My love game with them that will lead to certain death

But bringing up the past would do no good to the current situation. He just wanted to focus on building a career and didn't want to get involved in such matters. Therefore, avoiding previous emotional entanglements was the best way for him and Eriri to get along.

If the situation had continued like this, maybe one day he would change his mind.

After all, Tomoya Aki could realize that he was gradually becoming interested in Eriri when she let her hair down.

She speaks humorously and calmly, and sometimes says something surprising. She seems like a different person, including the cold and distant look when she sees him - this familiar yet strange feeling makes Aki Tomoya unable to stop.

"You know what? Eriri... I met a girl who is totally qualified to be the heroine of my project. If I pester her a little bit and ask her sincerely, maybe she can join us and become a member of the creative team."

Aki Tomoya took off his glasses and wiped the mirror surface with the glasses cloth he carried with him.

"But... I have actually started to care about you again... I think maybe I can use this opportunity to talk to you again, so that you can naturally become my "heroine". Maybe we can also have a chance to express the things that we didn't say back then..."

But it turned out that this was just a unilateral wishful thinking on the part of Tomoya Aki.

"But you care about your brother more than I thought, to the extent that it will affect the relationship between us - haven't you realized it yet? He is just afraid that I will take away the sister who has always been chasing after him and becoming his foil. He just can't bear to see us become as familiar as we were in the past!"

"Have you said enough, Renye?!"

The strategy of sowing discord - what a childish tactic.

As soon as this thought flashed through her mind, even Eriri was a little surprised that she would judge the emotions expressed by Aki Tomoya so condescendingly.

"It seems that I have learned some of Toru's cleverness."

After all, the only one who would think like this in such a situation is probably his brother, who is unconventional in both his thoughts and actions.

"I'll say this once again, and only for the last time - don't slander my brother in front of me anymore. Even if there is something about him that deserves criticism, it can only be done by me."

I can only scold the people in my family by myself – that’s how simple her thoughts are now.

"And I repeat, when I asked you to come out, Ren Ye, I wanted to explain to you clearly how I felt about you. After all, you have the right to know, and this is also my responsibility to myself. But now that things have come to this, I feel like there is nothing more to talk about."

The belated confession is more affectionate than a dog's, but it doesn't matter anymore.

Eriri Sawamura has already understood that at this moment there is someone more important in her heart than Tomoya Aki.

"You haven't changed at all, Tomoya. You cruelly ignored my feelings and naively thought that everything could go according to your ideas... Maybe this is why I liked you "before."

But that was only in the past.

"…So this is our signal to end our friendship?"

"It seems that I was the first to change."

After saying this with her head down, Eriri turned around and left.

She knew what Tomoya Aki wanted to "get" from her.

All ten sentences in the entire conversation are inseparable from the phrase "the heroine of the new project". Even with Toru's nose hair, it is obvious that he is just planning to use Eriri's skills to add bricks and tiles to his dream.

"You are not part of his future, so why do you have to go through so much trouble to realize his dream? The income is not proportional to the effort, Eriri. Think about it again."

If Che was here, he would definitely tease her with a half-smile.

"How could I possibly do something that would make him look down on me again?"

Having made up her mind, Eriri turned her back to Aki Tomoya, closed the door to the rooftop, and walked down the corridor without saying a word.

She never looked back at Aki Tomoya from beginning to end, nor did she dare to look back. After all, she was still a soft-hearted person at heart. If Aki said a few more words, she might really become more and more hesitant.

But that won't work.

He has already slandered his brother so much, and if he continues to be indecisive and entangled with Aki Tomoya, it will only hurt Toru.

“…I am such a loser.”

On the spiral staircase that seemed to have no end, Eriri looked down at her own legs - she had been controlling this body herself recently, as if no strange body-swapping phenomenon had ever occurred.

"I was originally going to confess to Tomoya... but that Toru looked annoyed."

As a result, her brother didn't care at all whether she confessed to Ren Ye, and she realized it too late and didn't want to make a big mistake. She even protected her brother at the critical moment.

She failed to do the bad thing she wanted to do to anger her brother, but she wasn't a completely good sister either.

"What on earth is wrong with me?"

This feeling of helplessness and frustration accompanied the dazed Eriri until she returned home from school, walked into the restaurant and saw her brother busy preparing a meal.

The carefully cooked steaks and the various Western dishes that were perfectly presented were all made by Toru himself - and they were all Eriri's favorite foods.

Logically speaking, preparing meals could be left to the Sawamura family's housekeeper and specially hired chefs, but for some reason her brother was fascinated by cooking, so he would hang out in the kitchen whenever he had free time.

"Oh, my cooking skills are really getting better and better. Although my mom is out playing again today, we can still have a good meal for two people. If I keep going like this, I'm sure I can cook more than just a bucket of instant noodles... Um, Eriri?"

The curly-haired boy noticed the blonde girl who appeared in the restaurant with her head drooping like a puppy that had lost its fighting spirit, but he still helped her take the schoolbag off her shoulders as usual and said the most common greeting between the brother and sister.

"Welcome back."

“Ooooo…!”

Eriri sniffed sharply, and wiped her nose with her sleeve without caring about her image under Toru's somewhat surprised gaze. Then she sat at the dining table and wolfed down all the food that Ming Hai had just prepared.

After devouring the food at a gluttonous speed, Ying Lili wiped the corner of her mouth and met her brother's puzzled gaze with an extremely serious look.

"Don't you want to hear me talk about the results of my confession today?"

Chapter 40 My Dear Half

"Confession? To Tomoya Aki?"

After quickly finishing dinner and leaving the dishes to the housekeeper, Toru was dragged to Eriri's room without any explanation.

