The first thing An Ning did when she got on the plane was to type the translation work she'd done earlier into the computer.
As she typed, she sighed at how nice it would be to have an all-in-one scanner app right now. The reality was that not only were there no convenient apps, she couldn't even afford to buy a basic keypad phone.
By the year 2000, the brick-sized mobile phones had already exited the stage of history, and pager services were beginning to go out of business one after another.
The new phone models on the market were still all thousand-yuan phones. She couldn't remember the exact year, but it would be within the next few years that a flood of domestically-made phones costing just a few hundred yuan would hit the market.
Once those phones came out, she'd finally have a communication device.
She wouldn't be able to download fully-featured apps, but at least she could play Tetris and Snake.
Multitasking, she typed the content into the document and did a full check before pressing send on the email.
The moment the email went out, her QQ pinged.
Guan Sheng: [Miss An, I've received the email.]
Little Ning Growing Strong: [OK, thank you, Attorney Guan. The bank account is still the same one as before, and work will continue through email as usual.]
Guan Sheng: [Alright.]
After replying to that message, An Ning closed the chat window and planned to use the remaining time to research what goods she could sell at a night market stall.
At this time, there was no Taobao or JD.com, but there was EachNet.
The process was troublesome, but products were laid out clearly online, which solved the problem of sourcing goods from other cities.
However, besides browsing online, she planned to visit the wholesale market when she had free time. Her capital was limited, and she couldn't afford to start a business blindly.
After browsing products for a while, her peripheral vision caught movement in the bottom right corner, and she noticed Guan Sheng had sent her more messages.
Worried that something had gone wrong with her work, she clicked it open—and found a full screen of messages, none of which had anything to do with work.
She breathed a sigh of relief, but as she looked at the sincerity filling the screen, she felt her long-term job was probably about to be lost.
Guan Sheng: [Miss An, I know this is presumptuous, but I've been thinking about it for many days. Were you working as an interpreter at the East China Fair back in October?]
Guan Sheng: [Please don't misunderstand—I haven't been deliberately digging into your personal information. It's just that your remittance account name is An Ning, and it reminded me of a brief encounter I had with a lady at the East China Fair.]
Guan Sheng: [At the time, she spotted a loophole in the buyer's contract, and I had also given legal advice to the manufacturer. But before I had the chance to speak with her, she had already left.]
Guan Sheng: [To this day, I still find myself regretting that from time to time… Are you her?]
Guan Sheng: [If so, we must be destined to meet.]
From the moment Guan Sheng saw An Ning's bank account name, he'd thought of their chance encounter at the East China Fair.
The same name, the same approach to law. If An Ning was a law student who hadn't graduated yet, it would make perfect sense that she could only take on freelance work and couldn't work full-time in an office.
These coincidences stacked together were striking, but they could also be purely coincidental.
There were so many people studying law in China, and it wasn't unheard of for people to share the same name.
Besides, even if this An Ning was the same An Ning he'd met at the East China Fair, he was still just a stranger to her. Being too eager might come across as intrusive, or worse, make her think he wasn't a proper person.
So after forming this suspicion, Guan Sheng had held it in for a long time—until today, when he simply couldn't hold it in any longer and needed to know the answer.
If the two of them really were the same person, this was entirely a match made in heaven—there was no way he could let it slip by.
After waiting ten minutes without a reply, Guan Sheng's anxiety slowly turned into regret. He kept deleting and retyping his message, but before he could send an apology, An Ning's message came through first.
Thriving Little Ning: [It should be me. I was interpreting for a bamboo weaving factory at the China International Fair for Trade in Services. On Sunday, I helped someone review a procurement contract.]
Thriving Little Ning: [I'm in high school this year. I'm sixteen.]
Thriving Little Ning: [Lawyer uncle who's already working—do you still want to be fated with me?]
Guan Sheng: …
The joy from the first message was quickly shattered by the second.
Sixteen?
A high school student?
