Liu Qiaohong’s bicycle had been around for some years. Between the wind, the sun, and lack of upkeep, rust had begun to appear in patches across the frame.

Fang Zhuo couldn’t bring herself to ride it and speed up its decline, so the two of them walked alongside it, pushing it slowly forward.

The countryside wind came and went in gusts, blowing in from the distant edge of the sky. It carried the scent of late-autumn vegetation and a chilled, desolate bite.

Fang Zhuo looked at Liu Qiaohong’s back and reached out to pat the mud off his jacket, but the stain wouldn’t come away.

Liu Qiaohong gave his own jacket a tug. “Doesn’t matter. These are my battle scars — I’ll wash them out when I get home.”

Battle scars was a fair description — the state of his jacket suggested he’d been rolled across the ground at least once.

“Liu Qiaohong,” Fang Zhuo called.

“Mmm.” The young man answered. Like Ye Yuncheng, his appearance was gentle, yet somehow gave off an impression of reliability.

Is this what they call the glow of a public servant? Fang Zhuo thought.

She asked: “When you first started this work and ran into things like today — how did you deal with it?”

When the only option is endurance, what other way is there?

Liu Qiaohong said, half-seriously: “I memorized the Party Constitution.”

Fang Zhuo looked at him. “You actually memorized it?”

“If I hadn’t memorized the Party Constitution,” Liu Qiaohong said, squaring his shoulders, “how do you think I’ve held on all these years? I keep it under my pillow. Every morning when I get up and every night before I sleep, I take it out and read a line. I let it light the way for my red-blooded life.”

He said it with such straight-faced conviction that Fang Zhuo was genuinely swayed for a moment. She asked, testing him: “So what’s the first line?”

Liu Qiaohong, without skipping a beat, declared: “The Communist Party of China is the vanguard of the Chinese working class!”

Fang Zhuo followed up immediately: “And the third?”

Liu Qiaohong fell silent. Behind her came a low, suppressed laugh.

“Alright, fair enough,” Liu Qiaohong said, laughing himself. “I didn’t ask you for the third word on your CET-4 vocabulary list either.”

Fang Zhuo said: “I’m still in high school.”

Liu Qiaohong worked at the grassroots level and was accustomed to always having something to say. Halfway along, he began chatting with Fang Zhuo at a meandering pace, sharing stories and outcomes from his years of poverty-alleviation work.

He told her about a girl from the neighboring village who had gotten into university — only a vocational college, but for her it was life-changing. Because before she enrolled, her mother had already lined up a boyfriend for her and was planning to send her off to the city to work and float along as a migrant.

“What kind of work?” Liu Qiaohong said. “A girl who doesn’t get an education faces a very hard future. And the more society advances, the more people look down on that. If there’s any way to keep going, don’t give up that chance.”

He glanced back at Fang Zhuo as he said this, and when he smiled, there was a warmth and brightness in his eyes that was unlike his usual expression — a kind of quiet shine. It made Fang Zhuo genuinely believe that he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into this rural poverty-alleviation work, staking his youth and ideals on it, betting everything on this tide of the times that would not let him turn back — all to give more people at the bottom a chance to start over.

He said: “You’re impressive. Have you thought about applying to our A University? The campus culture there is really solid.”

Fang Zhuo thought so too. She figured that any institution capable of producing someone like Liu Qiaohong must have a great many things going for it.

…Except for the admission score requirements being too high.

She looked at Liu Qiaohong’s somewhat long hair and found herself moved to say: “Liu Qiaohong, a few of the hairs at the back of your head have gone white.”

Liu Qiaohong’s step faltered slightly. Then he called back: “What do you expect when you’re getting older — am I not allowed a few white hairs? You wait until you’re my age, you’ll have them too!”

He was barely past thirty. But the past few years, as the country’s development priorities had shifted sharply toward poverty alleviation, the relief work had been known as the hardest position in rural governance. It had truly consumed much of him.

Liu Qiaohong’s home was in the nearby township — a comparatively livelier area, with a market.

