Chapter 1: Ye Wuyou

The smooth, full curves of the Lady Suit always stirred a young man’s longing for sweet romance, and when the spark of love suddenly fell, deep in his heart there had long been a dry prairie waiting in silence.

When the mothers at the orphanage founded by the House of Ladies nineteen years ago found him at the door, he was sleeping in a basket, his birth certificate tucked under the little blanket. Since the orphanage director at the time bore the surname Ye, he was given that surname as well. Abandoned from the moment he was born, the nurses did not want the little boy to suffer any more sorrow, so they named him Wuyou, meaning “without worry.”

The orphanage behind him had been established with funding from the House of Ladies, so money was never tight. Even though nobody ever adopted him, Ye Wuyou’s life over those nineteen years really had been worry-free.

The nurse mothers were not only gentle, they were all beautiful as well. On top of that, there was often a white-clad Ms. Ai who came to visit. She was always very kind to every child, and the mothers in the orphanage treated her with great respect.

What always puzzled Ye Wuyou was why every nurse mother never took off her white mask or white gloves, or removed the pair of white high-heeled boots with the towering heels that never changed; why, even when they were tending the director, they all kept their feet inside the yellow lines on the floor; and why, even when a few of them had been chatting animatedly a moment before, they would suddenly fall silent the moment they stepped beyond a certain boundary.

The first time Ye Wuyou saw Song Xuan was on a calm evening. He was trying to earn some pocket money to buy the computer he had wanted for a long time. Partly because his university major in mathematics often required serious computing power, and partly because he was also an amateur hacker.

So during summer break, Ye Wuyou worked as a waiter at a restaurant in Zhuzhou’s Tianxin District. It was close to both his school and where he lived, and every day the restaurant threw away scraps of meat he could collect and take to feed the stray cats and dogs on the street.

The owner thought he looked good on the floor, tall and solid, and more importantly quick on his feet, so he had him work the front desk as a receptionist. His gentle, polished manner really did win him a lot of praise from customers.

An innocent young woman, laughing as she chatted with the mature woman beside her about the latest funny gossip, walked in from outside and glanced casually in Ye Wuyou’s direction. Just that one glance was enough to make him feel as if something in his heart had been lit at once.

This beautiful young woman with phoenix eyes was wearing an academy-style dress, though clearly not a school uniform. Her quiet, restrained style, combined with her still-developing but already graceful 5'3" figure, made her seem especially refined. The only pity was that she seemed to be mute, because from start to finish she used sign language to communicate with the elegant woman beside her.

The elegant woman who came with her gave off a pure, aloof air, with the aura of an ice queen.

Both of their faces were covered by latex masks that hid the lower half of their faces. The older woman’s mask was milky white, while the young woman’s was a soft pink. Their equally lovely slender hands were covered by matching white and pink gloves, the cuffs long enough to disappear into their sleeves. Both wore high heels, though the young woman’s heel was slightly lower and pink, only about five centimeters high, while the older woman’s were more exaggerated, at least ten centimeters, in the same white as her mask and gloves. The heels on both women were very slim, making them look elegant and refined.

That style of dress, so similar to the nurse mothers in the orphanage from his memories, naturally stirred Ye Wuyou’s childhood recollections. Even he did not know when it happened, but he had already fallen deeply in love with that kind of appearance.

The young woman followed the older one to their seats. At some point, their masks had vanished, and Ye Wuyou could not remember ever seeing them take the masks off.

Both of their sitting postures were exquisite, their waists and backs held straight at all times, never once hunching. Their legs remained pressed together the entire time, never parting.

Just watching a tall beauty and a petite beauty sit there so gracefully was a pleasure in itself. It was hard to imagine that women this refined and elegant really existed in the world.

In that visual delight, time seemed to pass even faster. The two women ate remarkably little, and by the time Ye Wuyou was still staring in a daze, they were already getting up to leave.

He immediately asked the floor manager for time off, then jumped into a taxi and tailed the sports car driven by the older woman. The car had a distinctive shape, its emblem a hunter drawing a bow. Ye Wuyou had seen online that it was a sports-car brand launched by the Orion Company, and even the cheapest model had nothing to do with someone like him.

