25 Chapter Twenty-Four (Two chapters combined)

"It's been so long since I've seen the young master smile so happily—"

No sooner had Yu Jinyang finished speaking than Tony darted from the counter, grabbed the payment code, and sprang back to Yu Jinyang, treating him like a favored older brother. Finally, still not giving up, he asked, "You...would you like to get a membership card? We have a summer promotion right now: top up 2,000 and get 300 free, the more you top up, the more you get—top up 5,000 and get 900 free. We also have a skincare spa and beauty center—"

Tony glanced at his idol discreetly, "The balance can be used in both places."

Li Yingqiao suppressed a laugh and went to look at Yu Jinyang.

Yu Jinyang remained calm and composed, still sitting on the bed next to Li Yingqiao. After scanning the code, he put his phone back in his pocket, slowly lifted his eyelids to glance at him, and said, "Has Keven not come back yet? It's been twenty minutes, bro."

Tony understood immediately, but his smile remained impeccable: "Our teacher Keven only drinks Starbucks; he's probably gone to the old town."

Yu Jinyang pointed with his chin: "There's one in the mall."

Tony chuckled dryly and said, "He likes the one near Tanzhong, where there are many top students, so he can benefit from their academic success."

Since 2016, the Fengtan government has been determined to develop the city into a tourist destination, and has begun large-scale construction in an attempt to reshape the outline and heart of the entire city.

In the past two years, the city has undergone a complete transformation, with high-rise buildings and neon lights dotting the landscape. Several office buildings, a rarity in small towns, have sprung up. Starbucks has also opened two branches, one in the old town and one in the new town.

However, the old town is like the gradually declining old heart of Fengtan. Apart from the two key middle schools, Tanzhong and Shiyan, which are still relatively lively, the rest of the area is pitifully deserted. When the wind blows, there are fewer people than tree leaves standing upright.

The once magnificent state-owned hotel has long since closed down, and two more luxurious and glittering five-star hotels have opened in the new urban area, one of which is owned by Yu Renjie.

If Starbucks hadn't prohibited him from investing, Yu Renjie would have been willing to invest at least three or five yuan.

Tony seemed amazed by his own quick thinking and walked away contentedly with the QR code.

Li Yingqiao was already blow-drying her hair, and the constant buzzing of the hairdryers in the salon made the atmosphere suddenly quiet. The two of them didn't speak anymore, and their eyes occasionally met in the mirror before quickly looking away.

Yu Jinyang was sitting upright in the next seat, scrolling through his phone. Only now did he see the WeChat message Gao Dian had sent him, saying that Qiao was back and had gone to the barbershop to find him.

To be honest, after that summer of their sophomore year when they were caught in a sudden downpour, they were like fallen leaves scattered by the wind, and they almost never saw each other again.

As soon as the college entrance exam results were released, Yu Jinyang knew that the two of them were destined to be separated by vast distances. Although before the exam, Li Yingqiao had confidently told him that she did not want to be too far from home, fearing that Li Shuli would feel lonely, and that she would only have two choices: either a university in Shanghai or S University in the province.

During their senior year of high school, their grades were surprisingly stable. In 2016, S Province still had bonus points for elective modules. The total score structure was 750 points for both arts and sciences, plus 60 points for elective modules for students admitted to top universities, for a total of 810 points.

Their scores were hovering around 700 points, just barely enough to get into F University or S University. Relatively speaking, S University was a safer bet, while they both needed more room to improve for F University. But Zhu Xiaoliang and Liang Mei were already satisfied; securing a place at S University within the province was already beyond their expectations.

Unexpectedly, the results were astonishing. One student, a runaway horse, defied his parents' anxieties and surged into the top ten in the province for humanities, while the other also performed exceptionally well, breaking into the top one hundred for science. Although they consistently held onto third place, this "third" was far more valuable than anything they had achieved in the entrance exams for junior high school.

Li Yingqiao didn't care whether Li Shuli was lonely or not. After Liang Mei and Zhu Xiaoliang worked on her mindset all night, she filled in her application for B University's top-ranked major without hesitation. Yu Jinyang, who believed the slander, had already told his parents that he didn't want to be too far away from them, and his goal was F University or S University.

His wealthy father, with his exceptional execution skills, believed that his son genuinely didn't want to be too far from home, so he immediately bought him an apartment in Shanghai as a reward for his college entrance exam and a coming-of-age gift.

Several business owners in Fengtan had no attachment to Beijing. Instead, they had all owned properties in the provincial capital and Shanghai. Yu Renjie was no exception. After finishing the college entrance examination, he transferred his large riverside apartment directly to Yu Jinyang.

