Eight years later.

Hecheng was a very small city. Because it was right next to Huating City, housing prices had multiplied several times over the past few years. The entire city had been demolished and rebuilt several rounds already, leaving only a few old neighborhoods in the old city center standing firm due to the enormous cost of demolition.

The old-style neighborhood built in the 1990s had a semi-enclosed design, with a row of old, worn-out storefronts lining the street.

Yimin Pharmacy was located in one such inconspicuous old neighborhood. The store, less than sixty square meters, was packed with medicine shelves. The counter and cash register were tucked away in a corner. Under the white fluorescent lights, an old air conditioner roared loudly. As soon as the glass door covered in medicine posters was pushed open, a wave of hot air mixed with the smell of medicine rushed out.

Before stepping inside, Fang Yongnian had already seen that familiar figure. As he pushed the glass door open, he let out an almost imperceptible sigh.

Feeding a pet came with risks. Once you fed it, it might cling to you like sticky candy. Never to be shaken off.

Eight years had passed. Everyone and everything around him had changed beyond recognition, except for this one person. From the age of ten to eighteen, the first thing she always said whenever she saw him was: “Uncle Fang, I’m hungry.”

The little girl had gradually grown into an adult. The yellow-haired kid’s hair had long since turned dark and thick, yet when she asked to be fed, her expression and tone were still exactly the same.

Fang Yongnian patted his coat pocket. Inside were two packs of pineapple cakes he used for low blood sugar. He tossed one across the air to the starving young girl, frowned, and glanced at the empty cashier’s counter. “Where’s Old Zheng?”

“Warehouse.” Lu Yixin deftly unwrapped the packaging, took a small bite, squinted her eyes in satisfaction, then stuffed the remaining big half of the pineapple cake into her mouth.

“So strange,” she said, cheeks puffed up in confusion. “It’s clearly the exact same brand. Why does the one you give me taste so much better than the one I buy myself?”

Fang Yongnian gave her a speechless sideways glance, took off his coat, and walked straight into the cashier’s counter. When he sat down on the office chair, his right foot knocked against the wheel, producing a strange metallic sound.

Lu Yixin swallowed the cake in her mouth and suddenly felt a bit bitter.

“My dad’s coming back,” she said, trying to stuff the remaining piece of pineapple cake into her jeans pocket. Halfway through, she worried it might crumble, so she pulled it out again and held it in her hand.

The cashier’s password was six sixes. Fang Yongnian didn’t bother avoiding her as he typed it in. When the cash drawer popped open, he threw in thirty yuan, then pulled open a small black cabinet under the register and took out a pack of Yunxi cigarettes.

As he unwrapped it, he looked at Lu Yixin, then thought better of it and held back.

The girl was an adult now. He couldn’t keep shooing her away with, “Uncle’s going to smoke, go stand over there,” like before.

An eighteen-year-old girl, supposedly, needed her self-respect.

Because of one tofu bun, Fang Yongnian had somehow carried eight years of unearned elder responsibility and now felt a little regretful as he put the lighter away.

But when he looked up, the girl was staring at him with a face full of reproach.

“You’re running a pharmacy!” Lu Yixin said, heartbroken.

Even if it was just a small neighborhood pharmacy, and even if it sold only medicine for colds and bruises, it still shouldn’t be selling cigarettes!

“They’re not on the shelves,” Fang Yongnian said, amused by her frowning face, and for once offered an explanation. Then he pulled the topic back. “Your dad’s coming back?”

Lu Yixin’s attention shifted immediately. She nodded. “His last project finished. This time, he supposedly has a month off.”

“Mm.” Fang Yongnian’s reply was perfunctory.

Since he couldn’t smoke, he just held the unlit cigarette between his lips to ease the craving.

The register drawer was still open. Sitting there with nothing to do, he took out the cash and, cigarette in mouth, started counting.

Lu Yixin waited and waited for the reaction she wanted, but it never came. The pineapple cake wrapper in her hand crinkled nervously.

Fang Yongnian glanced at her with a half-smile, then lowered his head and went on counting the money.

Most residents in the old neighborhood were elderly, and the money they used to buy medicine was always old, wrinkled renminbi.

Fang Yongnian slowly smoothed out the soft, crumpled bills, meticulous and orderly in his movements.

“You… got the stray cat neutered?” Lu Yixin finally spoke, but her topic jumped elsewhere.

“Mm.” Fang Yongnian nodded, the unlit cigarette still between his lips.

“Aren’t you really busy lately?” Lu Yixin fiddled with the pineapple cake wrapper.

“It’s hot now, surgical wounds get infected easily.” Fang Yongnian answered every question without hesitation.

“Oh…” The conversation died there. Lu Yixin lowered her head again, picking at the cake wrapper.

Fang Yongnian didn’t urge her. When he finished flattening the bills, he started sorting the coins, stacking them neatly by value.

“You…” Lu Yixin spoke again, “your sweater’s pilling.”

Fang Yongnian glanced down at the gray sweater he was wearing and agreed, “Mm.”

“You haven’t had a haircut in months,” Lu Yixin continued rambling, “and you didn’t even shave properly.”

She sounded like an old housekeeper.

After finishing the last coin, Fang Yongnian took the cigarette from his mouth, lifted his head, and looked straight at her. “So?”

Lu Yixin swallowed hard.

The old Fang Yongnian wasn’t like this.

He had always been a little sloppy and slow with things, yes, but back then, he used to smile—a lot.

He looked like a girl, with big eyes and long lashes. His face used to have some fullness to it, and when he smiled, he looked beautiful.

He still looked beautiful now.

