In the evening, Lin Nan ordered takeout for the first time in a while.
Except for the period right after school started, he usually went to the cafeteria alone to eat. Now that his face and figure were becoming increasingly feminine, he'd draw attention walking on the road. Combined with the psychological shadow from yesterday's dream, Lin Nan decided to order takeout to comfort his fragile little heart. His three roommates had run off to some other dorm to hang out, leaving him alone in the entire room.
He got along decently with the neighboring dorm, but not to the point of frequently visiting each other, and he'd never been to any other dorms.
Yawning as he sat in front of his computer, Lin Nan felt very bored.
When studying, he wanted vacation; when on vacation, he wanted to study—that probably described him perfectly.
He watched gaming livestreams with nothing to do while checking his phone for his takeout order. Probably because it was mealtime, the delivery was already nearly an hour overdue.
Just as he was about to urge the order along, someone knocked on the dorm door.
Lin Nan excitedly got up and ran over, opened the door, and reached out to take the takeout, but suddenly saw the hand holding the food pull back.
He looked up in confusion, only to see the delivery guy seriously asking him: "Mr. Lin?"
Lin Nan nodded and reached out again.
"Mr. Lin?" The delivery guy looked carefully at Lin Nan's face and asked again.
"Mm." Lin Nan was bewildered.
"Mr. Lin?" The delivery guy persistently asked once more.
"That's me..."
Lin Nan thought this delivery guy might have some mental issues. Only after asking three times in a row did the delivery guy finally place the food in Lin Nan's hands.
He closed the door with a confused expression and returned to his seat, suddenly realizing he might have feminized to the point where even young people found his gender ambiguous.
Before this, he'd only been mistaken for a girl by the dorm supervisor downstairs, and that time was due to his posture being influenced by Lilith.
Maybe this guy was just being particularly responsible?
Lin Nan had ordered from off-campus this time, delivered by the platform, so if the delivery person got the wrong order and received a complaint, they'd have to pay compensation—maybe that's why he was being so cautious?
He found it both amusing and exasperating. He'd been mistaken for someone else before, but this was the first time encountering this type of situation. So he excitedly used his phone to describe what had just happened to Chen Yao.
But Chen Yao was probably having a blast in some dorm and had no time to deal with him, so Lin Nan put the incident out of mind.
The dorm had been thoroughly cleaned the day before National Day, and Lin Nan had maintained it pretty well during this time. But after all the roommates gathered, in just half a day, the floor was already covered with sunflower seed shells that Tu Junhui had spat out.
This guy was too lazy to even buy a trash can, usually sharing one with Xiong Da. When cracking seeds, he didn't even put a bag in the trash can, resulting in shells scattered everywhere.
Although Lin Nan found it unsightly, he didn't clean it up—after all, he wasn't Tu Junhui's father.
While he was grumbling internally, Chen Yao and his group pushed open the dorm door, walking in with laughter and conversation.
"Pan Hui's little braid is really sao. Wonder how long he's been growing his hair." (TN: Roughly means coquettish.)
"Premium version of Liu Huan," Xiong Da complained from the side. "Usually didn't notice him, but his hair's gotten so long."
Tu Junhui walked excitedly at the front, teasing Lin Nan: "When will your hair be long enough to tie up? Let's get a premium Liu Huan for our dorm too."
Lin Nan rolled his eyes at him: "I'm not that fat."
The Pan Hui they mentioned was another invisible person in their class, a chubby guy who was usually quiet. When occasionally seeing him, they had indeed noticed he'd grown his hair long, but they hadn't expected this group of roommates to have such high acceptance of men with long hair?
"Don't give me flirtatious looks. If you keep it up, I'll wash myself clean and climb into your bed tonight." Tu Junhui dramatically covered his chest with both hands.
Lin Nan knew that the more he retreated at times like this, the more he'd be teased, so he shot back unceremoniously: "Come on then! If you don't come, you're a dog! Tonight I'll do you until you submit!"
"Oh my, so scary!"
At this point Chen Yao walked over to Lin Nan's side and interjected: "Joking aside, you should trim your hair a bit, or people will really think our dorm is hiding a girl."
He continued, lowering his voice and leaning close to Lin Nan's ear: "If you want to keep it long, I think you should wait until after the surgery and changing your identity."
Although Lin Nan knew Chen Yao meant well—after all, his current appearance was feminine, his behavior was feminine, but his social identity was still male. If he grew long hair, who knows what kind of criticism he might face in class.
After thinking for a moment, Lin Nan felt he made sense.
However, barbershops near the school all started at thirty yuan, and for some reason he felt resistant to getting haircuts—perhaps this was also Lilith's influence.
So he nodded without hesitation: "We'll see. If it looks ugly when grown out, I'll cut it off."
"It definitely won't look ugly when grown out, it'll just look like a woman." Tu Junhui suddenly mocked. "When others grow their hair it's an artistic style, when you grow yours it's gender-ambiguous."
"I still haven't figured out how, even though last semester you were short, ugly, and had lots of pimples, you weren't this feminine." Tu Junhui was completely puzzled.
Lin Nan couldn't be bothered with him. Even if last semester he'd indeed been a proper person, Tu Junhui had often teased him then too—it's just that the target of mockery had changed from height to gender. He was already used to it.
With everyone gathered in the dorm, Chen Yao called Dong An online, and their five-man team started up once again.
They'd be competing in mid-October. Although it would only be preliminary qualifiers, and their average rank compared to other school teams put them in the top three, they still needed to prepare actively.
After all, this was about a thousand yuan and championship skins.
"So which team is strongest in this competition?" Lin Nan asked Chen Yao curiously as they entered champion select.
"Looking at the participating teams, it should be the Economics and Management Department, Computer Science Department, and a Foreign Languages Department team that are pretty strong. The strongest player is a Challenger in Ionia server, supposedly also Master tier in the main server." Chen Yao casually picked up a participant list to check. "Supposedly this person played semi-professionally, later got second place in nationals but didn't make it into LSPL, so he joined the army. After retiring from military service, he came to study at our school. They say he was teammates with mlxg, though who knows if that's true." (TN: Challenger is the highest rank made of the top 200 people reaching a certain elo. Master is a few steps below, but still consists of the top 1%. LSPL means League’s Secondary Pro League. And I’ve talked about mlxg before, so I’ll spare myself the words.)
This was the first time Lin Nan heard that their school actually had players better than him and Chen Yao.
"No problem, I'll crush mlxg in the jungle!" Lin Nan said confidently. "Last time he ran into me, I beat him down the entire game."
This was something Lin Nan could brag about for years—after all, that was a championship jungler, quite impressive to mention.
"Problem is, you're support."
Lin Nan deflated.