I Will Never Submit to Miss Grim Reaper - Chapter 13
This time, I brought back a nearly new full-length mirror, a brand-new dressing table, and an electric oven with an instruction manual and warranty card from the rental house. The tenant from unit 602 clearly just bought this oven a few months ago and rushed to move out. The full-length mirror can be used with a simple wipe of the mirror surface, the dressing table may not be needed for a big brother like me temporarily, and the oven is a bit small, but it’s completely sufficient for baking single servings of food.
Looking at the electric oven on the kitchen stove and the full-length mirror in the corner of the living room, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of joy that surpasses the excitement of successfully enhancing the main weapon in a game with a 5% success rate and the risk of weapon destruction. The pleasure of “earning” today is even greater.
This kind of “gained” joy is even more exciting than the thrill of enhancing the main weapon in a game, where success has a 5% chance and failure results in weapon damage, and then experiencing the exhilaration of successful enhancement.
Seeing the electric oven on the kitchen stove and the full-length mirror in the corner of the living room, I took a glance at the cute little girl in the mirror, and the frustration of turning into a little loli this morning had unknowingly disappeared by half.
Well… from a certain perspective, being able to see a cute loli in the mirror when you’re unhappy is a kind of consolation.
“What’s this? A cat climbing frame? They don’t want this either?” Going downstairs again, perhaps because the girl and her boyfriend sent a message in the group, there were quite a few people gathered in the lobby on the first floor at this time. It’s obvious that most of them took a day off today and didn’t have to go to work. Many of them were dressed in pajamas or slippers, picking and choosing among the remaining household items.
“Oh, it’s perfect. I needed an electric kettle at home. Nice, nice.”
“Does anyone want a bicycle pump? If no one wants it, I’ll take it.”
“You take it. I want this cabinet.”
As I passed by these people, I couldn’t help but stifle a chuckle.
I don’t know if this personality trait qualifies as “sly,” but in moments of complete relaxation, I genuinely enjoy scenes like this. For example, right now, I’ve brought back valuable and useful items early and am watching my neighbors arrive late and argue over seemingly insignificant props.
Or on rainy days, I like to sit by the bed or on the balcony, listening to music on my phone while watching pedestrians below struggle in the pouring rain, venting their frustration due to the inconvenience caused by the heavy rain.
The harder it rains and the more people there are, the better.
Of course, most of the time, I’m late to the party, picking up what others have left behind, or getting soaked like a drowned rat in the pouring rain outside. However, this doesn’t prevent me from enjoying this sense of satisfaction when my identity changes.
Moving the heavy dressing table upstairs just now left my hands sore and my calf muscles aching. A little girl’s body really doesn’t have much strength. It took me a good ten minutes to move that large table from the first floor to the third floor, and I had to stop and rest for a while midway.
Furthermore, due to the consecutive physical activities, a vague feeling of hunger began to creep into my stomach. It looks like I’ll be cooking dinner as soon as I get back home.
With that in mind, I exited the apartment and headed straight to the nearby pedestrian crossing, waiting for a red light to change to green so I could cross the road. The closest supermarket had been checked using a food delivery app around noon, so I decided to go to a larger supermarket for the remaining household items.
About a kilometer away from my Apartment is a bustling commercial street. To get there, you have to cross the road and pass through a small urban village. Under normal circumstances, it takes about ten minutes to bike there, but since I can’t ride a bike and have turned into such a small girl, I estimated it would take me about twenty minutes to walk there.
At the end of the commercial street is a super-sized supermarket, one of the largest in the area. It has a wide range of products, including a fresh produce section that covers all the surrounding categories. It’s one of my favorite places to go, aside from the nearby food market.
One of the benefits of shopping at a supermarket is that you don’t have to deal with the chatty vendors, and you can buy what you want without much communication. The quality of vegetables and meat is guaranteed, but the prices are a bit higher.
