Qin Zixin was utterly stunned, the ache in her legs from the arduous climb completely forgotten.
“My word! You actually dared to go on that date?”
“Why not? We’d already been chatting; how could I not ask her out?”
“But weren’t you… with my sister at the time?”
“That was ages ago. I hadn’t even managed to woo your sister yet. Actually, no, *I* knew your sister, but she had no idea who I was.”
Qin Zixin listened, a hint of disdain coloring her expression.
“What a loser. How can you even admit that? So you managed to get her out, then what? Didn’t you say you’d hooked a ‘dead fat pig’? Just how fat was she, exactly?”
Liu Wenjin’s face grew solemn, as if recalling a particularly unpleasant memory.
“Let me put it this way: have you ever seen a video of a tank crushing a small car? I was the small car, and she was the tank. Conservatively speaking, she could probably pick me up and toss me around.”
“You’re a man! You got picked up and tossed around?”
“So?”
“No, seriously, you’re exaggerating! You must weigh over 150 pounds yourself. How heavy would someone have to be to pick *you* up and use you as a holy grail?”
“You even know what a Holy Grail is? What exactly do you watch online?”
“Mind your own business! Not only do I know, but if you wanted one, I could even find someone to get it for you. Don’t try to change the subject. Just tell me how much that person weighed.”
“Let me put it this way: before I met her, I’d never imagined a Lolita dress could be made as wide as a potato sack.”
Liu Wenjin punctuated his words with broad gestures.
“The most terrifying thing was that her three dimensions were pretty much identical. Holy crap, I secretly drove my dad’s Jeep Wrangler to the train station to pick her up. I called her, and she saw me get into the car. Holy crap, holy crap, when she finally got in and sat down, the entire vehicle visibly tilted toward her side. I took her to Pizza Hut. When she got out, the car *still* shuddered. I even noticed the leather on the seat where she’d been sitting was all wrinkled.”
“Unbelievable! With that kind of weight, you *still* took her out to eat? If it were me, I would’ve bolted the moment I saw her.”
“Nonsense! I’d put in so much effort already; how could I give up halfway? ‘He who walks a hundred li is only halfway at ninety.’ What I wanted was the *game* itself. Her weight was utterly irrelevant to my pursuit. I am a pure soul!”
Qin Zixin’s expression shifted to one of profound admiration, her gaze almost reverent. Liu Wenjin felt a surge of pride, a lightness in his step, but then he quickly caught himself. ‘Wasn’t this supposed to be an embarrassing story for him? Why was this brat looking at him so strangely?’ he wondered.
“Fatty Liu—no, Brother Liu, Young Master Liu! I completely misjudged you before. You’re truly incredible!”
Qin Zixin punctuated her praise with a hearty thumbs-up.
“So, after you finished eating, did you ‘play cards’? By your own account, I hope you didn’t go through all that trouble just to find yourself wrestling with rolls of skin.”
“You little brat!”
Liu Wenjin’s eyes flashed with annoyance, but as his gaze met Qin Zixin’s alluring face, his anger swiftly dissipated.
“Well, after Pizza Hut, just the two of us ran up a bill of almost four hundred. Holy hell, you wouldn’t believe how much that woman ate, and she spouted so much nonsense! I eat pizza with my hands, but she insisted on using a knife and fork, meticulously placing each slice on her plate. And the most absurd part? Even eating with my hands, I couldn’t keep up with her. I was full after half a pizza and a plate of steak pasta. But her? She devoured everything, quickly and voraciously. Three pizzas weren’t enough, so she ordered extra drinks—sugar-free, of course, because she was ‘afraid of getting fat.’ Good heavens!”
“That’s such a cliché! A tank with an oversized fuel tank, reluctantly adding a tiny bit of ethanol after guzzling gallons of premium gasoline, then claiming it’s ‘energy-efficient.’ So much for ‘sugar-free!'”
Qin Zixin couldn’t help but burst into laughter just from hearing it.
“Sugar-free? Don’t even get me started! She only wanted water to lubricate her throat after stuffing herself so dry. I was literally counting how many bites it took her to finish a fifteen-inch pizza. I can’t even imagine how many times she’d have to relieve herself in a day with an appetite like that!”
