Transmigrating Into a Book, the Villain Becomes the White Moonlight!

90: Chapter 9: Who’s abroad?Just like the perfectly measured ”unfamiliarity” Mu Xue was displaying right now, an invisible wall of ice seemed to stand between the two of them, each on their own side, maintaining a tacit distance.

Though it wasn’t clear exactly what they were competing over, they both coincided in executing this deliberately created estrangement.

At the dinner table, Fatty was the absolute life of the party, cracking jokes and delivering witty remarks. He quickly dispelled the slight awkwardness of meeting for the first time, and the private room soon filled with rising steam and constant laughter.

The topics ranged far and wide, gradually shifting from polite small talk to more personal territory.

Su Bai, unsurprisingly, became the first target of focused attention.

“If you ask me, those places abroad sound all high-end and fancy, but once you’ve stayed for a while, it’s just the same old thing. The food doesn’t suit your stomach, the people are hard to get along with—it’s boring,” Fatty declared with a wave of his hand, making a concluding statement before naturally steering the conversation toward Su Bai.

“Case in point, we have someone right here who just returned from advanced studies abroad. Fresh out of the oven, the real deal!”

Su Bai was picking up a piece of fatty beef that had been scalded to perfection, slowly swirling it in a small bowl filled with fragrant sesame sauce. Hearing this, he merely lifted his eyelids.

A round-faced girl sitting diagonally opposite him immediately turned her head, her eyes lighting up as she asked curiously, “Really? So you just reported to school today? That feels so magical, like a transfer student!”

“Pretty much. I just finished getting the paperwork sorted,” Su Bai said, putting the sauce-covered meat into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed before giving The girl a casual smile.

“Then why did you insist on running off to another country back then?” a soft, inquisitive voice rang out. It was Mu Xue.

She rested her chin on one hand, her gaze falling on the bubbling red oil in the hotpot, as if she were just mentioning it in passing. “Who was there abroad?”

This question, asked in a joking tone yet subtly pointing toward private matters, immediately caught the attention of the other girls at the table. Several curious gazes shot toward Su Bai in unison.

Su Bai’s hand holding the chopsticks paused for a moment before returning to its natural state.

He looked up, his eyes calmly meeting Mu Xue’s seemingly casual gaze. “No one was waiting. It was arranged by my family—go out to study for a bit, and once finished, the timing was just right to come back and continue university. It’s just a cycle.”

The answer was airtight, attributing everything to family arrangements and the process of life, completely erasing personal will and emotional factors.

But in his heart, a faint sneer flickered: Is she trying to test me?

To this day, Su Bai still believed that breaking things off cleanly and decisively with Mu Xue back then was the right choice.

He detested trouble, and he detested unnecessary emotional entanglement even more.

If they hadn’t broken up, he might not have been able to stop himself from wondering if someone else had appeared by Mu Xue’s side during these two years, if they had... the thought stopped there.

Su Bai lowered his eyelashes, hiding the last ripple of emotion in his eyes, and put the last bit of meat on his chopsticks into his mouth.

It was better for both of them to act as if they had never known each other and maintain the safest distance.

She would play her role as a stranger and fellow student, and he would be the returning freshman. The plot was simple, saving both time and effort.

“Look at his ease and confidence. He’s clearly a veteran of the dating scene; he must have had plenty of girlfriends,” a short-haired girl said with a smirk, teasing Su Bai half-seriously.

Su Bai seemed to suddenly figure something out, and the faint layer of aloofness on him faded slightly. He picked up his glass and gave it a swirl, a bit of a cynical smile appearing on his face as he replied, “You’re joking. I’m very pure, okay? Don’t slander my innocence.”

“Ehhh—!” Several girls immediately started heckling. Another girl wearing glasses pointed at him with a laugh. “A truly pure man wouldn’t go around bragging about his own purity! This is what you call ’the more one tries to hide, the more one is exposed’!”

“Come on, come on, drink up! If the feelings are deep, down it in one! Why bother with all that useless talk!” Seeing the topic sliding toward a potentially explosive direction, Fatty interrupted loudly. He raised his glass, skillfully acting as the atmosphere regulator and master of topic diversion.

At a time like this, any dangerous sparks had to be snuffed out in the bud.

The group laughed in agreement and raised their glasses one after another.

Mu Xue also picked up her overflowing beer glass. Amidst the crisp sound of clinking glasses, she tilted her head back, her throat line moving slightly as she drained the entire glass of beer at a steady pace. Her movements were smooth, showing not the slightest bit of strain.

It was clear that her tolerance was not low; she might even... be used to it.

The meal continued, noisy and lively.

Between Su Bai and Mu Xue, they occasionally exchanged a word or two because of a shared topic or a question from someone else. The content was nothing more than the safest, most trivial exchanges: how many seconds this tripe should be boiled for, which school cafeteria was decent, or what new movies had come out recently.

Their tones were calm and their wording polite, perfectly fitting the social norms of people who had just met and weren’t yet familiar but were willing to remain strangers.

Like two skilled actors improvising a scene of a first meeting, the lines were random, but they never crossed the line.

After three rounds of drinks, the faces of Fatty, Zhou Feng, and the other two boys were visibly flushed, and their voices had risen significantly in pitch.

Su Bai, however, remained as usual, his eyes clear and his posture barely changed—the Immortal Kidney Body granted by the system was practically a cheat code in this situation. To him, alcohol was no different from plain water.

What surprised him slightly was that he didn’t seem to be the only one staying sober at the table.

Mu Xue had put down her chopsticks at some point, and the plate in front of her was clean.

She can really drink?

Her arms were lightly crossed over her chest as she leaned back slightly. Her gaze rested unfocused on the hotpot in the center of the round table, which was still bubbling with red oil and steam, her expression somewhat blank.

“Who says I can’t drink? Huh? My brother can drink!”

Fatty had clearly entered the post-drinking excitement phase. He had his arm around the shoulder of The girl next to him, who also had blurry eyes from drinking, as he bragged with a slurred tongue, “I brought him here today specifically... *hic*... specifically to deal with you guys, you know? A strategic weapon!”

“Oh my, we’re so scared!” That girl giggled, her whole body almost going limp against Fatty, but her finger pointed at Su Bai. “Your brother looks... quite handsome, but you can’t tell if he can drink just by looking.”

“You don’t believe me?” Fatty’s eyes widened, and he slapped the table hard, pointing at Su Bai. “Look at him! Look at how he looks! Is he okay? He’s perfectly fine! I’m telling you, he can keep drinking! Even if all of you... all of you combined took turns on him, it wouldn’t work!”

He got more excited as he spoke.

“Are you kidding me? Who are you looking down on?” The girl Fatty was holding wasn’t having it either. Her drunken eyes scanned the room for an ally, and when she saw Mu Xue sitting quietly to the side, she immediately felt like she’d found her trump card. She reached out and slapped Mu Xue’s arm hard. “We have someone who can drink here too, okay! Mu Xue! Go!”

She pointed her finger directly at the composed Su Bai opposite them and gave a loud command: “You, go! Drink him under the table for me!”

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