When you buy fish at a food market, you have to communicate with the vendor about which fish you want, whether you want it gutted or filleted, and so on. If you’re buying meat or ribs, you need to indicate how much you want, whether it needs to be chopped, and so on. At vegetable stands, there’s a lot of haggling and chatter from the sellers, and when they encounter someone like me, a little girl, they might make comments like, “So well-behaved” or “Are you helping your mom shop?” and so on.
The supermarket doesn’t involve all that fuss. Fish, meat, ribs, chicken breasts, and beef are all pre-cut and packed in boxes, stored in low-temperature freezers. Vegetables are neatly arranged in bunches. You bring a small cart, pick what you want, toss it into your cart, and then find a nearby staff member to weigh it. You don’t need to say a word throughout the process. It’s a social anxiety sufferer’s dream.
In the supermarkets on our side of the pedestrian street, there are even these “foolproof” vegetable combinations. They pack neatly cut and cleaned ingredients and seasonings in a box. For example, sweet potato leaves come as tender leaves, already peeled, with a small box of dried chili peppers, pickled bamboo shoots, and a teaspoon of salt. You buy it, stir-fry it when you get home, and you have a delicious dish.
Here, they also have pre-cut spare rib and winter melon soup, chicken and mushroom soup, and sour plum pork trotter soup. You don’t need to talk to a cashier or weigh them; the prices are already set. You just bring it home, heat it with water when it’s time, and you have a big pot of delicious soup.
Of course, I don’t have such severe social anxiety. I can still have simple interactions with the vegetable vendors. I came to the supermarket to replenish the underwear because of the transformation and to purchase some useful household items.
For example, slightly better shampoo and shower gel.
Back when I was a man, I had little interest in these things. I’d use cheap soap or sulfur soap for bathing, one piece could last a month. When it came to shampoo, I’d just scan the store shelves at the grocery store and pick whichever was cheapest.
But aside from that, I honestly can’t imagine that my current delicate body can tolerate low-quality sulfur soap. The same goes for shampoo, with this long hair down to my waist, I don’t think it’s something that can be dealt with by cheap shampoo.
Although I’m quite frustrated with being turned into a girl, it doesn’t mean I’ll give in to despair and mistreat my new body. That’s not my personality. Since the die is cast, I’ll strive to make the best of each day.
“What happened here?”
“A guy in his early twenties, it seems like he had a sudden heart attack or something, tsk tsk…”
I spent a fair amount of time in this area during my college internship. While it’s true that the neighborhood is often associated with dirt and chaos, old buildings, and poor sanitation – with garbage and discarded vegetables littering the streets, and large rats running around at night – it’s also known for having very affordable rent. Ground floor rooms, where you might be living with rats, can be as low as 300 yuan per month. Slightly better rooms on the third or fifth floor are around 500 yuan, with cheap utilities.
Unlike my memories of bustling urban villages, I saw an ambulance this time in my area. Several nurses were carrying a stretcher, transporting a young man whose face was already covered with a white cloth from one of the self-built houses. A crowd of onlookers gathered nearby. Most people didn’t speak, they just quietly watched. Only a few young folks whispered to each other:
“Did he pass away?”
“Yeah, his neighbor said he loved staying up late, playing games every night, and had to go to work at 5:30 in the morning. And then…”
“Sigh…”
Then, at a distance of less than 10 meters from the ambulance, I saw a “Girl” who followed the nurses down from the building. She should be the Miss Grim Reaper, right? She was completely different from when I saw her earlier. Her face and body were shrouded in thick black mist, but I could still barely recognize that she was the one who turned me into a girl this morning. A young man was with the Grim Reaper, and both of their bodies were semi-transparent. The people around them seemed completely unaware of these two semi-transparent figures as their attention remained focused on the nurses and the stretcher.
“Let’s go,” the Grim Reaper said, her voice gender-neutral.
“Yeah,” the young man glanced at the body being carried into the ambulance, then followed behind the Grim Reaper.
The Miss Grim Reaper used her scythe to cut open a black crack in front of her, and with the young man, they walked into it. A few seconds later, the crack disappeared, and the two of them vanished into the crowd.