The word "fate" shattered into pieces in his mind. Guan Sheng's face, illuminated by the blue glow of the screen, shifted from beaming with delight to looking utterly miserable.
How could she be a high school student?
Guan Sheng thought back to An Ning's face—her cheeks were fair and slightly plump, carrying a girl's innocent softness, but paired with those alluring eyes and brows, she didn't look that young at all.
Then he thought about her figure—at first glance, she stood out from the crowd, taller than most girls by a good margin.
Tall she was, but her chest was indeed as flat as a board.
Realizing what he was thinking, Guan Sheng slapped himself.
Ugh, he was a shameless pervert.
With the dream girl he'd been pining over all this time turning out to be nothing but an illusion, Guan Sheng had no mood to work overtime. He headed straight to the bar, planning to get thoroughly drunk to mourn his lost love.
When Huo Qin walked in, he caught a glimpse of Guan Sheng at the bar counter. After finishing his business dinner and leaving, he found Guan Sheng still sitting there, drinking alone.
"What's wrong?"
Huo Qin sat down beside him and ordered a vodka. "Is it that you think I'm overworking you, or that you're not satisfied with the bonus I gave you?"
After graduating, Huo Qin had taken over his family's business and also founded a foreign trade company as a startup venture.
Guan Sheng was his fellow alumnus from the same school and also his outsourced legal counsel.
The company had been dealing with quite a few troublesome matters recently. Huo Qin had heard from his assistant that the legal department was swamped, but he hadn't expected Guan Sheng to be pushed to this state.
On a Friday night, he was getting dead drunk at a bar Huo Qin had invested in.
Guan Sheng was about eighty percent drunk, squinting as he stared at Huo Qin for a long while before recognizing who this handsome, attention-drawing man was.
"None of your business."
Guan Sheng waved his hand and slumped onto the table with a sigh.
"President Huo, tell me, why is my love life so rough?"
Huo Qin's concern had opened the floodgates. Whether or not Huo Qin asked further, Guan Sheng, face flushed and voice hoarse, started pouring out his grievances.
"The senior I liked in college had a long-distance boyfriend. She only got close to me because she wanted me to do her homework. I wrote assignments for her for a whole semester, and in the end, I got beaten up by her boyfriend. Then recently, I finally developed feelings for someone again. I thought she was a junior, but who knew she was a high school student? I said we were fated, and she called me uncle, saying she was sixteen and asking if we still had a connection… wuwu, isn't that just pure mockery of me…"
A man's rambling when he's being long-winded is noisier than ten thousand ducks quacking.
Huo Qin downed the rest of his drink in one gulp, planning to leave as quietly as he had come.
"By the way, President Huo, you've seen that high school girl too. At the China Import and Export Fair, do you remember? Her booth was especially lively. She had a pair of strikingly beautiful fox eyes. President Huo, do you remember? Tell me, how does she look like a high school student? Forget her looks—my niece is also a high school student, and she can't even recognize all twenty-six letters. But this girl was working as an interpreter and helping the law firm translate contracts. Where did she learn all those legal terms?"
As Guan Sheng spoke, he felt that An Ning had simply made up a lie to brush him off.
Because she wasn't interested in him, she claimed she was a high school student.
Huo Qin's departing steps paused at the mention of fox eyes.
A pair of beautiful eyes surfaced in his mind—sometimes watery and full of innocence, sometimes clear and cunning.
"A high school student?"
"Yeah, she said she was a high school student. It scared me so much I didn't reply to her message and immediately shut down my computer. Legally, she's over sixteen, so I wouldn't be committing a crime, but morally, I'd be a complete pervert!"
"That is quite perverted."
Huo Qin walked back to the bar counter, didn't sit down, and looked down at Guan Sheng with affirmation.
