Blood Neon

Chapter 52

Chapter 52

Entangled

It was another bright and sunny afternoon.

Probably because there was only one more day before the weekend, that weekly reserved program, arrived, even the crowds on the street seemed to be walking with more energy.

And in a place slightly removed from the main road, on a mini commercial street along a one-way lane.

A young girl stopped in front of a certain shop, her expression looking extremely hesitant.

.

Lin Ying had already walked back and forth around this area three times, pretending to be out for a stroll.

Each round, she carefully observed the target shops, trying to peer through their tiny display windows and see through the mysteries inside.

—As an old commercial street in the center of the old city district, this area had a large number of all kinds of storefront shops.

Quite a few of them were little shops of only a dozen square meters or so, occupying just a single room on the first floor, crammed full with cheap goods brought in online or from some unknown small factory.

The style of their decoration and the way the goods were piled up carried a very early twenty-first-century flavor.

To put it simply, the glass and the display cabinets were densely hung and stacked with all kinds of merchandise, like clothes, toys, and other strange little things. Anyone who did not know better might have thought it was some kind of fog of war.

And in most of these little shops, there would usually only be a landlady sitting behind the register, motionless, head lowered as she played on her phone, along with a weird lighting atmosphere where the shop was obviously very dark but the lights were absolutely never turned on in order to save electricity.

It really made people not want to go inside at a glance, and one truly had no idea how these shops had managed to stay open until now.

Logically speaking, under the impact of the e-commerce era, these brick-and-mortar stores selling cheap little trinkets should have been very easily eliminated by similar online competitors.

However, if something existed, then its existence was reasonable.

A shop that had survived until now perhaps still had its own unique value.

Or perhaps, in a small city, not everyone shopped online after all, or rather, people still had a physical-level need to wander through these shops.

Lin Ying let her thoughts run wild like this. In her mind, she had almost finished writing an entire “Thanks for the invite, I’m in Pingyang…” post, yet she still had not gone into a single one of those shops.

As for the reason.

It was actually very simple.

It was just, how should she put it.

Mm...

In short.

Well, actually.

Anyway...

She shifted her gaze slightly away from the target, pretending to look at the candied hawthorns in the glass case by the street.

It was just...

She suddenly felt so embarrassed.

About the fact that she was planning to go in and buy underwear.

.

At first, Lin Ying had only been doing what she usually did, wandering idly through the streets like some old grandpa when she had nothing to do, while also taking the opportunity to familiarize herself with the continuity and field-of-view coverage of surveillance cameras around the city.

Nowadays, taking walks around the city could already be considered one of her daily required lessons. It exercised the body and also helped pass the time.

After all, observing all the different ways people lived in the city was quite an interesting thing.

And today, after she wandered here as usual and strolled around for a while, she suddenly... as if led by some ghostly impulse, wanted to go inside and buy something.

Could it have been because she had just fenced two phones yesterday?

After receiving an income of a little over six hundred yuan, her little treasury could now be said to be stuffed full, and her savings had reached an unprecedented four digits.

This time, she had sold one phone each to two different shops, and as for the one still left on her, she planned to wait a few days before selling it, so that she would not stand out too much.

And as the saying went, once there was grain at home, shopping made one want to chop off one’s hands.

By sheer coincidence, when that impulse arose, she had just happened to be standing in front of this underwear shop.

It was absolutely not that she had only felt the urge to buy something after seeing the clothes.

After all, after feeling the four band-aids that had long been in service on her chest, she really did want to change into a more proper bra.

Previously, after considering many factors (other than laziness), she had always been using paper to rub most of the anti-inflammatory medicine off the band-aids, then barely treating them as nipple covers and using them that way.

But in the end, that was only a part-time substitute, so the effect naturally could not be all that ideal.

At the time, with a spirit of enduring hardship and striving onward, she had figured that putting up with it a little longer was fine.

But now...

She had four digits of money, and she had been eating quite well too.

And besides, look, peeling band-aids off the skin when changing them still hurt quite a bit, right? And with the weather getting cooler and cooler now, wearing one more layer ought to help keep her warm, right? And then again, she was so lively and active that without sufficiently close-fitting clothing on her body, that would definitely lower her agility stat, right? And if her agility stat dropped further, that would affect her hunting efficiency, right? ...

This was a perfectly reasonable need. As a human action, it was the most normal thing in the world.

But... why?

Clearly, she had already prepared enough reasons in her mind.

But when she actually planned to walk into the shop, she still felt very...

...very ashamed, or rather, awkward?

Lin Ying poked her index fingers against each other with both hands.

Ashamed. Awkward.

Or rather, the sort of shame one felt on behalf of someone else, the sort of awkwardness one felt on behalf of someone else.

This kind of emotion often appeared when watching movies, TV dramas, variety shows, short videos, and things like that.

When viewers saw a character in a show do something embarrassingly foolish, or say something that made one’s scalp tingle, they would sincerely feel things like, “Ah, I feel so embarrassed for him,” or, “If that were me up there, I’d die of embarrassment.”

Or rather, when people imagined a scene, when they imagined themselves doing something, they could also feel a similar kind of awkwardness.

Lin Ying’s case belonged to the sort where, the moment she imagined herself going into the shop and selecting items one by one like a young girl, the moment she imagined herself choosing a suitable bra and putting it on, she would become inexplicably embarrassed beyond measure.

Since coming to this world, this was the first time she had felt such a strong sense of awkwardness.

If someone said this was because she was not used to her own body?

That was not right either. Earlier, she had already thoroughly examined her own body, top to bottom, all three hundred and sixty degrees of it, and had not felt anything especially unusual.

Of course, it had been a proper examination.

After touching, looking, and sniffing, at most she had only objectively thought, “Hey now, I’m really cute.”

At the very least, she definitely had not gone into heat over herself or anything like that.

Then, if it was not shyness toward a female body, what exactly was the reason?

Why was it that she rejected so strongly the image of herself truly being like a young girl?

Should she not have been the sort who did not care about such things at all?