Yu Renjie's extravagant spending left Li Yingqiao, Gao Dian, and the others speechless. From then on, none of them called him by his full name or "Meow Meow." Instead, they all winked and called him "Young Master," then vied for the positions of butler, doctor, and other roles—simplistic yet weighty characters reminiscent of CEO novels.

They were trying to make him laugh with ill intentions and jokes.

Yu Jinyang mostly observed with a detached eye, but sometimes he couldn't help but laugh. The next second, they would recite that famous line with great emotion: "It's been a long time since we've seen the young master laugh so happily—"

Immediately afterwards, Li Yingqiao's eyes lit up as she swore to him, "Young Master, I've decided to give up my studies and become a doctor for you. I'll be your private family doctor, and from now on, your heartbeat will be my heartbeat. If you don't beat, I won't either."

"..."

Gao Dian jumped up and pulled out a square scarf from somewhere, wrapping it tightly around Yu Jinyang's neck: "Then I'll be the butler! I'll serve you without hesitation, young master. Just give the order, and I'll even cut off my own excrement to pick your teeth first."

"..."

“Then I will create the most perfect 1:8 life-size wax sculpture of you in the world,” Zheng Miaojia said, pushing up her glasses with a serious expression. “Believe me, I will definitely capture your perfect curves in every detail and put them in a wax museum for the world to admire.”

Gao Dian couldn't help but look up and imagine it for a moment. Thanos popped into his mind, and he closed his eyes because he couldn't bear to look at him.

Yu Jinyang: "…………"

Yu Jinyang decisively chose to go to Shanghai because at that time, neither of them thought they would lose contact later. It's just that life is unpredictable, and life is too unpredictable.

Until he returned to Fengtan last year, he heard many rumors about Li Yingqiao—

They say she received the national scholarship at Peking University, and that she signed a contract with a major Beijing company before graduation. Later, that company went bankrupt and went into liquidation, but then, not long after, Li Yingqiao made a comeback, becoming the marketing director in just two years. Recently, I heard she launched some kind of cashmere product, which became incredibly popular across the country, with many people scrambling to buy it.

The whole story has a beginning and an end, full of twists and turns, and is described vividly. However, its credibility is not high because the person he was gossiping with at the time was his great-grandmother, Ms. Yu Wanjuan.

Ms. Yu Wanjuan, who used to eat three bowls of rice, is now 103 years old. Thanks to her feat of skewering Li Wusheng's kidneys in the town back then, many people in Fengtan still remember this brave and powerful old lady.

The old lady lived to an excessively old age; most of her children did not outlive her. Only the lineage of Grandpa Yu Jinyang remained intact, but the old lady refused to go anywhere and continued to live alone in the countryside.

Yu Renjie hired a nanny and caregiver for her, and renovated the old gray earthen tile walls into a luxurious and exquisite little villa, which stood out incongruously among the gray brick and tile houses. The yard was full of succulents and grapevines that climbed all over the trellis.

After Yu Jinyang returned, besides working in the city, he spent the rest of his time either playing ball with Gao Dian or hanging out with the old lady in the countryside, tending to her succulents and trimming the weeds. The old lady was quite talkative, often spouting nonsense. She talked about his old friends, who were more well-informed than him, saying that Xiao Gaodian had lost a lot of money starting a business in Shenzhen, and a rich woman wanted him to sell himself to pay off his debts. Xiao Gaodian refused and ran away from Shenzhen.

It was also said that Zheng Miaojia was dating several boyfriends at the same time, one a songwriter and the other a composer, and the two of them accidentally met.

Yu Jinyang asked her how she knew these things. The old lady was old, but her hearing wasn't bad. Sometimes when Tang Xiang and Yu Renjie came to visit her, she would overhear them chatting. His parents, on the other hand, tacitly avoided talking about these things in front of him. Instead, he overheard the old lady sometimes rambling on.

But he didn't quite believe Li Yingqiao was selling cashmere. Yu Jinyang had just finished repotting his succulents and, having nothing better to do, pulled up a chair and sat down next to the old lady, deciding to chat with her for a while: "What cashmere? A cashmere sweater? What brand is it?"

"How could I remember?" The old lady obviously couldn't recall, and frowned. "It's none of your business, you're not buying it anyway."

Yu Jinyang laughed and said, "I'll buy it. If I buy it, I'll be her customer, and the customer is God. When she comes back, won't she be completely subservient to me?"

Yu Wanjuan didn't believe him. She poked his forehead with her finger, harder and harder, until his head swayed back and forth like Galileo's physics experiment ball. He deliberately shook his head more vigorously, even kicking his feet to make himself look strong and healthy. He said calmly, "You must have misheard. How could Li Yingqiao, who can't even wear a cashmere sweater in winter, possibly be selling cashmere sweaters in this season?"

