Chapter 24: Happy Breakup

It is less than two hundred kilometers from Tong City to Jinling, closer than some cities within Jiangsu Province are to Jinling; or rather, cities in Anhui Province are all quite close to Jinling.

This is also one of the reasons why many people jokingly call Jinling the provincial capital of Anhui Province.

From ancient times to the present, there has been no shortage of people migrating from Anhui Province to Jinling; some Ma'anshan people even boast of being Jinling locals, though whether the actual Jinling locals agree is another matter entirely.

As the sun gradually rose, the bus drove past the later-famous abstract city, Wuhu.

During the trip, Xu Heng chatted with Zheng Jingjing for a while; the girl was quite interesting to talk to, but the topics always inevitably circled back to Ying Ziyun.

Later, Xu Heng really did not want to talk about Ying Ziyun anymore, so he had to find an excuse, saying he was a bit sleepy.

Zheng Jingjing probably realized that what she was asking was a bit too private, so she scratched her head in embarrassment, lowered her head, and started playing Snake on her phone.

At this moment, the driver in the front row suddenly called out: "Miss, your friend seems to be suffering from motion sickness, come over and take a look."

The friend of Zheng Jingjing that the driver spoke of was naturally Ying Ziyun.

At this time, her face was pale, and cold sweat was constantly dripping from her forehead.

Several boys, seeing that the girl was pretty, also cast their gazes toward Ying Ziyun, though out of politeness, they did not crowd around.

Zheng Jingjing grabbed a plastic bag and hurried to the front.

"Vomit, Ziyun, you'll feel better once you get it out."

Even though she said that, Ying Ziyun did not feel any better after vomiting; instead, her complexion turned even whiter, shifting from pale to deathly white. She gripped the edge of the car window, feeling her consciousness becoming somewhat blurred.

Zheng Jingjing half-knelt beside her, constantly wiping her sweat with a look of worry.

They were junior high school classmates; although they were not in the same school in high school, they had kept in touch and had a good relationship.

This time, when she learned that Ying Ziyun was going to take the train to Jinling, she was the one who took the initiative to ask Ying Ziyun to change to the bus with her.

But how was she to know that Ying Ziyun had a constitution prone to motion sickness?

And looking at Ying Ziyun's state, it seemed her motion sickness was quite severe, and for a moment, Zheng Jingjing panicked a little.

The space on the bus was so small that Xu Heng, sitting in the back row, could also tell what was happening in the front.

He turned his head to look at the scorching sun hanging in the sky and sighed slightly.

"It's not motion sickness, it's heatstroke."

Zheng Jingjing turned back and discovered the person behind her was Xu Heng, and she hesitated: "But Ziyun said herself it was motion sickness..."

"She's just being stubborn." Knowing Ying Ziyun's stubborn temper well, Xu Heng waved his hand, signaling Zheng Jingjing to move aside, then walked over to Ying Ziyun and picked her up in one motion.

Sitting in the very front in the middle of summer, and with Ying Ziyun being anemic to begin with, it would be a miracle if she didn't get heatstroke from the combination of motion sickness and high temperatures.

Ying Ziyun opened her eyes in a daze and saw the serious-looking Xu Heng. She wanted to push him away and say she didn't need his help, but she found that her throat felt like it was burning; she couldn't utter a single word, and her vision was filled with dense black spots.

"We're on the highway right now, and the next service station is still over thirty kilometers away."

In her trance, Ying Ziyun heard Zheng Jingjing's voice, followed immediately by Xu Heng's.

"It's fine, heatstroke is a minor issue if treated in time."

This thing called heatstroke is also known as 'fasha' in Huaxia colloquialism; it's not a major illness, but it can be fatal if not handled properly.

And the simplest and most effective folk remedy for treating heatstroke is 'scraping therapy'—using a spoon and Wine to rub the back of the person suffering from heatstroke to clear the blood vessels, then using an ice pack to help dissipate the heat.

Obviously, there were no such conditions on the bus.

Xu Heng held Ying Ziyun with one arm, reaching under her waist to grab her arm, while using the knuckles of his index and middle fingers on his other hand to clamp her elbow pit.

Before Zheng Jingjing even knew what he was doing, Xu Heng exerted force suddenly, pulling upward with his knuckles closed; the delicate, tender skin in Ying Ziyun's elbow pit instantly turned blood-red.

"Ah~" The sharp pain cleared Ying Ziyun's consciousness a little, and she let out a soft moan, like a lute string plucked by a musician.

This sound made Xu Heng freeze for a few seconds.

It had been a long time since he had heard his ex-girlfriend moan like that; the last time must have been over ten years ago in a youth hostel.

Ying Ziyun's cry of pain was not only heard by him, but also by several boys in the front who didn't understand the situation. They stood up and said indignantly: "What did you do to this girl, kid? Don't think about taking advantage of someone in a vulnerable state..."

"I'm her boyfriend!" Xu Heng retorted.

