It wasn’t long before Lu Yuchun came over as well, bringing some small mahua twists for Lu Yuning and Lu Yuping.
These were made by Seventh Grandma from flour ground from the sweet potatoes grown in her family’s private plot, mixed with some coarse grain flour and other things. They smelled absolutely delicious!
Lu Yuning ate two, yet still felt like she hadn’t had enough. They were really that good!
These old-fashioned homemade treats would become hard to come by in the future.
But right now, they were basic skills that every household knew.
Thinking about the future, when technology would develop rapidly and people’s lives would become more comfortable, many things would also lose their original flavor.
The flavor between people, the flavor of food, and even the flavor of dreams.
Lu Yuchun had only brought six in total, so each of the three girls got two. After they finished eating, Lu Yuping said enviously, “Yuchun, your grandma is really good to you. My family doesn’t have snacks this delicious. Next time, I’ll pick some wild chestnuts for you and roast them for you to eat.”
Lu Yuchun nodded. “Okay! I don’t know how to roast them anyway, so I’ll wait for you to roast them for me.”
Lu Yuping nodded. “Mm-hmm. I’m really good at roasting them.”
Lu Yuchun smiled brightly. “You’re so amazing. My grandma even said you’re the most capable child in our brigade!”
Lu Yuning nodded. “Exactly! Yuping, you’re really amazing. You’re much better than me at doing chores!”
Lu Yuping smiled shyly, her cheeks turning slightly red. “Not at all. I only know how to do some housework. I don’t know how to do anything else.”
Lu Yuchun shook her head. “But you already know how to cook!”
Lu Yuning nodded repeatedly in agreement. “Exactly! I only know how to pick vegetables.”
Lu Yuchun nodded along. “Exactly, exactly.”
The praise from the two girls made Lu Yuping’s face turn completely red. She quickly waved her hands. “I’m really not as good as you two say…”
At that moment, Grandma Lu also said with a smile, “Yuchun and Yuning are right. Yuping, you’re really amazing! You’re so young, yet you already know how to do so many things.”
Lu Yuping’s face turned even redder, but clearly, she believed what Grandma Lu was saying.
“Really, Tenth Grandma? Am I really that good?”
Grandma Lu’s heart softened. “Of course. Yuping, you’re much better than the others.”
Lu Yuping’s smile grew wider. “I’ll study even harder from now on. I’ll become even better!”
Lu Yuning quickly said, “I think, Yuping, you’re already very good at housework. From now on, you should focus on studying. Try to become good at studying too. That’s what you should do.”
Lu Yuchun didn’t understand too much, but she was also very enthusiastic about studying at the moment, so she nodded in agreement.
“Right, Yuping. Let’s study together and take the university entrance exams in the future!”
Lu Yuping’s eyes lit up. “Okay!”
Grandma Lu smiled. Now that was more like it. Of course, children should study hard, go to university, and become university students in the future!
Lu Yuning secretly breathed a sigh of relief.
Although she had been praising Lu Yuping to help her regain her confidence, she wasn’t trying to manipulate her into becoming some little cabbage who only knew how to do housework.
She had really been afraid that Lu Yuping would misunderstand what they meant and start focusing entirely on learning household chores while neglecting her studies. If that happened, they would truly be doomed!
When they grew up, it would happen to be around the time when the university entrance examinations were restored. Although they would already be in their early twenties by then, the truth was that they would still be young. They could still go to university and live better lives!
Lu Yuning still hoped that her friends could have better lives.
As for the female protagonist, that had nothing to do with her. As long as she didn’t come bothering her, Lu Yuning would be more than happy to stay far away from her and simply watch the drama unfold from the sidelines in the future.
The girls chatted for a while before continuing to play hopscotch. They waited until lunch was ready before returning to their respective homes to eat.
Meanwhile, at Ninth Grandma’s house, after carrying Fubao home, Ninth Grandma looked her over from head to toe several times. Seeing that Fubao didn’t have a single injury on her, she couldn’t help frowning.
