As soon as those words landed, Yan Luqing’s attention instantly shifted from the princess’ crystal crown back to Gu Ci.

She looked into his pitch-black, profound eyes. The two of them stared at each other for a few seconds. Afraid that she had just been distracted and misheard, Yan Luqing asked in confusion: “What did you just say…?”

“I said,” Gu Ci’s lashes lowered slightly, his voice even softer, “you’re so good at calculating, then calculate who I married, how about it?”

“???”

Truly baffling—why did Gu Ci always have this kind of magical ability to forcibly twist the situation around? The things she did, the words she said, all meant to render him speechless—he could always take the chance to change the ending, bouncing the speechlessness back onto her.

Yan Luqing’s eyes widened, her mouth opened, her expression could almost be described as dumbstruck: “This—no, this kind of thing, how could it possibly be calculated by fortune-telling???”

Besides, she was only making things up anyway!

“This is not scientific,” Yan Luqing hastily explained. “Look, even in wuxia novels, those fortune-tellers can only assert things like the protagonist won’t live past a certain age. But who could possibly calculate who the protagonist’s wife will be? They can’t, right?”

“This isn’t scientific?” Gu Ci smiled. “Then is fortune-telling scientific?”

“……” At this moment Yan Luqing practically wished a dialogue box could appear above her head, so that Gu Ci could see it. On it would be written: Can you stop roasting me already? With a cute emoticon added: qaq.

“Not scientific. Can’t be calculated.” Yan Luqing said, her tone laced with concealed grief.

The head of the household has a clumsy mouth, the head of the household admits defeat.

“Can’t be calculated…” Hearing this answer, he even sighed as if regretful, his lashes blinking, acting with great realism. “I thought you were very capable, really could calculate it, that’s why I asked.”

Yan Luqing clearly had many words of ridicule on the tip of her tongue, but when she heard Gu Ci say “I thought you really could calculate it,” she suddenly felt a little sad.

Strictly speaking, although her fortune-telling skills were no better than a layman who hadn’t studied at all, she did know Gu Ci’s “fate.” She had read the book, and she had seen Gu Ci’s ending.

She didn’t need to calculate to know his life.

In his past life, he did not live a long life.

He had much money, but was terribly lonely.

He never married at all, not even having someone he liked.

Gu Ci saw that the person in front of him seemed stunned by his question, her eyes fixed on him, full of sorrow.

……

Did she truly not know, or was she pretending not to? Her emotions were in fact extremely easy to see through.

Every time they were alone together, in Gu Ci’s eyes, Yan Luqing’s emotions were almost completely transparent, as if there were a sign above her head, constantly displaying her thoughts at that very moment.

Although, when facing outsiders, she was much better.

Just as he was about to speak to break this direct gaze, Yan Luqing suddenly opened her mouth, her eyes refocusing, seriously asking him a question:

“Gu Ci, do you really want to know?”

Gu Ci withdrew the expression he had just been feigning, and said lightly: “Know what?”

“That is… that is the question you just asked—the one where you wanted me to calculate who you would end up marrying. Do you really want to know?” Yan Luqing’s eyes lit up. “Or… is the reason you’re so fixated on this question because you already have a candidate in your heart? Can you tell me?”

After Yan Luqing finished the first half of her sentence, Gu Ci’s face was expressionless. After the latter half, he seemed not to have expected her train of thought to bend in that direction, and for a moment he was stunned.

So he wasn’t able to answer immediately.

And because of Gu Ci’s silence, the atmosphere between the two of them inexplicably became a little strange… as if ambiguous, yet as if confrontational.

Yan Luqing stared wide-eyed as she watched the person in front of her—above his head, a dialogue box gradually took shape. Though that dialogue box shone brightly, dazzlingly beautiful, it still could not overshadow his features. On the contrary, it only served to make him look even better.

Then, within the crystal crown dialogue box, as if typed out by hand, a line of punctuation marks slowly appeared.

——……

Although she had been momentarily stunned earlier, the princess immediately recovered.

He lowered his eyes to look at her, his expression seeming gentle, yet his voice was actually indifferent: “I must remind you, at the beginning I was reading a book.”

Gu Ci: “It was you who wanted to come give me a fortune-telling. After you finished, I asked a follow-up detail, and you couldn’t answer.”

“……” Indeed.

Yan Luqing was struck speechless.

