Although somewhat reluctant, Ruan Shiyu still found the restaurant's Cantonese cuisine fully lived up to its reputation once she actually tasted it. By the time she and Mu Xiaoxiao came back out, she had already loosened her belt by two notches.
The two of them strolled along in the cool night breeze. For a moment, Ruan Shiyu completely forgot about the earlier breakup, stepping on her own shadow beneath the streetlights and happily amusing herself.
"Hey, Xiaoxiao," Ruan Shiyu suddenly trotted around to stand in front of Mu Xiaoxiao, looking at her with a mischievous grin. "You know what you looked like today?"
Mu Xiaoxiao let herself be pulled by the hand, looking at Ruan Shiyu with a gentle smile. "Like what?"
Ruan Shiyu quietly took two steps back, then giggled at Mu Xiaoxiao and shouted, "Like my mom! Haha!"
Mu Xiaoxiao's face instantly flushed red. Clutching her handbag, she lunged toward Ruan Shiyu, shouting as she ran, "Ruan Shiyu, I'm telling you, you're in big trouble!"
The two of them chased each other around playfully, leaving behind a string of crisp laughter beneath the dim, yellowish streetlights.
"Alright, I'm not chasing you anymore." After pursuing her for a bit, Mu Xiaoxiao stopped to catch her breath, feeling that chasing someone in high heels made her look like an absolute idiot.
Ruan Shiyu wasn't doing much better ahead. She hadn't exercised in far too long, and after suddenly running for so long, she could taste a faint sweetness of blood rising in her throat.
Just then, the two of them arrived downstairs at Ruan Shiyu's apartment building. Mu Xiaoxiao exchanged a few more words with her, patted her on the shoulder, and turned to leave.
Ruan Shiyu stood downstairs watching her off, but unexpectedly, Mu Xiaoxiao stopped just as she got into her car. "A-Yu, there's a class reunion coming up in a couple of days. Do you remember?"
"A class reunion? Who organized it?" Ruan Shiyu asked, somewhat surprised.
Mu Xiaoxiao thought for a moment. "It seems our old class monitor is getting married, so he put together a class reunion."
"Oh." Ruan Shiyu nodded. "Are you going?"
"I wasn't planning on it, but the monitor's wife is my cousin, so..." Mu Xiaoxiao hadn't expected things to turn out to be such a coincidence.
Hearing that Mu Xiaoxiao was going as well, Ruan Shiyu readily agreed. "Since you're going, I'll go too."
Having gotten Ruan Shiyu's word, Mu Xiaoxiao's spirits perked up a bit. "Shall I come pick you up then?"
"Deal."
With everything settled, Mu Xiaoxiao drove away, and Ruan Shiyu turned around to head upstairs.
Ruan Shiyu had terrible luck; just as she reached the entrance, the elevator doors were about to close. She hurried over, shouting as she ran.
Yet her luck turned out to be not bad after all. Just when she thought she was bound to miss it, the elevator doors that had already closed slowly slid open again, and Ruan Shiyu squeezed right in.
Once inside the elevator, Ruan Shiyu hastily mumbled a thank-you.
"No need." It sounded like a clear spring flowing past; just that single sentence made Ruan Shiyu feel as though her phantom limb was about to harden.
She stared blankly upward and saw a somewhat familiar man standing before her. He was the son of Auntie Qian, the landlord from next door. Word had it he was a graduate of some famous foreign medical school and, at only thirty years old, was already an attending physician at a hospital.
He didn't usually live here, only coming back occasionally to check on his parents. In the month and a half since Ruan Shiyu had moved in, she had only run into this person two or three times.
Whether it was because the man's eyes looked too stern, Ruan Shiyu felt immense pressure standing before him. Whatever she had wanted to say was swallowed back down; she stood stiffly beside him, not daring to move a muscle.
The elevator quality in this residential complex was actually quite decent. The strange atmosphere inside didn't last long before the elevator reached her floor.
Seeing the man leave, Ruan Shiyu hurried out of the elevator as well, then scurried back to her small apartment like a frightened rabbit. Only after she slammed the door shut did she finally let out a thorough breath of relief.
She walked over to her bedroom, flopped onto her large bed, pulled out her phone from her pocket, and opened Idiopathic Sports.
Today was her first day using Idiopathic Sports, so she naturally had to check how many steps she had walked.
Then, to her awkward surprise, Ruan Shiyu discovered that her Idiopathic Sports seemed to have run into some trouble—the version displayed on it turned out to be v3075?!
Ruan Shiyu looked at her phone in helpless bewilderment, unable to understand how an app that had been perfectly fine when she left home could act like it was broken by evening, inexplicably jumping to this bizarre version.
She lay on the bed, holding her phone up slightly, and selected "delete" in the app management menu. Then she opened the app center, intending to download a fresh one.
Suddenly, Ruan Shiyu frowned, sat straight up from the bed, and stared at her phone with a blank, dumbfounded expression.
Her finger kept pressing the delete button, but no matter how many times she pressed it, this Idiopathic Sports v3075 stubbornly remained on her phone and refused to be deleted.
"What on earth is going on?" Ruan Shiyu muttered irritably. Seeing that there was simply no way to delete this strange app, she opted for the most commonly used method: turning the phone off and restarting it.
