Slime Evolution

Chapter 165: 165 - Pieces Falling Into Place

As she left the classroom and walked toward room H301, Lohan couldn’t stop thinking about that possibility.

Despite the slight difference in their voices, the way they acted when Lisa was in her ”cold and calculating” mode, especially shortly after they met, when Lisa still seemed to be analyzing and trying to understand him, was very similar!

The fox’s golden eyes, despite clearly having no connection to Isabella Vance’s golden eyes, still looked exactly the same! The way those eyes looked at him, despite the cold, almost murderous expression, gave Lohan the same feeling as the slightly tsundere, angry fox he knew from Elysium.

And the more he thought about it, the more the pieces fell into place...

Lohan stopped in the middle of the college hallway, ignoring the stream of students around him, and pulled out his phone with the cracked screen.

He opened the Syn app and searched for the file Lisa had sent him days ago: the doctor’s note that had allowed him to skip classes to focus on grinding in Elysium.

As he zoomed in on the digital seal of authenticity, Lohan’s heart skipped a beat.

At the top of the document, in elegant, understated lettering, was the logo of Eden-3 Central Hospital.

Now, focused on analyzing every detail of it, he remembered a detail that had previously seemed irrelevant: the Vance Group was the owner and operator of the Federation’s most advanced hospitals, and Eden-3 was one of the most sought-after paradisiacal planets among the wealthy, a planet that ”coincidentally” was owned by Vance!

The only explanation for Lisa being able to get something like that for him was that Lisa didn’t just have ”scary connections”, she had direct access to the infrastructure of the most powerful family on the planet.

The pieces began to fall into place in his mind, frighteningly so.

He remembered that, on the day he returned from his medical leave, the students couldn’t stop talking about how excited they were that Isabella had finally returned to college... At the time, no one mentioned that besides Isabella, another student had also been absent, but now it seemed obvious that they were connected on Elysium at that very moment.

Lohan also recalled the sparkle in Isabella’s golden eyes when he was exchanging messages with Lisa on the Syn app, as she looked at the hologram and smiled. Those smiles appeared exactly in the milliseconds when he sent the provocative messages to Lisa. He even noticed that she flushed with anger shortly after, the same shade of tsundere fury that the fox exuded in the game.

Lisa knew details about the Open World, about how guilds operated, and about the death penalties, knowledge accessible only to those with high-level corporate intelligence, information that only people from corporate groups at a level close to the Vance Group could possess.

Lohan felt a chill run down his spine when he realized that the girl he treated as a ”normal companion” in Elysium, and whom he even dared to tease with jokes, was, in fact, the Chief Heiress of the Vance Group.

’Shit... it’s not just a coincidence.’ He thought, shocked, feeling Mana circulate restlessly through his chest, just as it did when he transformed into a Slime to try to calm down.

’If Isabella managed to get a fake medical certificate from a Vance hospital for me, that meant she already knew who I was in the real world. She heard the teacher call me by my full name, Lohan Hayes, and linked that to my ID, Hayes, on Syn...’

Lohan put his phone away, feeling the weight of that revelation.

He was gambling, splitting profits, and even ”riding” on the back of the person who could, with a single command, erase his existence from this world.

However, what shocked him most wasn’t her power, but the fact that, even though she was Isabella Vance, she chose to treat him as an equal, never demanding subservience or flaunting her fortune, or even trying to change the way he acted based on her last name.

’And the most surprising thing... if she already knew my identity in the real world, she’d been pretending not to know me all this time for some reason... why? Maybe to protect me? Maybe so as not to overwhelm me? Maybe out of... shame?’

Thinking about that last reason, knowing that troublemaking fox from Elysium, Lohan felt more and more that this might be the option closest to reality.

Even though he knew Lisa was Isabella, instead of letting the image of Isabella Vance overlap with the image of Lisa, what was actually happening in his mind was the opposite.

Although he had been studying with Isabella Vance for a few months, the person he had truly known the longest was Lisa, the fox from Elysium.

Isabella was just a rich, popular girl he saw every day, but he’d never interacted with her or even had the courage to look at her for more than a few seconds. Lisa, on the other hand, was his only friend in this new world, and in fact, perhaps the best friend he’d ever had in both of his lives!

Lisa was a funny, cute fox with a fiery yet cool temperament, but she knew how to listen to others’ opinions and how to have fun, a girl who was hard to make laugh, but when he managed to make her laugh, the satisfaction he felt was incredible...

Thinking about the Lisa he knew, the Lisa he felt was sincere all the time, the fear he felt toward Isabella Vance diminished to the point of becoming nonexistent.

Sure, he wouldn’t be foolish enough to go up to Isabella and ask brazenly: ”Hello Isabella, are you Lisa, the fox I hug every day and touch every inch of her body?”

A much safer way to do this would be to try to get that confirmation through Lisa in Elysium, since even if he was wrong, Lisa wouldn’t get angry enough to make him disappear from the world.

Resuming his walk, Lohan followed the group of students to room H301, and noticed a focused gaze on him from someone standing at the classroom door.

The boy with the Rare Base from the Lower Zone was staring at him with a confident smile the whole time, and when Lohan looked at him, the boy waved his hands and signaled to Lohan that he wanted to talk to him after class.

Seeing the way that boy was acting, Lohan was surprised, but nodded nonchalantly.

It would be good if he could invite this boy to Astralis Requiem, so he’d at least have one person under him in the guild and wouldn’t have to rely solely on Lisa for that.

With Lohan’s nod, the boy was satisfied and entered the classroom; Lohan followed shortly after, and his gaze quickly scanned the room for Isabella.