Pissed off the little puppy to death!
Chen Zui hadn’t stuffed herself to the point of a food coma in a very long time. On the way back, she sat in the car fighting off food sleepiness, drifting in and out of slumber.
Without much conscious awareness, she just heard Jiang Feiwan say they had arrived.
Chen Zui sleepily opened her eyes, rubbed her stomach, and sighed: “Teacher, do you offer after-sales service for the meal?”
At her age, walking off a heavy meal had truly become a necessity.
Jiang Feiwan furrowed her brows as she looked at her. Seeing the latter clutching her stomach with a melancholy expression, she instantly understood and was left somewhat speechless yet amused: “Are you applying for after-sales service?”
“Yes.”
Most definitely yes.
Putting on a pitiful face, Chen Zui unbuckled her seatbelt and got out of the car: “Let’s walk a few laps, or I won’t be able to eat a thing all day tomorrow.”
Jiang Feiwan agreed, parked the car, and accompanied her out of the underground parking garage.
Shengting was quite large, with two medium-sized children’s playgrounds built at the front and back respectively, featuring slides that kids loved and some fitness equipment. Both spots were basically occupied by a crowd of children every single night.
Emerging from the exit closest to the parking lot, a single turn brought them right to the front playground. Before the two of them even got close, the raucous noise of children playing rushed over to crowd them out.
“How long has Teacher Jiang lived here?” Chen Zui wanted to call her by her given name, but after stewing on it for ages, she ultimately chose to call Jiang Feiwan “Teacher Jiang.”
Jiang Feiwan smiled and said, “I only moved here last year.”
One year earlier than her.
Lost in thought, Chen Zui walked over to the side of the playground and saw that two stepping machines were still empty, so she said she wanted to give them a try. Just as she reached the spot, three or four kids from nowhere rushed over, occupied the stepping machines, dropped straight onto them, and started swinging back and forth.
The stepping machines had turned into swings, and there was even a momentum of swinging higher and higher.
“Make way, make way!” the kids chanted nonstop as they swung, urging the two of them to move away.
Chen Zui frowned. She disliked this kind of behavior, but she was also worried that the heavy swinging arms might smash into her, so she suppressed her anger and pulled Jiang Feiwan away.
“Want to play?” Jiang Feiwan noticed her gaze and asked.
“Not right now, just feel like kids are super annoying.”
Truly super annoying.
“We can come back a little later,” Jiang Feiwan said softly. “In another ten minutes or so, they’ll have to go home to do homework.”
Hearing her speak with such certainty, Chen Zui was surprised, “How do you know? Shouldn’t they finish their homework before coming out to play?”
Jiang Feiwan thought for a moment and nodded, “Perhaps they prefer to finish their homework before dark so they can come out to play.”
Chen Zui laughed out loud.
Alright, in a child’s world, they generally chose to have the sweetness first and the bitterness later. Eating dinner, doing homework, and coming downstairs to play for forty minutes after dinner—the latter was indeed much harder to resist.
“Teacher Jiang is very thoughtful.” Chen Zui praised sincerely.
“Boss Chen still retains her childlike innocence.” Jiang Feiwan also praised sincerely.
Chen Zui raised an eyebrow at her, the probing intent in her gaze obvious: “Are you complimenting me, or are you secretly throwing shade at me for actually fighting kids to play on the stepping machines?”
“Complimenting you.”
Jiang Feiwan’s tone carried a smile, warm and gentle.
Very well, Chen Zui touched her ear; then she would take it as a compliment.
The corners of her mouth curved into a satisfied smile.
“You must have just arrived in Qingzhou.” Jiang Feiwan didn’t look at her, speaking against the wind. The hair gathered in her hair clip was somewhat loose, and when blown by the wind, it didn’t look messy at all; instead, it possessed an indescribable intellectual beauty.
Streetlights had been set up along the path. They weren’t overly bright—brighter than tonight’s moonlight, yet dimmer than the person right in front of her.
Chen Zui could see Jiang Feiwan clearly without any effort. Her skin was very white, the same color as the moon. Her slender peach-blossom eyes looked a bit cold when she wasn’t smiling, but the gentleness reaching her gaze was enough to make that touch of coldness negligible. Her brows and eyes were soft, her expression peaceful, and her relaxed facial lines made this gentleness even more pronounced.
Looking away from such a face wasn’t actually simple.
Anyway, Chen Zui—who never gave up—gave up.