During the brief few seconds she waited for the phone to reboot, Ruan Shiyu kept a blank face and flopped back onto the bed.
What she had said about not caring while drinking tea with Mu Xiaoxiao that afternoon was true, but so was their history of all these years. Habitually, she picked up her phone, wanting to stealthily check Zhan An's Weibo feed. Only when she saw the phone's startup screen did it dawn on her that back when they broke up, she had already wiped clean anything and everything related to Zhan An.
Mocking herself bitterly, she watched the phone finish booting up, gathered her energy, and once again began her battle against that version from who-knows-where.
"Hello, User. Idiopathic Sports v3075 at your service." Having deleted it countless times to no avail, Ruan Shiyu, whose patience was already wearing thin, directly tapped on Idiopathic Sports to figure out what was going on. Then she heard her phone—which was clearly set to silent—suddenly emit a strange electronic chime.
Ruan Shiyu's hand jerked, and she tossed the phone aside.
She stayed frozen in place, staring at the phone with terrified eyes for a long while. Seeing that it didn't make any more strange noises, she began to wonder if she had just misheard. With trembling hands, she reached forward twice and fished the innocently discarded phone back.
"Hello, User. I am Idiopathic Sports v3075. Is there anything I can do for you?" Her phone had no idea what had just transpired; the very first second it returned to Ruan Shiyu's hand, it spoke up again. Although its tone had become even gentler, that still couldn't change the fact that Ruan Shiyu seemed to have run into something bizarre.
"Ghost—!!" A piercing scream tore through the night sky, startling quite a few people out of their sweet dreams.
Ruan Shiyu slumped over the living room table with every light in the living room turned on, casting a dazzling, blinding glare. Her phone had been placed far away on the other end of the table; when it wasn't making noise, it still looked just like the normal phone it had been before this afternoon.
"So, you're an idiot from a millennium in the future?" Fully armed with a spatula in hand to serve as a weapon, Ruan Shiyu glared at the phone, her eyes filled with vigilance.
After a "friendly negotiation" lasting over ten minutes, Ruan Shiyu finally learned from this System what on earth was residing inside her phone.
According to the System's own account, it was a fitness-assistance app designed specifically by idiot workers several centuries into the future for people like them who hated exercising, loved staying up late, lived as complete homebodies, and were prone to sudden death. Completing tasks brought rewards, while failing or refusing to complete them naturally brought punishments. In short, once their ultimate goal was met, the contract with the user would be dissolved.
Even though System v3075 had explained to her repeatedly that this would only benefit her health and do her no harm, Ruan Shiyu remained somewhat skeptical.
System v3075 was also on the verge of a breakdown; it had merely accidentally traveled back in time from several centuries later and then attached itself to someone's phone. Weren't humans from the ancient Earth supposed to be remarkably gullible? Weren't users supposed to happily accept it the moment you mentioned the word "System"? How on earth did it end up running into such a difficult user to handle? Yet, no matter how much of a breakdown it was having, System v3075 had after all signed a contract with Ruan Shiyu, and everything still had to be executed according to that contract.
It explained to Ruan Shiyu once again: "Hello, User. This System is Idiopathic Sports v3075, Number 3075, and I will be responsible for your upcoming exercise needs. Furthermore, absolutely! No adverse effects will be produced on your body."
Whether it was her imagination or not, Ruan Shiyu always felt she could hear the System heavily emphasize certain words within its electronic voice.
"So, you've decided I'm your user? Can't you switch to someone else?" Ruan Shiyu inched slightly closer to her phone, holding the iron spatula high in her hand, ready to smash it down at the slightest sign of abnormal activity from the phone. "I can just give this phone to someone else who needs you, and you can follow them instead."
"User, we have already signed a contract," the System piped up with utter helplessness.
Ruan Shiyu was still rather reluctant and wanted to negotiate further to get it to go with someone else. But no matter how much she talked until her mouth went dry, the System's only reply remained the same: once the contract was signed, it was hers, and saying anything more was useless.
Helplessly, Ruan Shiyu had to accept the reality that this System might accompany her for a very long time. She listlessly picked up her phone and walked back to her bedroom.
"Can I really not give you to someone else?" Once in bed, Ruan Shiyu hugged her knees, looking at her phone with a pleading gaze and holding onto one final shred of hope.
"..." The System didn't answer her question. After a brief silence, its voice reverted to the completely emotionless electronic tone from the very beginning: "Issuing the first mandatory task: wake up tomorrow morning at six o'clock and jog three laps around the complex. I hope the User wakes up on time and successfully completes it."
"???" Ruan Shiyu sprawled across the quilt, staring at her phone in utter bewilderment. Once it finally registered, she snatched up the phone and screamed, "Wake up at six? Why don't you just tell me not to sleep at all tonight? It's already almost one o'clock, you know!"
As for her phone, it had automatically locked its screen right after issuing the task and now lay docilely in her hand, indistinguishable from any other ordinary phone.
Ruan Shiyu speechlessly stared at the phone clutched in her hand, unable to resist giving the bed a couple of fierce thumps to vent her fury. Then she tossed it aside, yanked the covers up over her head, and went to sleep!