“…Then who else could I be confessing to?”

Ying Lili placed her brother on the chair in front of the computer desk with a bit of annoyance, and then closed the door with her backhand, making sure that only the two of them could hear the conversation.

Although Sayuri probably didn't have the habit of eavesdropping at her own child's bedroom door, it would be better if the topic they were going to talk about wasn't heard by anyone else.

"Why can't it be a confession of love to me as a brother? After all, we know each other very well in every sense of the word. It's understandable that my dear sister would want to pour out her heart and tell me how much she loves me."

"Go to hell, idiot."

Eriri was obviously used to her brother's eloquent way of speaking, but she did not deny the hypothesis proposed by Toru.

Because she understood.

"…I was planning to confess and make things clear."

The way Eriri spoke made Ming Hai, who was originally a little nonchalant, raise his eyebrows slightly, and now he began to care about the ins and outs of the matter.

""before"?"

And he captured that key word very accurately.

"Ah, before. I have to admit that I also had a crush on Ren for a long time... but now... I feel like it's no longer the case, so I think it's necessary to make it clear to him."

"Is this so?"

"I thought Eriri would hold on to this person tightly."

Ming Hai did not interrupt again, but remained silent and waited for Eriri to continue.

He probably noticed the change in Yingliu's attitude towards Tomoya Aki, but he did not expect that Eriri would change her mind so quickly - after all, denying her feelings for Tomoya Aki would be denying her own persistence over the years.

She actually gave up nearly ten years of sunk costs just like that. It seems that Ying Lili is much more free and easy than he imagined.

"Ah, and then I had a terrible quarrel with him."

Eriri continued to explain nonchalantly, as if she was talking about something that happened to someone else and had nothing to do with her.

"Hmm...did he get so angry that he started swearing at you?"

After a moment's silence, Ming Hai gave a guess, but Eriri shook her head to deny it.

"No, because Ren also started to blame you for everything."

"Ah - then I'm really not surprised at all."

The curly-haired boy rolled his eyes. Even though he didn't have a very good impression of Aki, to be honest, he didn't really care what people like Aki Tomoya thought of him.

Do you remember how many loaves of bread you eat every day? Do you remember how many ants tried to block your path every day, but were crushed by you without you noticing?

This is probably how Ming Hai feels about Aki.

"Then I got super angry and scolded Ren Ye."

Eriri's vicious expression returned, like a loyal dog protecting its master.

But before Toru could even feel moved, Eriri came up with an explanation that made one laugh.

"Being able to beat a dog depends on its owner. Che, you can only be scolded by me, not Lun either."

"Who of us is behaving more like a dog right now?"

But this kind of complaint definitely cannot be said out loud.

Ming Hai just smiled without saying anything, looking at Eriri who was leaning against the door with an expression pretending to be calm and relaxed. He could vaguely catch the imperceptible redness around the girl's eyes.

If she wanted to break up with someone she cared about in the past, she certainly wouldn't do it as nonchalantly as she appears to be. It might be that Eriri didn't want to show too much vulnerability in front of her brother, so she was so stubborn.

"What exactly did he say about me?"

The curly-haired boy sat up from his chair, put his hands in his pockets, and slowly approached Eriri who had been leaning against the door. Eriri took a step to the side as if she didn't want to be discovered pretending to be strong.

"...He said that you never really treated me as a younger sister who should be taken care of, and that you enjoyed the feeling of being superior to me...so you didn't consider my feelings at all."

Ying Lili gently grabbed her sleeve, not daring to meet her brother's frank gaze.

Perhaps this was also the doubt that she had been hiding in her heart, unwilling to face and dared not say out loud, so she could only ask about it in a roundabout way through Tomoya Aki.

"Do you think I am like this?"

But what Eriri had never expected was that the smile on the boy's face became even bigger - instead he threw the question back without revealing even a little bit of his true thoughts.

"……I have no idea."

It was just that at that time, the loudest voice in her mind was on the side of her brother.

"Toru, you give me the feeling that... you never care about anyone, don't you?"

This is normal even if it includes her clumsy and unmotivated sister.

"Ah, indeed."

Ming Hai admitted this surprisingly frankly.

"I don't care about most people and things in this world. It's common for me to be indifferent to things that have nothing to do with me. It's not a good habit for me to pay attention to everything around me all the time."

"Ah... I know. I've always..."

Sawamura Eriri was not surprised by Ming Hai's frank answer.

"I've always known that."

She knew that her brother was actually very good at lying, and his silver tongue allowed him to easily evade the current topic, it just depended on whether he had the intention to do so at the moment.

"But... I've figured it out. No matter what kind of existence I am to you, Toru..."

She grabbed her sleeves with increasing force, and her originally slender finger joints began to turn white.

Even if I am just a foil used by my brother to show his superiority, I am one of the things that he doesn't care about.

Sawamura Erili also knew where she really wanted to go.

"Even if our relationship goes back to the way it was before, I still want to keep going... like this."

Rather than being played around like an idiot by Tomoya Aki, she was more worried that one day her brother would abandon her and start an independent life without her.

This is not okay.

Don't think about that kind of thing no matter how hard you try.

"Even if... Toru, you just treat me as a useless and embarrassing sister who needs help to clean up the mess... it doesn't matter."

It was enough as long as she could stay by his side forever.

"........."

Ming Hai did not give a clear response to this.

But he took a step forward, stretched out his arms without warning, and hugged the girl in front of him who lowered her head and spoke endearing words.

"It's okay, you've done well enough."

Eriri, who had been trying hard to suppress her emotions, could no longer hold back her gushing emotions after being embraced by her brother. She buried her head in the boy's neck and cried softly.