Chapter 72: The Love-Brain Female Lead Awakens 15

On the way down the mountain, Sang Ruo finally surrendered completely to her own stamina. After only a few steps, her calves were already trembling. Yi Chen’an wasn’t surprised in the least. He led her to the cable car station and showed the staff the e-ticket he had bought in advance on his phone.

Emmm… it was honestly pretty depressing. When it came to exercise, she seemed to have already become a complete weakling in this man’s eyes. Sigh, did that mean she’d be losing one more way to get close to him and build their relationship in the future?

The morning sunlight wasn’t too harsh. It wrapped the cable car’s glass cabin in a warm glow, making everything seem a little brighter.

Behind them stretched a vast, unbroken range of mountains. Before her sat the man she liked. Sang Ruo felt deeply content. Life ought to be this radiant.

Yi Chen’an sat across from Sang Ruo, seemingly taking in the scenery around them as well.

Picking up her phone, Sang Ruo wanted to move to the seat opposite him. The moment she stood up, the man grabbed her arm. “What are you moving around for? Be careful not to throw off the balance.”

“Tch, how much do I even weigh? Like I could affect the balance of this giant metal box.” She sat down beside Yi Chen’an. Raising her phone, she switched to the front camera and tilted her head closer to him. “Quick, quick, quick. This height is perfect for taking pictures. Come on, look at the camera.”

Of course, Sang Ruo didn’t forget to turn on the beauty filter. She looked pretty good on camera, while Yi Chen’an had turned his head slightly to look at her.

She complained in an affected tone, “Aiya, why aren’t you looking at the camera?” But inwardly, she felt this photo had turned out pretty well too. In the shot, she was smiling with happiness and contentment, while the man looked at her with gentle focus.

Of course, Yi Chen’an’s gaze might also just have been because of the lighting.

She raised her phone again and urged the man to look at the camera. At last, she got a proper front-facing photo of the two of them together. Their looks were both more than good enough, so there was nothing wrong there. The only flaw was that there was still a bit of distance between them, making them look not quite intimate enough.

Clearing her throat, she deliberately pointed at the background in the photo and said, “Look, didn’t the scenery come out really well? I’ll send it to you. This lighting and this height are really hard to come by.”

“Mm.”

Scheming a little, she slipped the two selfies in among several plain landscape shots before sending them to him. “Sent them to you. Save them, okay?”

That way, Yi Chen’an’s phone would count as having her photos on it too.

That morning’s exercise had drained every last bit of energy from the useless girl, so when she got back, she collapsed into a chair and stayed there until afternoon.

Then she noticed there were still a lot of uneaten lychees in the fridge, along with the salted eggs that had arrived with them. Sigh, a father’s love really could be troubling.

She found two large basins, rubbed her hands together eagerly, and started peeling lychees. She removed the plump white flesh and picked out the pits. It was delicate work. If she wasn’t careful and broke the thin outer membrane of the flesh, all the juice would spill out.

Hearing the noise, Yi Chen’an came out of his room. He had probably been sleeping too, because the hair at the back of his head was all tousled.

“What are you doing?”

There was already a small basin full of fruit flesh.

“If we don’t finish them, they’ll go bad. I’ll peel them and dry them into dried fruit. In winter, they can be used for stewing meat or making desserts.”

The man wanted to help. At first, Sang Ruo had no intention of letting him do it. He would definitely ruin a lot of the fruit. But then she thought about it, doing something together with him could help deepen their relationship, and those sacrificed lychees would at least have died for a worthy cause. So she explained to him how it was supposed to be done.

Just as expected, the lychees Yi Chen’an peeled were a complete disaster. On top of that, he failed to control his movements, and juice ran down to his elbow, then dripped onto his shirt and pants, ruining an entire outfit.

Sang Ruo said despairingly, “Lychee stains basically can’t be washed out.”

