Strawberries sold out. Qiao Ning was about to announce it in the group when another private message arrived—from someone saved as Zhuang Cheng.
The big bro who’d sold rice balls next to his stall that day.
Qiao Ning opened it. Zhuang Cheng also wanted a jin of strawberries.
Late to the party, alas.
But Zhuang Cheng had freely lent him the fruit knife and toothpicks for samples that day—there was at least a small debt of friendship.
Qiao Ning thought it over and decided: from the two-plus jin he’d kept for himself, one jin for Zhuang Cheng.
Opening the group chat to post the update—whoa. Someone was on the warpath.
Claimed his price hike was outrageous, that he might be a swindler—hook everyone with exceptional-quality samples first, then come to fleece them.
Qiao Ning wasn’t angry at all. He almost wanted to laugh.
Because he really had gotten the money.
He ignored them and posted a single line: “Strawberries sold out. No restock in the near term.” Then he prepared to leave the group and delete people.
The moment he posted, messages burst out below.
[Humble as a Valley: How is it sold out? Nobody even bought.]
[Life Is Not Worth It: Rich bro’s got that much pull, huh? 288 a jin and people still buying. Rich bro, Venmo me 50.]
[Early to Bed Never Waking: Wait, I hesitated for ONE second and it’s sold out?! No no no, Boss, restock please.]
[Not Eating Dirt: I JUST saw the group message! How is it gone?! I’ve been eating dirt to save up for this! Group Admin, look at me, sell me two jin!]
The price complaints got buried instantly—everyone demanding restock.
Qiao Ning could only reply:
[Genuinely gone. This new variety has low yields, and what I got was limited.]
[Cherry tomatoes still available. Also delicious. Interested parties can grab some.]
The group filled with wails. People asked who’d bought; the buyers all stayed conspicuously silent. Seeing others in the group offering to pay above asking price, the buyers felt an even stronger sense of: bought = won.
Qiao Ning had meant to disband the group, then figured—might come in handy later.
He kicked out the people who’d cursed him, deleted them from friends too.
Private messages asked about cherry tomatoes. Everyone had learned their lesson—no one ordered in the group this time; they DM’d the Group Admin first.
Qiao Ning answered questions one by one. Learning samples were available, plenty of people were tempted.
He had a free afternoon anyway, so Qiao Ning simply scheduled deliveries—door to door. He’d been lying around enough; a bit of running around sounded nice.
He messaged the roommates to buy a scale and paper boxes on the way. Selling by weight without a scale wouldn’t fly.
Qiao Ning had messaged them before heading to the landlady’s; by now they were nearly there. Receiving his message, they’d just exited the subway and bought his requested items along the way.
The roommates had never been to his rental, and worried about them getting lost, Qiao Ning went to wait outside the community. Soon the three brothers arrived together.
Chatting and laughing as they approached, they spotted Qiao Ning from afar and waved. Up close, mid-tease, their mouths opened—and froze.
“What?” Qiao Ning laughed, taking the bags from their hands. “Don’t recognize me?”
Talking as they walked, they headed for his apartment.
“Holy—I mean, Fifth Brother, you’re… you’re…”
Second Brother Qin Hao wanted to ask if he’d gotten plastic surgery, but it didn’t look like it. The face was still the one he knew—it had just gotten handsome by a huge margin.
Not that he’d been ugly before. Handsome in the ordinary way: pure good looks, standout features, compensating for average height with great proportions—long legs, narrow waist—rugged on raw bone structure alone.
Now his whole aura had turned crystalline. Standing there, he gleamed—like he’d been exported out of the background layer of ordinary passersby.
He finally stammered out: “That part-time job of yours—was it at, like, one of those beauty places?”
The results were too good. He wanted the acne scars of his own youth zapped too.
“Not a beauty place—that’s called medical aesthetics.” Lu Zeyu, slightly better informed, reached to pinch Qiao Ning’s cheek. “Did you get one of those hydro-facial things? Hyaluronic acid?”
Qiao Ning slapped his hand away. “Back off. Hands to yourself.”
“Why would I get any of that done?” Qiao Ning said, half-truthfully. “The part-time thing fell through, and my older brother sent me a bunch of fruit—more than I could eat—so I sold some and made a bit of money. I just took a break for a while. Maybe I’m just well-rested. Feel much more energetic.”
Qin Hao stared at his face—that flawless white skin without a single visible pore—and died of envy. “Your ‘rest and recuperation’ has insane effects.”
“Fifth Brother was running himself ragged before—wound tight as a spring. Rest was overdue.”
Zhang Bowen chimed in, then worried: “Your brother sent you fruit and you sold it. He’s not upset, is he?”
Qiao Ning: “Not at all. There was way too much; I couldn’t finish it and it’d go to waste. He knows. He sent even more this time.”
Lu Zeyu said, “I’ve been meaning to ask—which big brother is this, so generous?”
Qiao Ning lowered his eyes, lashes veiling the complicated feeling underneath. “A neighbor brother from when I was little. After my grandpa, the person who was best to me. Later… he went somewhere far away…”
Qiao Ning hadn’t been sent to the countryside at birth.
He’d been beautiful from the start—fair skin, big eyes, a gorgeous baby whose soft smile made everyone who saw him melt.