At this point, he leaned closer to Ms. Wanjuan and, unusually speaking clearly, asked her with curiosity, "Was what my mother said back then—'Case'?"

"That's right!" The old lady chuckled and patted his head with a palm-leaf fan. After a moment, she seemed to remember something, and her eyes began to glaze over. "Speaking of your mother, Xiangxiang, Xiangxiang has really had a tough two years—"

In recent years, she has often done this, talking for a while and then suddenly falling silent.

Whenever this happened, Yu Jinyang's heart would skip a beat. Only when he saw her breathing even and her casually fanning herself with a palm leaf fan did he feel relieved. He went inside to get a thin blanket to cover her, and only after hearing the old lady's snoring begin did he gently close the courtyard gate and leave.

He planned to meet Ms. Yu Wanjuan again another day. She was once again full of energy and wanted to chat with him about her old friends, completely forgetting that she had already told him these same old stories several times yesterday. His aunt happened to come over to help the old lady pack her seasonal clothes and also baked him a cornbread. Yu Jinyang quickly took it and cleverly changed the subject: "I'm starving."

"There's still some in the pot, don't choke," his aunt said in surprise as she saw him eating heartily. "Didn't you have lunch?"

"I ate. I just played ball with Gao Dian and I'm hungry again. By the way, has Grandma eaten?"

"I had some porridge," the aunt said, as she took a cotton quilt out of the house to air it out. Just as she opened the clothesline, Yu Jinyang got up, put a cornbread in his mouth, and helped her lift the other corner of the quilt. The aunt pulled him away with disgust, "You young master, don't move. Your hands are still oily. Don't get them dirty."

Yu Jinyang smiled and showed her his hand, saying, "This hand didn't touch the corn tortilla."

The aunt still thought he was getting in the way, saying, "Go chat with your great-grandmother."

Yu Jinyang was reluctant to go, fearing that the old lady would bring up Li Yingqiao again. He really didn't want to know how much she had gained or how much life experience she had accumulated outside. It was just the same old stuff over and over again. He knew what his great-grandmother meant; she simply felt that his friends were all working away from home while he was sponging off his parents.

As soon as he arrived, he heard the old lady tell him to squat down, and then she covered her mouth and whispered some gossip in his ear: "Chu Mei had plastic surgery."

Chu Mei is his eldest aunt. As the old lady spoke, she glanced furtively at her busy aunt, then rubbed her cheeks back and forth with both hands anxiously, whispering, "She shaved the sides flat, and her original square chin is gone."

Yu Jinyang knew that his aunt had a big fight with his grandfather over this matter. "After she divorced her uncle, she can't stand the word 'square' anymore. She can't even stand people saying that her face is square."

"Just because your uncle's surname is Fang?"

"Mmm."

“If you keep talking nonsense, I’ll beat you up,” the old lady glared at him, raising her palm-leaf fan high as if to slap him. “Want to taste the fist of a hundred-year-old woman?”

Yu Jinyang, a grown man, squatted down next to her. His hair was frizzy from the golden sunlight overhead, making him look like a big golden retriever. He smiled and asked, "How do you know so much?"

"How could I not know?" the old lady said, leaning back in her armchair and fanning herself with a palm leaf fan. "I also know that these days, if you want to compliment a young man with a good physique, you call him a double-door refrigerator!"

"..."

Yu Jinyang's smile vanished. He stood up, adjusted the height of her rocking chair, and said, "Is it Gao Dian? Did he tell you some nonsense again?"

The old lady glanced at him and smiled.

Gao Dian would occasionally accompany him to visit his great-grandmother, and he always liked to educate her on popular slang among young people today. This made his great-grandmother seem like a cyberpunk old woman. At the age of 103, her physical health had largely deteriorated, but her mind could still occasionally ride the wave of the times.

In fact, every year the municipal government organizes people to visit Fangjia Village to show care to the registered centenarians and ask them if they have any needs.

Cyber ​​Old Man loves to spout nonsense.

"I don't have any special needs, I'm just annoyed by you guys taking pictures of me all day long. I've taken almost as many photos in the past few years as I've taken in my entire life, but the thing I hate most in my life is being photographed. I might have to revise my previous secret to longevity. The secret to living to 100 is to mind your own business, but to live even longer, it's best not to be found by you."

"Also, has anything been done about the matter I asked you to help my great-grandson find a partner last year?"

Yu Jinyang had actually warned the municipal staff countless times before they went that he was just a smooth talker and shouldn't be taken seriously.

