In the coffee shop.
Lin Yu grimaced in discomfort.
Across the table sat Tang Manman, her eyes glistening with tears.
Lin Yu really had no idea what to say anymore.
Good grief.
Without a word, she’d decided to get a tattoo.
And she claimed it was to catch the attention of a guy like him, a dyed-hair delinquent?
Come on!
Sis!
You’ve got the wrong script!
You’re a real model student!
Your script should be about laying low and protecting yourself,
avoiding getting targeted by a punk like me!
He raised a hand to rub his forehead.
Lin Yu knew it had come to this—
he had to lay it all out clearly now.
Looking at Tang Manman across the table, her eyes red and wet, her crying so beautiful it made your heart ache, Lin Yu took a deep breath, met her gaze directly, and said seriously:
“Tang Manman.”
“I really, really, really have no feelings for you.”
“The reason I helped you.”
“It’s not because I’m interested in you.”
“Remember Zhao Dahu from Class Three?”
“I helped him out when he was being bullied too.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Big, strong, over two meters tall, with that silly look on his face.”
“That guy could probably swallow me whole with his build.”
“I helped him.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m into him, right?”
“Helping you and helping him—it’s the same thing.”
“It’s just that I saw you look...”
Lin Yu paused, chewing his words to make them a bit milder, then continued:
“...like someone who needed help.”
“And I just happened to have the ability and the desire to help.”
“So I stepped in.”
“It’s really that simple.”
“Don’t overthink it.”
After rattling off this long speech, Lin Yu looked up at Tang Manman across the table.
He saw that she still had that soft, stubborn look, sniffling and staring at him miserably.
Heartbroken, aggrieved, with a stubbornness as soft as cotton tangled in her tear-reddened peach-blossom eyes.
It was as if she were saying that his excuses weren’t enough to make her give up on him.
Facing a Tang Manman who looked so soft but was actually incredibly stubborn, Lin Yu was at a loss.
He had to hit her with something harsh!
Like how they trick you before a shot, telling you it won’t hurt.
Lin Yu softened his tone a little, speaking as gently as if whispering sweet nothings:
“Tang Manman.”
“I know you’re beautiful.”
“You obviously know that yourself.”
“Who doesn’t have a few mirrors at home?”
“But I’m being honest with you.”
“Beauty is subjective.”
“You think you’re good-looking.”
“Other people might think you’re good-looking too.”
“But I genuinely don’t go for someone like you.”
“Your type just doesn’t do it for me.”
“To me, actually...”
Lin Yu bit his lip.
Like the silence before a bomb goes off, he paused for a few seconds, then continued:
“To me, you’re really no different from any ordinary girl at school.”
“Think about it this way.”
“If you helped some random, average guy at school,”
“and he just kept clinging to you day after day, refusing to let go,”
“insisting on having something happen between you two,”
“wouldn’t you say that’s...”
Lin Yu lifted his eyes to look at Tang Manman across the table, his voice probing cautiously:
“Wouldn’t you say that’s not very nice?”
Seeing the dazed, shattered expression on Tang Manman’s face,
Lin Yu knew his words had hit the mark.
But clearly,
he had come on too strong!
Watching her eyes lose their sparkle and fill with tears, dim and hollow, Lin Yu, afraid she might do something drastic, quickly tried to backtrack:
“Ah,”
“I, I don’t hate you or anything.”
“It’s just that I don’t feel that way about you.”
“We, we can still be friends, right?”
“We go to the same school, we’ll run into each other all the time.”
“We’re homies.”
“From now on, if something’s up, just tell me.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Or how about we swear an oath of brotherhood?”
“Brothers for life?”
Lin Yu asked tentatively.
Seeing those empty, heart-wrenching eyes of hers, Lin Yu gritted his teeth and threw caution to the wind:
“We could even swear a bond of kinship, if you want!”
“Ahhh—”
Tang Manman suddenly opened her mouth wide without warning.
And let out a soft, wailing cry.
Lin Yu panicked a bit when she started crying.
But he quickly realized—
Compared to her earlier silence, like mourning a death worse than life,
maybe crying was actually a better thing for her.
Still, just standing there while she sobbed felt wrong.
Lin Yu got up, walked over to Tang Manman’s side, gently patted her shoulder, and comforted her with careful restraint:
“It’s okay.”
“Brother, just cry, cry, cry~”
“It’s not a crime~”
Lin Yu hummed an off-key, awful version of the song.
Tang Manman cried even harder.
Whether it was because of Lin Yu’s singing or some even more painful reason, she sobbed more intensely.
After offering a few simple words of comfort, Lin Yu paid the bill and slipped out quickly...
...
Stumbling through the deep snow, one step after another,
Lin Yu scratched his butt through his pants and sighed.
Actually, everything he’d said to Tang Manman just now was a lie.
But the fact that he didn’t want to be with her—that was real.
As for why he didn’t want to be with her,
it was because Lin Yu always felt a bit uneasy.
Not just with Tang Manman,
but also with the other heroines in the plot, like Xia Muzhu and Qing Mo.
Every time he saw them, he couldn’t help but think of those messy scenes from the manga.
It just felt...
wrong.
Like he was some kind of stand-in.
So toward these girls,
Lin Yu truly had zero romantic interest!
Compared to all that,
Lin Yu felt that the most urgent thing right now was to drag his grades up.
But how to improve his grades?
Just rote memorization all day wouldn’t cut it.
Wasn’t there some more efficient way to study?
Lin Yu pulled out his phone and started searching for more scientific, effective learning methods.
Soon enough,
he actually found one that seemed pretty reliable.
It was called the Feynman Technique...
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
ose... to cooperate with the protagonist! Shen Yuan: I have a system! Protagonist: What? System: Holy crap, you're just spilling it out like that? Shen Yuan: Let's team up, we'll split the system rewards! Protagonist: Fifty-fifty split? Shen Yuan: No way! Protagonist: What!? I'm the one getting beaten up, and I don't get half? Shen Yuan: Forty-sixty split, I get forty, you get sixty! Protagonist: Deal! Big brother, come on, hit me! As long as it doesn't kill me, beat me like you mean it! Shen Yuan: Don't worry... I will definitely protect all of you! No one but me can lay a finger on you! Guard our Heaven's Chosen Ones! I'm the only one allowed to bully them!
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
lanned to earn money steadily and take life at a slower pace. But he never expected... his father's remarriage, and the stepmother bringing along a dependent, would completely disrupt his life's plans...
