I am speculating here, but Bai's family has such a bad reputation that the flimsiest pretext is enough for people to go after her in a place where people, quite explicitly, consider an apolitical paradise.
And the thing is, our current opponents don't appear to fear retaliation.
Likely causes:
1) They want to do permanent damage to Bai Meizhen so as to neutralize her combat capabilities and ability to retaliate. Unlikely, you don't get into Zhou's class without ambition, and people with ambition aren't going to risk expulsion
2) They don't care. This points at a much deeper, underlying grudge and possibly means the Bai family is actively harassing their families and this is their shot at what they think of as comeuppance.
3) They believe that retaliation can be neutralized somehow, be it alliances (she can't beat ALL of us) or a guardian of some sort
4) The rewards are worth the risks (Bai Meizhen has a super cultivation technique they can steal? The loss of face suffered by the Bais is enough to get rewarded by mommy and daddy? they have a sponsor? something else?)
5) They are actually genuine about their motives: they're only here for us.
Or some combination thereof.
The way the scene is structured, people trying to cast themselves as good guys, the accusation of Bai Meizhen as somehow being a 'bully', this is starting to feel intensely political. Someone is aware of the optics of all this and is mugging for the damn camera. Worse, Bai is falling for it because she's apparently even less socially savvy than even Ling Qi with her sad, solitary dot in socialize.
This is how you beat the physical monsters using social skills.
Our options are... limited atm, but the implications are damnably inconvenient. If people are willing to gang up 8 vs 2, and against what is probably the second to fourth strongest student, robbing people blind isn't going to do shit for people who are just waiting for the chance to jump us. Tactics and strategy apparently operates on a wider context than personal battles and personal humiliations. This is what it means to enter the snake's nest of politics, and given the setting, I'm guessing that metaphor is not entirely figurative.
Right now, doing what we're doing, win or lose, we're playing their game. It's not a game we're good at playing.
If we can somehow get Bai Meizhen to make friends with ONE significantly powerful person, I think we'll have secured for ourselves one of the top factions in the school rather than an 'outsider looking in' position that we now vaguely occupy. In order to do that, well... my brain usually jumps to the most batshit insane solution, and here's what it has come up with: I think we need to consider challenging Sun Liling to a duel.
WAIT, hear me out.
Why are we doing this? To change the optics.
We have actually legitimate grievances with her:
1) She broke our house
2) She hurt our friend
3) After she left, mooks went and tried to finish Bai Meizhen off
Whereas if we challenge her:
1) It's going to underline the difference between the expendable eight going after us, and Bai Meizhen's pet mouse going after the damn mongoose
2) We're going to do it properly, letting her heal and all that. We can probably weasel a month of prep time out of it, if not a more conditional fight 'when I am at late silver and late yellow, or three months time, whichever comes first' type thing.
3) When we lose, we'll a) put up a fight, b) do so graciously. The point here isn't to win, it's to get people's respect. Sun Liling's respect is paramount.
Look, we might not be able to convince her to be friends with Bai Meizhen, but we could probably convince her to repudiate the more cowardly tactics used against Bai Meizhen, if only quietly.
Every fight we win is going to make us more enemies unless we can figure out how to turn those fights into part of a narrative stating how awesome Ling Qi is.
"She challenged The Butcher of the West's Daughter for hurting her friend, what the actual
fuck."
