After that, Yu Luan folded paper boxes with great enthusiasm. Even after all the egg tarts were sold out, he still seemed reluctant to stop, his eyes lingering on the cardboard box in the corner as if he wanted to fold every single one of Tao Guangzhi’s packaging boxes.
Tao Tao blinked and quickly pulled him up.
Enough, enough—there were still things that needed to be corrected, and she didn’t want to cultivate a new obsession.
Counting up the day’s sales, they had sold nearly 200 yuan worth of Portuguese egg tarts. After deducting costs, the gross profit was about 100 yuan—which turned out to be the highest daily revenue and profit Tao Guangzhi had ever earned since opening his shop!
When tallying the money, Tao Tao casually asked how much he used to make selling meat pies each day. Tao Guangzhi replied carelessly, “Around forty or fifty! On the first and fifteenth of the month when people make offerings to the gods, business is good—can hit sixty!”
So daily profit was only twenty or thirty? Tao Tao’s mouth twitched. All she could say was… thank goodness the shop was their own property and they didn’t have to pay rent. Otherwise, they’d have gone bankrupt in the second month from not being able to afford rent. How could they have lasted until now?
Making 100 yuan in a single day delighted Tao Guangzhi so much that he called the chicken farm to order a batch of eggs and had someone deliver a load of flour. Then he dragged Aunt Yu—after her glamorous transformation—out to go dancing again.
In his words: “Worked hard all day, gotta relax—that’s called balancing work and rest.”
Tao Tao: “…”
Weren’t you just complaining about standing all day, with sore arms and legs…
Now suddenly dancing doesn’t make them sore anymore.
She didn’t remember her dad being this addicted to disco.
Oh well, whatever. He’d done a decent job today, and he was only thirty-two—go ahead and have fun!
With a world-weary expression, Tao Tao heard Rao Lili knocking on the water pipe outside again, inviting her to go knock down mangoes. She poked her head out the window and shook her head: “We still haven’t finished the pile in the rice jar! No room for more!”
She was the only one in the family eating those green mangoes—Yu Luan wouldn’t touch them, and neither would Tao Guangzhi or Aunt Yu. Sigh!
Rao Lili thought for a moment, then asked excitedly, “Then how about we go knock on people’s doors for fun?”
Tao Tao choked.
This little terror!
Given how close they were as kids, she’d definitely done that before too… Tao Tao held her forehead. “Knocking on doors for fun” meant running up to neighbors’ doors, banging on them, and bolting before anyone could answer. Do it a few times, and the furious neighbors would stand at their doorstep cursing at the top of their lungs.
Tao Tao gave an awkward smile: “How about we go to your place and play the Little Tyrant game console instead?”
Rao Lili’s eyes lit up at the suggestion: “Okay! My dad’s not home—I’ll sneak the console out of his room. But my mom’s downstairs watching TV, so I’ll bring it over from the rooftop and hook it up to your TV, alright?”
Tao Tao gave an OK sign: “I’ll wait for you.”
Before long, Rao Lili had hauled over the Little Tyrant console, controllers, yellow game cartridges, and AV cables.
Tao Tao received them from the other side of the wall.
Looking at the gray-and-white console, Tao Tao felt a wave of nostalgia. She used to spend hours huddled at Rao Lili’s place playing Little Tyrant—she loved all the games in it: Super Mario, Adventure Island, Contra, Mega Man, Tank Battle, and more.
In a childhood filled with kid-sized worries like “failed the test again” or “don’t want a stepmom,” the days she could hide away with Rao Lili and play games were, in hindsight, the most carefree days of her life.
Back then, the Little Tyrant console was still very expensive. Only Rao Lili’s family in the whole alley had one, and even that was bought just that spring, after she’d begged her dad for ages for her birthday. When she got it, she carried the box around to almost every kid’s house to show off.
Especially Zhang Jiaming—he practically begged on his knees for a turn. His parents wouldn’t let him play such things, saying it would rot his brain, and even though they could afford it, they refused to buy it for him.
