Rebirth to Save Myself

Looking at Chen Yuan, Su Xia couldn't help but think of her past life when she had only gotten into a very poor junior college and was living in a dormitory for the first time away from home. Her mother had accompanied her to university registration, bought her a bamboo mat, a bucket, and some other things, and then left. Seeing her mother leave, Su Xia felt a pang of reluctance and tears welled up in her eyes. It was also her first time away from home, and she had no idea what to prepare. It wasn't until after showering that evening that she realized she hadn't brought a hairdryer and had to borrow one from her roommate.

That evening, Su Xia, who rarely used air conditioning, had no idea it could get so cold. She covered herself with a thin sheet and caught a cold. Coupled with the change in environment, her cold wouldn't go away, and she lost her appetite. Her roommates wanted to go out for dinner, and Su Xia couldn't refuse, so she reluctantly went.

The food in the cafeteria was terrible, and she was sick and had no taste, so she posted on social media: "I can't eat but I still have to eat, this is really too much!"

What she meant was that she was sick and couldn't eat, but she knew that going hungry was bad for her recovery, so she was forcing herself to eat. However, her roommates misunderstood, thinking that Su Xia didn't want to eat with them but still insisted, so they thought Su Xia was a slut!

Earlier, Su Xia hadn't learned how to express herself tactfully, which caused her roommates to dislike her. In addition, when the school assigned dormitories, they would group students from the same major or even the same class together, so Su Xia basically went to and from school with her roommates and ate in the cafeteria together.

Because of a post that angered her roommate, Su Xia went to the dorm after dinner because her roommate said they were going to walk around the school. Feeling unwell, Su Xia went straight back. When her roommate returned, they brought several bottles of alcohol and snacks, planning to chat all night. Su Xia couldn't sleep because of the noise, and her roommate even said, "Come down and have a fight if you dare!"

Later, when Su Xia returned to the dormitory late at night, her roommates locked the door from the inside, preventing her from entering. Su Xia kicked and shoved the door, attracting the attention of people from neighboring dorms who came out to see what was going on, but her roommates remained silent inside. Su Xia went directly to the dormitory supervisor, and only after being threatened by the supervisor did her roommates open the door, saying in front of the supervisor, "We didn't hear your voice from inside."

It was all fake; they were just deliberately trying to intimidate Su Xia. If Su Xia hadn't gone to the dorm manager, they definitely wouldn't have opened the door so quickly. So Su Xia went to her class advisor to change dorms. She originally thought that changing dorms would mean meeting some amazing roommates, but instead, she found herself with a group of people who weren't much different from her current roommates.

Previously, the school required freshmen to get campus cards, which would be used to pay electricity bills and eat in the cafeteria; cash was not allowed. However, the initial card application required a fee of 100 yuan, and Su Xia's mother directly transferred her living expenses to her bank card. Worried that it was unsafe for her to carry so much cash, Su Xia borrowed money from her roommates, saying she would withdraw the money that evening and pay them back.

However, none of them were willing, stating that they needed their own cash, and since WeChat Pay and Alipay weren't very common at that time, and the teacher required them to hand it in by the afternoon, Su Xia had no choice but to go to the bank to withdraw the money herself after lunch. On the way, she ran into her classmate Chen Wen. If Su Xia had another chance, she would never have become close to her again.

Chen Wen, claiming he wasn't from the same province and didn't know many people, ended up transferring dorms with Su Xia, since they were both in the same class. They became roommates. However, Chen Wen wasn't focused on his studies, and since the other dorm members were rarely around, he had Su Xia do all the assignments, then simply modified the original documents and submitted them. The teachers weren't stupid; they could easily spot the identical work, so they declared, "If you're caught, you'll fail!"

Su Xia was afraid of failing her courses because it was a hassle—she would have to pay for extra lessons, attend classes, and submit assignments for both regular and final exams. So, Su Xia refused Chen Wen's request for her homework. Chen Wen felt Su Xia was being unfair; they were such good friends, yet Su Xia wouldn't help him. Su Xia believed in teaching him how to fish rather than giving him a fish, and tried to teach Chen Wen how to do his homework, but Chen Wen didn't take it seriously at all.

Su Xia wouldn't give her homework, so she went to ask others for it, basically saying she couldn't do it herself. Su Xia was somewhat timid and not used to doing things alone at school, so she suppressed her reluctance and continued to associate with Chen Wen. Under Chen Wen's influence, she skipped classes in her second year, resulting in failing two courses.