“Ugh, that’s truly disgusting! Did you know some South Koreans distill liquor using… excrement?”
“What the hell! I’m talking about her taking a dump, and you’re spouting nonsense about *that*?”
Qin Zixin sniffed dismissively, a hint of defiance in her expression.
“I was just mentioning something I once heard!”
“Then go drink it yourself!”
“No way! That’s for them, it’s *their* brewing technique.”
“Alright, enough with your ridiculous tangents. After we ate, we went to the cinema. Do you have any idea how terrifying she was? I still remember we were watching *The Smurfs*. That ‘fat pig’ suddenly lunged and force-kissed me! I tried to pull away, but she’d just devoured hundreds of yuan worth of Western food; she had an incredible amount of strength. She practically hauled me in with one arm, holy hell, and just started gnawing on my lips! Do you know what that felt like?”
“Like being gnawed by a pig?”
“Worse than that! She’d just finished eating, so her breath was awful, and her saliva was… salty.”
“Oh, god, please stop.”
Qin Zixin’s brows furrowed, her face contorted in a grimace, but Liu Wenjin, undeterred, pressed on.
“Just imagine it: a glistening, double-chinned face, easily half a palm wider than my own, puckering those sausage-like lips and coming at me, with strange-tasting, salty drool oozing from her mouth.”
“Ugh, please stop! I’m not particularly interested in your tales of… unsolicited advances. I just want to know if you two actually slept together.”
Liu Wenjin, who had been hopelessly lost in his recollections, snapped to attention at the question, his expression instantly serious.
“How could that be possible?! I’m a vibrant young man, a blooming flower! If that ‘fat pig’ had sat on me, I’d undoubtedly be crippled; my pelvis would have caved in!”
As Qin Zixin and Liu Wenjin continued their playful banter, the four of them finally reached the platform halfway up the mountain.
The temperature up here was noticeably cooler. Qin Zixin, having just worked up a sweat, felt a shiver run through her as the wind swept past. She paid it no mind, however, simply bending over and panting. Once she caught her breath, she rummaged in her bag for the soda Li Jingxin had given her, taking a deep, desperate swig. The carbonation immediately sent her into a fit of hiccups.
Liu Wenjin was in no better shape; utterly exhausted, his legs trembled uncontrollably. He paid no heed to the dust on the ground, simply collapsing to sit and rest. Noticing this, Tang Manwen stepped forward and helped him to his feet.
Liu Wenjin offered a guileless grin. Qin Zixin glanced over, only to see the ‘dead fatty’ shamelessly wiggle his eyebrows at her.
“Sis, look at him!”
“What about me?”
“You two, stop bickering. You’re both incredibly childish.”
Tang Manwen shot Liu Wenjin a stern look. Liu Wenjin, sensing the mood, wisely chose not to retort, instead offering an awkward smile.
“Sister, where’s Qin Zhifeng?”
“He went to buy tickets. See? He’s queuing over there.”
Tang Manwen pointed, while Qin Zixin, still hiccuping from her hurried soda, craned her neck to look. She indeed spotted Qin Zhifeng at the ticket booth, but he was currently being accosted by two women.
“Who are those two? My goodness! Did he run into an ex-girlfriend?”
Liu Wenjin, equally curious, leaned closer to observe.
“Brother Feng is so handsome; it’s only natural he’d have a few ex-girlfriends.”
Tang Manwen’s expression grew somewhat awkward upon hearing this.
“They just met them on the way. Those two women were actually coming down the mountain, but the moment they saw Brother Feng, they couldn’t take their eyes off him.”
“If they were coming down the mountain, why are they now queuing at the ticket booth?”
Qin Zixin looked perplexed.
“They’re just infatuated. They started by just looking, then came over to chat. Once they found out Brother Feng and I are siblings, they started pestering him for his contact information.”
Qin Zixin grinned, delighted by the story.
“Given that guy’s old habits, he absolutely would’ve given it to them on the spot. I can’t believe he’s suddenly turned pure.”
“He did give it to them. He gave them his WeChat right then and there.”