The Little Tyrant was lightweight and super easy to set up—just three steps: plug in the AV cable, power on the console, and switch the TV mode with the remote. Then you could play on any TV, which made it convenient no matter whose house you were at.
It wasn’t until she grew up that Tao Tao learned the Little Tyrant was actually a clone of the Nintendo Famicom, and those cheap multi-game cartridges containing dozens of games were all pirated. But kids didn’t know any of that—they’d painstakingly save up their one or two yuan of daily allowance, buy those bootleg game cartridges at the audio-video game store, and treasure them, inserting them into the console with the utmost care.
Yu Luan, a kid who grew up in the countryside, had never seen such high-tech stuff before. When Rao Lili connected the game and the screen lit up, his eyes went wide.
Tao Tao and Rao Lili played King of Fighters in two-player mode—a new game that had come out that year. Yu Luan didn’t fuss about wanting to play. Instead, he trotted over to grab a little stool, sat down obediently beside them, and treated the game screen like a cartoon.
Even with a grown-up soul, childhood games were still fun. The two of them played until they were completely absorbed, and Yu Luan, watching beside them, was equally mesmerized. Though he didn’t quite understand what all the fighting was about, the game graphics were highly saturated and quite refined for the era. He watched with rapt attention, the flickering, shifting battle scenes reflecting continuously in his bright, shiny eyes.
They played five rounds straight before Tao Tao finally remembered she had a little brother. She handed the controller to Yu Luan and picked a character for him—Mai Shiranui, who had simple, flashy moves—and taught him how to play.
Yu Luan took the controller, barely figured out the buttons, and got knocked flying by Rao Lili’s punch.
Rao Lili: “Hahaha!”
He was stunned. Before he could react, he got sent flying again.
“Sister…” Yu Luan looked at his character getting repeatedly beaten to death, then turned back to look at Tao Tao. Tears quickly welled up in his eyes. With a pitiful, sobbing voice, he whimpered, “I died…”
“Pfft, pfft, pfft! You’re gonna live to be a hundred!” Tao Tao quickly grabbed the controller and executed a combo that sent Rao Lili’s character flying into the sky, ruthlessly depleting all five of her friend’s lives, ignoring Rao Lili’s screeching and head-clutching antics. She turned back gently to comfort Yu Luan: “There, there, don’t cry. See? Your sister avenged you!”
Yu Luan threw his arms around Tao Tao’s, holding back his tears and shooting a rather proud glance at Rao Lili.
Rao Lili: “…”
Damn it. Next time, she’d bring Zhang Jiaming along to be her backup!
No more crying—Tao Tao let out a huge sigh of relief. She was truly scared of him. His tears came so easily, just like that.
Later, Tao Tao discovered that Yu Luan was only suited for playing Tetris. He could go a whole round without dying for ages, and his accumulated score quickly far surpassed Rao Lili’s previous record, which even impressed her.
By the later stages, the blocks were falling so fast that you couldn’t even react in time. In the end, it was because Yu Luan’s hands were too small—he couldn’t reach the buttons in time a few times, leading to misplaced blocks—that the game slowly wound to an end.
Rao Lili stared in disbelief: “600,000 points!!”
She turned her head and looked at Tao Tao’s crybaby little brother with a completely new expression of shock. She even knew a middle schooler who was a pro at arcade games, and even he couldn’t score 600,000 points!
It startled him! Yu Luan dropped the controller, covered his ears, and hid behind Tao Tao.
The three of them played until nearly 9 PM, when Teacher Luo called for Rao Lili to go home, and they finally wrapped up.
Tao Tao saw her off as she climbed back over the wall. The wind on the rooftop terrace was picking up, and drops of water kept landing on her face. Tao Tao looked up—under the dim yellow glow of the bulb on the roof, she could clearly see the rain falling in distinct streaks.
It was raining again.