Qiao Chenggong, first-time father, still had a flicker of novelty in him and hadn’t washed his hands of the boy entirely.
Though his wife’s bones had hardly cooled before he’d gotten involved with his current wife, Luo Wenqi, he hadn’t hidden Qiao Ning or Qiao Ning’s mother’s existence—not that he could have.
Qiao Ning and his mother were excellent performance props, helping Qiao Chenggong build the persona of “tragically widowed single dad, bravely raising his child.”
By the time Qiao Chenggong remarried, Qiao Ning wasn’t yet one.
When Qiao Ning turned one, Luo Wenqi got pregnant with her own child, and her attitude toward Qiao Ning turned strange. Sometimes fine—she’d say that looking at pretty babies might help her make pretty children too.
Sometimes vicious. Once she went two straight days without feeding him, starving him until he fainted and had to be hospitalized.
Qiao Ning learned all this later, after returning to Qiao Chenggong’s side, from the old grievances the couple hurled at each other mid-fight.
In short, in the years before he could remember, life beside his biological father was bad.
Then he reached age three and still couldn’t speak.
At two-plus with no words, Qiao Chenggong had already taken him to the hospital—they suspected he was intellectually disabled.
The doctors said Qiao Ning showed some developmental delay but found no disease that would prevent speech; his vocal cords were fine.
Finding the cause would require further testing—which of course cost more.
Qiao Chenggong took him home. They Baidu’d it on the computer and self-diagnosed: autism.
By then Qiao Rui had been born, at the age of learning to talk. After his birth, Luo Wenqi’s treatment of Qiao Ning worsened by the day.
Because staring at Qiao Ning during her pregnancy hadn’t had the slightest effect on her baby, Qiao Rui took after her: long narrow slits for eyes, and while his nose bridge wasn’t flat, Luo Wenqi had a hawk’s beak of a nose—and Qiao Rui seemed to have inherited his mother’s nose too. His face shape was an exact match for her narrow, long face.
He ate far better, so he had plenty of flesh, the fat piling up on his face until his eyes nearly vanished, his whole head shaped like a date pit. Even uglier.
Luo Wenqi cared desperately about looks—why else marry a man like Qiao Chenggong, who had nothing going for him but his face, and as a second marriage with a child, no less?
Now she watched her own ugly child grow uglier by the day while Qiao Ning—even sallow-faced—drew compliments from strangers: what a beautiful child.
Then came the “diagnosis” of autism, and Luo Wenqi erupted. Qiao Chenggong was to send Qiao Ning away. Autism was contagious, she said—what if her precious son caught it? Did Qiao Chenggong want two simple-minded sons?
When Qiao Ning learned this years later, he genuinely wanted to laugh. Between her and Qiao Chenggong—which of them was the actual illiterate?
Though perhaps that was just the excuse. Qiao Chenggong had lost patience with the mute son anyway, and shipped Qiao Ning straight back to the hometown, dumped on Grandpa Qiao.
Qiao Chenggong was an ungrateful wretch. He was himself a child Grandpa Qiao had taken in—his family too poor, with too many sons, so many they’d stopped being worth anything and couldn’t be fed besides.
As a boy he’d gone to steal a neighbor’s chickens to eat and got caught. To avoid paying for that old hen, his own parents disowned him on the spot.
The stolen-from family threatened to break his legs if there was no compensation; his parents still wouldn’t pay. It was Grandpa Qiao who couldn’t stand by and paid for the stolen chicken—and thereby got himself landed with the boy.
With his parents washing their hands of him, Qiao Chenggong had nowhere to go. He squatted outside Grandpa Qiao’s door.
Grandpa Qiao gave him a bowl of rice; the boy knelt and called him Dad, refused to go home. So Grandpa Qiao kept him, sent him to school. The name “Qiao Chenggong” was the teacher’s gift.
For school enrollment, his household registration had been filed under Grandpa Qiao—the village handled it back then. By paper, he was Grandpa Qiao’s adopted son.
But Qiao Chenggong was no scholar. Under Grandpa Qiao’s prodding he barely scraped through to middle school, then bolted before finishing to rough it in the world. The tuition money Grandpa Qiao gave him went the same way—frittered on idle living and bad company.
Grandpa Qiao’s heart probably broke. He couldn’t control the boy, so he stopped trying.
After settling in the city, Qiao Chenggong never once went back. The first return visit in years was to dump a kid at Grandpa Qiao’s door.
He literally set Qiao Ning down at the door, told the villagers gathered to gawk, “My son. My father’s raising him,” and walked off.
Qiao Ning couldn’t even speak. At home he got yelled at constantly—Qiao Rui, barely a year old, could already bully him.
Suddenly deposited in a strange place, set down on the ground, surrounded by a crowd of “giants” pointing and murmuring—Qiao Ning was terrified. Two small hands pressed over his face, he cried in secret, not daring to make a sound. Crying out loud at home meant harsher scolding, even a slap to the mouth, a pinch and twist of the cheek.
Grandpa Qiao wasn’t back from the fields yet. Next door, a gate creaked open.
The neighbor grandpa shooed away the gawking villagers, and the young brother who came out with him lifted Qiao Ning up off the ground.
He fed Qiao Ning a piece of candy.
It was the sweetest, most delicious thing Qiao Ning had tasted in three years of life. He stopped crying on the spot.
