An Yiqing made a snap decision, leaping over the bridge railing with one swift stride. She looked around and broke off a long branch, about as thick as a man’s thumb, from a withered old tree.
"Catch!" She stood on the bank and threw one end of the branch to the man in the water.
The man, grasping for his life, hurriedly grabbed the branch and flailed desperately.
Seeing the branch about to snap, An Yiqing let out a delicate shout, "If you don’t want to die, stop moving!"
Upon hearing this, the man immediately stilled. Yiqing, holding the other end of the branch, skillfully pulled the man ashore. Once he reached the bank, like a drowned rat, he collapsed on the ground, coughing for a long time before starting to rant, "Why did you save me?! Just let me die! Girlfriend’s gone, job’s lost! What’s the point of living?!"
An Yiqing raised an eyebrow, huh, seems like she interfered with his plans?
"If that’s the case, then try dying again. I won’t disturb you anymore." With that, Yiqing extended her leg and kicked the man at his butt.
Before he could react, he was kicked back into the water. Panicked, he splashed around, "Help! Help! Cough, cough!" Then, in his fluster, he actually stood up in the lake.
A vein popped in Yiqing’s forehead, what the hell—he was making all that noise for this? The water didn’t even reach his waist!
The man also noticed this shocking situation; he walked back and forth in the lake, huh? It’s this shallow?
Stunned, he then dejectedly dragged his drenched clothes back to the shore and lay on the ground like a corpse.
"Hey! Dead?" Yiqing, suddenly intrigued by this somewhat clueless man intent on dying, nudged the ’corpse’ on the ground with the tip of her foot and teasingly asked.
"I wish I could just die!" The ’corpse’ responded with a sneeze in the cold air, then flipped the sky off fiercely and cursed, "Damn you, Heaven, you bastard! You made off with my girlfriend! You screwed up my job! Just because I drown my sorrows in a few cans and bottles of booze, you send me tumbling into the lake! Is it just because I’m handsome? Are you really that jealous of me?!"
An Yiqing listened to the ’corpse’s’ irrelevant swearing with a twitching mouth, covered in black lines. Turns out he wasn’t trying to commit suicide; he just fell in accidentally.
"Stop howling! It’s awful to listen to!"
Just as the man was cursing fervently, a voice tinged with disgust choked off his rant. Liao Jinglin looked up to see his savior, and when he saw the girl’s face, he couldn’t help but inhale sharply. She was stunning!
An Yiqing noticed that the man’s eyes only held amazement and admiration, without a hint of impropriety, and nodded in approval. He was an upright person indeed.
"So, tell me what happened?" An Yiqing sat down on the ground as if bracing herself for a long and melodramatic story.
The story unfolded like all melodramatic plots. Liao Jinglin was a top scholar from a well-known university in Country Jin, specializing in finance and economics. After completing his postdoctorate, he went straight to work in the financial district. However, in the district where talents were aplenty, his ideas and talent failed to catch his boss’s attention. Instead, his boss, wary of Jinglin possibly surpassing him, constantly suppressed him. During a minor financial turmoil, Jinglin could no longer stand his boss’s stubbornness and quit in a fit of anger. He thought he would get some comfort from his girlfriend, but to his shock, she broke up with him the moment she learned of his unemployment.
With his pride battered in both love and career, Jinglin decided to return to his home country for a period of readjustment. At tonight’s reunion, he had some drinks with classmates and lost control in a bout of sorrow, which is why he ended up falling headlong into the lake.