"Wuwuwu, I'm innocent because I didn't know. Besides, she didn't even want to acknowledge me. She must think I'm a shameless perverted middle-aged man. She called me uncle! So to high schoolers, men like us who work are already uncles… Wuwuwu, I'm not an uncle. I'm only twenty-four. My niece even says I'm her most handsome little uncle…"
Guan Sheng had clearly drunk too much. Clutching his bottle, he started throwing a drunken tantrum, pestering Huo Qin to praise him for being handsome and young.
When Huo Qin ignored him, he went to pester the bartender instead.
The bartender was much more agreeable, telling him he was extraordinarily handsome, charming and carefree, young and promising, which made Guan Sheng beam with delight like a fool.
Huo Qin found it an eyesore. He pulled a few hundred-yuan bills from his wallet and handed them to the bartender: "Look after him for a few hours. If he's still not awake by closing time, dump him at the police station."
After giving his instructions, he tapped his fingers on the solid wood countertop: "What's her name?"
"Huh?"
"The dream girl who made you commit moral crimes."
"Almost committed a crime. My morality has no flaws whatsoever!"
Guan Sheng argued vehemently, and only after defending his innocence did he say, "Her name is An Ning. An as in 'safe,' Ning as in 'peaceful.' Her online name is 'Little Ning Growing Strong.' Well, she's safe, peaceful, and growing strong, but she doesn't care about anyone else at all, wuwuwu…"
"An Ning."
Repeating the name, Huo Qin curled the corner of his mouth.
If they were talking about fate, it wasn't just Guan Sheng who had a connection with An Ning. The first time he met her, he was purely doing a good deed. If he said he hadn't had any thoughts the second time they met, that would be an insult to his own taste.
Luckily, when she had looked up at him with those upturned eyes and softly said he smelled nice, his rationality had held firm. Otherwise, today he would have been one more person with moral flaws.
He glanced at Guan Sheng, who was so drunk he couldn't control the muscles of his mouth, drool dripping down to his chin.
A pervert, and embarrassing to boot.
An Ning was completely unaware that she had left two men in their twenties feeling like lovelorn youths.
After replying to Guan Sheng's message, she noticed his status had changed to offline. Knowing that matter was settled, she focused on browsing the products.
Although Eachnet was a shopping platform, it was primarily a platform for second-hand resale and personal auctions.
By setting the item location to Yiwu, An Ning finally saw quite a bit of information she was looking for.
If she wanted to source goods in bulk online, accessories were a good choice.
Compared to the jewelry commonly seen at night markets, the products listed on Yiqu were much more refined in design, and most importantly, the prices weren't outrageously high.
Having chosen her target and planned to visit the market tomorrow, An Ning saw that it was getting late and returned to Teacher Zhao's home.
Teacher Zhao was still awake and brought her a midnight snack when she saw her come back.
"It's about this time—from now on, come back before nine o'clock, or else I'll go wait for you at the internet cafe."
After saying that, even though her student might find it annoying, she couldn't help adding, "After you finish your snack, remember to read for a while. Same for tomorrow and the day after—you can go to the internet cafe, but you need to set aside a few hours for homework and studying."
An Ning smiled and nodded: "Don't worry, Teacher. If I don't study hard right under your nose, that would be asking for trouble."
Zhao Wen tapped her forehead: "Good that you know."
After finishing the red bean soup, An Ning went back to her room and opened her books.
After more than a month of studying, she had recalled quite a bit of the knowledge she'd learned in her previous life, but that didn't mean she could skip studying and still maintain good grades.
There was no helping it—being a student was just that miserable.
No matter how hard or diligently you studied before, after a few years, the knowledge would grow legs and slip right out of your mind.
Relearning would feel familiar, but it was only familiar.
The knowledge that left didn't come back as smoothly as it had gone.
She studied until eleven o'clock, and her mind was still clear. Thinking that living outside was nice since there was no worry about lights-out, she heard a knock on her door: "Time to sleep. Don't study yourself silly."
An Ning: "…"
This was what teachers were like—afraid students wouldn't study, and afraid they'd study so hard they forgot to eat and sleep.
Summary: Students really had it tough.
Sigh.