She had meant to persuade him to give up, but unexpectedly, after hearing that, the man only became even more unrestrained. He let loose completely and went to war with the lychees one after another.

He was so focused it was like he was doing scientific research. The two of them barely spoke through the whole process. Not only did it fail to achieve the effect she had hoped for, she also ended up with half a basin of mangled fruit flesh. By the time they got to the last few lychees, Yi Chen’an seemed to have found the trick and was peeling them decently well, but there were no more lychees left for him to wreak havoc on. He could only stop reluctantly, though he looked quite satisfied. After all, he had learned a new skill.

Sang Ruo comforted herself by thinking that if she could win this man over this year, then next year, when it came time to dry fruit again, she would have a ready-made laborer on hand, and she wouldn’t even need to train him again.

She tore apart a cardboard box to make a drying tray, then lined it with a layer of foil to keep the fruit from sticking, and set it out on the balcony to dry. The sun had been strong these past few days, so all that was left was to wait for the harvest.

These past few days, Sang Ruo had been devoted to filling Yi Chen’an’s territory with traces of herself. That included this tray of fruit waiting to be dried, and also some of her little belongings, like a hair tie in this cabinet, a hair clip left on that table, the pink towel and colorful contact lens case in the bathroom, the pajamas hanging out to dry on the balcony, and her slippers in the shoe cabinet.

Before the holiday break ended, she even went out of her way to peel the yolks from that half basket of salted duck eggs and stir-fry them into a big bowl of egg yolk sauce. She packed it into a glass jar and stored it in the fridge, reminding Yi Chen’an that he could use it to mix with rice or noodles.

The first time he tasted it, his eyes lit up. That was exactly the effect she wanted. When he ate his meals or noodles three times a day, maybe he’d think of the sauce in the fridge, and along with it, think of her too.

Schoolwork carried on as usual, uneventful as ever.

In a few days, the college entrance exams would begin. Sang Ruo and a few other students from her department were called by their counselor to help out at the Admissions Office, doing odd jobs like sorting documents, processing forms, and answering phones.

By the end of each day, they were rushed off their feet, and their eyes were practically blurred.

That day, they didn’t finish until after nine. When they left the Admissions Office, one of the students with them suggested going out for hotpot. Sang Ruo had no objections, and everyone immediately agreed. They found an all-you-can-eat hotpot place in the snack street outside the school. Each person got their own pot base and picked their own ingredients. It was actually pretty clean too.

Though they didn’t all know each other, they were from the same department, so they still had common topics to talk about. Once the spicy hotpot was in their stomachs, they gradually became more familiar with one another. After they were half full, they started chatting about everything under the sun, including complaining about some truly bizarre inquiries.

Answering phones made it easy to run into parents who weren’t exactly rational. Sang Ruo had dealt with one before. After confirming that this really was the Admissions Office of Y University, the caller said he knew some vice president at the school, and that his son was interested in a certain major, so wouldn’t it be enough to just register it with the Admissions Office? If the senior students hadn’t warned her in advance, that absurd stunt alone would definitely have left her completely dumbfounded.

It seemed that complaining about other people always brought people closer together more quickly. A full stomach made people relax, and a girl sitting beside her, whom everyone called Fengfeng, nudged Sang Ruo with her elbow. “There’ve been some rumors about you going around the department lately. Do you know?”

“What?”

“You really don’t know? The girls in our class have all been saying you found a rich boyfriend off campus, and then broke up with Zhou Yan. You have no idea, quite a few girls in the department have had a crush on him. Before, it was one thing when he was taken. Now that you two have broken up, a lot of people are already getting restless.”

Seeing that her expression had turned unpleasant, Fengfeng said, “But I didn’t believe it from the start. With stories like this, it’s either some girl who’s jealous of you making things up to hurt you, or Zhou Yan himself leaked it to save face. We all know you were the one who dumped him. Otherwise, we’re in different classes, how could we have found out about your private business so fast? If it really was Zhou Yan… honestly, a man who can’t even keep his dignity after a breakup has pretty lousy character. You were smart to break it off.”

