The bookstore had been facing some issues lately
—specifically, the coffee wasn’t selling well.
Boss Jiang wasn’t someone who chased after profit at all costs, so he’d let the problem slide for quite some time.
It wasn’t until one day when he compared the receipts that he realized half of the coffee beans they’d bought three months ago were still sitting in storage.
“Only high schoolers come in for a cup or two. Nowadays, middle schoolers and even elementary school kids prefer milk tea, and desserts are selling more,” the employee on duty explained. “Most people in the city find coffee too bitter and don’t drink much of it.”
…Maybe the market just hadn’t developed that taste yet.
It was like how avocados only became popular after heavy advertising, or how Double Eleven wasn’t originally a shopping holiday. Back in 2006, coffee was still a niche indulgence.
Isn’t tea just as enjoyable?
Boss Jiang reflected on his own habitual thinking and instructed the staff to bring back the menu for revisions.
“Let’s add some chocolate mille-feuille and mango mille-feuille, and maybe start selling soufflés too.”
These kinds of desserts were popular with young girls, and the ingredients were cheap and easy to make. They wouldn’t be losing money.
The employee taking notes looked puzzled.
“Thousand-layer crepe1this is a more direct translation of the chinese name for this dessert? Like the scallion pancakes they sell at breakfast stalls?”
“What’s a soufflé?”
Jiang Wang was slightly annoyed. “Look it up online. Don’t ask me everything.”
A little while later, the employee came back again.
“Boss, I searched, but there’s really nothing.”
Jiang Wang wondered if they were joking, so he checked for himself.
As of now, there were only three related search results, and they were for irrelevant personality tests—no actual recipes.
For the first time, Boss Jiang felt the impact of a temporal gap.
Really? Was information that hard to come by in 2006?
…So these desserts only started becoming popular after 2010?
“I’ll look into it later.” He cleared his throat. “You guys go back to your other tasks.”
There were definitely recipes on foreign sites. He could ask Teacher Ji to help translate later and teach the staff once he’d learned to make them himself.
Oddly confident in his culinary learning skills, Boss Jiang left work early to pick up the kid from school.
Outside the school gate, a street vendor was holding up a bamboo pole with grasshopper cages for sale.
The dried wicks of the lamp grass had turned brown and tough, and with a few bends, they could be fashioned into octagonal cages.
A whole string of grasshopper cages hung from the end of the pole, jingling like bells, with a sound that washed over him like waves.
Jiang Wang had almost forgotten about these little trinkets from his childhood. He asked the vendor for the price.
“Three yuan each! Two for five!”
Just then, the first batch of kids came rushing out of school, and hearing the vendor, they eagerly crowded around to buy.
Jiang Wang bought one, carrying the lantern grass cage as he walked inside.
Peng Xingwang happened to come out of his classroom, paused when he saw Jiang Wang, and quickly broke into a smile.
“Big Brother.”
“Did Teacher Ji not teach your class today? Let’s wait for him,” Jiang Wang said.
The two stood quietly in the first-floor corridor, waiting.
Jiang Wang was engrossed in playing with the octagonal cage for a while before remembering that it was meant as a small gift for Xingxing. He placed the cage in the child’s hand.
“Do you like it?”
He was worried about this.
Specifically, if the insect inside might start chirping at night and disturb the neighbors, so he reminded, “Put the cage on the west balcony on the third floor. Just give it some leaves every day, and it’ll live for a long time.”
The child accepted the cage, curiously examining it before quietly thanking him.
Jiang Wang sensed that something was off.
The kid wasn’t as lively as usual. He seemed fine but clearly had something on his mind.
Raising a child, Jiang Wang mused, was like drawing a lottery every day—some days you hit the jackpot, and there was always something going on.
Just then, Ji Linqiu came down the stairs, carrying his bag. He paused when he saw the two waiting by the staircase.
“Brother Jiang… were you waiting for me?”
“Yeah, let’s go home together,” Jiang Wang said with a smile, taking Peng Xingwang’s hand. “Without you, the house feels incomplete.”
Ji Linqiu, helpless against Jiang Wang’s charm, took Peng Xingwang’s other hand, softly saying, “You don’t have to wait for me. Sometimes I have to work late.”
Jiang Wang suddenly turned to look him in the eyes.
“Teacher Ji, are you shy?”
Ji Linqiu shot him a glare.
Even after getting into the car, Peng Xingwang remained unusually quiet.
Sensing the mood, Jiang Wang had been trying to lighten the atmosphere and finally asked what was wrong as the car slowly started.
The child hesitated.
“I feel like I shouldn’t say anything… it’s something I brought upon myself.”
Despite the strict oversight of the teachers at school, some kids still liked to gang up and bully others.
Previously, they had picked on Peng Xingwang, but recently they’d started mocking a little girl with a stutter.
During recess, a group of boys and girls would surround her, exaggeratedly imitating the way she spoke, and loudly called her by nicknames.
“I… I tried to stop them,” Peng Xingwang said softly. “Maybe I shouldn’t have provoked them.”
Ji Linqiu, who had spent the day teaching in the adjacent class, turned cold upon hearing this. He first checked Peng Xingwang for any injuries before asking what happened next.
“They’re too scared to hit me because they’re all afraid of Big Brother,” the child sighed, sounding oddly mature for his age.
“So instead, they started singing ‘Only Mother Is Good in This World’ around me.”
“Only Mother is good in this world, a child without a mother is like a piece of grass. Away from mother’s embrace, where can one find happiness?”
“Only Mother is good in this world, children with mothers don’t know, but if they did, they’d smile even in their dreams.”
Children can be pure, and their goodness is pure, but their cruelty can also be shockingly blatant.