After following for more than ten minutes, Ye Wuyou had no choice but to get out several blocks away, in front of a magnificent wall. Beyond it lay Tianxinyuan, the most luxurious and high-end residential district in all of Zhuzhou. Inside its nearly ten thousand mu of green space stood fewer than fifty mansions, and the Tianxin Lake from which Tianxin District took its name was located right within it. Every entrance to the residential area was guarded, and outsiders could not get in unless invited by a homeowner.

Ye Wuyou took one long look at the entrance where the sports car had disappeared before walking back to the restaurant where he worked, hoping he might get his wages docked less for taking leave.

After a week of asking around, Ye Wuyou finally learned that the pink mask, pink long gloves, and pink high heels might be a signature style of a famous girls’ school in the city: Ladies’ Academy.

Parents who could send their daughters to Ladies’ Academy were either extremely rich or powerful figures. In that school, every student was required by strict regulations to dress that way every day. Although the girls were no longer bound by that rule once they left campus, they absolutely had to follow it while at school.

Ladies’ Academy was a global elite education brand created by the House of Ladies. For sixty years, its forty-two Ladies’ Academies around the world and its twenty-four academy university divisions, run in cooperation with top-ranked 9A schools, had been famous for their quality education, elegant lady training, strict school rules, tradition of admitting only women, and exorbitant tuition.

Ladies’ Academy enforced a strict boarding system. Except during summer and winter holidays, no matter the circumstances, all students had to live on campus. They could only be taken out temporarily by their guardians or by adults carrying written authorization from the guardian on weekends, holidays, or during the summer and winter breaks. But by 6:00 p.m. on the last afternoon of Sunday, a holiday, or the holiday break, they had to return to Ladies’ Academy. If they were late, the academy would call the guardian and send an email reminder.

At any other normal class time, if a student was not personally picked up by a guardian, there was absolutely no way to leave the school on her own.

Since the young woman and the mature woman beside her appeared so intimate, that older woman must be her mother, right?

Ye Wuyou remembered the credit card they had used to pay. With a bit of simple hacking, he quickly dug up the cardholder’s information. He learned that the cardholder was named He Ziying, the general manager of Siji Heavy Industries.

Ye Wuyou had no idea what Siji Heavy Industries was, but what thrilled him most was that as long as he searched for He Ziying in Ladies’ Academy’s information system, he would surely be able to follow the trail and uncover the young woman’s information.

After three days and nights of nonstop effort, Ye Wuyou finally hacked into Tianxinyuan’s network server and obtained the password to enter that wealthy district. But hacking into Ladies’ Academy’s system was still beyond his limits, so he had no choice but to ask his friend Great-XT, who belonged to the hacker group DarkKnight, for help.

After hearing that this was the prologue to a romantic love story, Great-XT enthusiastically agreed and promised that he would definitely help him hack the administrator account for Zhuzhou’s Ladies’ Academy server.

Because he entered the correct password, the synthetic guard at the gate did not stop Ye Wuyou at all. After bowing to him, it opened the door.

Tianxinyuan covered a huge area, with the massive Tianxin Lake at its center. The whole neighborhood felt like a wetland park.

Walking along the lush path by the lake, Ye Wuyou looked up at several mansions far apart from one another in the distance and sighed inwardly. This really was a true wealthy district. In a megacity like Zhuzhou, many hills and rivers had been filled in for commercial development, yet right in the center of land this valuable, they had preserved such a huge lake.

Each mansion was separated from the next by deep woods, magnificent gardens, and delicate courtyards. If not for the map on his phone, he might have gotten lost in the neighborhood.

On the way there, Ye Wuyou had checked online and found that every mansion here was worth more than ten billion Republic Coins. An ordinary person could work for ten thousand years and still never afford a house here.

From then on, whenever it was not time for his restaurant shift, Ye Wuyou would come early to the shore of Tianxin Lake, sitting on a bench in the shade of ginkgo trees. It was his first time seeing a real ginkgo tree with his own eyes. In this huge metropolis, built of steel, concrete, and display screens and stretching more than a thousand kilometers in every direction, green was almost impossible to find. Yet this lush world was enough to show just how noble the class of the homeowners here really was. Wild birds could even be seen in the ginkgo trees, and there were wild ducks in the lake...

He held a large book in his hands and pretended to read it, while actually paying constant attention to the people in the park, longing to see the young woman who occupied his dreams every day.

