Chapter 2: Mistaken Identity Right After Rebirth
"Get up!"
Lu Man rolled over half-asleep and pulled the bedding toward him, but his arms closed around nothing more than the corner of the quilt.
Figuring his wife must be back from buying breakfast, Lu Man kept his eyes shut and called out, "Lingyi, let me sleep a little longer. We went through a lot last night, I'm exhausted..."
"Lingyi?"
The crisp voice of a young woman beside the bed suddenly shot up an octave. "What did you just call me?"
Right after, Lu Man felt a sharp pang of pain—a hand was twisting the skin on his arm through three full rotations.
"Ow!"
Lu Man propped himself up and looked at the intruder. "Trying to murder your own husband in broad daylight... Huh?"
The "Gu Lingyi" standing before him glared at him with a face so gloomy it looked ready to drip water.
The longer Lu Man stared, the more bewildered he became. Her features had grown impossibly youthful. If not for the familiar eyes and facial structure that remained unchanged, he almost wouldn't have recognized his own wife.
"How did you do your makeup today?" he asked in wonder. "Some kind of age-reversing trick? Can it really look this good? You look so tiny!"
The girl stood frozen and ice-cold, making no sound.
Lu Man looked down at her outfit. On her upper body, she was actually wearing a summer short-sleeved middle school uniform, with the words "Lu Province Caoxian No. 1 Middle School" printed across the chest.
He couldn't help marveling to himself. Last night it had been JK outfits, Hanfu, and all sorts of roleplay—was she still not done playing this morning? "You're really something. Where did you even get this custom-made? It looks just like our high school uniform."
He reached out to touch the fabric, but the girl finally snapped, grabbing a thick, green-covered hardcover book and hurling it right at him.
"You've had enough!"
"We grew up together since we were kids, and you still can't tell me apart from my sister!"
"Don't even think about getting back together with me!"
The book struck Lu Man right on the head, leaving him completely dazed.
He wasn't dazed from the blow, but from what she had just said.
The girl remained fuming. The heavy green hardcover book bounced off the bed with a muffled *thud*.
"And to think I even went out of my way to borrow last year's application guide to help you figure out how to fill out your college choices."
With that, she spun around and stormed off, slamming the bedroom door hard enough to make the doorframe rattle twice.
Lu Man sat there in a daze for a long moment before reaching down to pick up the green book she had left behind.
The book was as thick as an Oxford dictionary, and its dimensions were as large as A4 paper.
Emblazoned across the bright green cover in stark lettering were the words: *2006 Gaokao Application Guide for Lu Province*.
Lu Man flipped through the pages at random. The small opening section of the guide introduced the rules for submitting college applications, while the vast majority of the back was filled with school codes and major codes for higher education institutions across every province and municipality in the country.
This thing could practically be classified as an antique.
As his fingers brushed page after page, the texture of the light newsprint felt coarse against his skin. Accompanied by the rustling sound of turning pages, a sharp, distinct scent of printing ink rose into the air.
This was all far too real to be a dream.
Besides, that girl had really put her back into twisting his arm; the burning sting of the pain hadn't faded yet...
"A rebirth? No way, right?" With a flutter of anxiety in his chest and a muttered phrase on his lips, Lu Man swept his gaze across the room, already arriving at an absurd conclusion.
The wooden plank bed he was lying on had seen better days, letting out a creaking groan at the slightest shift.
Directly opposite stood a wardrobe with two curled-edge posters pasted over the glass doors—one of Stefanie Sun, one of Kakashi Hatake—concealing the auspicious peony pattern underneath.
A flip phone lay on the nightstand with its battery pried out and its stubby antenna extended. A universal charger was plugged into the wall outlet, two metal contact prongs gripping the battery while its red and green indicator lights blinked alternately.
The surrounding environment was clearly not the two-bedroom apartment he had bought in Yanjing, but rather his parents' house in Caoxian—a hometown that should have been sealed away in the dust of memory.
Lu Man slid the battery back into the flip phone. The time displayed on the screen confirmed his guess without a doubt.
June 10, 2006. 06:13, Saturday.
He had traveled back sixteen years, to a summer morning shortly after the Gaokao.
"That summer after the Gaokao... even though Lingyi and I were childhood sweethearts, our relationship wasn't that close yet... That girl just now wasn't Lingyi!" Cold sweat instantly beaded on Lu Man's forehead.
*Tap, tap.*
A knock sounded at the door, followed by his mother Liu Jing's voice: "Mr. Gu's younger daughter just came by looking for you. Why did she storm off looking so angry?"
"I don't know..."
As Liu Jing pushed the door open, Lu Man pulled the quilt up to cover his head.
Peeking out from the corner of his eye, he took in his mother's current appearance. Liu Jing was not very tall; standing around one hundred and sixty centimeters, she possessed a petite frame. Her thick, dark hair was tied into a short ponytail, the stray wisps swept back from her forehead and held in place by a wavy black headband. Her smooth brow and forehead showed not a single sign of sagging, and her temples were completely free of gray. Born in 1968, she was thirty-eight years old right now—right in the prime years where time seemingly spares a beauty.
