Chapter 1

It was a brilliantly sunny morning.

When Ye Shuangqi woke up groggily in bed, the first thing she did was check whether she had finished differentiating today.
The back of her neck was no longer swollen and painful as it had been these past few days. Instead, it felt faintly hot. She reached back to touch it, feeling that something was different from yesterday.

She raced downstairs and called out to Auntie Lin, who was preparing her breakfast. “Auntie Lin, can you smell my pheromones?”

This exchange had taken place once a day throughout her differentiation period, and Auntie Lin was long used to it.
Out of habit, she was about to shake her head. “I can’t sm—huh?”

She broke off halfway through. As the girl leaned closer, Auntie Lin caught the faintest hint of citrus.

“Are you wearing perfume?” she asked.

“What?” Ye Shuangqi immediately raised her wrist and sniffed it carefully, but detected nothing. “No. What do you smell?”

Auntie Lin sniffed again.
The older Omega’s sensitivity had gradually begun to decline. She stood there concentrating for quite a while before finally catching that elusive trace in the air. “Miss, you seem to smell like oranges,” she confirmed.

“Oranges?!”
Ye Shuangqi was horrified. Fruity scents [read the original at bailiantales.com]were most common among Omegas. If all she smelled of was oranges, didn’t that mean the differentiation she had looked forward to for so long had turned into one big joke?!

It wasn’t that she looked down on Omegas. It was just that her differentiation result would determine something extremely important to her:
—whether she could finally score a victory in her one-sided battle against Zhu Jinyue.

Who was Zhu Jinyue? Her nemesis since childhood.
The very first time they met in primary school, when they were seven, Ye Shuangqi had thought Zhu Jinyue was such a poser.

They were both children, yet she insisted on putting on a stern face and lecturing the other girls, telling them they couldn’t do this or that, like some miniature teacher.
Ye Shuangqi had always been the rebellious sort, leading the others into mischief and skipping her homework. Then Zhu Jinyue went straight to the teacher with a written complaint, and Mommy grabbed her and spanked her that very evening.

Once that grudge took root, everything about Zhu Jinyue irritated her.
Coming first on every exam was bad enough, but she also had to act as Mommy’s undercover spy and secretly tattle on her! It was fair to say that every spanking Ye Shuangqi received from then on had something to do with Zhu Jinyue.

In the nearly ten years they had known each other, Ye Shuangqi had never really beaten her at anything.
She could put up with losing to her on exams. Life wasn’t all about exams anyway. Once they left school, Zhu Jinyue could forget about lording it over her. She could put up with the tattling too. They would go their separate ways at university, and Zhu Jinyue wouldn’t be able to keep tabs on her anymore even if she wanted to.
But differentiation was where she drew the line!

The result of her differentiation would stay with her for life. She refused to spend her entire life with Zhu Jinyue’s big feet planted firmly on her head!

After grabbing two more servants who weren’t Betas to confirm that she really did have a pheromone scent, Ye Shuangqi immediately took leave from school and went to the hospital to have her gland examined.

*

“Ye Shuangqi’s taken the day off?”
“Yeah. Who knows what excuse she came up with this time.”

At her classmates’ words, Zhu Jinyue’s gaze paused over her book. Then she raised her eyes and glanced at a certain person’s seat behind her.
The state of her desk matched her approach to everything else: workbooks stacked haphazardly, yesterday’s half-finished test paper all crumpled, with a scratch notebook weighing it down. The seat behind the desk was empty. Only her deskmate, Xu Jingzhe, was there, head lowered as she rummaged around inside Ye Shuangqi’s desk for something.

Ye Shuangqi’s attempts to avoid her were nothing new. Over the years, she had made up countless excuses to take time off school. At first, Zhu Jinyue had believed she was ill and gone to visit after school, holding her mother’s hand, only to find a little girl playing video games with a lollipop in her mouth. Later, Zhu Jinyue learned to tell Ye Shuangqi’s mother too, and those incidents gradually became less frequent.

