Chapter 61.1: Where the Hell Did My Dad Go?!
As the old saying went, there was no point in wearing fine clothes on a nighttime stroll. Once you had made a fortune, you had to return to your hometown and show it off. Now that his work had been published in a journal, how could he possibly pass up the chance to go out and hear everyone express their envy?
After admiring the names printed in the journal several more times, Liao Zhongsheng handed it back to them. He estimated how much time had passed, waited a little longer, then picked up his cup and headed out to the break room to get some water.
Of course, somehow, he never managed to fill the cup. And somehow, despite having worked in the building for years, he started getting lost in it. One moment, he would appear in the lobby downstairs; the next, he would find himself on the top floor. In short, he just couldn’t find his way back.
Meanwhile, the news was indeed spreading like wildfire throughout the various offices.
The journal was distributed down through the administrative hierarchy, eventually reaching the municipal public security bureaus and even county-level offices. The provincial department was far away, but it had plenty of money, so it mailed copies directly to every city. The cities, however, weren’t nearly as well-funded. Since it was only a few hours’ drive, they simply left the journals lying around until someone from a lower-level office came by on official business and could take them back.
As a result, the Logistics Department still had several copies of the journal on hand.
Some people had originally picked one up just to browse through it like a newspaper and kill some time. Who could have imagined that halfway through, they would actually come across their own people?!
Huh? You say that’s the Technical Division? What do you mean, which Technical Division? Just tell me, aren’t they all from Changning Municipal Public Security Bureau?!
In short, the moment people saw the place name and the names of the personnel, they were stunned. They called over their office colleagues to confirm what they were seeing. Those colleagues then went to find other people to verify the news, spreading it along the way.
The news raced from the Logistics Department to the Personnel Department in no time. Even the few copies of the journal were being snatched up and passed around as everyone scrambled to see whether it was really true.
So, when Liao Zhongsheng found himself wandering around the building, he saw people in office after office huddled together, their heads bent over something, or letting out one astonished exclamation after another.
Some people were even out in the corridor. The moment they spotted Liao Zhongsheng, they congratulated him.
“Section Chief Liao, have you heard? Jiang Xia from your section got published in a top-tier journal?!”
“Congratulations, Section Chief Liao! Your section is famous now!”
“You’re the project lead, Old Liao! You’ve just made a name for yourself nationwide!”
…
“Oh, I only just found out myself!”
“Luck, that’s all. Just good luck!”
Liao Zhongsheng suppressed the corners of his mouth, answering everyone with an air of modesty while his heart was already floating up into the clouds.
Just as he was basking in the moment, a figure suddenly sprang out from behind him and hooked an arm around his neck.
“You old fox, Liao! How dare you keep something this huge from us?!”
That voice could only belong to Captain Feng.
Liao Zhongsheng hurriedly broke free of the headlock and protested, “A gentleman uses his words, not his fists!”
But the moment the words left his mouth, Captain Zhao appeared in front of him, looking as though he was practically grinding his teeth.
“You even got published in a journal… How did you manage to snatch her away from us back then?!”
As he spoke, Zhao Zhenzhong grabbed Liao Zhongsheng and dragged him toward the stairs, shouting loudly, “No way! We absolutely have to take him to the state-run restaurant today and make him pay for a feast! Old Tan, get over here and help us get him!”
Good grief, where was all this sour smell coming from? It was practically overwhelming!
Tan Bingyi, who had only just learned what was going on, hurried out of his office. Putting on an indignant expression, he said, “You sly old fox, Liao! You even used the Thirty-Six Stratagems on us! We’re absolutely going to make you pay through the nose today!”
As he spoke, he too started pushing Liao Zhongsheng toward the stairs.
Well, so much for being on cloud nine. Now his wallet was going to suffer for it.
“Hey, hey, hey! You three planned this together, didn’t you? It’s not even mealtime yet! At least wait until noon!”
Liao Zhongsheng shouted in protest, but he couldn’t stop grinning.
He didn’t mind spending the money. Right now, all he wanted was to see the envy, jealousy, and resentment on their faces!
…
Jiang Xia didn’t get off the train until three in the morning.
There was no helping it. In addition to the usual delays along the way, she’d also run into a train inspection that had brought everything to a halt for five or six hours straight. As a result, she’d arrived at this rather awkward hour.
