“What’s this, Chuchu?” Luo Ming pointed at the large bowl of food in front of him.
“This is buckwheat noodles and stir-fried greens, Wen Jie!”
“I’m supposed to be having lunch.”
“This is lunch!”
“Is there any chance that I’m a human being, not a rabbit?”
“But Sister Shan said your weight is over the limit. You need to get it under control.”
“Over the limit?” Luo Ming looked down. Okay, fine—he couldn’t see past a certain point. He patted his waist. There wasn’t an ounce of flab there!
“Wen Jie, your height is 164 centimeters, and when we weighed you the day before yesterday, you were 107 jin. According to Sister Shan’s requirements, your weight needs to stay under 105 jin. Otherwise, some fitted clothes won’t look as good on you. So…”
“So I have to become a rabbit?”
“Not just that—Sister Shan also said I need to make sure you go for an hour-long jog, from 5 to 6 PM.”
Luo Ming let out a long sigh upon hearing this. Being a celebrity was no easy gig!
“Wen Jie, if you really can’t stand the salad, I can pan-fry some chicken breast for you. But you’d have to add a bit more time to your jog.”
“Forget it. I’ll just stick with this.”
After lunch, Luo Ming officially started recording the demo for Light Years Away.
He strummed his guitar and began to sing, but he’d barely gotten through two lines before he sensed something was off. It felt completely different from when Deng Ziqi sang it.
Luo Ming closed his eyes and replayed the song in his mind, then consciously started imitating Deng Ziqi’s vocal style.
Having a reference made things much easier than fumbling around blindly. Luo Ming soon found his rhythm and finished recording the demo in no time.
After listening to “Lin Shuwen” sing, Chen Junmiao felt she might have overthought things yesterday. Maybe “Lin Shuwen” had just been thrown off by a migraine.
“Wen Jie, should I send the demo straight to Sister Shan?” Chen Sichu asked.
“Go ahead.”
A few minutes later, Sister Shan replied, saying the recording was solid—and incidentally asked when Lin Shuwen had learned to play the guitar.
Luo Ming brushed it off with a flimsy excuse.
With the demo done, today’s work was officially wrapped up. Luo Ming pulled up some memory palace training methods on his phone, then leaned back on the sofa and slowly closed his eyes.
The core idea behind the memory palace is to link information you want to remember with an imaginary building or location, placing that information as mental images in different parts of the structure, making it easier to recall.
So the first step is to choose a familiar building or location.
Usually, the most familiar place for most people is their own home.
But Luo Ming had two lifetimes’ worth of memories, and home felt a bit too cramped. So he chose the second most familiar place—the library from his previous life’s university.
His family background was fairly average. His father was a long-haul truck driver, and his mother was an elementary school teacher.
To get a foothold in an unfamiliar city in his past life, Luo Ming poured all his energy into his studies. For seven years—four in undergrad and three in grad school—he spent most of his time in the library.
So the university library became his second most familiar place.
With the memory palace’s setting chosen, the next step was to connect the information he wanted to remember with that location.
For this, Luo Ming decided to store those memories inside the library’s books, using the date of each event as the marker to find them.
Then, he began to imagine walking through the library, placing the information he needed to remember as books on various shelves.
Luo Ming had far too many memories, so this process would take a long time.
Before he knew it, the afternoon had slipped by. At 5 PM sharp, Chen Sichu woke the “soundly asleep” Luo Ming.
To Chen Sichu and Chen Junmiao, it simply looked like Luo Ming had napped on the sofa all afternoon.
But in reality, he’d spent that entire time constructing his memory palace.
“Wen Jie, time to go running.”
“Where should we go?”
“Right here in the neighborhood.”
Luo Ming nodded, changed into his workout gear, and headed out.
He’d assumed Chen Sichu would just supervise him from the sidelines.
Instead, she ran alongside him—but there’s running, and then there’s running.
Lin Shuwen didn’t have Chen Sichu’s financial luck to have gotten her own “runway” at such a young age.
Chen Sichu ran without any strain, no wind resistance to speak of. Luo Ming, on the other hand, felt like the extra weight on his chest was making it hard to breathe.
After an hour of jogging, Luo Ming was drenched in sweat and utterly drained.
“Chuchu, draw me a bath. I need to shower.” At this point, he couldn’t afford to care about modesty. After running for an hour, his whole body felt sticky and miserable.
Chen Sichu filled the tub with hot water, and Luo Ming sank right in.
Half an hour later, he emerged from the bathroom. Freshly bathed and moisturized, “Lin Shuwen” had skin as smooth as solidified cream, with a faint pink flush throughout. Bare-faced, her lips looked even more vividly red.
It was November in the north, so the heating was already on at home. Luo Ming wore an oversized white T-shirt that Chen Sichu had found for him, and his long, pale legs were exposed to the air, almost blindingly white.
He flopped onto the sofa with zero regard for dignity. Chen Sichu came over and started massaging his legs to relax the muscles and prevent soreness the next day.
Maybe because he’d been curled up on the sofa for too long, his body felt stiff. He stretched his arms above his head, and the hem of his T-shirt rode up, revealing a sliver of his clean, slender waist—impossibly thin.
“Do I really need to lose weight?” Luo Ming asked, having just confirmed things in the bath.
“Wen Jie, you can’t see a pound or two of fat, but it adds up! By the time you can actually notice your figure changing, it’s already too late!”
“Aahhh! I want barbecue so bad!”
When someone’s carrying the heavy load, someone else gets to enjoy the peaceful days.
At the barbecue joint that Luo Ming and Rong Mu frequented, the two of them were feasting with abandon.
“Man! This barbecue is insanely good!” Lin Shuwen said, taking a huge bite of the meat skewer in her hand, followed by a big swig of ice-cold beer.
She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had barbecue.
She was naturally prone to gaining weight. Forget greasy, salty foods like barbecue—even eating a bag of chips made her feel guilty enough to add an extra half-hour to her evening run.
Heaven only knew how much effort she’d put into maintaining her figure.
On top of that, Lin Shuwen suffered from migraines. She’d been checked out at plenty of hospitals, and they all said there was nothing wrong, but every time she stayed up late or ate something cold, there was a good chance she’d end up with a splitting headache.
And since Lin Shuwen was a woman, overindulging in cold foods also meant dealing with painful cramps later.
So this was actually the first time in her life she’d ever downed ice-cold beer so freely.
Today, though, she made a surprising discovery: no matter how much she jumped or ran around, her shoulders didn’t ache at all.
No diet restrictions, no fear of cold foods, no migraines or cramps, and no extra weight to lug around—this was amazing! She was having so much fun she almost forgot to go back.
