After watching her mother busy herself in the kitchen for a while, Huang Xiu finally found a moment of respite, settling onto a chair at the dining table to rest.
Huang Xiu immediately stretched out her voice, calling out, “Mom, there’s something I need your help with…”
Her mood was light, and her clear voice ended with a mischievous lilt.
‘This child… why didn’t they feel this adorable when they were a boy?’
‘Is this what they call beauty bias?’
Zhuang Wenli chuckled inwardly. She clapped her hands, stood up, and turned to ask, “What is it? Speak quickly.”
“Well, it’s just that…” Huang Xiu tilted her head back. “My phone and other things are still at school.”
Before she could finish, Zhuang Wenli already understood.
“Alright,” she nodded. “I’ll go get your things back for you this afternoon.”
“Thanks, Mom!” Huang Xiu’s face lit up with joy.
Her mother’s decisiveness was always remarkable.
Sometimes, she would be eager to finish everything immediately. Other times, even a simple task would be endlessly postponed.
Huang Xiu flopped back onto the sofa, letting out a soft, goofy chuckle…
‘She was finally getting her phone back!’
These days without her phone, she had been going to bed earlier than chickens and waking up later than dogs…
‘It was simply too boring!’
Although her hometown was near Ying City, the transportation was inconvenient, making a trip take a considerable amount of time.
By noon, her father still hadn’t managed to make it back in time.
The dishes, however, were not skimped on. Six dishes were spread across the dining table for just two people.
Steamed pork ribs with rice powder, stir-fried pork with chili, radish and pork rib soup, steamed egg with dried scallops and dried shrimp, blanched bok choy, and stir-fried cucumber with chili.
All these dishes were Huang Xiu’s favorites.
Having not tasted home-cooked food for a whole month, she hadn’t said anything aloud, but inwardly, she was practically drooling with craving.
On Sunday, after her dirty clothes were washed, she devoured everything at an astonishing speed.
Bowl after bowl, her chopsticks never paused. The food vanished at a visible pace.
Bones piled up into small mountains on the dining table.
Zhuang Wenli sat opposite her, watching her child eat without any decorum, rice grains clinging to her lips. Her eyelids twitched.
‘My child truly has no awareness of being a girl at all,’ she thought. ‘And this appetite…’
‘Most people couldn’t afford to feed her, could they?’
“Slow down… slow down…” she murmured inwardly.
Contrary to Huang Xiu’s expectations, her mother’s acceptance was far stronger than her own.
She was even already contemplating Huang Xiu’s future.
Perhaps this was the peculiar magic of Daxia parents, always possessing strange capacities for acceptance in unexpected areas.
After a satisfying meal, her mother went to wash the dishes—a task usually handled by her father. Meanwhile, Huang Xiu retreated to her room.
The division of labor in her household had always been clear.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, her father would open the shop alone in the morning while her mother cleaned the house. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, their roles reversed.
Typically, whoever cooked, the other person washed the dishes.
Thanks to this clear division of labor, ever since Huang Xiu joined the family, she had rarely seen her parents argue.
Creak… Huang Xiu gently closed her bedroom door.
Her family didn’t have a study room. In their three-bedroom, two-living room apartment, she slept in the smaller guest bedroom.
The room wasn’t large, about ten square meters, with a bright window.
The bed was placed against the wall to the left of the entrance. A wardrobe stood on the side near the door, while a desk and bookshelf occupied the other side.
A yellowed multiplication table sticker was still affixed to the desk.
Aside from some worn-out textbooks, the desk held only old items like a lamp she had bought previously.
The drawers, meanwhile, were filled with a jumble of stationery and trash…
Sometimes, Huang Xiu was too lazy to throw out trash, or secretly ate spicy strips, even using the drawers as a makeshift trash can.
For this, her mother had often lectured her, pulling at her ear.
At this thought, Huang Xiu let out a soft chuckle.
‘How nostalgic, those times…’ she thought. Ever since she started high school, she rarely had the chance to study at home.
Her mother also wasn’t as strict as before.
The bookshelf stood against the wall next to the desk. It had four shelves, categorized with comics and novels.
Toys like spinning tops, yo-yos, Bomber Kong, Rubik’s cubes, and magic rulers had no other place to go, so they were all stacked on top of the books.
Despite its small size, this room held the most beautiful seventeen years of her life’s memories.
However, as she grew older, the room now felt increasingly cramped.
Huang Xiu had always wanted a bigger room, one where she could display all the toys she had bought over the years.
“I must get that scholarship!”
Miss Jioumi clenched her fists tightly. In her eyes, a flame named ‘poverty’ burned fiercely.
If she could secure all the scholarships for four years, she would accumulate a massive sum of 800,000 yuan.
The entire room’s color scheme was monotonous. Though the walls were covered with moisture-proof blue wallpaper, it lacked any patterns.
Huang Xiu lay on the bed, burying her head in the blanket and wriggling like a maggot.
“Ah, the smell of home.” She squinted her eyes.
Even after a month away, the room was still immaculately clean.
The lavender scent on the sheets was as strong as ever, as if they had just been laundered.
“Senior Yun Ning likes this scent too.”
Huang Xiu’s associative memory was strong; the scent immediately made her think of Yun Ning.
“I wonder how they’re doing now…”
****
“How are things?”
At a farmstead in the suburbs surrounding Ying City, a butler in a grey trench coat was conversing with…
Jurisdiction Bureau personnel had already sealed off the area.
They systematically activated the ‘Aura Concealment Devices’ and placed them in every corner of the farmstead.
The residents had long since been evacuated.
Currently, the surrounding skies were clear and boundless,
yet dense dark clouds hung heavily over the farmstead area.
It was remarkably conspicuous.
However, had it not been for this, the Jurisdiction Bureau would not have detected the anomaly so early.
Professor Yuan squinted, observing the farmstead. Su Ming walked over from the side and replied, “The situation is acceptable. There are no ordinary people inside, but something feels off. It seems there are traces of the Black Tower.”
“I’ll go in and take a look.” The middle-aged man loosened his tie, then tossed his suit jacket aside, which Gu Ning deftly caught.
Yue Zhengyang and Li Qinyue, standing nearby, exchanged helpless smiles. “Here we go again.”
“Honestly.”
He grumbled as he strode inside, “Can’t you give an old man like me a little free time?”
Huang Xiu took a nap.
She couldn’t help it; the bed at home was simply too soft, too perfectly conforming to her body, and she was terribly drowsy after eating.
Half-asleep, she had a strange dream.
She dreamed someone was calling, calling a surname, but the surname was indistinct, its syllables strange and incomprehensible.
She couldn’t understand it at all; she was utterly bewildered.
“Can’t you speak proper human language?!” Huang Xiu couldn’t help but shout in the depths of her dream.
“Speak proper human language?” A hand, slightly calloused but still relatively smooth, gently pushed Huang Xiu.
Hazily, she awoke from her dream. The moment she opened her eyes, she was met with her mother’s face.
“Here.” Zhuang Wenli handed her something.
“Look at you, you were so groggy from sleep! You were even talking in your sleep!”