Chapter 117: Maybe It's Because of the Jade Pendant
"The hair dryer is in my room, go get it yourself."
Before going into the bathroom to shower, Ye Ziming glanced at Lin Muqing's hair and said this, then went straight into the bathroom on his own.
“Oh, okay.”
Lin Muqing looked up at her good friend and nodded to show she understood.
But she didn’t get up right away. Instead, she decided to play on her phone for a while before going to his room to get the hair dryer, because she had just come across something interesting on her screen.
Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Ye Ziming was still thinking about the story Lin Muqing had just told him.
He seemed calm on the outside, but deep down, he wasn’t. He really cared about Lin Muqing’s physical condition.
When he heard her say that she used to be a boy, a strange feeling suddenly popped up in his heart. It made him feel a bit uncomfortable.
While rinsing himself under the shower, Ye Ziming started thinking, if the chromosome check tomorrow shows she has XX chromosomes...
Then maybe there’s nothing to worry about.
After thinking it through, he decided there were two things he needed to do. One was the health check, and the other was investigating the jade pendant's origin.
“Alright, time to dry my hair.”
At the same time, out in the living room, Lin Muqing put down her phone after a bit and stood up to head into her good friend's room. The whole time, she had to keep holding up her pants because they were too loose and felt like they could fall off at any moment.
This wasn’t her first time going into his room, so she wasn’t shy. Once she entered, she immediately started looking for the hair dryer. After searching for a while, she found it, placed on a bookshelf in his room.
"Isn't this a bit too high?"
It was a little awkward. The height was fine for Ye Ziming. He could easily reach it just by lifting his hand.
But for Lin Muqing... she’d probably need to find a chair to stand on, or maybe she could jump to reach it. When she turned around, she saw the chair in the room had wheels, so it wasn’t safe to stand on.
After thinking for a moment, she tried jumping and found that she could just touch the shelf with the hair dryer.
“Alright, just a bit more effort.”
She encouraged herself and then jumped up again to try.
On her third jump, Lin Muqing finally grabbed the hair dryer, but she accidentally bumped into the items on the shelf below it. Luckily, she was quick and managed to catch the falling items while still holding the dryer.
“Lin Muqing, you…”
At that exact moment, Ye Ziming walked into the room, drying his hair with a towel. He stopped in his tracks when he saw the scene.
From his point of view, Lin Muqing was leaning against his bookshelf in a strange pose, as if she was trying to stop something from falling. That part made sense.
What didn’t make sense was why her pants were down around her ankles, and her underwear looked like it was about to fall too.
Just as she turned around with the hair dryer in hand, Lin Muqing realized what had happened.
“Aaah!”
She let out a cry of surprise and quickly pulled her pants up, her face instantly turning bright red.
This was way too embarrassing. She had jumped too hard, and because she was focused on catching the stuff on the shelf, she had let go of her pants. That’s how this happened.
“Ahem… Next time, if you can’t reach it, just call me.”
Ye Ziming coughed into his hand a couple of times, trying to ease the awkwardness, for both of them.
It looked like he needed to prepare some clothes for Lin Muqing. Otherwise, if she kept wearing his clothes, who knew how many more awkward situations like that might happen. After all, he had only moved here in high school, so all the clothes in the house were made for someone 180 cm tall.
“Oh… okay.”
Lin Muqing felt super embarrassed and didn’t know what to say. She just nodded, then walked out of her best friend’s room with the hairdryer in her hand.
Later, the two of them sat on the sofa together. While drying her hair, they started chatting about other things.
During the conversation, Ye Ziming asked if anything strange happened with the jade pendant on the day her body started changing.
“Oh, that… The string on the pendant suddenly broke when I was taking a bath. Luckily, I wasn’t standing up at the time, so it didn’t fall and break.” After thinking about it for a bit, Lin Muqing answered honestly.
“Before that, did you ever take the pendant off?”
Hearing her answer, Ye Ziming thought for a moment before asking another question.
“Maybe once or twice. My mom said I’ve been wearing it since I was a baby and told me not to take it off unless I really had to.”
“Can I take a look at your pendant tomorrow?”
“Sure! I left it at home. If it stops raining tomorrow, I can bring it and show you.”
From this conversation, Ye Ziming started to get some ideas in his head.
He thought maybe Lin Muqing’s body wasn’t the real problem, maybe it had something to do with the jade pendant. He still needed to do more research. After chatting a bit more, he smoothly changed the topic to something else: food.
There was a nice Chinese restaurant near the hospital they were visiting tomorrow, and he planned to take Lin Muqing there for lunch.
As soon as she heard there was good food, Lin Muqing got really happy, and the conversation instantly became much more lively.
“It’s getting late. Let’s go to bed.”
No one knew how long they’d been talking until Ye Ziming checked the time and decided to call it a night.
“Mm-hmm.”
Lin Muqing nodded obediently and stood up with her best friend, instinctively getting ready to head to the guest room.
“Oh right, bro… the room I just went into earlier, who’s it for? It’s decorated so nicely. That person must be a girl, right? Is she someone special to you?”
Right before stepping away, she suddenly remembered something and turned around to ask Ye Ziming. She spoke quickly and asked a lot at once, but still had many things in her heart left unsaid. Lin Muqing cared a lot about this.
She was sleeping in the guest room, but that mystery girl got to sleep in a better one?
Didn’t that mean this unknown girl had an even closer relationship with Ye Ziming than she did?
How annoying! For some reason, her fists suddenly clenched tightly. She felt like she could perform a wrestling move right then and there.
“That room is for ‘Lin Muqing’. She’s my ‘girlfriend’.”
Ye Ziming paused for a moment, looked at Lin Muqing with a complicated expression, and slowly answered. She had asked two questions, and he answered them one by one, very reasonably.
“Uh…”
Lin Muqing froze after hearing that. Her fists, which had just tensed up, instantly relaxed.
“Ahaha… so, um, that room is for me, huh?”
How embarrassing. What had just come over her? Why did she get into such a strange mood?
She scratched the back of her head, her lips twitching awkwardly from the embarrassment, and didn’t know what to do next.