"Could it be that the salt and seasonings weren't mixed in properly?"
Gu Lingyi asked, perplexed. She had already finished off a large half of this bag and thought it was delicious.
She poked another piece with a toothpick and held it out to Lu Man's lips. "Want to try another one?"
"It does seem a bit unevenly mixed. The salt flavor is a bit heavy on this piece."
Gu Lingyi tightly gripped the paper bag, gave it a shake, opened it, poked another piece, and fed it to him again.
"How about this one?"
"A bit better."
Back and forth, she fed him several more bites. As she fed him, she suddenly caught sight of Lu Man struggling to hold back a smile at the corner of his mouth.
Only then did she realize.
"Big Brother!"
Gu Lingyi shoved the paper bag right into Lu Man's arms.
She had fallen for a huge trap!
He just wanted to trick her into feeding him a few more bites!
"Give me the medicine." Gu Lingyi snatched the package of dried tangerine peel from his arms, let out a huff, and took a few quick steps forward, deliberately putting some distance between them.
Though it made her scrunch up her little face in a pout, Lu Man wasn't flustered at all and followed her at an unhurried pace.
After all, if a girl was walking with a little skip, she definitely wasn't angry.
From the occasional backward glances Gu Lingyi cast his way, one could see her eyes sparkling brightly and a clear smile lingering at the corners of her brows.
They arrived at the front door of their home, a detached villa belonging to their father, Gu Yan. Gu Lingyi stopped in her tracks and turned to look at him.
"Big Brother, thank you for today."
"There's no need for you to say thank you to me. Hurry on inside."
Lu Man said, "Give my regards to Aunt Wen. Tell her that since her throat is uncomfortable and the weather is so hot, she should remember to drink plenty of water and eat more cooling fruits."
The sisters' mother was named Wen Yi. As for the girls' father, Gu Yan, Lu Man chose to ignore him entirely.
Even his own daughters had nicknamed him the "Stubborn Old Gu," and in his "past life," this Stubborn Old Gu had relentlessly broken up Lu Man's marriage plans twice.
After graduation, he refused to let the younger daughter stay with him, which Lu Man could somewhat understand given his fierce paternal protectiveness; but later on, when the older daughter went to Yanjing to find him and they had been living together for years with a fait accompli, this Stubborn Old Gu still guarded the household registration booklet with his life to prevent them from registering their marriage...
Well, thinking about it that way, having ruined the old man's two precious daughters, from the perspective of a father-in-law, he probably didn't look like much of a good guy either. The fact that the old man hadn't chopped him to pieces could be considered an act of vast magnanimity on his part...
Lu Man had a premonition that even after his rebirth, the Stubborn Old Gu would remain a towering Mount Tai standing squarely between himself and Gu Lingyi.
It would be a miracle if the man even agreed to take his regards.
Gu Lingyi glanced toward the house, saw that no one was paying attention to them, paused for a moment, and didn't go inside right away.
"Jiashuo mentioned this morning that she brought you a guidebook for college entrance examination applications. Did you get it, Big Brother?"
"I got it."
"Did you find any universities you have your eye on?" Gu Lingyi asked with some nervousness. "I heard Jiashuo say your estimated score could reach 600?"
Lu Man not only knew his score, but of course he also knew the final admission results. "Binhai Normal University. I think it'll be that one."
"Binhai Normal University?"
Hearing the name of this school, Gu Lingyi was somewhat surprised. "What a coincidence, that's our mother's alma mater."
Lu Man thought to himself, *I know, that's why after the scores came out, your family strongly urged both of you sisters to apply to Binhai Normal University.*
"Big Brother, are you sure you want to apply to that one?"
"Mm, I'm sure. The first few days after the scores are released and applications open, I'll talk to you about it again."
His own wife had suddenly turned into a seventeen-or-eighteen-year-old youthful high schooler—or rather, a prospective college student—and Lu Man was more than happy to look at her a few extra times and chat a bit more. "Your sister arrived at my place at six o'clock this morning. I was still half-asleep, and she gave me quite a scare."
"That application guidebook... I asked a cousin for it. My cousin had to catch a flight, so we agreed she'd drop by here at four in the morning and put the book in our mailbox."
Gu Lingyi's gaze shifted evasively. "So Jiashuo basically brought it over to you the very moment she got the book."
He could clearly sense that the emotion in her tone had dropped.
Lu Man took it all in. The him from more than a dozen years ago had eyes only for her younger sister, Gu Jiashuo, and completely failed to notice any of Gu Lingyi's subtle details.
She didn't mind physical contact with him; she was always the first to get angry when Lu Man was being mocked or subtly insulted; she would nervously and anxiously want to know his application preferences; yet whenever her sister and him were mentioned, she would show an imperceptible sense of loss.
This couldn't be brushed off with a simple label of "childhood sweethearts."
