The red collar indicated she was a junior, a student in her second year. And for some reason, she looked familiar...
Su Mu quickly stood in front of Ye Ge and began making frantic hand gestures at the girl.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!"
Realizing she had almost struck the wrong person, the girl with twin ponytails quickly apologized to Ye Ge. "I'm her younger sister, Su Yue. You were holding a brick and facing my sister, so I thought she was in danger. I’m truly, truly sorry."
"It’s okay, it’s okay." Ye Ge looked at the kitchen knife in the girl's hand and swallowed hard, still shaken. "Let’s call the police first."
"Right."
The girl hurriedly pulled out her phone to call the police. They were told the officers would arrive in ten minutes.
While waiting, it all came back to Ye Ge. In his past life, there had been an attempted sexual assault in Linhai City where the victim's sister had chased the attackers off with a kitchen knife, cutting them in the process. The men didn't die, but they were sentenced to three and a half years in prison. The girl was ruled to have acted in self-defense and bore no responsibility.
After transmigrating back to this life, he had happened to walk down this alley and intervened just in time. Truthfully, Su Mu probably would have been fine even if he hadn't shown up, but Ye Ge never expected that the person in that news story would be Su Mu.
Su Mu was a university classmate of his in his previous two lives. Although they weren't in the same major, Ye Ge had heard her name and seen her photos. Su Mu was one of the three great campus beauties of Yuhang University. One of the others was his childhood sweetheart, Yan Cici, and the third one... he didn't even want to think about her. She was the nightmare of his second life.
He had heard that Su Mu worked part-time throughout university and never had a boyfriend. In his first life, his heart had been set only on Yan Cici, and he had been indifferent to Su Mu. After he graduated, he died in a traffic accident early on, so he never knew what became of her.
In his second life, he only heard about Su Mu when he was thirty; at a class reunion, he learned that she had developed depression and had taken an entire bottle of sleeping pills one night.
He had felt such regret for her. Even though he hadn't known her well, she was a deaf-mute girl who had overcome such hardship to get into Yuhang University and complete her studies through sheer grit. She should have had a bright future. Ye Ge didn't know the cause of her depression, but in this life, he vowed to help her whenever he could.
As for Su Mu’s sister, Ye Ge had found her familiar from the start. He looked again.
*I remember now! Isn't this Wang Yue, the girl who would be known ten years later as the last true diva of the Chinese music scene?*
So her real name was Su Yue! Ye Ge never imagined they were sisters! He had been planning to invest in some songs to earn seed capital. He could learn to write music scores and materialize the melodies in his head, but without a great singer to perform them, it would be impossible to succeed. Now that he had met Su Yue, perhaps they could collaborate.
Standing next to her sister, Su Yue suddenly shivered. Feeling a gaze, she glanced at Ye Ge and found him staring at her intensely. She instinctively gripped her kitchen knife tighter.
While waiting for the police, Su Mu turned to gesture to her sister. Su Yue nodded and walked over, still holding the knife and looking at Ye Ge with a hint of suspicion—after all, he had been staring at her quite intently.
"Big brother, thank you so much for saving my sister. Really, thank you."
Su Yue meant it from the bottom of her heart. She didn't know what would have happened if not for him.
"Don't call me big brother, I'm not that old. Judging by your uniform, you're a second-year student at Linhai No. 1 High, right? I'm a third-year graduate from the same school. You can just call me Ye Ge, or 'Senior' works too."
"Eh? What a coincidence!" Su Yue’s eyes blinked.
Ye Ge looked at Su Mu, then back at the little girl with the twin ponytails, and smiled with a touch of sentiment:
"Some things, it seems, really are just that coincidental."
...
...
[Su Mu is not completely deaf; she can hear if she uses a hearing aid, similar to the anime film "A Silent Voice."]