Chapter 173: Fear of Heights

"Go on, go on! Do you think I don't know what's on your minds? You don't love me, you love my chocolate!"

Though Yangyang put on a careless, swaggering front when he heard this, he was already blooming with joy inside.

"Oh, right!" he suddenly remembered something and hurriedly unzipped his schoolbag.

"I brought some good stuff today, but not much. Just one pack of each."

"Given my current purchasing power, this is the best I can do. I'll owe you the rest of the snacks and pay you back slowly later."

With that, he pulled out a piece of chocolate and handed it to one of the little kids: "This is for Xiaoli."

He pulled out a lollipop: "This is for Xiaojia."

He pulled out a piece of sachima: "Xiaocong, your sachima."

"What about me? What about me?!" Xiaofang looked at Yangyang with eager, puppy-dog eyes.

"This is the spicy strips you like." Yangyang shoved a greasy-looking package into Xiaofang's arms.

"Thank you, Brother Yangyang!" ×4

The little kids beamed with sweet smiles and cheered their thanks to Yangyang.

"You really should thank me properly," Yangyang said, folding his arms with a swaggering, hooligan-like air, looking as though he had just strolled in from some street corner.

"I only get three yuan of allowance a day. I can't even bear to spend it on myself, and I used it all to buy you treats."

"But having said that, my dad has already caught on to our relationship. He's cut off my allowance, so our days might not be so easy from now on."

"What should we do then? Will Uncle be against us being together?" Xiaoli asked with a worried expression.

At that very moment, this little kid experiencing her first taste of romance was already mentally conjuring up a melodrama hundreds of thousands of words long.

It was likely a tragic tale of two young people deeply in love, only to be brutally torn apart by an disapproving father...

"For the next little while, we need to keep a low profile," Yangyang waved his hand grandly, striking a pose as if he were pointing the way across the rivers and mountains, looking as heroic as could be.

"From now on, after school, none of you should hang around me. Keep a bit of distance so my dad doesn't suspect anything."

"And keep a low profile at school too. Don't let the teachers and classmates find out about our relationship."

"Our teacher was the one who snitched on me this time, otherwise my dad would never have found out about us."

"Okay, we'll listen to you." Xiaojia nodded her little head, looking utterly adorable and naive.

"Alright, that's everything! Off you go and do whatever you need to do!" Yangyang patted his schoolbag and flopped back into his seat.

"Brother Yangyang," Xiaofang suddenly spoke up.

"Hmm?" Yangyang looked at her in confusion.

Mua!

Before he knew it, Xiaofang stepped forward and planted a kiss right on Yangyang's face, leaving it covered in saliva.

"This one's free~"

After the kiss, the little girl blushed furiously and scampered away like a startled rabbit.

"I want one too, me too!" Seeing this, Xiaojia joined in on the fun.

She puckered her little lips and gave Yangyang a light, dragonfly-kiss on the cheek.

Afterward, she made sure to tell Yangyang, "This one's free too."

With a beaming smile, Xiaojia skipped back to her seat, glancing over at Yangyang from time to time.

Clearly, she was still unsatisfied after that single kiss.

Next came Xiaoli and Xiaocong. The two sisters exchanged a knowing look and simultaneously kissed Yangyang on both cheeks, left and right.

"Brother Yangyang, you're the coolest!" ×2

The two of them spoke in crisp, clear unison, like a pair of delicate flowers blooming in the wind.

For a moment, someone was blessed with more fortune than he could handle.

***

Meanwhile, on his way home, Chang Yu wasn't having a very smooth time either.

Mostly because these days the streets were crawling with lovey-dovey couples showing off their affection everywhere you looked, an absolute eyesore for any single person.

Take the couple right in front of him, for instance...

A guy had just given a girl a bouquet of flowers, and she accepted them with ecstatic joy, even rewarding him with a kiss on the cheek.

"Let's go get some coffee," the guy suggested with a smile.

"No, no! My feet hurt, I'm tired, I don't want to go," the girl whined coquettishly.

"You're tired? Then I'll carry you." Straining mightily, the guy hoisted the girl onto his back, his face flushing bright red with the effort.

The girl looked puzzled. "I'm not even that heavy. Why are you struggling so much?"

Though the guy was cursing up a storm internally, the smile on his face never wavered. "Because to me... you are the whole world..."

The girl beamed like a flower, completely satisfied and happy with his answer.

Watching this scene unfold, Chang Yu suddenly felt rather annoyed, prompting him to sigh inwardly that society was truly degenerating and moral standards were declining day by day.

"These young people today, making out publicly right in the middle of the street—did they ever consider the feelings of us onlookers?"

As he muttered to himself, he couldn't help but recall his own tragic history of going on countless blind dates only to be repeatedly rejected, filling his heart with bitterness.

"Think of me, Chang Yu, a strapping man of sound stature, getting on in years yet still without a girlfriend. A lifelong bachelor through and through—could any situation be more miserable?"

"Ah, right!" Mentioning this, he suddenly remembered something. "Isn't Katerina at home? I might as well go see her."

With that, he happily set off toward home, completely forgetting how he had just been critiquing that couple moments ago.

Men were truly creatures of hypocrisy.

Envying others to death in their hearts while pretending not to care at all on the surface—why bother?

As he passed by the young couple, Chang Yu suddenly turned to the girl and dropped a remark.