She leaned over the wall and peered down for a while. There was no one at the entrance of the alley—her parents were still out having fun with no sign of returning anytime soon.
So Tao Tao had no choice but to take Yu Luan upstairs herself to wash up and get ready for bed.
She had already made a vow to grow taller—persistence was key to victory, and tonight she would sleep early too!
The two of them stood side by side on little stools, facing the mirror and brushing their teeth with equally fierce, exaggerated grimaces. After they were done, Tao Tao told Yu Luan to go back to his room to shower and sleep, then waved goodbye to him at the top of the stairs as they parted ways.
But no sooner had she gotten inside, taken a quick shower, changed into her pajamas, and rolled around on the cool bamboo mat, than there was a knock at her door.
She opened it to find Yu Luan, who had also taken another shower and changed into a tank top and little shorts, dragging his little goldfish-patterned pillow along with him. Tao Tao looked puzzled: “There’s no thunder tonight.”
Yu Luan didn’t say a word—he just threw himself at her and hugged her.
Tao Tao could smell the cool scent of soap on him and sighed: “Alright, alright.”
She moved the electric fan over to the bedside. Yu Luan always stuck close to her when sleeping, and without air conditioning, it was way too hot. The rain made it a bit better tonight, but usually, the sun rose before 6 AM, and it got so hot she wished she could sleep inside the freezer.
She hadn’t expected this—the appliance she missed most after being reborn wasn’t her phone, but air conditioning!
As soon as she brought the fan over, Yu Luan lay down by the edge of the bed and stared at it spinning.
Tao Tao lay down next to him and asked, “What’s so interesting about an electric fan? Doesn’t it make your eyes dizzy?”
She looked at it for two more seconds and felt like she was turning into a mosquito coil.
Yu Luan thought for a long moment before replying, “Circular motion… is beautiful.”
Tao Tao slowly turned her head, utterly stunned: “Huh?”
What the heck is beautiful??
Yu Luan tilted his head too, but didn’t know how to explain it. The fan blades went around and around in circular motion, their trajectory always the same, repetitive, with no surprises or chaos.
It was just beautiful. And soothing.
What actually surprised Tao Tao was that he even knew what circular motion was. Earlier, she had come across an exercise book of his that she’d hidden behind the cabinet. The characters and pinyin were so badly written that she stared at them for ages without recognizing anything. His sentence construction was a mess too—one exercise asked him to use “naive” in a sentence, and he wrote: “Today zhen re.” If his Chinese teacher had seen that, she’d probably cry.
Tao Tao had thought Yu Luan was practically illiterate.
Turns out his extraordinary talent for mathematics from his previous life had already started showing signs this early.
Tao Tao ruffled his head: “Impressive. Stop staring and go to sleep.”
Yu Luan reluctantly pulled his gaze away, neatly placed his little pillow next to his sister’s, turned on his side, and tried to snuggle closer to her—but then his small body paused.
He still remembered Tao Tao saying not to get too close because it was too hot.
After a moment’s thought, he curled up slightly on his side, reached out, and grabbed a tuft of her hair, holding it in his palm.
His eyes closed—and he was instantly asleep.
Tao Tao: “…”
Did he just shut down??
And so the summer days passed quietly.
Every day after that, on workdays, Tao Guangzhi baked at least two oven trays’ worth of Portuguese egg tarts—about eighty to a hundred. On weekends, the whole family had to pitch in to bake an extra batch to sell, moving over 140 or more.
They sold out every single day.
They kept this up for over half a month, and the egg tart business was still going strong.
During that time, Tao Tao’s aunt called to place two more large orders of about a hundred egg tarts each. Tao Tao also accompanied Tao Guangzhi to the advertising print shop to pick out new packaging boxes.
Before, they’d been using plain white ones, which really weren’t attractive enough. This time, they chose red and pink ones with printed ribbons and bows, which looked more festive and upscale.
They also designed a dedicated promotional poster for the egg tarts.