Actually, what she said was a little too personal for how well they knew each other. But Fengfeng genuinely looked down on the people spreading rumors, and after working with Sang Ruo for the past few days, she could at least be called an acquaintance. She felt Sang Ruo was reliable, so she kindly gave her a heads-up. It was also only after she started talking and saw that Sang Ruo didn’t seem overly attached to Zhou Yan that she said a bit more.

Sang Ruo said, “Thank you for telling me all this.”

Actually, there was no need to guess. These rumors could only have come from either Chi Qing or Zhou Yan. Sang Ruo found it annoying. Those two really were impossible to shake off.

Sang Ruo did not care that much about this kind of gossip, and it could not really affect her anyway. It was just irritating. How had she been so blind as to fall for Zhou Yan in the first place?

She had even spent a great deal of effort pursuing him, chasing after him all the way from high school to college. It had not been easy to finally get Zhou Yan to agree and become her boyfriend.

At the time, she had only felt that her life was complete. Even though Zhou Yan had some flaws, she did not care. She just kept giving to him and being good to him. She had also heard people say it was not worth it for her, but in love, what did “worth it” even mean? The only question was whether you were willing.

But after the dream woke her up and let her look at things from an outsider’s perspective, she suddenly realized that Zhou Yan had never liked her that much. So she stopped being willing. She wanted to take back the kindness she had given him.

In this relationship, it had always been Sang Ruo who took the initiative and did the giving.

Zhou Yan had gotten used to reaping the benefits, and now that she suddenly did not want to keep giving, was that why he had become so angry out of humiliation? Even if he had not started the rumors himself, the fact that he did not step forward to clear things up and instead let them slander Sang Ruo behind her back still made him no good person.

After returning to the dorm, Sang Ruo asked Yin Xiaoxin whether she had heard anything about the rumors.

Yin Xiaoxin was also taken aback. “I haven’t heard anything like that in class for now, but since we’re in the same dorm, they probably wouldn’t say it where I could hear it. I’ll ask around later.”

“No need. I only heard it from someone in another class, so I just thought I’d ask.”

Yin Xiaoxin was indignant. “That Zhou Yan really is something. I always thought he was unreliable, all looks and no substance.”

“Huh?” Was there something else Sang Ruo did not know?

“What’s so strange about that? You liked him that much before, would you have listened to anything other people said? If we had said anything, wouldn’t some Love Brain have held a grudge against us?”

Sang Ruo said awkwardly, a little embarrassed, “It wasn’t that bad…”

Yin Xiaoxin seemed to have held it in for a long time and had finally found an outlet. “You have no idea. Every time Zhou Yan played basketball, if you weren’t there, tons of girls would go give him water, towels, and stuff like that. He accepted every single one, then thanked them all with that smile on his face. Le Xian even said she once saw Zhou Yan ask a girl who had a crush on him to do his homework for him…”

Le Xian was another one of their roommates.

Sang Ruo had known absolutely nothing about any of this.

“Was I really that blind and deaf before?” She found it utterly unbelievable. “Did he really just give off hormones everywhere he went?”

“Heh…” Yin Xiaoxin curled her lip. “Back then, did you ever think anything about him was bad? You, of all people, were the very picture of a Love Brain.”

Sang Ruo let out a long, heavy breath. So everyone else had noticed the signs that early on, and she had been the only one blinded by love, trapping herself inside a prison of false happiness she had drawn around herself. Considering the ending she had gotten in that dream, maybe it really was not undeserved.

“Um…” Seeing her like this, Yin Xiaoxin grew a little regretful. She poked her guiltily and asked, “Did I… say it too harshly? Well… anyway, you’ve already broken up, so don’t dwell on it.”

“Yeah. Thank you for telling me all this. As far as I’m concerned, he’s completely in the past now.”