For half a semester, the kid behind her kept pulling her braid. Telling the teacher got her nothing but, "Can't you take a joke?" Her dad worked late delivering takeout, and the notes he left always secretly included an extra fifty yuan. Even when she brought a classmate who'd broken a bone a notebook of practice problems, she had to pretend she was just passing by, then quickly duck her head and shovel down her food. Su Xiaoxiao's seventeenth year was ordinary in a way that made her hide even her kindness. Then, during morning study, she knocked over her pencil case, and a mechanical voice exploded in her mind: [System No. 001 bound. Choose one of three ways to get back at the kid behind you.] Other people got bound to Systems and instantly became top students, face-slapped their enemies, and rose to the peak of life. Her System started with an affection rating of 1%, and its first comment was, "At least you know to pick the biggest option. You're not completely boring." She casually picked the craziest one: "Make the kid behind me's niece confess her love in front of everyone." The next second, a middle-school girl stood at the classroom's back door and shouted, "Uncle, I love you!" The whole class erupted. Only then did Su Xiaoxiao understand: every option the System offered had been tailor-made to account for the braids pulled and complaints brushed aside over the past six months. The System never gave her a golden finger, never made her the top student in her grade, and never helped her tear into a bitch. It just secretly memorized her speech patterns and learned to make terrible jokes. When she fried an egg for her dad after he was laid off, it stayed quiet and said only, "Okay." When she praised the transfer student for being considerate, it got so flustered its "calculations went haywire." And when she wrote "Just get through this week first" on the glass for a stranger, it quietly recorded in its log, "Human kindness isn't very efficient, but it's wonderful." Its affection rating rose from 1% to 4%. It unlocked no superpowers, only an unspoken conclusion: ["Caring"
