PL | Chapter 16

There’s Plenty of Time

For quite a while after Qi Yue walked out, Gu Zhong still could not figure out what that sentence of his had meant.

He had been a little dizzy all evening. Ever since Qi Yue said those things, he had stayed in a hazy, muddled state. It felt as though something had been stripped of the bright outer wrapping around it and turned clear, yet that very clarity had thrown his mind into even greater confusion.

He had spent the whole night spacing out. It felt like he had thought through a lot of things, but when he came back to himself, he had no idea what exactly he had been thinking about.

Not understanding that line from Qi Yue, he instinctively glanced toward Xiao Ding.

Xiao Ding smiled at him. “Boss is really interesting.”

“Yeah…” Gu Zhong suddenly felt a little embarrassed. He had the vague sense that Xiao Ding had seen through something. “He’s… always been pretty interesting.”

Xiao Ding had only been smiling before, but after hearing that, she burst out laughing. “You’re pretty interesting too.”

“Ah.” Gu Zhong rubbed his nose. “I think so too.”

Still smiling, Xiao Ding picked up a rag and went to wipe the tables. Sleepwalker A was sleepwalking at the cash register. Gu Zhong stood up and moved around a little, then went outside and looked around. What had Qi Yue gone off to do?

Serious? Serious about what?

The current Qi Yue was already very serious. Back when Qi Yue used to sit in the corner of the blockhouse every day spacing out, when whether he felt like earning money or not depended entirely on his mood, Gu Zhong had never imagined that one day he would see a Qi Yue like this.

After standing at the doorway for more than ten minutes, Gu Zhong still could not figure out what Qi Yue had gone to do.

Still, he had no intention of calling to chase him down with questions. He turned and went back into the shop. Sleepwalker A was still playing with his phone, and Xiao Ding, after wiping down the tables, was also sitting by the wall playing with her phone.

He slowly went upstairs and opened the door to Qi Yue’s room.

For some reason, when he went in, he looked back over his shoulder, as if he were sneaking around doing something underhanded.

Qi Yue probably had not been living here for very long. The room had not been tidied much, but it was not really messy either. Qi Yue did not spend much time here every day anyway, just sleeping at night.

And now he did not even have any old classic films to watch. A middle-aged man did not spend much time on his phone either, so he probably just lay down and went to sleep as soon as he got back to the room. Then he got up in the morning and did a few sets of radio calisthenics.

Gu Zhong lay down on the leather mat, stretching out his arms and legs, and let out a long sigh. Just running a little noodle shop like this, after a whole day of bustling around, was actually exhausting. At that moment, the sensation of his back and waist being stretched out made him comfortably close his eyes.

Core strength. Gu Zhong smiled.

Tsk tsk.

He did not know when he had fallen asleep, nor how long he had slept.

But because he had not shut the room door, the moment some noisy commotion drifted up from downstairs, he was jolted awake at once.

Customers? There was a big round clock on the floor. He glanced at it. It showed ten to nine.

They closed at nine. Business here mainly depended on people out strolling around the shopping area, so there really should not still be customers coming in at this time. He got to his feet.

As he stepped out of the room, Gu Zhong heard a man’s voice from downstairs saying, “I don’t care whether you’re closing or not. My brothers and I want food right now!”

“I’m really sorry, our ingredients are all prepared fresh for the day, and by nighttime there isn’t any left…” Xiao Ding’s voice was trembling a little, but she was still patiently explaining.

Had they run into people looking for trouble? Gu Zhong hurriedly jogged down the stairs.

Sleepwalker A had already left, probably because Xiao Ding had stayed behind to clean up.

At that moment, besides Xiao Ding, there were three men on the first floor, each sitting at a separate table. Before Gu Zhong could even see their faces clearly, he smelled the alcohol on them first.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

The moment Xiao Ding turned and saw him, she immediately moved over to his side. “These gentlemen want something to eat, but our noodles are all sold out…”

“If you’re out, then go buy some for me!” a man in a black jacket roared, slamming a hand on the table.

A wave of alcohol fumes hit Gu Zhong in the face, making him instantly nauseated. To be honest, he had never dealt with a situation like drunkards causing trouble before. He had never even run into it. And these guys did not look like mere drunks either. Their faces all seemed to say, We’re bad news.