Calculated against his age before his rebirth, his psychological age was only four years younger than hers. The bizarre sense of displacement felt much like the old saying that the closer one gets to home, the more timid one feels, leaving him somewhat at a loss as to how to face his mother as she was now.
"Get up, it's past seven."
*Swish.*
The curtains were yanked open, sunlight flooding the bedside. Lu Man tucked the edge of the blanket tighter over his face to block out the glare.
"Let me sleep a little longer," Lu Man mumbled from beneath the covers, trying to buy time to steady his emotions. "Mom, if you say it's seven, then it's barely past six right now."
Fortunately, calling out that "Mom" came naturally enough, without feeling too difficult.
Liu Jing's brows arched upward, her hand rising as if to swat him on the backside, but second-thought stopped her—her son had just finished the Gaokao, and even if he got up there wasn't anything much for him to do anyway. She suppressed the urge and walked away.
Underneath the quilt, Lu Man unlocked the phone to check the time again.
June 10, 2006. 06:15, Saturday.
"Knew it."
Lying about the time first thing in the morning was probably an instinctive, master-level skill shared by all mothers.
"During the summer vacation right after the Gaokao, I should have been flirting back and forth with Gu Jiashuo." Lu Man felt a splitting headache coming on. "And just a moment ago, I mistook Jiashuo for her older sister?"
Right after being reborn, he had blundered into a lethal question on impact! Wrestling with his dilemma, Lu Man decided that his top priority was to get accustomed to his new identity.
He began browsing through his phone. Back in 2006, even computers required dial-up to access the internet, and mobile phones remained the undisputed heavyweights of communication.
His text message inbox wasn't cluttered with spam and promotional junk; instead, it was filled with countless messages exchanged with classmates and friends. At one cent per text, every single character back then carried genuine feeling and sincerity.
The Mobile QQ icon featured a penguin wearing a flat cap and riding a skateboard. The massive volume of chat logs stored inside also allowed Lu Man to revisit the state of mind he'd had at eighteen years old.
A moment later, the sound of Liu Jing shuffling in slippers drew near again.
"It's almost eight! Lu Man, get up."
Lu Man stayed buried under the covers. "Almost eight? That means it's just past seven. Let me sleep another hour and I'll get up."
Lu Man heard Liu Jing suppress a deep breath, followed by the sound of her slippers receding into the distance.
Turning his attention elsewhere, he browsed the news sections on his phone to refamiliarize himself with the current affairs environment.
The year 2006.
At the start of the year, the agricultural tax known as the "imperial grain and state tax" had been abolished; in March, the Eleventh Five-Year Plan was launched; in April, Baidu rolled out a new feature called "Baidu Baike"; in June, the Three Gorges Dam was completed across its entire length, and shortly before that, the sports lottery had introduced a World Cup football guessing game...
*The Myth* and *Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire*, which had premiered late last year, had pirated torrents flying everywhere; on forums, all it took to start a fan war was posting a single sentence saying Jay Chou didn't sound good, instantly harvesting hundreds of replies shouting, "Do you even understand what it's like when the opening notes of *Nocturne* play and you go up to accept an award?"...
Even more striking, just a few days before his rebirth, he had still been scrolling through Douyin and seeing a chart-topping, viral video BGM—"Let's just say a proper goodbye, the river of time flows into the sea..."—only to find it sitting right at the top of the 2006 news rankings as well. It was *The Intersection Where Phoenix Flowers Bloom*, a graduation song for many students.
Many things that still felt fresh in 2022 already had their sprouts in 2006, enduring long enough to make people gasp in astonishment that such a thing had existed over a decade ago. Other things appeared thoroughly dated in the rushing tide of rapid development, prompting sighs that mere decades—no, mere years—had passed instead of generations.
[China Mobile 10086 Notice: Your 5 RMB for 20MB data package quota is running low...]
"It's nine-thirty!"
Lu Man put away his phone, pretending he had just taken a nap, and rolled over. "Oh, past eight already? I'll be up in five minutes."
This time, however, Lu Man's good days came to an end. Liu Jing whipped away the quilt he was hiding under, waving a plastic clothes hanger right in front of his eyes.
"You little rascal, are you getting up or not?!"
There is a saying that everyone must face a few high-risk moments in life, and one of them is "when your mother calls you by your full name."
Going from "son" and "Lu Man" all the way down to "little rascal"—if he disobeyed any further, the heartwarming mother-and-son scene he'd hoped for right after his rebirth threatened to devolve into a one-sided slaughter.
"Up, up, up!"
Lu Man immediately adopted a cooperative attitude, pushing the clothes hanger a safe distance away first. "Mom, you go on out first, I'm putting my clothes on right now."
Only then did Liu Jing nod in satisfaction. "Go wake your sister up too. You two really like to outdo each other in sleeping, like a pair of penned-up piglets."
"Right, right..."
Laughing through his tears, Lu Man dug out a few short-sleeved shirts and shorts.
Before his mother's wrath could spread to his sister, he needed to hurry up and wake Lu Xiaoshuang.
Xiaoshuang... she must only be fifteen or sixteen years old right now.
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