Chapter 5: Silk Hiding Steel
Chen Guo's voice carried across the café floor like a small artillery strike.
"—three hours! Tang Rou, you told me you'd sleep for three hours and it's been exactly ninety minutes. I counted. Do you think I can't do basic math?"
I looked up from the customer complaint I was pretending to resolve. The argument was happening near the front counter, visible to half the morning crowd, and Tang Rou stood at the center of it with the posture of someone who'd never lost a fight she considered worth having.
"I slept enough." Her voice was flat, factual. "I want to play."
"You work in four hours!"
"I'll be fine."
"You said that yesterday and then you fell asleep standing up during inventory."
"I caught myself before I dropped anything."
Chen Guo made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been the prelude to violence. She caught me watching and jabbed a finger in my direction.
"Ye Qiu! Tell her she's being an idiot."
Tang Rou's eyes followed the gesture. For a moment, our gazes met—her assessing, me carefully neutral—and something in her expression sharpened.
"You're the night shift." It wasn't a question. "Station three, corner spot. You play Glory."
She noticed.
"Sometimes."
"I saw you last night. You queue for Green Forest at five AM when the server's dead. Weird choice." She stepped away from Chen Guo and walked toward me, her stride carrying the controlled precision of someone who treated every movement as practice for something more important. "What class?"
"Unspecialized."
Her eyebrow lifted. Not surprise—curiosity, maybe. The kind that came with sharp edges.
"That's the class that can't advance past twenty. Why would anyone choose that?"
Because the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella requires it. Because the weapon your friend's brother designed before he died only works with a character that can use every skill tree. Because I watched a hundred episodes of animated footage showing exactly what Lord Grim could become.
"Seemed interesting," I said instead.
Tang Rou studied me for three seconds longer than comfortable. Then she turned and walked to the station next to mine—not asking, not requesting, simply occupying the space with the assumption that I wouldn't object.
Chen Guo threw her hands up. "Fine! Both of you, gaming addicts, see if I care when you collapse from exhaustion during the lunch rush!"
She stormed off toward the back office, leaving Tang Rou and me in a bubble of competitive tension that the morning customers carefully avoided.
"You declined my party invite." Tang Rou logged in without looking at me. Her fingers found the keyboard with unconscious familiarity, the posture of someone who'd been playing for less than a week but had already made the interface an extension of herself. "Last night. I sent you an invite and you ignored it."
"I was in the middle of something."
"You were grinding alone in a dead zone at four AM. That's not 'the middle of something.' That's avoiding people."
She's observant.
In the source material, Tang Rou had been characterized as competitive, stubborn, fiercely talented. The donghua had shown her as a challenge-seeking rival who needed to be defeated before she could respect anyone. The live-action had softened her edges, made her more approachable.
Neither version had prepared me for this—the analytical sharpness behind the competitive fire, the way she dissected behavior patterns with the same intensity she brought to gameplay.
"I'm not great with pickup groups," I said. It had the advantage of being true.
"But you cleared Green Forest with one. I checked the server logs." Her screen loaded, Soft Mist materializing in a village plaza surrounded by other players. "Eleven minutes forty-three. Efficient for randoms. You know the dungeon routing."
"I've played Glory before."
"How long?"
A decade of watching someone else play. Zero days of actually being good at it.
"Long enough."
She accepted the non-answer with a nod and started navigating toward a grinding zone. For a moment, I thought that was the end of it—interrogation complete, curiosity satisfied, back to the business of leveling.
Then she spoke again, her voice carrying the casual weight of someone lobbing a grenade.
"Your hands are wrong."
My fingers stopped on the keyboard. "What?"
"During the duel last night. Your positioning was perfect—better than mine, probably better than anyone else on this server. But your execution stuttered. The combo chains kept breaking in the same places, always on the third or fourth input." She turned to look at me directly, her expression unreadable. "That's not lag. That's muscle memory that doesn't match the inputs your brain is sending."
She noticed.
Of course she noticed.
She's going to be one of the best Battle Mages in professional history and she's been playing for less than a week.
"Old injury," I said. The lie came out smooth, practiced from a dozen deflections already. "It flares up under stress."
Tang Rou held my gaze for two seconds. Then she turned back to her screen.
"I want a rematch. When you're warmed up. When your 'injury' isn't flaring."
"Why?"
"Because you beat me by reading my movements, not by outplaying my execution. I want to know what it feels like to lose to someone who's actually trying."
She didn't wait for an answer. Her Battle Mage started moving across the map, heading toward a zone I recognized from the source material—high mob density, fast respawns, exactly the kind of grinding spot that would push her to Level 12 before the day was over.
A message notification pinged on my screen.
[Friend request from Soft Mist]
I stared at it.
In the source material, Tang Rou and Ye Xiu's relationship had started exactly like this—competitive friction that gradually evolved into respect, then partnership, then something close to family. She'd been one of the core members of Team Happy, one of the few people who'd followed Lord Grim from anonymous internet café to professional championship.
But that was the real Ye Xiu. The one whose hands moved at 764 APM. The one who could back up his strategic reads with flawless execution.
I was someone wearing his face, failing at twelve percent of the combos he could execute in his sleep.
Accept it anyway.
She'll figure out the truth eventually—that you're not as good as you should be, that something is wrong with the hands that used to be legendary. But that's a problem for later.
Right now, she's the first teammate.
I accepted the friend request.
Across the café, Chen Guo emerged from the back office with two cups of instant noodles and a resigned expression. She set one in front of Tang Rou, one in front of me, and walked away shaking her head.
"Gamers," she muttered. "Both of you. Hopeless."
Tang Rou didn't look up from her screen. Neither did I.
But somewhere between the click of keyboards and the steam rising from cheap noodles, something had shifted. A thread of connection, thin and fragile, stretched between two strangers who both knew Glory well enough to recognize what they saw in each other.
I ate my noodles without tasting them and watched Soft Mist carve through a field of mobs with the savage efficiency of someone who'd decided that sleep was optional.
She learns terrifyingly fast.
And she's already watching my hands.
The PRD pulsed in my peripheral, recording everything.
To supporting Me in Pateron.
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!