Restart life

Chapter 56 0055 [Departure for Shanghai]

At the three-way intersection between No. 2 Middle School, No. 7 Middle School, and the street lined with internet cafes, there is a relatively large vegetable market.

Chen Guiliang went and bought four catties of pork, two catties of beef and a bag of pig liver.

If you don't buy it in the county town, you won't be able to find it anywhere along the way home. Meat is only available in towns and villages on market days. You can usually buy it in the morning, but it will definitely be sold out in the afternoon.

Then I went back to my dorm to get my luggage.

I stuffed the freshly bought meat into the bucket, and placed the bag that held the kitten on top of the meat. Then I packed my clothes, pants, and shoes into a snakeskin bag, and then put on my schoolbag to go to the school gate to catch the bus.

After a bumpy two or three-hour ride in the dilapidated bus, Chen Guiliang got off at the intersection of the county road and the village road.

He carried a bucket in his left hand, a snakeskin bag in his right, and his schoolbag was also full of things—a whole bunch of heavy stuff.

I hadn't walked far when I was exhausted and my whole body ached, and the kitten kept meowing.

He recalled a morning in junior high school, on this same dilapidated village road, in the light rain, the road muddy. Walking in the mud was difficult, and he had to be careful not to slip and fall. It was still dark and visibility was poor, and he was carrying his schoolbag and thirty or forty pounds of rice on his back.

The rice needs to be taken to school to exchange for meal tickets.

My sandals were torn in the mud, the umbrella frame was broken, and half of my body was covered in mud.

He squatted by the roadside, feeling wronged and on the verge of tears, watching bus after bus drive by. In order to save 5 cents on the fare, he ultimately did not take the bus, threw away his tattered umbrella and sandals, and continued walking to school with his schoolbag and rice on his back.

More than twenty years have passed, but the memory remains vivid.

He personally participated in the construction of this dilapidated village road twice.

He attended school once in elementary school and once in middle school. Every family needed to help, and since his parents had to go to work elsewhere, he went to school with his grandmother.

The grandfather and grandson were well taken care of; they weren't made to carry stones. They just squatted by the roadside, smashing the larger stones into smaller pieces before carrying them to fill the potholes.

If you're tired, take a break.

Chen Guiliang whistled to tease the kitten, and looking at the dilapidated village road in front of him, he thought that he should donate money to repair it in the future.

Turn it into a cement road surface.

It was already 2 p.m. when we arrived near my grandparents' house.

It was the off-season for farming, and my grandmother was chatting with a group of old ladies by the roadside. This place served as an intelligence hub for the village.

“Mother-in-law!” Chen Guiliang called out.

Upon recognizing him, Grandma came over with delight: "You're on holiday?"

"You're on holiday, so I bought you some meat."

Chen Guiliang took out the bag containing the cat and took out two jin of pork and one jin of beef from the bucket.

Seeing this, the other elderly women immediately had something to talk about:
"Oh my, your grandson is so filial. He even knows to buy meat when he's on vacation."

"Sister Liu, you are blessed."

"Last time I bought a color TV, this time I bought meat. It's different when you're rich."

"..."

Grandma laughed heartily and asked, "Have you eaten?"

"I've already eaten," Chen Guiliang said.

"Come home and sit for a while."

"it is good."

The entire village is divided into five administrative groups.

Each group was further divided into settlements due to the hilly terrain.

The settlement where my maternal grandmother's house is located is relatively large, with about twelve or thirteen households.

Chen Guiliang went to his maternal grandmother's house, and the old ladies followed him, trying to extract more useless information.

"Father-in-law!"

"I'm home."

Grandpa was still making brooms in the courtyard. When he saw Chen Guiliang arrive, he quickly went inside and brought out a long bench.

Chen Guiliang casually asked, "Where's my youngest uncle?"

Grandpa said irritably, "What could he be doing? He's probably playing cards."

My uncle had an accident when he was in school, which left him with a slight limp in his left leg. He has no other skills, so he's still a bachelor, spending his time playing cards after finishing his farm work.

It's not gambling, just pure entertainment. You only win or lose two or three dollars a day.

Chen Guiliang sat in the courtyard, surrounded by a group of old ladies, dealing with all sorts of questions.

He's a senior high school student, and an old lady actually offered to be his matchmaker!
"Guiliang, you still don't have a girlfriend? Do you recognize my granddaughter?"

"Which one?"

"Sasha. Huang Sasha."

"I vaguely remember her. Wasn't she still in junior high school?"

"You two will graduate from junior high school next year. You two are such a perfect match."

Chen Guiliang was both amused and exasperated.

Even her grandmother chimed in, "Sasha is well-behaved and obedient."

Then an old lady came up with a terrible idea: "Sasha's on holiday too, let's call her over quickly!"

Chen Guiliang couldn't bear it any longer and just wanted to escape as soon as possible. He quickly got up and said, "Father-in-law, mother-in-law, I'm leaving now."

"What's the rush?" Grandma held his hand, very enthusiastic about the matter. "Wait for Sasha to come before you leave. You two used to play together a lot when you were little. You don't know, Sasha's grades are also very good. Her teacher said that even if she doesn't get into No. 2 Middle School, she'll definitely be able to get into No. 1 Middle School."

Helpless, Chen Guiliang sat back down, waiting for his first "blind date" after his rebirth.

If this counts as a blind date.