But the municipal staff were very dedicated to their work, even including it in their annual summary report and presenting it to their superiors in a serious manner. The leaders only mentioned it briefly during a government meeting. As a result, that week's Fengtan News Network unexpectedly featured the news of Yu Jinyang's marriage proposal, broadcast on three news programs in rotation: morning, noon, and evening.

Yu Jinyang really wanted to call the police at that moment. Because the height section of the marriage advertisement listed him as 1.79 meters.

He was already 1.8 meters tall when he graduated from high school, okay, 1.795 meters. When he was studying at F University, because of his relatively outstanding appearance, the badminton club recruited him to be a badminton shuttlecock retriever for a while. Later, the club president unexpectedly discovered that he was quite popular and insisted that he be the one to retrieve the shuttlecocks, since there would be more people watching.

It wasn't until a training session where he was given a chance to play that his ball control skills were discovered to be quite good. Suddenly, he was given a regular spot in badminton for several years, and even unexpectedly won a runner-up trophy at a university badminton championship one year.

When he was packing his luggage at home during his exchange program in Chicago, he suddenly realized that he could reach up and touch the crystal chandelier above his head. His mother immediately took a tape measure to measure him and found that he had grown another six centimeters.

Tang Xiang specifically asked a doctor, who suggested he get an X-ray. Generally, the growth plates close after university, but if he's still growing, a detailed examination might be needed to determine if the growth plates have closed. Otherwise, some boys who develop later might need to consider the possibility of hormonal imbalances, gigantism, etc. This scared Yu Jinyang so much that he hastily tied all his badminton rackets into a bow and gave them to Gao Dian.

Fortunately, Yu Jinyang stopped growing after going abroad, and his height stabilized at 1.88 meters in the morning and 1.86 meters in the evening, even though the doctor said that his height was closer to his true height at night.

He would also fill in his height on the form according to the priority of each item. Although the marriage proposal was not his subjective intention, who knew it would make the news? It wasn't unreasonable to report his height in the morning.

That's why he thought he'd had such bad luck lately and decided to get a haircut. However, it was already 2025, and in this rapidly changing city, the skills of hairdressers seemed to be a step ahead of the competition.

As the two were leaving, the receptionist, who had just taken over her shift and knew nothing of what had happened, stopped him and asked, "Were you satisfied with today's service? Do you have any suggestions?"

Yu Jinyang pushed open the glass door and let Li Yingqiao go out first.

As Li Yingqiao walked through the door he opened, she heard his voice above her head: "You should hire an assistant for Director Keven. He's been buying coffee for a long time."

Pfft. Li Yingqiao subconsciously looked up at him, about to laugh, but then realized that he really was much taller than before. The next second, she reflexively looked at his shoes to see if he was wearing shoe lifts. She remembered that during her sophomore summer vacation, he was only about 1.8 meters tall.

So much so that when the two walked out of the barbershop, Li Yingqiao deliberately lagged behind to look at his heels.

How could Yu Jinyang not notice her shifting gaze? Without turning his head, he said, "Stop looking. My leg was broken and has been reattached."

“Right?” Li Yingqiao nodded without thinking, then, realizing what he was doing, she suddenly exclaimed, “—Huh?”

Yu Jinyang stood by the roadside waiting for the traffic light to change so he could cross the street and buy himself a hat. He turned to look at her and chuckled, "Li Yingqiao, why do you look like you're about to be swindled out of your retirement savings?"

Li Yingqiao realized what he meant, slowly walked up to him, brushed a strand of hair that had been blown across her forehead by the wind, and laughed, "Tsk tsk, Yu Miaomiao, how come you're talking nonsense now?"

“No,” he said, shifting his gaze from her to the dilapidated wooden toy market sign across the street, now reduced to a few faded characters. “So, where are you going?”

"And you? Where are you going?" Li Yingqiao said casually, "If we have time, we can catch up; if not, we can talk about it next time."

July and August are typhoon season in Fengtan, and the weather is always unpredictable. The weather was completely different from what Li Yingqiao was seeing when she entered the barbershop. Although it wasn't raining, the wind was strong, tearing at the trees lining the sidewalk. It looked like the prelude to another downpour. No sooner had Li Yingqiao finished speaking than several shared bicycles on the sidewalk were blown over with a series of loud bangs.

“Okay, you go wait for me at Gaodian’s place first,” Yu Jinyang said as he bent down and skillfully picked up the shared bicycle. Then he looked at her and said, “I’m going to buy a hat. This head of mine is so ugly that I can’t sleep.”

"Then why don't you buy a bottle of sleeping pills? Why buy a hat?" Li Yingqiao said with a smile.

"Then I'll have to wear a hat while I eat, okay?" He straightened the bike and walked right past her, saying expressionlessly.

[Author's Note]

See you on Wednesday.

Two hundred red envelopes~