When she stepped off the train, countless passengers were getting off alongside her, while others waited to board.
In the distance, the sky was pitch-black. The moon hung overhead like a jade plate with a corner missing, surrounded by a few scattered stars. Dim streetlights shone down from high above, stretching people’s shadows into long, eerie shapes.
One of the officers who had accompanied her off the train gazed into the distance. All he could make out was a vast, pitch-black silhouette. Its true appearance was impossible to discern; it looked like some enormous, clawed beast lying in wait, ready to swallow something whole.
This really wasn’t a good time for someone to go home alone.
He took the initiative and said, “It’s far too dangerous to go home alone this late. We’d better escort Comrade Jiang home before buying our tickets back.”
Jiang Xia was always cautious when it came to personal safety. She had no intention of letting her guard down and getting caught off guard by some unexpected mishap. Hearing the officer’s suggestion, she immediately agreed.
“Then I’ll have to thank you both.”
With two police officers escorting her, the deterrent effect would be more than sufficient. In theory, there was absolutely no need for anyone else to accompany them.
But after hesitating for a moment, Lu Yixing quickly made up his mind.
In a perfectly casual tone, he said, “I’ll come along, too. It’s on my way back anyway.”
‘Do you honestly expect me to believe that?’
The way he was saying one thing while clearly meaning another was just too amusing. The older officer twisted his mouth to one side, unable to resist the urge to tease him a little.
He smiled and said, “It’s fine, Comrade Lu. Don’t worry. We know you think it’s dangerous to walk home alone at night, too. We’ll make sure to escort you home as well.”
Lu Yixing immediately choked on his words.
‘How can you twist the facts around like that?!’
Yet, as much as he wanted to argue, he couldn’t think of anything to say in his defense.
After all, if he refuted the officer’s words, he’d have no excuse to keep accompanying Jiang Xia home.
His silence ended up looking very much like an admission.
And so, an outstanding criminal investigator who wouldn’t have flinched at facing three armed and gun-wielding robbers with nothing but his bare hands had now developed a fear of walking home at night.
“Ahem.”
Jiang Xia gave a light cough and came to his rescue.
“I just remembered that there are a few things I haven’t finished discussing with Comrade Lu. We might as well walk together.”
‘Oh, great. Another person saying one thing while meaning another.’
‘They’d spent two whole days and nights on the train together. What on earth could they possibly have left to discuss?’
“Oooh—”
The older officer seemed to suddenly understand everything. He played along, but didn’t tease them any further. Smiling broadly, he said, “Then let’s get moving! We’ll go outside and find two pedicabs. You two can sit together, and that’ll give you a chance to talk.”
After teasing the pair just enough, the officer knew when to quit while he was ahead. He didn’t want to push them so far that they got annoyed, so he promptly headed outside.
“Come on, let’s go! If we don’t hurry, it’ll be daylight before we know it!”
He quickly moved to the front.
Seeing that the officer wasn’t going to say anything else, Jiang Xia breathed a sigh of relief. She glanced at Lu Yixing, only to find him looking at her in surprise. The moment he realized she’d noticed, however, he immediately looked away.
Carrying his suitcase, he hurried ahead with a distinctly guilty air.
Tsk.
Why was he avoiding her?
Jiang Xia huffed inwardly and followed after him.
Beside the road, towering streetlights cast a warm glow. Under the lights shining from both ahead and behind, three shadows stretched across the ground. The shortest was the darkest, another was gradually growing longer, while an extraordinarily long shadow was slowly fading away.
Watching them, Jiang Xia suddenly remembered the night she and Lu Yixing had formally met.
Her thoughts took an unexpected turn.
Come to think of it, handsome young men really were in danger when walking alone at night.
They were liable to run into hooligans, you know.
Although they’d claimed there were things they needed to discuss, once the two of them were seated in the same pedicab, neither said a word.
Instead, the two drivers were extremely talkative. They chattered nonstop about everything under the sun: another armed brawl that had broken out somewhere; how, despite it being summer, vegetables at the market stalls hadn’t gotten any cheaper and had actually gone up in price; how some poor fool had been robbed while venturing out at night; and how one driver had taken a passenger to a faraway destination, thinking he’d landed a lucrative fare, only to have the passenger rob him of an entire day’s earnings…
Listening to all this, Jiang Xia almost wanted to sigh and lament, ‘Whatever happened to the good old days? The world really is going downhill!’