At last, one evening, he saw that captivating figure again.

The young woman was wearing a blue striped dress, her straight, long legs wrapped in white pantyhose, and on her feet were a pair of light blue high heels secured at the ankles with a narrow strap.

A thick ponytail hung down her back, tied with a bow at the end.

She walked with a natural pride, head held high and chest lifted.

The mask that had covered her face the first time he saw her was gone now. He could see her looking straight ahead, steps light and quick, her nose slightly narrowed; her delicate features were even more beautiful without the mask.

Her slender arms, free of the long gloves, swayed lightly with every step like jade.

The way she walked was like a young doe, as if she were completely unburdened by gravity.

The mature woman beside her was still the same one from before, still dressed the same way. Although she had changed outer clothes, the milky white mask and long gloves were still on, and she still wore those equally milky white high-heeled boots. Yet despite the absurdly high heels, her steps remained easy, steady, and graceful. Her whole body radiated a cold aura, as though she would only ever show warmth to the young woman at her side.

Every day at 6:30 p.m., they would always take a walk around Tianxin Lake like this, chatting about the latest interesting things they had learned, and the young woman’s face always shone with a happy smile.

Ye Wuyou did not know how to strike up a conversation, but as long as he could see the girl he loved, he was more than satisfied.

Bit by bit, he idealized her, attributing to her all sorts of virtues, whether real or imagined, along with emotional fantasies that existed only in his mind.

A month passed like that. He made an agreement with the boss that he had to finish work at the restaurant after 5:00 p.m. This inevitably slashed his wages by a huge margin, but as long as he could see the young woman’s graceful, doe-like figure glide past his eyes every day at 6:30 p.m., that was more than enough.

After a month of effort, Great-XT finally cracked the key to Ladies’ Academy’s firewall and got the administrator account. Before he disconnected from the academy server, he repeatedly reminded him to be absolutely sure to clear the logs.

What Ye Wuyou did not know was that the challenge of cracking Ladies’ Academy’s server had caused a frenzy throughout the entire DarkKnight organization. It was one of the hardest tasks the DarkKnight hacker group had encountered in its forty-four years, almost since its founding in 2000.

It was not for money. Purely to demonstrate their superior computer skills, dozens of unmasked hackers from all over the world had rarely joined forces to attack the Ladies’ Academy server together. After a month of relentless effort, the success was finally handed over to Ye Wuyou.

Back in his dorm, he typed the administrator account into the login window one character at a time with trembling fingers. As green text flashed across the screen, he successfully entered the backend of the Ladies’ Academy server.

But this was only a non-core student archive server for Zhuzhou Ladies’ Academy. The real core permissions server was protected by a powerful and complex firewall, and even the most arrogant hackers in DarkKnight had been unable to break through it.

The vast flood of Ladies’ Academy data stored on the server surged before Ye Wuyou like a tide: student records, schedules, guardian visit logs, academic scores, daily behavior ratings, ladyly demeanor scores, mental health evaluations, teaching assessments... if he wanted, he could check the registration file of almost any student at Ladies’ Academy. But his only goal was that young woman. His purpose was clear, his eyes fixed ahead like a leopard’s.

All the indexes related to He Ziying pointed to a young woman named Song Xuan. The records showed that Song Xuan had been studying at Ladies’ Academy since elementary school, was now twenty-one, had just finished a three-year preparatory program, and was about to enter the university division.

He Ziying was not her mother, but her aunt, and her real mother and guardian was Song Mozhu. Strangely, Song Mozhu had never once personally come to Ladies’ Academy to pick Song Xuan up or drop her off. All this time, it had always been her aunt He Ziying or her uncle Ai Beihai who handled it.

Her aunt He Ziying came to Ladies’ Academy twice a month to take Song Xuan home, and every time she did so with perfect punctuality, sending her back to school just as precisely on the last day of the holiday.

To learn more about Song Xuan’s life, Ye Wuyou downloaded and browsed a great deal of information from Ladies’ Academy’s official website and the academy server. After reading it all in one go, he was genuinely astonished.

First of all, the Ladies’ Academy uniform was very different from the so-called uniforms at ordinary schools. They used a special piece of equipment called the Lady Suit, something like a latex bodysuit.