That one sentence shut them up. The few young boys who wanted to step up to play the hero and save the beauty immediately shrank back into their seats, muttering: "Damn, letting his own girlfriend sit in that miserable front seat, he's really not a decent guy."

Xu Heng couldn't be bothered to pay attention to these wet-behind-the-ears brats and focused on performing the "simplified scraping therapy" on Ying Ziyun.

Someone watching the spectacle used their phone to record the whole thing from start to finish and posted it online, not hesitating to spend a huge amount of data to invite the people on the school Tieba to eat the melon.

For students who were currently starved for entertainment, this incident was still quite interesting, and in less than a few minutes, over a dozen people had commented under the post.

"Whoa, the senior is so handsome, is he from our Zijin Academy?"

"Seems like he's from Jin Da."

"Then I think he's even more handsome."

"?"

"Who is this girl to the senior?"

"Give up, didn't you hear the senior say she's his girlfriend."

"No wonder, sob sob sob, if only my boyfriend treated me that well too."

Compared to the complex environment more than a decade later, most college students nowadays were still relatively simple, and there was no such thing as the "Dian-Xiao-Ji-Le-Ying-Bang-Ma" seven-character mantra on Tieba.

Many people were just asking for the name of the boy in the video; as for the girl, because she was blocked tightly by the boy, her full face wasn't revealed, so there were fewer people interested.

The more people asked, the higher the popularity of the post became, and after the popularity rose, people from other forums also ran over to watch the spectacle.

For no reason at all, Xu Heng became a hot topic of gossip on the Tieba forums of several major universities because of this small incident.

The person involved, Xu Heng, didn't know about this at all; he was still lamenting that he had only learned scraping therapy from Mother Xu after he became a father and his child frequently suffered from fever, yet now he was using it on his ex-girlfriend.

Time flowing backward, the cause and effect after rebirth were completely different from his previous life.

In his previous life, Ying Ziyun wouldn't have taken this bus, and in his previous life, Xu Heng wouldn't have known how to perform scraping therapy.

After Ying Ziyun's two elbow pits and neck were pulled into a purplish-red color by Xu Heng, her condition improved significantly; at least the cold sweat on her forehead wasn't flowing incessantly like before.

Seeing this, Zheng Jingjing breathed a sigh of relief and said, "Xu Heng, take good care of Ziyun, I'm going to sit in the front."

She was very tactful, knowing that once Ying Ziyun woke up, she would definitely have things to say to Xu Heng, so she left them space in advance.

Xu Heng nodded, placed Ying Ziyun on the seat, and fed her two sips of cool boiled water, then pulled the curtains to block the light, only to turn around and meet Ying Ziyun's weak and aggrieved little gaze.

This look was rare; the outwardly tough but inwardly soft Ying Ziyun only had this expression when encountering major setbacks or when being thrown onto the bed by Xu Heng.

"I am not your girlfriend." She had likely heard that sentence Xu Heng said in front of others.

Xu Heng did not refute it either, nodding with a smile: "Right, you are not my girlfriend."

"Then why are you still being so considerate to me?"

"Just because you aren't my girlfriend doesn't mean I can't be considerate to you, right?" Xu Heng stroked her head, "A hundred days of grace for a single day as husband and wife; we've had physical intimacy, so even if we can't be boyfriend and girlfriend, we can still be friends!"

"But my attitude toward you was so bad before..."

"You don't understand."

Ying Ziyun truly did not understand; she did not grasp why Xu Heng had changed so much. The old him would only speak bluntly, was spineless, never hid his thoughts, and when he said he wanted to pursue her again, he would buy flowers every day and wait downstairs at her dormitory, sending her all kinds of love quotes copied and pasted from the internet on QQ every day, and even after being blocked, he would repeatedly create new accounts to harass her.

At that time, it was as if Xu Heng only had eyes for her, sticking behind her like a child.

But the current Xu Heng had the temperament of an old father; he explained nothing, kept everything to himself, acted more maturely, but did not value her as much as he used to.

For the entire summer vacation, Xu Heng had not looked for her, even though the two of them were in the same city, which left Ying Ziyun feeling empty inside.

She pressed her lips together, recalling in her mind the kindness Xu Heng had once shown her, bit by bit, accumulating in her heart like stagnant water, gathering into a stream.

Perhaps she shouldn't have been so stubborn about realizing her own dreams; having someone who loved her deeply by her side was far better than anything else in the world.

Ying Ziyun gently tucked her hair up, revealing her pearl-like earlobes.

"Xu Heng."

"Hm?"

"Let's get back together."

Xu Heng was texting Liu Yiyan on his phone when he suddenly heard Ying Ziyun say this; he frowned and looked at her, for a moment even thinking he had misheard.

"What did you say?"

"Let's get back together."

After Ying Ziyun finished speaking, she closed her eyes to wait for Xu Heng's agreement; Xu Heng had never refused her requests, and there was no reason for him to refuse.

But this time, she did not wait for an agreement, only a very flat sentence...

"Forget it, we have already broken up, you deserve better."