Tang Manwen looked quite embarrassed; Qin Zhifeng’s actions had certainly been overly casual.
“He gave them his WeChat, and they’re *still* pestering Qin Zhifeng? Don’t tell me they’re going to try and ride the cable car with us later?”
Qin Zixin felt a surge of irritation, an inexplicable sense of outsiders intruding on her life, especially those who were so brazenly attracted to someone purely for their looks. She’d heard her cousin, Qin Zhifeng, speak of such women before: a particularly zealous type who abandoned all pretense of ‘modesty’ the moment they spotted a handsome man, practically eager to jump into bed on the first encounter. Yet, these same women were notoriously harsh on men of average appearance.
As Qin Zhifeng himself would put it, these women weren’t even suitable for a casual fling; any interaction with them yielded negative returns. Their minds were single-threaded, utterly incapable of grasping others’ perspectives, making genuine communication impossible.
“Not attractive at all. Underbites and classic ‘shoehorn’ faces. Poor Brother Feng.”
Liu Wenjin pulled a camera from his bag—a Nikon D4. The body alone cost over forty thousand yuan, and with the lens, the total came to sixty or seventy thousand. Qin Zhifeng was too far to discern clearly, so Liu Wenjin simply used the camera as a makeshift telescope. Qin Zixin, impatient, eagerly peered through it.
“What is Qin Zhifeng doing?! He should just refuse them! Fatty Liu, if you had ‘hooked’ someone like *that* back then, would you have…”
Before Qin Zixin could finish, Liu Wenjin swiftly smacked her on the head.
“Stop! You’re about to say something foul again. Manwen, please drag your unlucky sister away. This pure little devil has no filter!”
“Hmph, how stingy. What are you so afraid of? One day I’ll tell, um, let, um, let her know about your past.”
Liu Wenjin remained unperturbed.
“Manwen already knows. She was with me on Douban, ‘fishing for fools’ herself.”
This time, Qin Zixin was truly shocked. She looked at Tang Manwen incredulously. Tang Manwen’s face flushed slightly, her gaze flickering away.
Just then, Qin Zhifeng returned with the tickets, looking somewhat disheveled after shaking off the two women. Qin Zixin shot him a mischievous glance.
“Brother, how was that? I heard you even gave them your WeChat?”
“Don’t even mention it. If I hadn’t, they would’ve clung to me like leeches. I’ll delete them when we get back. I should have just said Manwen was my girlfriend earlier; those idiotic types are truly infuriating.”
Qin Zhifeng’s words were innocent, but Tang Manwen, who overheard them, lowered her head, a faint, unnatural blush spreading across her cheeks. Qin Zixin and Liu Wenjin, being thoughtless, noticed nothing.
But Qin Zhifeng did. He cast a meaningful glance at Tang Manwen, then pretended as if he hadn’t noticed anything.
The four of them boarded the cable car, which ascended directly to the mountain peak.
The cable car was brand new, having been built shortly after the asphalt road below. The protective film hadn’t even been fully peeled off the glass handrails. Tang Manwen sat gracefully, while Qin Zixin, like a child, pressed her tender, jade-like face against the window, gazing out with curiosity. Her restless hands couldn’t resist tearing off the plastic film from the handrail.
Qin Zhifeng slid open the window, allowing the mountain breeze to rush in. He lit a cigarette in the downwind, crossing one leg over the other.
Liu Wenjin, meanwhile, was experiencing stomach discomfort. His face was ashen as the cable car ascended, the sensation of weightlessness making him feel as if he might burst.
As the cable car climbed higher, the scenery below grew increasingly miniature.
Qin Zixin watched with a fascinated gaze.
It was the same familiar landscape she had known since childhood, a place she had explored countless times, holding vivid memories. Yet, she was struck by how a mere change in perspective had utterly transformed everything.
The cable car crested the mountain peak and continued its descent. Anji Lake now stretched before their eyes. The dark blue waters shimmered under the morning sun, adorned with layers of golden dust, sparkling with ripples stirred by the occasional flick of a fish’s tail. But from the distant cable car, Anji Lake appeared as a silent expanse of black water.