But less frequent didn’t mean they had stopped.
Ye Shuangqi had once boasted smugly to her, “Mom and I have already worked it out. I can take up to three days off a month. That means I get three extra days to hide from you, besides weekends and holidays. You can stay in the classroom and study all by yourself!”

And this was her second absence this month.

Zhu Jinyue gathered her thoughts, trying to return her attention to the textbook in front of her.
Yet her mind kept drifting back to a certain mischievous girl.

She rubbed her temples.

But Ye Shuangqi always took Mondays or Fridays off, giving herself a three-day break together with the weekend. Today was Thursday. By that logic, she shouldn’t have taken today off.
Could she be ill…?

Remembering how Ye Shuangqi had kept rubbing the back of her neck these past few days, Zhu Jinyue thought for a long time, her thoughts moving from one person to another, before finally reaching a conclusion: she had finished differentiating.

*

[Comprehensive Gland Examination Report]
Name: Ye Shuangqi
Primary Sex: Female
Diagnostic Findings: Differentiation complete
Secondary Sex: Alpha
Rank: S-class
Gland Status: Mature morphology; no persistent congestion; well developed.
Pheromones: Dominant notes of blood orange, citrus, and aged brandy, with an amber and leather base; warm, potent pheromones.
Pheromone Control: Excellent
Olfactory Receptor Sensitivity: Above the population average.
Report Summary: All indicators meet the required standards. Gland function is stable.

Holding the report, Ye Shuangqi was excited beyond words.
An S-class Alpha. That meant Zhu Jinyue could never beat her at this. At worst, they would tie.

She let out a relieved breath.
Folding the report into her pocket, she wanted nothing more than to sprint straight to school, slap it down on Zhu Jinyue’s desk, and tell her fiercely, “See that? S-class Alpha!”

In reality, though, it wasn’t every day she had a legitimate reason to take time off. Ye Shuangqi went home again, and after she told Mommy the result of her differentiation, Auntie Lin immediately came over with a suppressant patch and stuck it to the back of her neck.

“What are you doing?!”
Ye Shuangqi hated suppressant patches more than anything.

Being forced to wear one every day during her differentiation period had been bad enough. Why did she still have to wear one now that she was done?!
Besides, she knew that mature Alphas didn’t need suppressant patches!

Without batting an eye, Auntie Lin quickly secured everything in place before replying, “President Ye’s instructions. She’s worried you might not be able to control your pheromones yet and could cause an incident at school.”

Was that really how her mother saw her?!
Ye Shuangqi’s resentment toward Zhu Jinyue flared all over again.

This was all Zhu Jinyue’s fault!
If she hadn’t spent the last ten years tirelessly tattling bailiantales.comon her, how could her mother possibly think she was so unreliable?!

Ye Shuangqi understood that changing someone’s impression of her wouldn’t happen overnight. If she protested now, she would be playing right into Zhu Jinyue’s hands.
Even if she really did gain perfect control over her pheromones in the future, she might still end up having to wear this suppressant patch for the rest of her life.

A little patience now would keep the peace.
Ye Shuangqi raised a hand to touch the suppressant patch, which was already almost invisible against the back of her neck, and had no choice but to concede defeat for the time being.

She took a taxi back to school that afternoon. Standing outside the classroom’s back door, she first glanced at Zhu Jinyue’s seat. She wasn’t there yet. Perhaps she hadn’t returned from her lunch break.
Clearing her throat, Ye Shuangqi slapped the folded report down on Xu Jingzhe’s desk and leaned toward her with an air of mystery. “Guess what I differentiated into?”

Startled, Xu Jingzhe rolled her eyes. She didn’t bother guessing, simply reaching out to unfold the paper on her desk.
“An S-class Alpha?” She clicked her tongue twice, looked her deskmate up and down, then closed her eyes and shook her head. “I really can’t picture it.”

