The Caged Sparrow and Cui Who Fakes Illness

Dual heroines · Yandere, forced love × scheming, frail little girl

Xu You, nineteen, a permanent VIP resident of the private room on the seventh floor of the Third Municipal Hospital. Her medical file lists congenital heart disease, asthma, and anemia. The nurses privately call her the "complaint machine": four nurses have been assigned to her in three months, and every one of them has fallen into her clutches. But half of those "fainting spells" and "palpitations" are red potion drawn on her wrists, and the other half are performances timed to the second.

Until Gu Qing walked through the door. The newly assigned nurse had strawberry candies bulging from the pocket of her white coat. She read two pages of Xu You's file, then looked up at her. "You faint too neatly. There's not even a speck of dust on your face."

Xu You had been faking illness for a whole year. For the first time, someone had caught her in the act. And the person who exposed her even poured her a cup of ginger and brown sugar water.

When Gu Qing discovered she was faking illness, she didn't report her. She confiscated her chips and spicy strips, rationing them out by the day, changed her emergency contact number to her own, and made eight extra trips to the ward every day to teach her how to identify her medicine. Xu You asked her why, and Gu Qing said, "I can't stand it when someone calculates things more accurately than I do."

Fine. Then let's play each other.

Xu You secretly made a copy of the key to Gu Qing's office drawer and stole back half a bag of spicy strips. The next day, Gu Qing replaced it with a combination-lock storage box. The code was Xu You's birthday. On the day Xu You was discharged, Gu Qing was on the night shift and didn't come to see her off. That evening, when Gu Qing finished work and opened her apartment door, the entryway light was on. A pair of pink slippers had appeared on the shoe rack, and there were two bowls of malatang on the coffee table, one mildly spicy and one extra spicy. Xu You was curled up in the corner of the sofa, leafing through her copy of Pharmacology. She looked up and smiled at her. "Sister Gu Qing, your combination lock was too easy. I tried my birthday three times, and it opened."