Marrying the Ugly Woman of a Rich and Powerful Family - Chapter 5
Shen Qingyuan firmly closed the car window, only then did she feel that her back was not so cold. The image of Cang Yan clearly being very angry but trying hard to suppress it echoed in her mind.
Thinking of how she had angered such a frail beauty, Shen Qingyuan felt truly guilty. Even more guilty was that she didn’t know how she had angered Cang Yan.
Shen Qingyuan silently took out her phone. Following her search for school information, she hadn’t inherited any of the original owner’s memories. If she were to be exposed, she might be caught and studied as a monster or a lunatic.
This is how it’s portrayed in TV dramas, after all, she had essentially soul-traveled.
In A City, which was full of colleges, A University was unremarkable, a regular first-tier university, full name A City Institute of Technology.
“Miss Shen, which building are you going to?” the driver turned his head and asked.
This was Cang Yan’s family driver. Shen Qingyuan had slipped away from Cang Yan and met the driver uncle as soon as she left the house. He was there to take her to school. Maybe this was the perk of marrying into a wealthy family. Shen Qingyuan accepted the ride with peace of mind.
It was a few minutes past eight now, past class time. There were only a few scattered people having breakfast on campus.
Shen Qingyuan only knew that the original owner attended A University and the dorm number was 419, which she found from the original owner’s “Penguin” account, but she didn’t know which dorm building it was.
She looked at the class schedule sent in the group chat, which had the class location, and said, “Go to Zhiyuan Building.”
A few minutes later, the driver stopped in front of a retro-style teaching building.
Shen Qingyuan got out of the car with her phone. The buildings in the university all looked similar. As soon as she stepped onto the stairs, she noticed people glancing at her and whispering amongst themselves.
Shen Qingyuan looked left and right. There was no one else around. Those few students were indeed discussing her.
She secretly checked her clothes and appearance again, afraid that when Cang Yan tugged her tie, she might have also pulled off something strange, but there was nothing.
Her bra strap wasn’t showing. What was there to discuss?
Shen Qingyuan belatedly realized.
She had been trending online.
In the age of universal internet surfing, being on a trending topic was equivalent to exposing oneself to the public eye. It seemed that almost everyone at this school now knew her.
Shen Qingyuan’s gaze darkened. She walked openly toward the group of people discussing her. They were all female students. She could vaguely hear them mentioning Cang Yan’s name.
The people discussing Shen Qingyuan didn’t expect her to walk straight toward them. They all took out their phones and tilted their heads, pretending nothing had happened.
Shen Qingyuan: “…”
Shen Qingyuan strode past them and went to the classroom N519, only to find that someone was already having a class there, and it was Advanced Mathematics.
She thought about finding an empty classroom casually, but realizing it was still five hours until her afternoon class, she decided to go to the library instead.
Shen Qingyuan left the teaching building and found that the driver was still there.
No reason not to take a ride. She hitched a ride to the library.
Since fate had given her a chance to start over, she must seize the opportunity, study hard, and shine in her field. She was determined to thoroughly understand the optimization problem she hadn’t fully researched in her past life, even though her current major was… Chinese Language and Literature.
Shen Qingyuan felt a headache coming on.
She wasn’t an incredibly brilliant student, but she wasn’t bad either. She had passed the graduate entrance exams from an ordinary undergraduate university to a top 10 national university, then pursued her master’s and doctoral degrees there. After graduation, she secured a position to stay and teach, moving from assistant to lecturer, all while researching optimization problems.
She was a solid math major!
Shen Qingyuan rubbed her temples.
Since she was majoring in Chinese Language, she would start by supplementing her knowledge.
The place Shen Qingyuan frequented most in her past life was the library. She was very familiar with the library’s operations and classifications and quickly found the books on the class schedule: Ancient Chinese and History of Ancient Literature.
It was early morning, not exam week, so most of the library’s seats were occupied by the graduate exam cohort, but there were still many vacant spots.
Shen Qingyuan found a seat with no one in front, behind, or next to her, and started reading seriously.
She initially thought that being Chinese, she surely knew Chinese characters, but after opening the book, she realized she recognized the individual characters, but their combinations seemed strange.
She was truly not sensitive to language. For all these years, she had faced mathematical formulas, proof processes, various assumptions, and numerical algorithms. As a science and engineering person, she now had to study Chinese Language and Literature.
Shen Qingyuan read the book gloomily.
Even with a change of major, she had to study hard.
Shen Qingyuan sat rigidly in front of the book for four hours, going to the restroom four times, opening her phone three times, flipping through two books cursorily, and spending the rest of the time spacing out.
It was too difficult.
Pictographs, associative compounds, pictophonetic characters.
She felt like she didn’t recognize Chinese characters anymore.
Guessing that lunchtime was approaching, Shen Qingyuan borrowed one copy of each textbook needed for her class schedule. She didn’t have a campus card or an ID, so she ended up using the facial recognition procedure.
Shen Qingyuan hadn’t brought a backpack, so she carried a stack of books out. The driver was still waiting outside. She hitched a ride back to the teaching building. The morning classes had ended, and there were only a few people left in the classroom. Shen Qingyuan went to the fourth row, placed the books by the window seat, and continued reading.
Li Xinyan and Mu Qing left the dorm a half-hour early. When they arrived at the classroom together, they were both stunned, doubting whether they were seeing things.
