Jiang Ruoqiao stared at Yun Jia with a completely blank expression.

She had long since known that their entire dormitory was full of incorrigible gossips. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together… But wasn’t Yun Jia being just a little too oblivious? If she really were watching that kind of thing, would she be sitting up this stiffly, this primly? Would she look this earnest and solemn, like someone who had bathed in incense and purified herself before a sacred rite? She was learning high-quality knowledge for human beings — she was on her way to becoming a high-quality, enlightened mother.

Jiang Ruoqiao didn’t want to bother arguing, because Yun Jia was the type who would press a question until she hit bedrock.

If she denied it, Yun Jia would definitely say — come on, who are you to me? Do you think I don’t know what kind of person you are? Stop pretending.

You’re not watching that kind of thing? Then tell me — what exactly are you watching?

To strangle every problem at birth: that was Jiang Ruoqiao’s personal philosophy for navigating life. She gave a small nod. “I’ll send it to you in a bit.”

Yun Jia: “Heh heh.”

Jiang Ruoqiao: …Wonderful.

After sitting through the full hour-long live stream, Jiang Ruoqiao’s eyes were glassy and her mind felt somehow cleansed. She didn’t forget to take a screenshot, post it to the class group, tag the teacher specifically, and deliver a long, flowing outpouring of deep and sincere reflections. She also pledged to cooperate fully with all of the teacher’s future efforts, and to do everything in her power to help her child grow up healthy and thriving. Honestly, she had never written a school essay with this level of dedication.

The classmate’s mother sent her a private message: 【You’re incredible. I opened it, watched for about ten minutes, and then closed it. So boring. It’s been like this since nursery class.】

Jiang Ruoqiao was stunned.

Her expression at that moment was the spitting image of “honest person discovering they’ve been deceived and betrayed”: 【?? You only watched ten minutes?! Didn’t Teacher Xiong say to watch the whole thing and write reflections?】

The classmate’s mother: 【Don’t tell me you actually watched all of it.】

Jiang Ruoqiao: 【……Yes.】

She hadn’t let her attention drift for even a single minute.

The classmate’s mother: 【/Thumbs up/ /Thumbs up/, impressive. But honestly, it’s not necessary — no matter how much you listen, no matter how much you read, when the time comes to lose your temper, you’ll still lose your temper.】

Jiang Ruoqiao: 【……I thought everyone was supposed to watch the whole thing.】

The classmate’s mother: 【Ha ha ha ha, well, we’re all seasoned veterans at this point. When my kid was in nursery class there was the same kind of activity, and his dad and I both watched every second of it seriously. Do it enough times and you get lazy — you check in, then go off and do your own thing.】

Jiang Ruoqiao: 【I see.】

So in the eyes of the other parents, the person who had watched the whole thing and then written this sprawling reflection piece — was she just a naive fool?

She was wounded. She needed to withdraw from society.

Lu Yicheng had brought Lu Siyan with him to work overtime at the company. Lu Siyan sat to the side reading and drawing. While Lu Yicheng waited for the system to restart during testing, he took a moment to pick up his phone from beside him, opened it, and saw the messages in the class group.

Only Jiang Ruoqiao had seriously written out a reflection post.

Teacher Xiong replied: 【/Thumbs up/ @Lu Siyan’s Parent】

Seeing that there was such an outlier among them, the other parents thought — is someone raising the bar again? Several parents chimed in with a few words, and for a moment the group was lively, but Lu Yicheng noticed that Jiang Ruoqiao had stopped surfacing to respond.

He could more or less guess why. He wanted to laugh, but was afraid that if he laughed out loud, the small human in the room would notice.

After thinking it over, he sent her a private message: 【You worked hard. I thought what you wrote was very good — accurate, thoughtfully argued, logically coherent, worth a read. It gives one cause to reflect that when it comes to raising a child, we still have a very long road ahead.】

Jiang Ruoqiao: 【Wow, you really had to work for that, didn’t you.】

And yet he could still send her something so formal. The effort he’d put in was truly touching.