“Now it’s turned into me being fixated on this question, why is that,” Gu Ci paused. The words before carried a teasing tone, yet the last two syllables were inexplicably lightened, “best friend?”

As if whispered right at her ear.

…How could anyone call the two syllables “best friend” with such profound meaning???

Yan Luqing, hearing him call her “best friend,” inexplicably lost her composure—her heartbeat quickened, her face instantly heating. At this very moment, she only wanted to leave quickly, to escape from this room, this city.

“If you don’t want to know then forget it… haha,” Yan Luqing forced a laugh as she stood up, saying to him, “Wait until my technique improves a bit more, then I’ll tell you the answer, okay.”

She then quickly pointed at the incomparably thick book lying on the nearby table, still awkwardly laughing: “Then you continue reading, I’ll leave first.”

And without turning back, she exited Gu Ci’s room.

Looking outside, she saw the dialogue boxes still popping up above people’s heads, showing their inner dramas. The scene was no different from before she had stepped through his door, and Yan Luqing suddenly felt a trace of disorientation.

Why had she gone in? She had gone to change Miraculous Cici’s outfit.

Why had she left? Because she had embarrassed herself with a series of contradictory actions.

Fortunately, she was always the head of the household, free to come and go as she pleased.

If it had been the other way around, wouldn’t she have been toyed to death?

The head of a household, deeply troubled, slowly went upstairs, collapsed onto her bed, and began reflecting on life.

Fortunately, though the Yan-named head of household could never outmatch her cobra-like spouse, in terms of self-consolation ability in small matters, she could be considered world-class.

From another angle, at least it wasn’t a total loss—today had yielded great harvest.

——She had, without his knowing, managed to put a beautiful crystal crown on his head, and admired it to her heart’s content. So no matter how clever and sharp his retorts, this round was still the head of household’s victory.

Yan Luqing’s butt had been sore the past two days, so aside from lying on her side, she spent her time sprawled out playing on her phone. Taking this chance, she replenished herself with a huge pile of hypnotism knowledge from that old grandpa. After each lesson, still unsatisfied, she would seek out depictions of hypnotism in film and television—watching them was truly exhilarating.

But she still didn’t dare make a move on Gu Ci; she still wanted to find a real person to practice on.

When she voiced this request, the white-haired old grandpa showed a trace of puzzlement on his face: “Little girl, don’t you have friends? Find your friends, tell them what kind of mindset they need to have, and then let you try once, that would do.”

Yan Luqing: “……” No friends—indeed no friends.

If she were to look for someone, it wasn’t that she couldn’t, but she could already imagine what kind of reaction the people she found with her current identity would have.

If she went to Little Black and said she wanted to hypnotize him, please cooperate with her practice, Little Black would definitely perform it vividly and unmistakably. What she wanted to achieve was a Q&A mode, but Little Black might even snatch an answer while in a hypnotic state.

The best subject for hypnosis was someone not too familiar, but if the famously renowned “Yan family’s lunatic” went to an unfamiliar person and said: hey, let me hypnotize you.

That person would probably be so frightened they’d perform a Thomas full-spin 360-degree backflip on the spot.

In short, having expressed her difficulty, Yan Luqing received the second offline meeting notice from the old grandpa not even two days later, and this time the practice subject was still the same senior brother as before.

Unfortunately, the new golden finger couldn’t be used—because the time limit was only two hours a day, and before she received the old grandpa’s notice, Yan Luqing had already used it up.

Having found new fun, of course she wanted to play every day—Miraculous Cici wasn’t just empty words.

Yan Luqing first, in her room, changed the dialogue box’s skin with Makka Pakka. This time, unlike the pure white beauty of before, it was in a black swan style: the lower right corner of the dialogue box was a great billowing hem of gauze, the upper left corner was a crown made of swan feathers. It looked truly elegant.

Then she ran downstairs and sat on the sofa together with Gu Ci—he watched television, she pestered him. The so-called “pestering” was Yan Luqing racking her brains to find all kinds of ways to make dialogue boxes appear above his head, to make him show emotions.

After she’d had her fill of looking at the black swan, she pretended to go to the toilet, and in the toilet changed with Makka Pakka into the white swan effect, then ran back to the sofa and continued with the same measures as before.

After pestering Gu Ci to the end, he no longer even watched television. Wearing the lofty swan coronet, he turned to face her, his seriousness in expression lethally powerful. He asked:

“Best Friend, the place you hurt when you fell—was it really your butt?”