"Actually, he didn't finish his sentence," he said, referring to what the guy had said earlier.

"He left out four words: 'the heaviest person!'"

"The full line was, 'Because to me, you are the whole world... the heaviest person.'"

Having said that, Chang Yu walked away with breezy nonchalance amidst the young man's bewildered glare, leaving behind the faint sounds of a couple starting to quarrel in the distance.

He had done another great deed today! Chang Yu thought to himself.

If everyone in the world could be as honest as him, as unpretentious as him, and speak with such grounded truthfulness, the world would undoubtedly be a much more harmonious place.

Therefore, to make the world increasingly harmonious, Chang Yu decided he should do things like this more often in the future.

Don't ask him why; he was simply a warm-hearted citizen, here to spread a little warmth.

***

"See that castle on the opposite side?" Katerina stood by the riverbank, pointing toward a castle towering over an island across the water.

"Ah, I see it." Following the direction of Katerina's finger, Chang Yu indeed spotted a majestic castle.

"That's Tai Island, the largest island situated on the Song River, and a popular tourist resort favored by many visitors," Katerina explained.

"Many residents of H City love taking their families there for day trips. That's where we're going in a bit."

"There are plenty of things to do there—a polar aquarium, a Russian-style folklore town, and a water amusement park."

"Sounds like it should be quite interesting." Chang Yu's gaze drifted persistently toward Katerina's shoulder.

A black handbag bearing the Gucci logo hung dazzlingly from her shoulder, emitting a subtle, luxurious, and elegant aura.

It was the bag Chang Yu had bought for her—his very first gift to Katerina.

The fact that she was wearing the bag the very day after receiving it was proof enough that Katerina truly cherished the gift.

At this, Chang Yu was naturally overjoyed, and this happy mood would likely sustain him for an entire year.

What could possibly bring greater joy in this world than the girl you like accepting a gift you gave her?

"There are many ways to get to Tai Island—you can take a car, take a boat, and of course, the most romantic way is to take the cable car," Katerina hinted meaningfully.

"Like those? Looks pretty nice." Hearing this, Chang Yu looked up at the sky.

From his perspective, numerous cable cars spanning across the entire river were gliding along overhead cables, moving from their side of the riverbank toward the other side on Tai Island.

As the starting and ending points for the ropes and cable cars, both the urban side where Chang Yu stood and the resort side on Tai Island featured castle-like structures serving as support pillars.

In other words, these cables and cable cars were constructed relying on these two castles, which were built respectively on the mainland side and Tai Island.

The two castles were closely connected by long cables, and directly beneath these cables lay the boundless river.

The cable cars were suspended from these lines, gliding back and forth like this.

By simply taking the cable car, one could cross geographical boundaries, traversing the entire river in a different sense and going straight from the city to Tai Island...

Walking into the fairy-tale-dream castle before them, Chang Yu saw many young couples along the way.

Following the flow of the crowd, Chang Yu smoothly found the ticket office inside the castle and gentlemanly paid for two one-way tickets.

There were far more people taking the cable car than Chang Yu had imagined, the vast majority being young couples.

Queueing up along the way, the two of them finally got their tickets checked and boarded the long-awaited cable car.

"It's much higher than I expected."

Chang Yu glanced down below the cable car, where his field of vision was filled entirely with the vast, boundless river hundreds of meters below in the high sky.

At this moment, he and Katerina were suspended in mid-air over the endless river and vast sky, swaying back and forth like a leaf drifting in the wind.

For a fraction of a second, Chang Yu's mind went completely blank.

Involuntarily, he stiffened his posture, his expression instantly freezing as his hands gripped the table in front of him with all his might.

His heart hammered wildly against his ribs, and more than half of his blood rushed to his head and face, turning him as red as a boiled lobster.

"A little afraid of heights?" Katerina noticed the unnatural expression on Chang Yu's face.

"I'm only just finding out myself," Chang Yu tried his best to look tough in front of Katerina, though the panic in his voice betrayed his inner state.

Come to think of it, it was quite ironic. Even Chang Yu himself hadn't expected that he, someone who dared to engage in hand-to-hand combat with violent calamities, would actually be afraid of heights.

Mostly because he had never ridden this sort of thing before, so he had never realized he had a touch of acrophobia.

"You don't need to feel embarrassed," Katerina comforted Chang Yu at the appropriate moment. "It's a completely normal psychological phenomenon for humans to feel a sense of insecurity at high altitudes."

"We are terrestrial creatures; the sky does not belong to us, and it's only right that we feel a sense of awe toward it."

Look at that—people with education certainly phrase things differently.

Expressing the exact same sentiment in a different way made it sound so much more refined.

As they were talking, the cable car suddenly began to accelerate.

Accompanied by this acceleration, their cabin also began to sway precariously, like a lonely boat tossed about on a vast, stormy sea.

They had begun the ascent phase—a process of moving from low to high during which violent swaying of the cabin was entirely normal.

"Is this thing safe? Are we going to fall out?" Chang Yu felt severe dizziness washing over him, making the surrounding scenery start spinning wildly.

He was terrified.

Terrified that the cabin they were in would detach from the cables and plummet.

He was still young, hadn't yet contributed his light and heat to the motherland, and he certainly didn't want to fall from here and meet an untimely end.