She consistently lagged half a step behind her, tilting her head slightly to quietly admire: “Teacher Jiang is great at interrogating information out of people, and great at guessing people too.”
Jiang Feiwan expressed her helplessness that she still remembered this episode: “I’m not a teacher.”
“Then what are you?”
“Boss Chen’s technique at interrogating information isn’t bad either.”
Chen Zui puckered her lips.
Well, she hadn’t managed to get anything out of her, had she? Only once you successfully fish for info can you say that.
“I only got here yesterday,” Chen Zui returned to the main topic. “Besides, I’m not that young anymore; friends advised me to settle down here.”
“Settle down?” The smile on Jiang Feiwan’s face froze for a split second before quickly recovering: “Your friends are really good at looking out for you.”
“Yeah, I was still out of town, and bam—I got smashed right down onto Qingzhou.”
Chen Zui didn’t care where she settled down. Her first half of life was basically in a state of homelessness; when she was dumped at the orphanage, all of this seemed destined.
The director had successively scouted two families for her. Both were wealthy with no children of their own. After much picking and choosing, they selected a DINK couple who ran a business. That couple also picked out the delicate-looking Chen Zui from a crowd of children at a single glance. Of course, her mixed-race appearance might have added a few points for her—she was the only mixed-race child in the entire orphanage, an outlier among a sea of Asian faces, which made her the quickest child adopted out of that batch.
However, she was also the quickest one sent back.
Because that couple got pregnant.
Chen Zui didn’t actually remember much more, only that the director was furious for a very long time.
Because that DINK couple had lied; they heard from others on the internet that if you couldn’t have children, you could adopt one to bring a bit of child-friendly atmosphere to the household, and the probability of getting pregnant would increase significantly. So, holding a “let’s try it out” mentality, they adopted Chen Zui, and through a twist of fate, half a year after the adoption, the wife became pregnant.
An adopted child doesn’t compare to one of your own flesh and blood, so they sent young Chen Zui back, and knowing they were in the wrong, they sent a sum of money to the orphanage.
In the second year after her return, another couple took a fancy to her. Bound by multiple contracts, Chen Zui was adopted for the second time.
Unfortunately, good times don’t last. Four years after adopting her, her adoptive parents died in a car accident.
From then on, Chen Zui no longer harbored expectations for a new family. Driftwood-like uncertainty was perhaps the best state of life a person could have.
She had long since seen through all of this. She went everywhere holding onto the belief that a person could die at any moment. Anyway, to repeat the phrase: if she died, she’d serve as nutrient-rich soil; if she didn’t die, she’d milk another day of daylight.
“What about you? Where are you originally from?” Chen Zui turned her head to ask Jiang Feiwan, her gaze sweeping past her high-bridged nose and resting on those rosy lips below, her mouth pressing into a line.
Jiang Feiwan had just wanted to reply when her peripheral vision suddenly caught sight of a children’s bicycle rushing out from the dimmer path right next to Chen Zui. The bickering sounds of children followed close behind. The bicycle wasn’t moving slowly, and even if the child on top reacted, it was already too late to brake.
Without time to think much, Jiang Feiwan hurriedly grabbed someone and pulled them back to dodge. However, she herself was off by half a step, and half her body was sent staggering by the violent impact.
Whether that path had a slope or something, the impact was truly immense. The bicycle tilted violently toward the other side upon impact. Jiang Feiwan’s heart tightened, and enduring the numbness across half her body, she grabbed the child’s arm just in time to keep him from falling over.
Chen Zui’s attention had been entirely on Jiang Feiwan, and she was completely oblivious to the danger in her own blind spot. It wasn’t until Jiang Feiwan reached out to grab her, followed immediately by a harsh crashing bang, that Chen Zui reacted quickly, grabbing the bicycle seat to stabilize the bike’s center of gravity.
“Jiang Feiwan!” Chen Zui saw that she had been hit. That blow wasn’t light, yet she had managed to not utter a single sound while also pulling the child who was riding.
The tightly knitted furrow between Jiang Feiwan’s brows loosened by half. She squatted down to check on the child’s condition first, but before she could even say two words, the child started wailing at the top of his lungs.
A child’s cry is the ultimate summoning spell. The child’s parent popped out instantly, shielding the precious darling in their arms and fussing over this and that with a heart full of anguish.