The Lady Suit was a special multifunctional latex-like undergarment designed and produced by the House of Ladies. Once worn, it could be kept on for twenty years without ever needing to be removed.

The Lady Suit had four major features. First, it wrapped the girl’s body from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, 100 percent covered. Second, although it enclosed the wearer’s entire head, hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, and other special parts could still pass through the surface of the latex bodysuit via the suit’s magical liquid-latex material. Likewise, skin keratin, sweat, and other metabolic byproducts could pass through the fabric and be delivered to the suit’s outer surface, allowing it to be worn long term. Third, the material of the Lady Suit was extraordinarily tough, a special military-grade substance that could not be cut even by a blade sharp enough to be called molecular-level. It was also fireproof, anti-corrosion, and radiation-resistant. Fourth, inside the suit were deformable plugs and locks for the mouth, nose, urethra, vagina, and back passage, allowing the wearer to handle bodily functions, meals, and hygiene without taking it off.

In its default state, it looked like a latex outfit that beautifully emphasized a woman’s curves, and its color and patterns changed according to the student’s grade level: milky white in primary school, pink in junior high, and black in high school.

From the first day a girl enrolled at Ladies’ Academy, she had to put on the Lady Suit and could not remove it until graduation, transfer, or withdrawal. The suit contained a complex locking mechanism, with sturdy and ingenious locks at the neck, arms, wrists, chest, waist, hips, thighs, and ankles, fully preventing students, their parents, or outsiders from taking it off by any means. And while the special material was soft, it was also unimaginably strong, making any violent attempt to destroy it impossible.

Second, Ladies’ Academy’s school rules were extremely strict. The students’ words and actions were judged according to a detailed set of standards, and every day the academy assigned scores to the female students based on those standards.

As for exactly how the academy scored the women, and what rewards or punishments different score bands brought, that remained unknown, because the server contained no such records.

Over the years, Ladies’ Academy had relied on its strict rules, its professional and patient teaching staff, and its highly effective lady-training to cultivate generation after generation of graduates, proving the effectiveness of its education on them.

By now, there were forty-two Ladies’ Academies for primary and secondary education around the world. In the nine cities of the East Asian country alone, there were seventeen: three in the capital Dongzhou, six in Xingzhou, the headquarters of the House of Ladies, one in Zhuzhou, two in Yunmengze, two in Lion City, one in Mumbai, one in Western Australia, one in New Bangkok, and none in South Africa for the time being.

In addition, the House of Ladies had partnered with twenty-four 9A universities, military academies, and research institutes around the world to establish Ladies’ Academy university divisions, extending their educational reach from primary school all the way to doctoral study. That was why Ladies’ Academy’s reputation in elite circles had long spread everywhere, making it a quintessential elite education institution.

World-class educational resources, extremely strict school rules, and the excellent reputation that circulated widely in elite circles all made Ladies’ Academy highly favored by wealthy parents, who were eager to send their daughters there for an education, at least through university. And for most of the girls who came to Ladies’ Academy, before they finished high school and left, there was basically no chance for them to take off their Lady Suit uniforms on their own.

From Song Xuan’s records, her posture score rarely dropped below 80 except for the first few months after entering Ladies’ Academy in first grade. It generally stayed above 80, and on some days it even reached above 90. Ye Wuyou thought that a score of 80 must already count as excellent inside Ladies’ Academy, and that thought only deepened the ideal lady image of Song Xuan in his heart.

As for academics, Song Xuan had always ranked near the top of her class, with beautiful grades across every subject. Her file also recorded first prizes in piano competitions, special grand prizes in ballet competitions, and she had even won excellent placements every year in the sports meet hosted by Ladies’ Academy.

Ye Wuyou could not imagine that such a perfect woman could truly exist in the world: a face beautiful enough to rival the heavens, even if he had never seen her full face because of the mask; outstanding grades; talent in the arts; and a healthy body.

If he could win such a beauty for himself, even dying ten thousand times would leave no regret.

The Lady’s Academy that Song Xuan attended was a school founded by the Lady’s Home, and the orphanage that had raised him was also founded by the Lady’s Home. To him, there had to be some hidden thread of fate connecting the two, so with even stronger longing, he tried to learn everything he could about Song Xuan from her records.