The house was purchased quickly, but cleaning and preparing everything took another four or five days. Professor Dong was as busy as a bee these days, flitting here and there, never able to stop.

I had Suihe till the garden plots and plant some vegetable seeds. This season, I'd plant some cabbage and radishes for winter. And, true to local custom, I dug a large vegetable cellar in the backyard. That way, even if I took out some fresh produce in the winter, no one would suspect it. Those years were coming up soon, and since I'd bought this Western-style house, I had to eliminate any potential worries.

The fireplace on the first floor is absolutely unusable. Fearing it might leak if left unused for a long time, we blocked the air duct with yellow mud on the roof. Then, we installed honeycomb coal stoves and separate chimneys on both the first and second floors. I'm sorry for the wallpaper, but there's nothing we can do about it. We'll treat it differently during this special period. We'll restore it to its original state once the environment improves.

All the furniture in the house was gone, and Professor Dong did not buy new ones. In order to stay comfortably for those few years, he kept everything simple and lived an honest life.

She decided to hang out at the scrap yard, chatting with the security guard under the pretext of buying some scrap newspaper for the walls. She even gave him half a pack of cigarettes, which he immediately pocketed. Actually, the moment Professor Dong approached him, the guard knew what he was up to. These days, scrap yards really only accept scrap. The antique gold bars you'd see mentioned in some novels aren't there! Only the most useless things end up there.

For the sake of half a pack of cigarettes, the old man asked her directly what she wanted. Professor Dong was amused when he heard it. This old man likes to play straight ball, which is interesting.

Then he said that he had just moved from the countryside and his house was missing everything, no tables, chairs, benches, pots, pans, or anything else.

The old man squinted at Professor Dong, trying to discern the truth of what he'd heard. He paused, then asked her what quality she wanted. Professor Dong replied that ordinary clothes would be fine; she couldn't afford anything too expensive. She'd chosen some rather worn clothes from the space in order to visit the scrap collection station today. They were the ones she'd worn while working in the fields in the village. So the old man wasn't too wary of her.

After a while, a colleague of the old man arrived. The old man asked him to help watch the door for a while and then return after taking a relative home. This colleague didn't look very old, no more than 27 or 28, but he looked at people with great vigilance, staring at Professor Dong with sharp eyes. Professor Dong felt uncomfortable under his gaze, and also felt that this person's eyes were too vigilant. She was dressed like a simple rural woman now, so what was there to be so vigilant about? Taking advantage of the time when the old man went to the inner room to smoke, Professor Dong deliberately smiled and approached the young man.

"What's your name, young man?"

The young man ignored him.

"Oh, you're so quiet! You're just like my nephew, who doesn't say a word all day unless there's something going on. You're just a taciturn person."

At this time, the doorman who had gone into the house to smoke came out from the inner room and took over the conversation: "It's not good. This little Sun is just not talkative. He has been working here for almost two years. Don't even think about getting him to say a word unless there is something wrong."

As he said this, he patted the young man's shoulder.

There was no extra expression on the young man's face, as if the person Professor Dong and the gatekeeper were talking about was not him.

With a clang, Professor Dong accidentally knocked over the stool next to the young man. The young man quickly lifted himself up by holding the lower half of the table with both hands, preventing the stool from hitting his legs. A second later, he was standing a meter away. This young man's arm strength is amazing! Not only is his arm strength strong, but his reaction time is also incredibly fast.

There is something wrong with this person!