Passing a barbershop on the way, the interior’s décor frozen somewhere in the early 2000s made Fang Zhuo remember why she’d come. She stopped. “Oh, right — I brought you some shampoo.”

Liu Qiaohong took it without understanding, saw the familiar logo on the Bawang bottle, and gave her a little push, laughing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Then: “Don’t go spending money on random things! Where did you get the money for this?”

“It’s just a bottle of shampoo. Am I supposed to rob someone for it?” Fang Zhuo said. “When I have money someday, I’ll get you a new bike.”

Liu Qiaohong patted his bicycle seat with exaggerated sternness. “Don’t you dare say anything bad about it. This is my old partner.”

He weighed it for a moment, then accepted the gift anyway and placed it in the small wire basket at the front of the bike. He reached up and ruffled his own hair, confirming it was still thick.

His genes had come through for him — no middle-aged thinning in sight.

Liu Qiaohong let out a quiet breath of relief. He thought of an incident a while back, when some online commenters had mocked him during an outreach event, and asked tentatively: “Do you think I should dye my hair sometime? Or get a perm? To look a bit younger?”

Fang Zhuo said: “Sure — let the young ladies see how handsome you are.”

“What’s there to be handsome about.” Liu Qiaohong muttered something under his breath, then slid his gaze toward the glass shopfront ahead, turning his head slightly to peer at his own reflection.

Then he noticed Fang Zhuo was looking at him too, and his face went a little pink. He puffed himself up and called out: “What are you looking at?! I’m watching the TV in there!”

Fang Zhuo held back a smile and turned away. “I know. I’m watching it too.”

The television inside the barbershop played to an empty room. The news was reporting on what had been put forward at the National Congress that year — “the decisive stage in completing the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, achieving the First Centenary Goal” — with 2020 named as the target year.

The two of them watched quietly for a moment.

Behind them, the noise of the world. In front of them, a small and narrow barber’s window.

Streams of people passed on either side, none of them connected to this moment. The hawkers’ calls layered over one another, giving the impression that life was nothing more than the daily grind of firewood, rice, oil, and salt.

But they both knew that further out, beyond all of this, a great nation was rising and being reborn. The pride embedded in its bones was straightening itself upright, surging forward on the blood and sweat of countless generations before it.

“The pace of development is extraordinary,” Liu Qiaohong said quietly. “Sometimes I worry I can’t keep up.”

Fang Zhuo said: “We’re all builders of the dream — what is there to worry about keeping up with?”

Liu Qiaohong smiled. He turned around, raised a hand, and rested it gently on the back of her head. “Good girl.”

Liu Qiaohong had dated each egg before putting them in the refrigerator, to make sure none spoiled from sitting too long.

Fang Zhuo took only six, placing them in her backpack, and explained that the apartment in the city had no refrigerator yet. The rest she left with him to eat, and asked him to keep an eye on their chickens in the meantime.

Liu Qiaohong said he would, and waved her off with a smile.

By the time she returned to the city, Yan Lie was already back.

He hadn’t just had the mattress brought over — he’d also brought fresh, clean bedding and pillows, and had moved over several spare chairs and a small table besides.

The apartment finally had enough in it to be called a functional living space.

Ye Yuncheng sat with them through dinner, then packed two rice balls for them to have as an evening snack and urged them to head back to school before it got too late.

Every day of the third year was precious — rest up properly, or at the very least lie in bed and get some revision done.

Fang Zhuo was genuinely tired. On the bus back to school she nearly dozed off, and in her drowsy half-sleep she almost let her head drift onto Yan Lie’s shoulder — catching herself only when the automated announcement called out the next stop: A Secondary School.

After getting off, she was still a little foggy, still not quite awake.

January daylight had grown short. It was barely past seven in the evening, but the sky had already settled into a deep grey.

Fang Zhuo yawned, walking along the main path under its warm amber lampposts.

She wanted to get back to the dormitory quickly, but Yan Lie’s pace was very slow — so slow that she kept walking ahead and having to stop and wait for him. After this happened a few times, she simply matched his speed.

They strolled unhurriedly through the interlocking pools of light and shadow. The cool breeze and the settled calm of the evening gradually shook the last of the drowsiness from her.