Lu Yicheng: 【You’re the one who worked hard.】

Jiang Ruoqiao: 【.】

Lu Yicheng smiled to himself, knowing she was unhappy. He glanced at his computer screen and estimated he had a few more minutes. His slender fingers typed quickly across the screen: 【We’re just beginners. The parents in that group are all our predecessors — they’ve been parents for at least five years. We haven’t even managed five months. So truly, I think we’ve both been doing quite well.】

Jiang Ruoqiao lay on her bed and rolled to one side, turning to rest her cheek on her pillow as she stared at her phone screen. She replied: 【Oh, I see. You used to say I was a seventy-point mother. So what score would you give me now?】

Lu Yicheng replied with a faint smile: 【At least ninety-five points.】

Jiang Ruoqiao pressed her lips together in a quiet smile: 【Really? And what score would you give yourself?】

Lu Yicheng: 【Ninety points.】

Wow.

She actually scored five points higher than him?

Jiang Ruoqiao: 【Really? I don’t believe it.jpg】

Lu Yicheng looked at the sticker she’d sent, and simply could not help himself — he let out a soft laugh. Fortunately, Lu Siyan was engrossed in his book and hadn’t noticed anything. Otherwise the child would have shot over like a ball, rolling and bounding straight toward him.

Lu Yicheng: 【Really.】

……

Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, Mrs. Lin was utterly exhausted. On one hand, she had to keep a close eye on the charity gala to make sure not a single thing went wrong. But on the other hand, she was seething with rage. What a twenty-year-old university student like Jiang Ruoqiao could think of, Mrs. Lin could naturally think of as well. The lies Jiang Yan’s mother had told that night alone — the way she had concealed something of such magnitude without a single crack showing — were more than enough to fully wake Mrs. Lin from her long slumber.

Mrs. Lin paid a visit to the school where her daughter was enrolled.

The moment she saw her daughter, Mrs. Lin felt both pain and fury.

Lin Kexing had been tormented for some time. Jiang Yan’s departure, and his complete indifference to her, had left her heartbroken and at a loss. Because of what had happened, she couldn’t bring herself to go looking for him on her own initiative. And yet she wanted to see him — and at the same time, feared seeing him. This feeling was more tormenting than a simple breakup, and in just a short span of time, Lin Kexing had grown noticeably thin. Where her small face had once had a trace of softness, she had now lost so much weight that her cheekbones were almost visible.

Lin Kexing’s eyes had lost their light. Seeing her mother arrive, she tried to make herself look a little better, tugging the corners of her mouth into something resembling a smile. “Mom, why did you come?”

Looking at her daughter like this, Mrs. Lin had no need to verify anything further.

Her heart ached unbearably. She wanted to shake her daughter until she woke up — but she caught herself in time. Doing that would only push her daughter further away.

“I came to see my darling, of course. Kexing, why have you lost so much weight?” Mrs. Lin took her daughter’s slender white wrist in her hand, her heart growing colder with each moment. “Is the food at school not agreeing with you?”

Lin Kexing shook her head. “It’s not that. I’ve probably just had no appetite in the heat.”

Hearing those words, Mrs. Lin suddenly remembered — over the past two years, especially the last six months, something similar had happened several times before.

But whenever her daughter said she had no appetite, Jiang Yan’s mother would say that Kexing had a weak stomach, and she would simply instruct her to have the kitchen prepare dishes to strengthen her daughter’s constitution.

Looking back now, though… Jiang Yan must have gotten together with that Miss Jiang around six months ago, hadn’t he?

The truth was, Mrs. Lin had not always been so at ease with Jiang Yan’s mother. More precisely, she was not at ease with anyone — before her daughter turned eight, she had insisted on handling everything herself. But after Jiang Yan’s mother arrived at the Lin household with Jiang Yan in tow, it was she who gently pointed out that Mrs. Lin was investing too much time and attention in trivial, everyday matters. So under her husband’s encouragement and expectation, she began to take on work in the philanthropic sphere.

Mrs. Lin was not a foolish woman. She had accepted the suggestion precisely because, at the time, Jiang Yan’s mother’s advice had genuinely been in her best interest.

Over those ten years, she had been busy with charity work and managing relationships with the wives of other major families. Her attention to Kexing had gradually diminished from what it once was.