At long last, they arrived at her apartment building.
Jiang Xia had brought back quite a lot of things. The group decided to see the job through to the end, carrying her suitcase and all the local specialties upstairs before finally taking their leave.
She opened the door and quietly set her things beside the cabinet. After confirming that neither of her parents had woken up yet, she tiptoed back to her room and went straight to sleep.
Seven o’clock.
Jiang Xia pushed open her bedroom door, full of energy, only to look up and find her mother sitting at the table, snapping the ends off long beans.
Bundles upon bundles of long beans covered the table, and more were scattered all over the floor. Green seemed to be everywhere she looked. Jiang Xia’s vision went dark, then dark again. Somehow, this sight was even more terrifying than a tomb chamber.
As the saying went, every province had its own nightmare food, and Shandong was no exception. These local yardlong beans had a short growing season, produced abundant yields, were easy to cultivate, and cost very little. As a result, they became the most common vegetable on summer dining tables.
It was always the same story: you ate them once a year, but that one stretch of eating could last half the summer. Every meal, morning and night, featured the same beans until the mere sight of them made you want to run away.
“Mom, there are only three people in our family. Why did you buy so many beans?”
Jiang Xia took a deep breath. “Couldn’t you at least buy some eggplants, tomatoes, mushrooms, or something?”
“Look at you! You’ve barely gotten home, and you’re already complaining again. How many meals of beans have you even eaten so far?”
Zhou Mei kept working without pausing.
“Do you have any idea how expensive vegetables are these days? Even Chinese chives cost seventeen fen per jin now. Thank goodness your aunt has a yard where she grows beans. She can’t eat them all, so she can pick some for us. Otherwise, we’d barely be able to afford vegetables at all.”
“Seventeen fen? How did they get so expensive?”
Jiang Xia was puzzled.
After all, there was a saying that Chinese chives harvested in the sixth lunar month could stink up the place so badly they’d make even a dead dog recoil. From the sixth through the eighth lunar months, chives developed more fiber, had a stronger smell, and tasted their worst. On top of that, other summer vegetables were coming into season, giving consumers plenty of alternatives. As a result, chives usually couldn’t command a high price.
In previous years, they’d cost around seven or eight fen per jin. This year, however, the price had more than doubled!
“I haven’t heard anything about a drought anywhere.”
“Who knows what’s going on?”
Zhou Mei set aside the bunch of beans she’d just finished trimming at both ends.
“Anyway, that’s what all the vegetable vendors are charging. And the prices just keep going up, never down. Nothing is as affordable as it used to be.”
Huh?
Jiang Xia raised an eyebrow.
Remembering the complaints she’d heard from the pedicab drivers the previous night, Jiang Xia couldn’t help suspecting that the vegetable vendors might be working together to drive up prices.
Something wasn’t right.
Most vegetable sellers were independent vendors. Even if they organized themselves by village, there was no way they’d spontaneously band together on their own. Someone had to be taking the lead.
But who could get so many vendors to reach a consensus? And how had they managed to coordinate with one another?
Jiang Xia had a vague sense that something was wrong. Before she could think it through, however, Zhou Mei picked up another handful of beans and said, “You haven’t had breakfast yet. I’ll make you something.”
“No need to trouble yourself, Mom.”
Jiang Xia immediately put her thoughts aside, stepped forward, and hurriedly took the beans from her mother.
“Let me do it instead!”
If she left her mother to cook, the meal might as well be poison!
“Fine.”
Hearing her daughter offer, Zhou Mei didn’t even get up. She simply let Jiang Xia take the beans away.
Jiang Xia went into the kitchen and began washing them. As she worked, she said, “By the way, Mom, while solving this latest case, I ran into an expert from the provincial public security department. He said I could go to the provincial department to take part in a conference on cracking cold cases.”
“Go to the provincial department?”
Zhou Mei’s face lit up with delight.
“Then you’ll have even more prestige at work!”
“Oh, right! Does that mean you can get promoted and earn a higher salary?”