But he was too thin. When he didn’t speak and only looked at her like that, she felt as if she couldn’t breathe.

“So?” he asked again.

“So when my dad comes back this time, will you go see him?” She had wanted to ease into the question, but fear made her blurt it all out at once.

Fang Yongnian’s lips curved slightly to one side.

Lu Yixin clutched the pineapple cake wrapper, tense and uneasy.

This girl…

“If I don’t go to him, he’ll come to me.” He hadn’t wanted to answer her question.

The affairs of adults had nothing to do with her.

She must have just found out that Lu Boyuan was coming back. As soon as she knew, she had rushed over to the pharmacy, rambling from his sweater to his stubble.

Thinking about it now, the last big argument between him and Lu Boyuan had probably died down for a while because of this girl.

Back when the project started, Lu Boyuan had always stressed that everyone in the project team was one family—that they should help each other both publicly and privately. Looking at it now, the only one who had truly treated the team like family was Lu Yixin.

That tofu bun, it seemed, hadn’t been fed in vain.

Lu Yixin lowered her head.

He hadn’t called her father’s name. When he mentioned her father, there was still a clear tone of distance in his voice.

“Then I’m going back,” she said, dispirited.

He looked as if he had already known her father was coming back, completely unsurprised.

Although he hadn’t often met with her father over the past four years, he had always clearly known where her father was. Everything she said about her father, he never seemed surprised or unaware.

The shabby little pharmacy he opened in Hecheng wasn’t to make a living.

Every month, he would be away for several days. He had other sources of income, and many friends she didn’t know.

He didn’t hide these things from her.

“Lu Yixin.” Fang Yongnian called out to her just before she stepped out of the pharmacy.

Lu Yixin turned around.

Fang Yongnian had already lit the cigarette from before. In the shadow behind the cashier’s counter, he took a drag. Beneath the smoke, his overly thin face was sharply defined.

“Study hard,” he said. “The other things have nothing to do with you.”

That car accident, the brother who died, and his leg. None of it had anything to do with her.

୨୧ ⏔⏔⏔⏔♡⏔⏔⏔⏔ ୨୧

“I honestly think you’re a pervert.”

Zheng Fei, who had been holed up in the pharmacy’s storeroom, finally appeared. His first words never pleasant. “Investigating that girl’s father on one hand, playing the role of her uncle on the other. Does that give you some special thrill?”

Zheng Fei looked very ordinary. He wore a regulation white lab coat pinned with a pharmacist badge, had thick glasses from high myopia, and was of average height and build. Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin.

Fang Yongnian exhaled a puff of smoke right into his face, expressionless. “You’re the pervert.”

Zheng Fei was oddly afraid of Lu Yixin. Every time Lu Yixin came looking for Fang Yongnian, Zheng Fei would always find some excuse to leave.

At his age, he still wasn’t ashamed of it.

“That girl’s sharp as a fox, she’s fished a lot of things out of me already.” Zheng Fei tossed thirty yuan into the register, tore open a pack of Liqun cigarettes for himself.

The two pharmacy owners shut the door and smoked inside.

“Got the recording?” Zheng Fei took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with his lab coat sleeve.
“Got it.” Fang Yongnian took a drag, frowning. “But it’s useless. It’s not the tape from that year. It only shows that Ge Wenyao had financial dealings with that pharmaceutical company a few years back.”

Holding his cigarette between his fingers, Zheng Fei gave a bitter laugh. “If you keep investigating like this, there won’t be a single clean person left in your project team.”

The dead, the living, the crippled, the whole—each had their story, each their stance.

Fang Yongnian didn’t speak for a long time.

That recording was from seven years ago, when the project had only just been approved. Everyone in the team had been handpicked by old professors: all young, all capable of handling things independently, all with the potential to become leaders in their field.

Such a lineup was rare in the industry. Many media outlets had reported the project prominently back then.

On the day of its launch, everyone had been full of ambition, believing that conquering Alzheimer’s was only a matter of time.

Fang Yongnian swallowed the bitterness in his mouth.

Ge Wenyao was his senior fellow apprentice, a southerner whose Mandarin was terribly unstandardized. An expert in pharmaceutical crystal forms.

The recording Fang Yongnian had managed to obtain today, through every possible means, captured Ge Wenyao’s distinctive accent as he sold their project’s early research report, word by word. The price wasn’t mentioned in the recording, but Fang Yongnian knew—it was probably equivalent to thirty percent of the down payment for a sixty-square-meter house in the suburbs of Huating City.

Although that early-stage research report had problems with its direction and was soon discarded, the fact remained that Ge Wenyao had indeed leaked confidential information.

Seven years ago.

Fang Yongnian let the cigarette burn down to his fingertips, the red ember curling into a gray wisp of smoke.

From the very moment their project had been approved, someone had already been watching them.

Three years after its initiation, on the very day they finally found the correct research direction after countless failures—a major traffic accident occurred involving key members of the project team. A construction truck from the opposite lane broke through the guardrail and collided head-on with their car.

There were four people in the vehicle. Three died. One was crippled.

Ge Wenyao, in the passenger seat, died instantly.

He himself had been sitting in the back seat; his right leg was pinned in the door, and during the rescue process, it was amputated.

He was twenty-eight that year. The project’s principal investigator, Lu Boyuan—who was originally supposed to be in that car—had received a mysterious phone call right before departure. He gave up the driver’s seat to Qi Yi, another married senior fellow, who died instantly in the crash.

“Keep investigating,” Fang Yongnian said, pressing the cigarette into the ashtray.

Even if everyone in that project team back then had dirt on their hands, he would continue digging.

For the dead. For his leg. And for the dream he once had.