Chen Wen comforted her, telling her not to worry, that she could just pay the extra fees when she was about to graduate in her third year and pass. She wouldn't even need to attend classes or submit assignments—how convenient!

As a result, Su Xia believed it to be true, almost causing her to fail to graduate. The teacher changed her score the day before the graduation ceremony, which relieved Su Xia. After graduation, Su Xia declined Chen Wen's invitation to go to Shanghai with her and returned to the provincial capital to find a job, and they gradually lost contact.

When they were working on their graduation project, Chen Wen wanted to be in a group with Su Xia, but the teacher said that a group couldn't have more than six people. Chen Wen didn't take this seriously, which led to a classmate who was originally close to them wanting to be in their group, but ended up going to another group.

Finally, everyone in the class finished their teamwork, leaving only Su Xia and Chen Wen in one group. Chen Wen didn't know how to do anything and did absolutely nothing. Su Xia was responsible for all the graduation projects. She felt that she had paid such expensive tuition for a year, and if she didn't get her diploma, her parents would probably scold her to death. But in the most important year of her studies, she slacked off and failed to learn anything useful. If Su Xia was a mediocre student, then Chen Wen was barely above the bottom of the bucket.

In the new dorm, there was a girl named Zhang Yi who was incredibly arrogant, acting as if she were superior to everyone else. She constantly looked down on Fujian Province and kept asking Su Xia if all people from Fujian were like that, saying that Fujian was really terrible. Su Xia didn't know how to answer her, so she avoided the question. Su Xia and Chen Wen knew each other first, then they transferred dorms together and were in the same class, but Zhang Yi interfered, making Chen Wen her good friend, and Su Xia became the third person.

There were two other girls in the dorm, but they dropped out in the second semester of their freshman year. Another one was obsessed with dating and had come all the way here to study for her boyfriend. Su Xia didn't interact with them much, nor did she have any major conflicts with them. Before Su Xia and Chen Wen arrived, Zhang Yi used to hang out with those two girls, but after Zhang Yi got together with Chen Wen, she abandoned the two girls.

More than half of the first semester of freshman year had passed when a new roommate named Zhou Wen transferred to our dorm. She would get up early every morning to put on makeup and then leave the dorm until it closed. At first, no one dared to talk to her because she looked a bit fierce. Later, we learned that she had dropped out of teachers' college to come here for her boyfriend.

Since Zhou Wen arrived, Zhang Yi formed a trio with her and Chen Wen, a group that Su Xia couldn't get a word in edgewise. Su Xia wasn't as clear-headed as she would later become; she couldn't accept being without friends, couldn't accept going to and from get out of class alone, eating in the cafeteria alone, or picking up packages alone. So she forced her way into the trio, trying to win Chen Wen back, even though she was the one who met her first!

In the second semester of her freshman year, one of the girls in the dorm dropped out, and a girl named Wu Xuan, who was also supposedly bullied in the previous dorm, moved in. She came from a single-parent family. To ease the burden on her mother, she would go out to work part-time to earn money, which excited Chen Wen greatly. She also wanted to go out and earn money.

So Wu Xuan took Chen Wen, Zhang Yi, and Su Xia out for part-time jobs, mostly distributing flyers. The clients required them to work in pairs, spreading out to various corners of the city to maximize awareness of their activities. Whenever this happened, Zhang Yi would push Wu Xuan to Su Xia, pairing her with Chen Wen. Su Xia complained and resisted, but Chen Wen eventually agreed that this combination was good.

Chen Wen said she had no money and couldn't bear to ask her parents for it, but she needed to buy a computer for her major courses in the second semester of her freshman year. So Chen Wen borrowed money from Su Xia to buy a second-hand computer. Su Xia, at the time, was also blinded by greed and gave Chen Wen most of the living expenses her mother had given her for the semester. Chen Wen promised to pay her back soon, but the money wasn't paid off until she graduated from her junior year.

Su Xia later learned that Chen Wen hadn't even asked her parents for her tuition. She had been delaying paying her junior year tuition, and her class advisor kept urging her to pay. She was the only one in the class who hadn't paid, and if she didn't pay soon, she wouldn't be able to graduate. There was no way to get Chen Wen to pay; her parents had actually given her the tuition, but she kept it for herself and didn't hand it over.