“Uh…”
Jiang Xia felt as though she’d just taken a knife to the heart.
“Not in the short term.”
Unlike technical workers, who could get a pay raise simply by advancing a grade and a promotion by earning a merit award, police officers didn’t have all that much room for advancement. Their salaries were largely fixed, too.
The only thing this job could really offer her was honor.
As an ordinary person, Zhou Mei naturally had rather down-to-earth aspirations. Still, if a promotion came, that would be great; if not, so be it. Her daughter was already working at the municipal public security bureau. Just telling people that was enough to make her proud. If Jiang Xia couldn’t climb any higher for now, that was fine, too.
“It’s all right.”
Zhou Mei even turned around and comforted her daughter.
“You’ve only been working at the municipal bureau for a short while. How could you expect to get promoted so quickly? The eldest son of your Auntie Wang is already in his thirties, and he’s still just a junior clerk.”
“Then I’ll definitely get promoted faster than him.”
Jiang Xia shook the water off the beans, placed them on the cutting board, and began chopping them as she continued preparing her mother for what was to come.
“I’ll probably be busier in the future, too. I’ll have to travel for work more often.”
Zhou Mei’s hands stopped sorting the vegetables.
Her brows drew together, then quickly relaxed again. With a sigh, she said, “You two sisters really are something else. Each of you spends more time away from home than the last.”
“But you and your older sister are different.”
Zhou Mei lowered her hands and looked seriously at her younger daughter, who was busy chopping vegetables in the kitchen.
“Your sister may not spend much time at home, but at least she’s settled down in one place. You can’t keep traveling all over the place forever, can you? That kind of life is exhausting. Besides, with you living like this, it’ll be hard to find someone to marry!”
At that, Jiang Xia raised an eyebrow.
Not necessarily.
“Oh, right.”
Having brought up marriage, Zhou Mei grew curious again.
“Isn’t there anyone suitable at your workplace you could consider?”
But as soon as the words left her mouth, she immediately rejected the idea herself.
“No, no, no! Everyone at your workplace is a criminal investigator. They earn low salaries and are never home. After you get married, all the housework would fall on you. How could that possibly work? At the very least, you need to find someone like your father, someone who’s willing to lend a hand around the house!”
In those days, most men in society still clung to traditional male chauvinism. Men who left all the housework to their wives, or wouldn’t even bother picking up a fallen bottle of cooking oil, were everywhere. Still, some men had become more progressive under the influence of communist revolutionary ideals, and Jiang Xia’s father was one of them.
Not only did he willingly take the initiative to do household chores, but when his wife’s health deteriorated, he also didn’t insist on having more children. Instead, he underwent sterilization.
For this, he’d even received a certificate recognizing him as an Outstanding Birth Control Advocate of the city. Jiang Xia had once dug it out herself.
Unfortunately, his decision had also invited plenty of ridicule from outsiders. Even though their family was doing reasonably well, her paternal grandparents, uncles, and other relatives frequently came around to take advantage of them, using the fact that the family had no male heir as an excuse.
Back then, they’d even tried to force her mother to give her job to Jiang Xia’s male cousin. The dispute had ultimately ended with the family severing ties with those relatives entirely. From then on, they maintained contact only with her maternal grandmother’s side of the family.
The original Jiang Xia’s determination to become a police officer, as well as her willingness to dive into the water to save people, had something to do with all of this. She had desperately wanted to prove that she was no less capable than a boy.
Putting those complicated memories aside, Jiang Xia grew serious.
She and Lu Yixing did indeed have feelings for each other. However, relationships between men and women were still taken very seriously in those days. Dating without the intention of getting married was considered nothing more than playing around with someone’s feelings. If they really took things a step further, it would mean they were heading toward marriage.
But that absolutely could not be allowed to interfere with her career.
After all, what man could compare to having her name written into the history of public security, becoming a towering figure for future generations of police officers to look up to?
That said, anyone who became her partner was destined to make considerable sacrifices.
He would have to shoulder the burden of family life and endure the pressure of public opinion.
Meanwhile, there was very little she could offer him in return.
She couldn’t compensate him financially, and the honors bestowed upon her by the state weren’t something she could genuinely split in half with him, either.
Would he accept a future like that?
Hmm…
She needed to have an open and honest conversation with him.
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