Chen Zui’s complexion turned the absolute worst shade possible; she had no heart to care about this farce. She pulled Jiang Feiwan over to stand under the streetlight and carefully inspected the areas that had been hit.
Jiang Feiwan was only wearing a short-sleeved top with a silky ice-silk drape over her upper body, leaving her completely lacking extra fabric for defense. Two long red marks had been scraped onto her right forearm, and the skin at her wrist had even broken, welling up with beads of blood. Her skin was naturally fair, making even the slightest bit of redness look shockingly stark.
Chen Zui locked her brows tightly, her tone entirely stripped of its usual laziness: “Did you get hit anywhere else? What about your legs and stomach?”
Jiang Feiwan shook her head and instead comforted her: “No. The marks on my arm should just be from the bicycle handlebar scraping me, don’t worry.”
Not worrying was a lie. If she had possessed the reaction speed she usually had when exploring the outdoors, this situation wouldn’t have happened at all.
Saying she didn’t blame herself would also be a lie. Not paying attention to road conditions herself and letting someone else take that impact for her—a sour, tight swelling welled up in Chen Zui’s chest.
She wished she had been the one hit instead. She had always been tough-skinned and wore ice-sleeves on her arms anyway; either way, she could have blocked those injuries.
“Hey, what did you two do to my grandson? He’s crying like this! His stomach even got bruised red!”
The parent pulled over their crying-their-eyes-out darling—who still didn’t dare open his mouth wide—to cross-examine them, hiding behind the parent as if they had genuinely done something terrible to him.
Jiang Feiwan was gentle, but Chen Zui wasn’t gentle in the slightest. Without making a sound, she stepped forward to shield Jiang Feiwan behind her, confronting the cataract-blind, unreasonable old man: “Crying makes you right? Then should I also sit on the ground and throw a tantrum to see whose logic is stronger?”
“A kid this size can actually get bullied by two adults?!”
The old man wasn’t just cataract-blind; his brain wasn’t working either.
Chen Zui tilted her head to stare at the half-grown figure behind him, shouting coldly: “Opening your mouth is either howling or bawling—can’t you say what you did yourself? Do you want me to call the police and take the legal route?”
And then.
And then the kid cried even louder.
Chen Zui was intensely annoyed. Just as she was about to say something else, the person behind her tugged at her hemline.
She turned her head sideways.
Jiang Feiwan’s voice drifted over softly: “Forget it.”
Just minor injuries; she didn’t want to get tangled up in this endlessly.
Chen Zui glanced at her increasingly red and swollen arm, her heart tightening all over again: “Doesn’t your arm hurt? Why did you pull me just now? I’m out in the wind and sun all the time, I’m way tougher than you.”
Besides, it was her own lack of awareness…
“Being tough means you deserve to take this hit?” Jiang Feiwan disagreed with her logic, her eyebrow arching up: “Besides, I think you’re quite tender-skinned yourself. Where are you tough?”
Chen Zui grabbed the stray hairs in front of her forehead, turned her head to sweep a glance at the old man who was swearing not to let it go, and said, “Old sir, don’t you worry, this matter is far from over. Right now, I’m taking my friend to the hospital. I’ll keep the receipts for all expenses, and furthermore, I’ll have the property management pull surveillance footage of how this happened. Don’t think you can skirt past the law just because you’re young; if the little one can’t walk away from this, then the big ones will!”
With that, she carefully took Jiang Feiwan’s other hand and led her away from that zone that sounded like squealing pigs.
Her steps were hurried, and her heart was hurried too, completely failing to notice that holding Jiang Feiwan’s hand was in any way inappropriate.
She was genuinely planning to take someone to the hospital.
With her hand tightly gripped and a wave of warmth continuously transmitting from the palm, Jiang Feiwan struggled awkwardly, her heart pounding like a drum. When she ultimately couldn’t shake her off, she finally spoke up to call out to the person in front of her: “Chen Zui.”
Chen Zui stopped and paused for a second: “Sorry.”
Jiang Feiwan didn’t understand this sudden apology.
Or perhaps, she should understand it.
“Alright, are you satisfied with the after-sales service for the meal?” She skipped over the unpleasant episode.
The topic returned to track.
And so did the distance.
Actually, she wasn’t very satisfied, Jiang Feiwan thought.
With herself—she was extremely dissatisfied.
Jiang Feiwan, you hid away to escape, but today you’ve already run out so many times.
Right in front of her, it was all seen.