Jiang Wang’s expression darkened, a certain pain in his heart triggered by the memory.
Who on earth wrote this stupid song?
“I wanted to explain that my mom is actually still around, and I’m going to visit her in Cizhou in November,” Peng Xingwang murmured. “But I was afraid the more I said, the more they’d find things to mock.”
Jiang Wang was torn between teaching Peng Xingwang to hurl insults back at them, the harsher the better, and not wanting to make him bitter and harsh.
Suddenly, Ji Linqiu spoke up, “Turn the car around.”
“Turn around?”
“Teacher Xu hasn’t left yet. She stays late every day.”
The car was already near the entrance of their neighborhood, but Ji Linqiu fastened his seatbelt again.
“Let’s go talk to her.”
Jiang Wang wasn’t sure what the consequences of this would be, but he chose to trust Ji Linqiu.
Peng Xingwang suddenly grew anxious. “Are you going to talk to the teacher?” he asked nervously. “Won’t that blow things out of proportion? I really don’t let it bother me… maybe we should just let it go.”
Ji Linqiu reached out and gently patted the child’s head.
“Xingxing, some things need to be handled by adults. You can’t take everything on yourself.”
Peng Xingwang’s hair was soft and fluffy, like the down feather of a baby bird.
As expected, the elderly Teacher Xu was still in her office grading papers, her lunch in a thermos beside her long since gone cold.
When she heard a knock and looked up, her gaze lingered disapprovingly on the earring in Jiang Wang’s ear for a few seconds before she spoke.
“What is it?”
Ji Linqiu walked in, holding Peng Xingwang’s hand, and explained the situation from start to finish.
Teacher Xu, who had grown somewhat desensitized to the constant troublemaking of children, rubbed her temples and sighed. “They did go too far. I’ll have them come by tomorrow and apologize.”
Peng Xingwang instinctively wanted to nod, but Ji Linqiu gently shielded him.
“I understand that your job is difficult, Teacher Xu,” Ji Linqiu said, his tone uncharacteristically serious, his presence commanding. “But some things need to be addressed openly, or they’ll be condoned.”
He rarely spoke this sternly, and his usual mild demeanor now carried a sharp edge.
“This isn’t the first time something like this has happened”
“Every class has vulnerable children—those who are sick, from divorced families, overweight, underweight, too smart, or not smart enough. They bully one, and then they’ll move on to the next.”
“Teacher Xu, I don’t think I need to spell out what that leads to.”
Jiang Wang, who had rarely seen this side of Ji Linqiu, was taken aback.
Teacher Ji, who usually avoided conflict and never seemed to get angry, now displayed a side of himself that was sharp and decisive.
Teacher Xu adjusted her reading glasses, giving Ji Linqiu a long, considering look.
She slowly spoke again.
“Do you think I should get involved in such trivial matters?”
Ji Linqiu didn’t back down, meeting his senior’s gaze directly.
“You should.”
“Just because nothing serious has happened yet, Teacher Xu, doesn’t mean it won’t.”
Teacher Xu finally caught the warning in his words, and after a long pause, she simply said, “I understand.” She then gestured for them to leave.
The next day, the class had a meeting where the troublemakers were called up to the front, and their past behavior was laid bare for all to see.
The old teacher might not have had much energy for scolding, but her cold, biting sarcasm was just as effective in making them hang their heads in shame.
“Don’t apologize to Peng Xingwang only. You should apologize to the whole class, to every student you’ve mocked.”
The boys and girls, thoroughly chastened, ended up bowing and admitting their mistakes.
Peng Xingwang was less moved by the vindication than by a newfound realization. The experience seemed to open his eyes to the possibility of trusting adults more, as if he had finally stepped out of a lonely wilderness and started to reach out for others’ hands.
When news of this reached Jiang Wang, he was sitting beside Ji Linqiu, waiting for a translation of a dessert recipe.
Ji Linqiu had printed out some materials from the internet and was translating them line by line with a fountain pen. His handwriting was elegant and neat, effortlessly beautiful.
Jiang Wang had been watching him write, but his gaze eventually drifted to Ji Linqiu’s eyelashes.
When Teacher Ji was calm and focused, he looked especially gentle and easy to tease—like a fluffy white rabbit that wouldn’t make a sound even if you took a bite out of it.
But in reality, he could lash out with claws sharp enough to draw blood, all while maintaining an innocent, pure demeanor.
Jiang Wang’s throat tightened as a strange itchiness spread through his heart.
He suddenly had the urge to reach out and touch Ji Linqiu’s delicate ears, as if he were petting a favorite rabbit.
“Why are you staring at me?”
“I’m a little surprised,” Jiang Wang leaned closer to watch him write the steps for making crepes, slowly saying, “I always thought you were afraid of Old Lady Xu.”
It wasn’t just about whether Ji Linqiu was afraid — Jiang Wang himself had been scared of her since he was a child, always keeping a five-step distance from the stern, icy old lady whenever he had to visit the office.
“Mm, I am afraid. She’s strict with her colleagues too.”
“Then why… did you still take Xingwang to see her?”
Ji Linqiu paused, his pen hovering over the paper, before he continued writing.
350 ml of milk, 2 eggs.
30 grams of sugar, 130 grams of cake flour.
“I want Xingwang to believe that there’s order in this world.”
Ji Linqiu said softly, his voice clear and cool, every word sounding beautiful.
“I don’t want him to feel like he has to shoulder everything on his own. I hope he can live a little more like a child.”
“…That’s how I show him I love him.”
Jiang Wang hummed in acknowledgment, then quietly leaned his head against his arm without saying another word.
With his face hidden in the crook of his arm, he was secretly smiling.