Chen Wen was quite an oddball. It took Su Xia a while after graduation to realize that out of the six girls in their dorm, three had come specifically for their boyfriends, including Chen Wen. Like another girl, Chen Wen had traveled a long way to see her boyfriend, only to be rejected by his mother because she was from out of town, and forced him to go on a blind date and get engaged. Su Xia, Zhang Yi, and Zhou Wen all rushed to confront the man. In the end, Zhang Yi told Chen Wen to ask the man for compensation, and he gave her two thousand yuan, considering the matter closed.

Later, during their junior year, Zhang Yi secretly went to Shanghai to find her boyfriend, and Chen Wen, thinking his mother was also in Shanghai, happily followed suit. This left Su Xia alone in the province. If anything happened with her graduation project, Su Xia would have to handle it. Because Su Xia was doing an internship, her parents didn't give her any living expenses. Then, because the professor required a physical copy of the graduation project, which couldn't be submitted by someone else, Su Xia bought a high-speed train ticket back to school and rushed there overnight. However, the dormitory had been without power for a long time, and Su Xia's phone and computer were dead. Lying on her metal bunk bed in the dormitory, she was too hot to sleep.

Chen Wen hadn't experienced any of this, nor had she told Su Xia about her hardships or offered to split the travel expenses. She acted as if Su Xia's actions were perfectly natural, requiring no explanation; she simply wanted to comfortably fish for men in Shanghai.

Su Xia and Zhang Yi had argued before because Wu Xuan had found a part-time job at a logistics warehouse, where their job was simply to find goods based on orders. It was close to Singles' Day (November 11th), and the factory workers, seeing how efficient they were, hired them, allowing them to work part-time whenever they were free. However, Zhang Yi was reluctant to do it because the factory was located in a remote area with no direct public transportation; they commuted by taxi and didn't actually earn much money.

There were no snack shops near the factory, so Zhang Yi sometimes used the excuse of needing to do homework to refuse the part-time job. The arrival of Singles' Day brought a surge of orders to the factory, and Chen Wen thought it was a good opportunity to make money. Zhou Xuan was also very happy, but Zhang Yi was not happy. She felt that going back and forth to find goods was too tiring for her.

So when everyone was having dinner together in the rest area that evening, Zhang Yi suggested going back to school after dinner. But at that moment, Su Xia hadn't finished picking all the orders she was picking. She put down the orders she was picking and ran over to eat with them. Su Xia then said that she needed to finish the orders first.

Zhang Yi explained that Su Xia had a lot of orders and it would take a long time to sort them, so she couldn't wait. She also asked Chen Wen and Zhou Xuan if they wanted to go back with her, since it would be cheaper to split the taxi fare if there were more people. Su Xia, of course, wasn't happy about it. The four of them had split the fare when they came, and if Zhang Yi took the other two away, she would have to pay the full fare, especially since the buses had already stopped running!

After dinner, Su Xia wanted to get back to the warehouse early to finish picking up her orders so she could go back with the others. Chen Wen also came to help, and Su Xia complained to him about Zhang Yi being a bit willful, which Zhang Yi happened to see. Zhang Yi instantly lost her temper and started arguing with Su Xia, accusing Su Xia of talking badly about her behind her back and complaining about why Su Xia didn't help her pick up her packages when she got back from her part-time job earlier than her last time. After saying that, Zhang Yi left.

Su Xia and Chen Wen returned to school. Su Xia didn't want to go back to her dorm to face Zhang Yi because she felt she hadn't done anything wrong. Putting aside the order issue, even with the package, she hadn't wanted to go because she was tired that day and it would have required a detour. However, Chen Wen insisted it was Su Xia's fault and demanded an apology from her to Zhang Yi. Su Xia stubbornly refused to apologize, and the two finally reconciled on Zhang Yi's birthday.

Looking back now, Su Xia felt incredibly stupid. It was clearly Zhang Yi's fault, but in the end, she was the one who had to apologize, all because of Chen Wen's words: "We're all in the same dorm, we'll see each other all the time, it's not good to make things awkward."

Su Xia really wanted to rush back and slap herself. Why did she care so much about these people? Not a single one of them could help her. And they were constantly using psychological manipulation to make her insecure and anxious—they weren't her friends at all! That kind of college life, that kind of dorm friendship, wasn't what Su Xia wanted, and it wasn't the kind of friendship she could have for life!

Sometimes, roommates are just roommates!