They actually saw Shen Qingyuan reading. Not watching a movie, not reading a novel, but reading a textbook. She even had a pen in her hand, writing and drawing, not writing a novel or playing a game, but taking notes.
Shen Qingyuan was accustomed to checking the table of contents before reading to grasp what the whole book was about. To avoid getting a headache, she had consecutively finished the tables of contents of four books.
Feeling someone sit down next to her, Shen Qingyuan turned her head and saw two students who looked almost identical, wearing the same black-rimmed glasses. One was full of spirit, and the other was listless. Both had youthful, collagen-rich faces and slightly gaping mouths, staring at her in shock.
Shen Qingyuan pointed at herself uncertainly.
Li Xinyan put down her backpack, still recovering from the shock that Shen Qingyuan was secretly reading.
She picked up Shen Qingyuan’s book and flipped it open, confirming it wasn’t a romance novel disguised as a textbook, nor a comic book, but an actual teaching aid/textbook.
Shen Qingyuan looked bewildered.
Li Xinyan put the book back and said, “Qingyuan, you’re actually reading. Is the mid-term exam coming up?”
“I don’t know,” Shen Qingyuan looked clueless. She just wanted to study.
Mu Qing quietly added from the side, “Mid-terms are easy to coast through.”
Meaning, no need to study.
Shen Qingyuan nodded. She knew university exams were easy to coast through, but she had nothing about Chinese Language and Literature in her brain. Since she had taken over the original owner’s body, she certainly had to study hard, or she would be letting this body down.
She carefully looked at the two people in front of her again. They looked like a pair of ordinary twins. In fact, after arriving at the school, Shen Qingyuan had realized that no matter how the aesthetics changed, most people were ordinary.
Most people’s skin color was neither dark nor pale, but the normal skin of the yellow race. Their figures were neither muscular nor thin, but a normal, healthy person’s build. Of course, many were also dark, glossy, and strong.
It seemed that in any world, handsome men and beautiful women were the minority. Most people were still mediocre.
This discovery made Shen Qingyuan happy. At least this world was the same as her world, the only difference being the aesthetics.
Because of the difference in aesthetics, a different kind of beauty emerged.
She suddenly felt that integrating into this world was not that difficult.
Li Xinyan and Mu Qing still couldn’t believe that Shen Qingyuan was studying seriously. The two looked at each other and finally agreed that Shen Qingyuan was forced to study after getting married.
The Cang family was a prestigious family and definitely wouldn’t need a poor student.
Shen Qingyuan lowered her head and continued to read the history of literature. Students gradually trickled into the classroom during this time.
A shadow suddenly enveloped her, and a loud voice bellowed, “Holy cow! You’re actually studying seriously! I thought you were reading an erotic novel! Is that old woman really that ugly? It scared a poor student like you into studying hard.”
Immediately after, the book was pulled away, and Shen Qingyuan was slightly dazed.
She looked up and saw a heavily muscled boy holding her book, spinning it on his finger, thinking he looked cool, like he was playing basketball.
That book had been borrowed and flipped through by who knows how many people. The spine was almost falling apart. Shen Qingyuan always respected books. She stretched out her hand and said, “Give it here!”
The boy said dismissively, “You just want to put on a show, don’t you? You don’t have to pretend in front of us. We’re all the same kind of people. Tell me, buddy, is that old woman as ugly as they say online? Is she really an S?”
The boy winked while talking.
“Does any of this concern you?” Shen Qingyuan’s face had completely frozen. She hated this kind of shameless, self-righteous person the most.
The boy, however, didn’t notice. He tossed the book into the air and said cheaply, “It doesn’t concern me, I’m not the one who married her.”
What kind of bad friends did the original owner make!
Shen Qingyuan was about to lose her temper when Li Xinyan nudged her with her elbow and then said to the boy, “Zhou Chuan, the teacher is here.”
The boy turned his head and saw that the teacher, wearing reading glasses and with gray hair, had indeed arrived.
“You’re Zhou Chuan?” Shen Qingyuan narrowed her eyes.
She remembered Yin Ruyun saying that the original owner went out to play with a boy named Zhou Chuan and fell into the water. Yin Ruyun thought she had just fallen into the water and her life was not in danger.
But Shen Qingyuan knew that the original owner had not only fallen into the water but had drowned.
Therefore, she had the opportunity to take over, transforming from a thirty-year-old worker to a twenty-year-old university student.
“Here you go,” Zhou Chuan, perhaps thinking of something, handed the book back to Shen Qingyuan and found a back seat to play games.
Shen Qingyuan looked thoughtfully at Zhou Chuan. Seeing that the front page of the book was about to come loose, she smoothed the pages and said to Li Xinyan, “Thank you.”
Li Xinyan shivered, let out a sound of “Ew,” and said, “You are so weird. I only sent you the class schedule this morning, and you didn’t even say thank you to me.”
Shen Qingyuan said in surprise, “You are Little Nun #1?”
Li Xinyan raised her chin: “That’s right, Mistress.”
Shen Qingyuan: “…”
Li Xinyan looked curious and asked, “Honestly, why did you start studying hard?”
Shen Qingyuan certainly couldn’t say she had transmigrated and that the original owner was gone. She exaggerated Zhou Chuan’s words, looking worriedly, and said, “Cang Yan said that if I can’t be the top student in my major during the final exams, she’s going to drip wax on me every day.”
Li Xinyan: “…”