Yan Lie walked just behind her. His shadow stretched out long across the ground at her feet. Fang Zhuo didn’t need to turn around — she could see what he was doing just by glancing sideways.

This dedicated phone-user — one Yan by name — was currently on his phone.

The camera flash fired in the dark with unmistakable brightness, lighting up Fang Zhuo’s entire field of vision for an instant.

She turned around instinctively, and as she faced him, the shutter flashed a second time.

She squinted, certain the photo must have come out badly. Probably catching her exhausted or scowling, mouth open in some undignified expression, pupils reflecting the flash in an eerie glint.

But Yan Lie looked at the photo, then looked back at her face — and the smile that came over him was pure, unguarded, and entirely impossible for her to read.

He put his phone away, clasped his hands behind his back, took two small skipping steps backward, and gave her a coaxing smile, making clear he did not want her to delete the photos.

Fang Zhuo wasn’t particularly bothered either way. She didn’t think Yan Lie would use an unflattering photo to make fun of her. She just asked: “What are you taking pictures of?”

Yan Lie said: “It’s the first day of the new year. Keeping a record.”

Fang Zhuo paused.

Their holiday had passed without ceremony — just a meal eaten together. Nothing in particular accomplished.

The festive spirit, the meaning of the occasion, all of it had felt distant.

Fang Zhuo thought back over everything that had happened today and genuinely could not identify a single moment that should have brought Yan Lie any real joy. She asked: “Wasn’t spending the day with me boring?”

“Hmm…” Yan Lie ticked off on his fingers: “A quarter of today was rest. A quarter was studying. A quarter was various miscellaneous things. And the remaining quarter was spent with Fang Zhuo.”

He smiled and summed it up: “Very good. Today I was happy. Happier than I was last year, easily.”

Fang Zhuo sometimes thought he was a genuinely strange person — carrying a kind of optimism and peculiarity she couldn’t quite make sense of.

“Your family’s in A City,” she said, puzzled. “So why are you living in the dorms? You weren’t in the dorms before, were you?”

Yan Lie wasn’t sure how to answer that. His words didn’t feel quite adequate for what he actually meant.

He thought: if his life were a coordinate axis, then the space where he and Fang Zhuo existed together would be the positive side, and the space without her would be the negative side.

From the outside they looked the same — both moving forward. But moving in the positive direction took him further and further from zero, while moving in the negative direction brought him closer and closer to it.

For every value of x less than zero, all his answers were unhappiness.

So he wanted to extend himself toward where Fang Zhuo was, to become a straight line with no end.

Fang Zhuo received no answer. She glanced sideways and realized her dormitory building had appeared ahead of her. She moved her lips and managed only a parting goodbye: “Then I’ll go in first… Happy New Year.”

Yan Lie nodded.

She shouldered her bag, passed through the shadows of the trees on either side of the path, and disappeared from view along the narrow lane.

Yan Lie watched the streetlamp that had walked her away for a long while, feeling the world settle into quiet around him. He drifted over to a nearby bench, sat down, and took out his phone to scroll through his photos.

His thumb moved back and forth a few times. He moved the photos into a dedicated album, set a name for it, and then sat staring at the pale glow of the screen until his mind drifted.

After a while, the sound of footsteps that had vanished returned from among the quiet shadows — just the same as when she had left, stopping in front of him. Within less than a foot.

As though time had run in reverse.

Yan Lie looked up at this person standing before him with an expression so calm it barely seemed real.

Fang Zhuo set her bag down, sat beside him, and said seriously: “I gave it some thought. My actual study time today didn’t quite reach a quarter. I wouldn’t mind finishing that goal with you before we call it a day.”

Yan Lie blinked.

“Starting a new year’s day with studying can never be a wrong choice.” Fang Zhuo pulled out her English test paper, found the page she was on, and asked: “Do you have time?”

Yan Lie was about to say yes when he heard Fang Zhuo add: “Show me those pictures from before.”

Yan Lie said: “Don’t delete them.”

“I won’t.” Fang Zhuo said. “Besides — aren’t these my pictures?”