Idol Image Burden

Before you actually date someone, you often look forward to it. But once you actually try it, the experience can be all kinds of weird.

It might be great, or it might be a total disaster. This kind of thing depends entirely on the individual; there are no fixed rules.

Chu Mingzhe was very envious of Su Bai. His relationship with his girlfriend... no, his relationships with his female confidantes felt incredibly smooth. Those girls didn't disrupt Su Bai's rhythm of life at all; they were very well-behaved.

He didn't extravagantly hope to meet such great girls, but at the very least, they should be normal people!

Sigh, dating is so hard. I feel like I need to meet some normal girls to balance things out. These toxic girls really have extreme views; we can't talk about anything refined at all!

Chu Mingzhe complained like this.

Wang Haoran's expression looked a bit like a sweating emoji. The Shanghai bro's theory was fine, though. People really should interact with normal girls. After all, there are quite a few abnormal girls nowadays, and getting tangled up in their unreasonable drama is completely meaningless...

The so-called maturity of adults is all about filtering, not cultivating.

Cultivating someone's character is their parents' job. College students just want to date; where would they get all that responsibility?

The problem was, normal people probably didn't want to interact much with Chu Mingzhe either!

In the eyes of his classmates, Chu Mingzhe was a purebred Jiahao (show-off archetype), always acting pretentious in weird ways that left people scratching their heads.

As for Su Bai, he just smiled and said nothing. He figured the Shanghai bro was probably just depressed from studying too much late at night. After all, just last week, Chu Mingzhe had told him that although Leilei seemed a bit unsociable, her inner self was sharp and spiritual, and since he, Chu Mingzhe, was also a spiritual person, it was simply a match made in heaven!

The Shanghai bro's aesthetic preferences were all over the place, pure mysticism.

Diagnosed as a side effect of staying up late studying.

After the two clowns finished complaining, Wang Haoran asked Su Bai how he was going to handle the lab report.

Oh, that? Wan Xinyan wrote it for me.

As expected... wait, they even do the data processing for you?

Not to that extent. Data processing only takes a few minutes, so I still have to experience it a bit. Su Bai thought that since he was in college studying a proper STEM major, he should at least have some sense of participation. Doing the data was enough; the rest of the formalities could be left to his little maid.

Asking those two art-major twins to figure out data processing for Su Bai would be asking a bit too much anyway.

Sigh, that's so awesome. I wish someone would help me write these disgusting assignments, Wang Haoran gritted his teeth while furiously writing with his pen.

Some course instructors maintained very pedantic habits, like insisting that students handwrite their lab reports. This was indeed a bit out of touch with the times. After all, in this day and age, anyone who doesn't just hand in a pure AI-generated lab report is already putting in effort.

Handwriting was the most traditional of the traditionalist ways.

If you set aside the work of calculating a few data points, the rest was really something even an art student could learn. Who knows what the point of this kind of homework was; it was purely to torture students.

Why don't you get a girlfriend too, Haoran, so she can help you write your homework? Xue Tao suggested.

Huh? Wang Haoran froze. Does senior Liu Yuanyuan help you write your homework?

... Bro, why did you have to bring that up?

Xue Tao choked a bit.

To be honest, he felt that his relationship status with Liu Yuanyuan wasn't very optimistic. Recently, he noticed that Liu Yuanyuan was mingling in some weird clubs, chatting enthusiastically with senior students in the club, and even with older alumni who had long since graduated and entered society. This made Xue Tao feel that his authority was being challenged.

Let alone helping him write his homework, Liu Yuanyuan barely even bothered to reply to his messages.

He felt it might be because the relationship lacked novelty.

Su Bai, I have a friend... after passing the honeymoon phase with his girlfriend, their relationship has grown a bit cold. How do you think this situation should be handled scientifically? Xue Tao asked in a roundabout way.

Basically, his roundabout way was completely transparent.

Su Bai wasn't stupid; he could easily hear Xue Tao's little hidden thoughts.

So the local guy thought the problem between him and Liu Yuanyuan was that the honeymoon phase had passed...

Bro, it's only been a few months, right?

From Su Bai's perspective, these two had never actually been in love, so where would a honeymoon phase come from?

Liu Yuanyuan's choice of Xue Tao was purely because she saw he was willing to spend money on her.

After all, how should he put it? Useful simps aren't that easy to find these days.

As for how much Xue Tao actually liked Liu Yuanyuan, that was hard to say too. Su Bai felt that Xue Tao more so enjoyed the sense of superiority that came with having a girlfriend.

Some people are like that. They think failing to get into a relationship makes them a failure. That's just caring too much about other people's opinions.

It was still a legend like Wang Haoran who was more pure.

Actually, Su Bai had recently heard that a few girls from other majors had tried to get close to Wang Haoran.

One of them was even one of the cosplayers from the anime club.

The result was also very obvious. Wang Haoran merely maintained basic politeness toward them and wasn't charmed by any of the girls trying to approach him.

He was a pure sigma male.

Or perhaps he just found 3D women too boring. That was just how Wang Haoran was.

Su Bai thought this was a good thing. After all, he had been bringing his bro along to do business in the gaming industry. In the future, Wang Haoran would definitely stand out among his peers, and the probability of him being targeted by gold diggers wouldn't be low.

A hardcore otaku makes money for various reasons and then gets targeted by gold diggers—this storyline was quite common.

And the ending was usually quite tragic...

Now, suddenly discovering that his bro's resistance was incredibly high made Su Bai feel very relieved.

Women in reality couldn't drain Wang Haoran's gold coins, and as for 2D women... this kid purely grinded without spending real money. Besides, compared to bleeding money for women, paying for microtransactions was indeed much cheaper.

Has the honeymoon phase passed? I don't know either. After all, Shengsheng and I haven't passed that stage yet.

True, you guys have only been dating for a month or two. Sigh, I'm so jealous. If Liu Yuanyuan were a top student like Chen Yusheng, there probably wouldn't be so much annoying drama.

...Why a top student? Does this have anything to do with being a top student?

Haven't you noticed? Girls who love studying are generally more reasonable. Liu Yuanyuan can't even handle her own major courses. Every day, all she cares about is eating, drinking, playing, and what's happening in the entertainment industry, or otherwise she's online fighting in toxic arguments. It's so annoying.

Once he started complaining, Xue Tao was really getting into it.

In the past, Xue Tao wouldn't complain about these things to his roommates. After all, back then, he was the only one in the dorm who wasn't single. He thought he couldn't relate to those single dogs, and besides, talking about this stuff made it easy to expose his insecurities, so he simply didn't talk about it, creating an illusion that his relationship was incredibly sweet.

Now, since he had been completely outclassed by Su Bai anyway, he suddenly lost his idol baggage.