“…Hey!” Deeply displeased, Ye Shuangqi held the report right in front of Xu Jingzhe’s eyes. “What do you mean, you can’t picture it? I’m so dashing and charming, so strong and powerful. Isn’t it perfectly normal for me to differentiate into an S-class Alpha?”
She pouted and pulled back. “Forget it. A Beta like you wouldn’t understand.”

Xu Jingzhe couldn’t be bothered with her.

“So you took the whole morning off to get tested?”

“Yep.” Ye Shuangqi finally sat down and propped her chin on her hand, staring at her desk. She had the nagging feeling that something was missing, but couldn’t remember what.

Xu Jingzhe suppressed a laugh. “Then you’re screwed. We had to hand in last night’s test paper this morning. You hadn’t bailiantales.com finished yours, but I handed it in for you.”

Ye Shuangqi: “…”
She gritted her teeth. “Don’t you know what a bitter feud Zhu Jinyue and I have?!” Catching what looked like someone sitting in Zhu Jinyue’s seat out of the corner of her eye, she instinctively lowered her voice for fear of being overheard. “If she finds out I didn’t finish my homework, I’m dead when I get home tonight!”

“Then go steal it back from the staffroom,” Xu Jingzhe said.
“What do you mean, steal? I’m getting it back fair and square!”

Before getting up, she instructed Xu Jingzhe, “Make absolutely sure you very casually let Zhu Jinyue hear about my differentiation.”
Xu Jingzhe looked up. “?”

Ye Shuangqi said, “And I won’t hold it against you for handing in my paper.”
Xu Jingzhe: “…Oh.”

The public school wasn’t particularly strict, and Ye Shuangqi had arrived early. There was no one in the staffroom yet.
She slipped over to the math teacher’s desk and searched for quite a while before finally finding her own paper in the stack buried underneath.

She switched off the light and was about to leave when she found someone blocking the doorway.

Zhu Jinyue.
Ye Shuangqi instinctively hid the paper behind her back and put on a show of authority. “What are you doing in the staffroom?”

Zhu Jinyue’s cool gaze fell on the hand she had hidden behind her, then returned to her delicate, pretty face. Her tone was even. “The teacher asked me this morning to hand the papers back.”

“…The math papers?”

Zhu Jinyue gave a low hum of assent.

Ye Shuangqi: “…”
So she’d made this trip for nothing! It was all Xu Jingzhe’s fault!

She turned sideways, intending to slip through the doorway and settle the score with Xu Jingzhe, but Zhu Jinyue called her back.

“Ye Shuangqi.”

“What?” Ye Shuangqi was a little impatient, wondering what fault Her Highness intended to find with her now. Nothing good ever happened when Zhu Jinyue stopped her like this.

“…Have you finished differentiating?”

Xu Jingzhe had worked that fast?
Ye Shuangqi was astonished.

Remembering her original goal, she straightened her back and cleared her throat. “You heard?”

Zhu Jinyue neither nodded nor shook her head. She simply kept those beautiful eyes fixed on her.

Unable to bear the staring, Ye Shuangqi spoke first. “Do you know what I differentiated into?”

She didn’t know whether Zhu Jinyue was aware of her own unconscious little movements, but Ye Shuangqi noticed every one.
The girl opposite her tilted her head slightly, her eyes widening without her realizing it. She actually looked a little cuter than her usual annoying self.

Ye Shuangqi’s voice tightened slightly, and she turned her head away. “An S-class Alpha.”
The moment the words left her mouth, she felt she shouldn’t have looked away. It made her seem as though she had something to hide. She quickly turned back and stared straight at Zhu Jinyue. “An S-class Alpha, you hear? You can forget about beating me again!”

Zhu Jinyue merely nodded calmly. “Mm.”

Thoroughly dissatisfied with her reaction, Ye Shuangqi blustered, “You’d better differentiate into an Alpha too, or I… I definitely won’t let you off!”