Chapter 162

Unfortunately, Gavin didn't know the origin of the tattoo either. Yolanda briefly told Gavin what had happened that afternoon, and the two of them agreed to investigate separately and then share their findings later. In the blink of an eye, a week had passed. Because both Gavin and Bryce visited Yolanda frequently, it created a competitive tension between the three of them. This made the girls at the academy so jealous that they wished Yolanda would just disappear. Since they couldn't change Gavin's or Bryce's minds, they targeted Yolanda instead. Rumors tended to spread like wildfire on a campus. Thus, the lies they fabricated spread throughout First Academy in just a few days. But what puzzled the other students was that any post discussing Yolanda on the campus forum would be deleted almost instantly without exception. Some students confronted the forum administrator, accusing him of protecting Yolanda. However, the administrator had no idea what was going on. He gave the excuse that the system was infected by a virus to buy some time. But even after a few days of combing through the forum, the administrator couldn't find any trace of a virus. He even hired a semi-famous hacker from Dowonair to look through the forum's code. Yet, the hacker couldn't find anything wrong with the web forum as well. Since this bug didn't affect the forum's normal operations, they eventually gave up trying to fix it. In reality, the reason the campus forum was behaving this way was because Gavin had planted a Trojan horse program in it. The program automatically monitored and deleted any posts that defamed Yolanda or were related to her without him having to lift a finger. Of course, no one else knew about this. As a result, everyone firmly believed the rumors about Yolanda receiving special treatment from a big shot at the academy. The gossip soon spiraled out of control. Some even spread the rumor that Yolanda was the illegitimate daughter of an elite family in Dowonair. As the rumors got out of hand, the number of students who disliked Yolanda and wanted to drive her out of the academy increased. A few days later, just as Yolanda was returning to the academy after lunch, she was suddenly blocked by a group of girls from the school. These girls were athletic recruits who rarely focused on their studies and often bullied the well-behaved honor students. Some students in Class A had been holding a grudge against Yolanda, so they'd called in these troublemakers to teach her a lesson. The leader of the group was a girl named Luna Pith, who had fiery red hair and was around five feet nine inches. She was half a head taller than Yolanda. Everyone in the academy knew that Luna liked Bryce. At the start of the semester, she had represented the school in a provincial gymnastics competition. She had just returned that morning, only to hear that some vixen had bewitched Bryce. Of course, Luna was furious to hear about this. She immediately rallied her crew to corner Yolanda. Luna had heard that Yolanda was fat and ugly, but she had chalked it up to exaggeration out of jealousy. Now that she had seen Yolanda in person, she realized that Yolanda looked even worse than they'd described! Instantly, Luna felt even more indignant. How could such an ugly girl possibly earn Bryce's favor? She glared icily at Yolanda and demanded, "Are you Yolanda?" Yolanda glanced at the group of teenage girls surrounding her and immediately understood what they were up to. She gave them a bored look and said indifferently, "If you're planning to start a fight, hurry up. I don't have time to waste." Yolanda would rather spend her time working through a few physics exercises she already knew by heart than deal with these bullies. "How arrogant!" Luna was no stranger to bullying others, but this was the first time she had met someone as audacious as Yolanda. "I'm warning you, stay away from Bryce! You're not worthy of being with him!" "If that's what you think, you should go tell him yourself," Yolanda retorted. Yolanda had never once taken the initiative to approach Bryce. In fact, to avoid any misunderstandings, she had already made her position clear to him at the start of the semester. However, hearing this only made Luna's expression darken. "If you hadn't thrown yourself at him, do you think he'd give an ugly creature like you a second glance? I'm telling you, if I see you around Bryce again—" Before she could finish her threat, a stern, icy voice rang out from behind them.