“Fubao, what exactly happened? Did that girl Yuning bully you? Did she hit you? Or did she scold you?”
Fubao sobbed, “They didn’t hit me, and they didn’t scold me. They just won’t play with me anymore. They don’t want to play with me because I’m dirty, and because I don’t have any good food anymore. Grandma, I want to be clean. I want good food too…”
Ninth Grandma: “…”
If this weren’t the child she had loved and spoiled for so many years, she really might not have been able to stop herself from getting angry!
But she also felt somewhat guilty. These past few days, she had been so focused on being angry at her eldest son’s family that she had neglected Fubao.
“All right, all right. Grandma understands. Grandma will buy you some good food, give you a bath and wash your hair, and change you into clean clothes.”
At this point, Ninth Grandma couldn’t help feeling annoyed with Third Aunt Lu as well.
She was Fubao’s grandmother and hadn’t paid enough attention, but wasn’t Third Aunt Lu her mother? How could she have failed to notice either?
So when Third Aunt Lu and the others returned home, Ninth Grandma immediately started scolding her, leaving Third Aunt Lu speechless.
But in the end, Fubao was her own daughter. Seeing her daughter’s eyes red from crying, she still felt guilty.
“Fubao, Mom’s sorry. Mom didn’t give you a bath or wash your clothes. It won’t happen again. Mom promises, okay? Don’t be sad anymore.”
That noon, Fubao received an extra bowl of eggs cooked with brown sugar, making several of her older male cousins and Lu Shisan drool with envy.
After lunch, Ninth Grandma took Fubao to town and bought her a pound of broken biscuits.
Fubao didn’t mind any of it. As long as she had something to eat, she was happy.
When she returned home, she stuffed the biscuits into her pockets and ran out to Lu Yuning’s house to show off.
“I have biscuits to eat again! I’m not giving any to you anymore!”
Lu Yuning and the others: “…”
They weren’t interested at all, okay?
Especially since Grandma Lu had made another batch of glutinous rice cakes with brown sugar that day. Lu Yuning thought they tasted much better than those broken biscuits sold in town!
Lu Yuchun had the small mahua twists made by Seventh Grandma, while Lu Yuping benefited from her eldest sister today and got to eat sesame balls for the first time.
After Sixteenth Grandma had thought things through, she had asked Eldest Aunt Sixteen to fry some sesame balls. Lu Yuhe had eaten two, then used the excuse that she couldn’t eat anymore because she was feeling a little overheated and gave them to her younger sister.
Lu Yujun and her own older brother, Lu Yuzheng, hadn’t fought with their sister over them either.
So this was the first time Lu Yuping had eaten an entire sesame ball, and it had been so fragrant that she was still savoring the taste.
When Fubao saw that Lu Yuning and the others only glanced at her without any reaction, Lu Yuning merely gave a very perfunctory response.
“Oh.”
Then the girls continued sitting beneath the corridor and practicing their writing.
Grandma Lu and the others hadn’t gotten up from their afternoon nap yet. Since the girls had woken up early, they gathered together again to practice writing.
Seeing that none of them looked envious at all, Fubao became unhappy and turned around and ran off.
She refused to believe that everyone else in the brigade would be like Lu Yuning and the others and refuse to play with her.
Ninth Grandma had initially thought nothing of it when she saw Fubao run over to the Tenth Household to show off, but in the blink of an eye, Fubao had already run away.
She hurried after her, afraid that Fubao might fall along the way or get lost.
However, most people in the brigade were taking their afternoon naps at this time. Even those who weren’t napping were working in their families’ private plots.
Who would be wandering around the brigade at a time like this?
Fubao ran around for quite a while but couldn’t find many children to play with, so she could only dejectedly return home, her eyes red with sadness once again.
Lu Yuning didn’t care what happened to the female protagonist.