Not long after, Huang Shasha was called over. After understanding what was going on, she was even more embarrassed and awkward than Chen Guiliang.

Grandpa, who had been making brooms, finally couldn't help but scold, "You bunch of crazy women! What are you doing doing this for school kids?" Grandpa stopped making brooms and ran to the nearby convenience store, dragged my uncle, who was playing cards, over, and asked him to help Chen Guiliang carry his things home.

"My dear in-laws, I'm leaving!"

Chen Guiliang took the opportunity to say goodbye.

Huang Shasha also quickly ran away, her face flushed.

When Chen Guiliang saw that he had bought a cat, his uncle went to the kitchen and brought out half a basin of fried river shrimp: "I caught these yesterday and sold them for more than ten yuan. You can take these back to feed the cat."

After saying that, the uncle put the basin and shrimp into the bucket and then helped carry the snakeskin bag.

After walking for more than ten minutes, they finally returned to their own courtyard. Chen Guiliang handed his uncle a pack of Hongtashan cigarettes.

My uncle grinned and accepted the money somewhat embarrassedly.

"I'll be going now," the uncle said anxiously.

Chen Guiliang guessed that he wanted to rush back to play cards, so he didn't try to stop him, and symbolically walked his uncle a few steps away.

Grandma isn't home again; she's probably out doing farm work somewhere.

Chen Guiliang released the kitten, which immediately panicked and fled, disappearing into the woodpile under the eaves.

Upon entering the house, Chen Guiliang found a broken bowl to use as a cat food bowl, threw in a few fried river shrimp, placed it by the woodpile, and then left it there.

He took out his PHS phone and tried to call Tao Chenggang, only to find that it had no signal in the countryside.

I might as well lie in bed and have a good sleep.

When I woke up, Grandma hadn't come home yet.

Chen Guiliang went to check the cat's food bowl and found that the river shrimp had been eaten, so he threw in two more.

Then I went to the private plot next to the house to pick vegetables that my grandmother had planted, and also picked a handful of wild blood-skin vegetable (purple-backed amaranth).

Then rinse the rice, cook it, wash the vegetables, and cut the meat.

Grandma returned home close to nightfall, carrying a jumble of recyclables in her hands.

There's practically no scrap to collect in the countryside, so she must have gone to the landfill in the next village. It was originally used to dump coal ash from a boiler factory, but later it started dumping urban waste, gradually piling up into several small, impressive mountains.

The garbage dump was also Chen Guiliang's playground when he was a child, where he could often find pencils, erasers and books.

His proudest trophies are a copy of "100,000 Whys" and a copy of "Essentials of Emei Qigong".

He even foolishly practiced qigong according to the book for several years.

He also created his own method of "using qi to ward off the cold". It was too cold to go to school in the winter mornings, and the cold wind made people shiver. Chen Guiliang would use his mind to circulate qi, directing the qi in his dantian to the tanzhong acupoint, and then conduct it to his limbs through the meridians.

This cycle repeats itself, and after a few cycles, it will no longer be cold.

They even felt feverish all over.

Looking back now, it was probably just psychological.

"Your Majesty, I've brought the cat back," Chen Guiliang called out while cooking.

"I see!"

Grandma stood at the door of the main room, and the kitten peeked its head out from the woodpile.

A person and a cat stared at each other.

Grandma moved half a step, and the kitten shrank back into the woodpile and hid.

Chen Guiliang cooked the dishes and took one plate of stir-fried meat to his second uncle's house. After a few casual words, he returned to eat with his grandmother.

"Your Majesty, I'm going to Shanghai to participate in a competition." Chen Guiliang took out the invitation letter for the semi-finals.

Grandma stared at the invitation letter again and again. Although she didn't know anything about Han Han or Guo Xiaosi, she still understood that this competition was very prestigious.

After all, we're going to Shanghai.

"Play the game well, do you have enough money?" Grandma asked.

Chen Guiliang said, "That's enough."

Grandma asked again, "When are you leaving?"

"In two days."

"Then you should be careful, hide your money well on the road, and don't talk to strangers."

"I know."

"..."

Chen Guiliang rested at home for a day, and the next day he went to the city to buy a train ticket and a decent suitcase.

You can't exactly carry a snakeskin bag to Shanghai.

Upon arriving at the private server's combat command post, Chen Guiliang did not see Tao Chenggang.

Only after asking did I learn that Mr. Tao had gone to internet cafes in surrounding cities and counties to promote his business.

Yang Yuhui said, "The internet cafe promotion has been very effective; the peak number of online users has exceeded 10,000. By the way, there's some news about the special operation."

"What news?" Chen Guiliang asked.

Yang Yuhui said, "The main focus is on cracking down on pirate manufacturers, and the efforts on the internet are not very strong. But there are exceptions. In Hubei Province, the crackdown is combined with online and offline measures, and I heard that some people who run private servers have been detained and fined."

Chen Guiliang laughed heartily.

From the second year after the emergence of private servers until twenty years later, Hubei Province remained the most active place for private servers!
Many private server operation sites are located in Hubei Province.

For several years, Shanda even specifically targeted Hubei Province, establishing a long-term strategic partnership with the province's cyber police.

That evening, Chen Guiliang stayed at his uncle's house and made phone calls to Bian Guanyue and Tao Xue respectively.

The next morning, I took the train straight to Chengdu.

Aunt Lin Chunhong is really virtuous; she specially cooked twenty eggs for Chen Guiliang.

(End of this chapter)