Now, however, Lu Man had returned through rebirth and was thoroughly familiar with his own emotional threads.
If he stopped entangling himself with Gu Jiashuo starting right now, everything that followed would become so much simpler.
At the very least, he could spare the Stubborn Old Gu from having another precious daughter ruined...
That was easier said than done, though...
Thinking of Gu Lingyi's current introverted, social-phobic nature, and considering that Gu Jiashuo had already been through puppy love with him once, whether Gu Lingyi could easily accept him would still depend entirely on the efforts he put into winning her over.
"Big Brother!"
A crisp voice interrupted his thoughts.
Lu Man looked up to see a girl with an identical appearance standing right beside Gu Lingyi.
"Jiashuo."
The two sisters stood side by side, their natural, unadorned appearances truly looking like a copy-and-paste job.
Fortunately, Gu Jiashuo was wearing a black thin-strapped slip dress. Having rushed out, she had hastily added a white shirt over the top to cover her snow-white shoulders and collarbone, tying the hem of the shirt in a casual knot across her lower abdomen.
If she had really intentionally dressed in the exact same outfit as her sister and then spun around a few times before separating, Lu Man wouldn't have had any confidence in telling them apart at a glance.
Gu Jiashuo wore a frosty expression, obviously harboring strong opinions about Lu Man's recent QQ reply. "Big Brother, do you really not want to get back together?"
"You guys talk first, I'm heading back..." Seeing that the atmosphere was turning ominous, Gu Lingyi wanted to slip away first.
"Lingyi, stay right here for a moment. I want you to be a witness to what I'm about to say to her."
Lu Man looked earnestly at Gu Jiashuo. "We are breaking up completely, and we are not getting back together."
"...What?"
Gu Jiashuo's icy expression instantly collapsed. She froze on the spot, her little mouth slightly agape, unable to utter a word for a moment.
Gu Lingyi, standing off to the side, hadn't anticipated this development either. At this point, she was far more anxious than the two people directly involved. "Hey, you two, talk this things through properly! Is there anything between a couple that can't be discussed and resolved? I... I'm going upstairs! Both of you, calm down, and stop saying things in the heat of the moment!"
With that, Gu Lingyi practically bolted into the house, her hurried footsteps fading away with a rapid *clack-clack-clack*.
Turning back to Gu Jiashuo, her chest was heaving up and down with anger, and every breath she exhaled seemed laced with gunpowder.
"Fine! If you want to break up, let's break up!"
Gu Jiashuo certainly didn't have her sister's pushover temperament.
She stepped right up to him, tilted her head up, and locked eyes with Lu Man. "You tell me yourself—wasn't it me who advised you to focus on your studies first and put romance aside, saying we'd have plenty of time for each other in college? You were the one who insisted on making things official back in high school, acting as if your entire high school life would go pitch black without me."
"I only agreed because I saw how hard you chased me and felt sorry for you! But after we got together, whenever we went out to play, you never had an opinion of your own. Whenever I asked, it was always 'whatever' or 'fine by me'—it was so boring!"
"And this morning you even mistook me for someone else! How could my sister possibly bring you a book at six in the morning? She's a sleepyhead who wouldn't even be awake yet!"
While she let loose a torrent of complaints, Lu Man had already made up his mind: breaking up with Gu Jiashuo was an absolute must; otherwise, Gu Lingyi would never agree to be with him.
Even after the breakup, Gu Lingyi would still have reservations—after all, he was her younger sister's first boyfriend. An eighteen-year-old Gu Lingyi wouldn't possess the bold decisiveness she would have at thirty. There would inevitably still be a thorn in her heart, and Lu Man would just have to figure out a way to slowly work through it.
"So, your grievances boil down to this: I was too humble, too clingy, and terrible at romance, which made it all completely meaningless," Lu Man looked at Gu Jiashuo, "especially the part about me mixing you up with your sister."
"Right! Twins hate being mistaken for each other more than anything! But Big Brother, as long as your attitude is a bit better..." Gu Jiashuo tried to use the exact same tactic she had used in their previous squabbles to bring Lu Man to heel.
Breaking up had always just been a minor tantrum, meant to force Lu Man into chasing her all over again. Usually, Lu Man would take all the blame upon himself, anxiously trying this and that to figure out more ways to coax her back.
This time, however, Lu Man completely broke the pattern.
He needed to make a clean break with Gu Jiashuo and cut ties without dragging things out; the faster the breakup, the fewer variables there would be.
He had to treat her strictly as his future wife's sister—his sister-in-law—and keep her at a respectful distance.
"Then we truly have no reason to continue."
"Big Brother!" Gu Jiashuo couldn't quite believe her ears, her eyes turning faintly red. "Stop joking around at a time like this..."
Watching Gu Jiashuo's eyes suddenly well up with frustrated tears, Lu Man said every word clearly and deliberately: "Breaking up completely is for the best for both of us."