After she finished practicing large-character writing with Lu Yuchun and Lu Yuping, the three girls started learning how to calculate addition and subtraction within ten.
When the family members got up from their afternoon naps, Grandma Lu even became their examiner and gave them questions to answer.
After they passed, Grandma Lu brought out the glutinous rice cakes with brown sugar and divided them among the girls.
The little girls had such a wonderful time playing together!
They spent the whole day happily, and when evening came and they returned home, every one of them was still smiling.
Lu Yuning was quite happy too.
She hadn’t expected Lu Yuting to look for her as soon as he got home.
He tested her on recognizing characters and solving math problems. When he saw that she answered every question correctly, he was still unwilling to admit defeat and directly asked,
“What is 15 plus 8?”
Lu Yuning instinctively answered, “23.”
Lu Yuting: “…”
It happened to be Mother Lu’s turn to cook that day. She had just finished preparing the food and was bringing it out when she heard Lu Yuning’s answer.
“Oh my, our Yuning really is clever! She can even do two-digit addition now.”
Lu Yuning gave an awkward smile.
She had simply answered instinctively and hadn’t realized that she hadn’t even learned this yet.
Lu Yuting was extremely depressed.
“My little sister is way too smart.”
Lu Yubai found it rather amusing.
“Isn’t it a good thing that your little sister is smart?”
Lu Yuting was speechless for a moment.
Lu Yubai smiled and said to Lu Yuning, “Little Sister, come here. I’ll teach you. Don’t listen to your Third Brother.”
Lu Yuning quickly ran over and sat beside Lu Yubai.
“Okay! What are you going to teach me, Little Brother?”
“I’ll teach you the multiplication table.”
“Oh, okay. Go ahead.”
“One times one is one, two times two is four…”
Lu Yuning repeated after him and then “learned” it.
Lu Yubai was delighted.
“Then I’ll teach you another one. Eleven times eleven is 121, twelve times twelve is 144…”
Lu Yuning: “…”
Brother, are these really problems someone my age should be learning?
Aren’t you moving a little too fast?!
This is beyond the syllabus… and then some!
But Lu Yubai didn’t think so at all.
He felt that since his little sister had such a good memory, why not use that good memory to memorize some fixed calculation formulas first? Wouldn’t that save a lot of trouble?
Once his little sister started school in the future, perhaps she could even skip a grade or two.
He was already planning to skip grades himself.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have kept participating in competitions. He wanted to prove that his learning ability was absolutely enough to handle the examinations required for skipping grades as well as the studies that came afterward.
Aside from Lu Yubai, there really wasn’t another child in the family who thought this far ahead.
Apart from Lu Yuting, who attended the same school as him, no one knew about Lu Yubai’s plans.
And Lu Yuting felt that with his little brother’s brain, skipping grades wasn’t a big deal, so he never thought of telling the family about it.
Thus, when summer vacation arrived, the principal of Hong’an Elementary School came to speak to Grandpa Lu about Lu Yubai skipping grades.
Grandpa Lu was completely stunned.
“What? You’re saying our Yubai can go straight to junior high school?”
The principal of Hong’an Elementary School smiled and nodded.
“Yes, Tenth Uncle. Yubai is very bright. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s still so young, honestly, I think he could go straight to high school.”
Grandpa Lu was completely dazed. He felt as though the principal’s words were something out of a dream.
Grandma Lu was the one who reacted quickly. After being stunned for a moment, she immediately asked,
“Principal, do you mean our Yubai can go straight to the third year of junior high?”
The principal of Hong’an Elementary School smiled.
“Let him start with the first year of junior high and see how he handles it. If he can manage the workload, then we’ll let him go directly to the third year of junior high and start high school next year.”
Grandpa Lu: “…”
He couldn’t help looking at Lu Yubai, who was sitting nearby with a smile at the corner of his mouth.
Was this really his child?
How could he be so smart?
Lu Yuning: “…”
Oh, heavens!
She had actually met a real-life child prodigy!