When exactly had her guard against Jiang Yan’s mother completely dissolved?

Mrs. Lin had been turning this question over in her mind for the past two days. Only now did she realize just how frighteningly meticulous that woman’s mind was — ten years of steady, patient effort, drop by drop, wearing down the stone of her vigilance. And Jiang Yan’s mother had genuinely taken exquisite care of Kexing throughout, never making a single misstep. For ten years, she had remained dormant, never revealing a trace of ambition or calculation. Maintaining a mask in the beginning might have been easy enough to disbelieve — but ten years without a single crack? The people around her had long since been changed without even realizing it.

Mrs. Lin didn’t even dare consider whether it was Jiang Yan’s mother who had cultivated her daughter’s feelings for Jiang Yan — or whether her daughter had developed feelings on her own, and been taken advantage of afterward.

Either way, as a mother, she could not accept it.

“Why don’t you come back home to stay,” said Mrs. Lin.

Lin Kexing shook her head. “I’m fine here, and Auntie comes to see me every week. She takes really good care of me.”

Once, hearing those words would have meant nothing to Mrs. Lin. But now, with the veil stripped from her eyes, she looked at her daughter again — and felt a jolt of alarm. When had it started — this dependence her daughter had on Jiang Yan’s mother that ran deeper than her bond with her own mother?

Mrs. Lin tightened her grip.

She kept telling herself inwardly: don’t rush, don’t rush. Her daughter was only eighteen. As long as she put in the effort, she could still bring her back.

As for the rest…

Mrs. Lin held her daughter close, her thoughts resolving into a cold clarity: if one repays virtue with virtue, what does one repay cruelty with? Answer cruelty with cruelty. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

After finishing the system work, Lu Yicheng was done for the day.

Whatever mischief Lu Siyan got up to at home, he was well-behaved and sensible in public, doing his best not to cause trouble for the adults around him. Seeing that Lu Siyan was busy drawing, Lu Yicheng stood up and walked over, bracing one hand on the table. “What are you drawing?”

Lu Siyan said, “Drawing Daddy, Mommy, and me.”

Lu Yicheng wanted to see it. Lu Siyan wouldn’t let him.

“Alright, I respect your privacy,” Lu Yicheng said.

Lu Siyan glanced at his father’s hand, then spread out his own and looked it over for a while. His father’s palm was so big. Why was his own hand so small?

Lu Yicheng asked, “What are you looking at?”

“Looking at Daddy’s hands,” Lu Siyan answered, perfectly matter-of-factly. “Mommy said Daddy has nice hands. So I was wondering — are they nicer than mine?”

Lu Yicheng’s heart gave a small, sudden leap.

She said his hands were nice?

Without thinking, his gaze drifted downward to his own hand. He couldn’t tell — he had no real sense of what made hands look nice or not. But the thought of her having said that made him pause, just for a moment.

“When?” Lu Yicheng asked.

Lu Siyan glanced at him. “A long time ago.”

Lu Yicheng: “……”

Right. Of course. He understood now — that was from the future. His heartbeat returned to its normal pace. He couldn’t help but smile at his own foolishness. When he thought about it, it was obvious — she would never say something like that to the child.

“But Daddy’s hands are a little different from before,” Lu Siyan added.

Before Lu Yicheng could ask what the difference was, Lu Siyan had already picked up his ballpoint pen and started doing as he pleased on Lu Yicheng’s hand.

And for some reason, Lu Yicheng did nothing to stop him.

With a very serious expression, the child first drew a watch on Lu Yicheng’s wrist, then lifted his head with a rather proud air and announced: “Daddy has a watch now!”

It was true — Lu Yicheng didn’t own a proper watch at the moment. He had never gotten used to wearing one.

Lu Yicheng smiled. “Thank you for the watch.”

“Not done yet!” Lu Siyan drew a ring on Lu Yicheng’s left ring finger. “Now it’s done. Daddy wears a watch and a ring~”

Lu Yicheng paused. His gaze stilled on the ring the child had drawn on his ring finger.

In that moment, he found he couldn’t help but wonder — in the future, what kind of wedding ring would he be wearing?

—