He had no example to follow. There had been trouble at the blockhouse before, but Qi Yue’s way of handling it every time had been to smash and kick up a fuss if he felt like it.

That method was obviously no longer suitable now.

“Brothers, why don’t you go somewhere else?” Gu Zhong said. “We really are closed.”

“I told you to go buy some.” The man in the black jacket glared at him. “Are you deaf?”

“It’s already closing time. You can’t buy anything anywhere now.” Gu Zhong looked straight back at him. “You just came in from outside, you should have seen…”

“Then make it!” another man cut him off. He was wearing tight pants so tight they had practically squeezed his ass into a pumpkin. “Our dage says one word, do you believe I could smash your shitty little shop right now?”

Dage? Ha. Ha.

At that instant, Gu Zhong could practically hear the cold laughter in his own heart.

Dage? With that look, that bearing, that presence, that… face, and he dared to call himself dage?

Bragging like that in front of other people was whatever, but saying it in front of him had zero credibility. Did they really think he had never seen a real dage before?

“You all look like reasonable men.” Gu Zhong squeezed out a fake smile. “We’re just employees. There are no ingredients left. The boss didn’t stock extra, and we can’t just produce them out of thin air.”

Anyway, the boss was not here.

Pumpkin Ass glanced at him, then kicked the chair next to him. The chair toppled over and crashed down by Gu Zhong’s feet.

“Xiao Ding.” Gu Zhong shoved Xiao Ding toward the stairs. “Go upstairs.”

It was probably impossible to call the police with these men standing right there. If Xiao Ding went up to the second floor, she could call the police from there and hide in Qi Yue’s room too.

Xiao Ding reacted pretty fast. She snatched up her bag from the side and ran upstairs.

The moment Pumpkin Ass saw that, he immediately followed after her and kicked the bag she was carrying.

Xiao Ding let out a scream, and the bag got kicked onto the floor.

“Go up.” Gu Zhong did not let Xiao Ding stop to pick up her bag again. After Xiao Ding ran up the stairs, he took a step forward in front of Pumpkin Ass and blocked his way. “If you’ve got something to say, say it to me.”

“Cook!” Pumpkin Ass roared right in his face.

The reeking stink of alcohol blasting into him nearly made Gu Zhong slap him on reflex. He was truly at a loss for words, so he also roared back in Pumpkin Ass’s face, “I told you there are no ingredients!”

“Then go buy some!” Pumpkin Ass kept yelling, and for good measure he also kicked the fridge.

The fridge rocked. Gu Zhong reached out and steadied it. There was simply no communicating with drunken trashy hoodlums.

Just as he was thinking he might as well go all out and shove the guy aside, the man in the black jacket, who had been sitting there without moving, suddenly jumped up and flipped a table over.

Then he pulled out a knife and sat down beside another table, slamming the knife down into the tabletop. It did not go in.

He picked it up again and hacked at the table a good seven or eight times before he finally got it jammed into a crack in the tabletop.
Gu Zhong had been annoyed and angry, but now the sight of him nearly made him laugh.

“Why are you arguing with them? Whether there are ingredients or not, just go look for yourselves!” Black Jacket also started shouting, his voice thick with drunken slur.

“Get out!” Gu Zhong really did not want to let them keep making a scene here. “Get out!”

When Black Jacket and Pumpkin Ass both glared over at him, Gu Zhong was very grateful for the third man already passed out asleep on the table.

He was just thinking about what he should do if both of them came at him together, how he would charge out through the gap between the two of them, when suddenly he caught sight of a figure shifting at the shop entrance.

He recognized at a glance that it was Qi Yue.

“Call the police!” Gu Zhong shouted toward him.

“What’s going on?” Qi Yue pushed open the door and walked in.

“You the boss?” Black Jacket tossed the knife in his hand, still sitting there like some big shot. “Go make something for me and my brothers to eat.”

Qi Yue said nothing. He glanced at Gu Zhong, then ran his eyes up and down over him.

Gu Zhong guessed he was checking whether he was hurt, so he shook his head. These drunken idiots had not reached the peak excitement level where they would start throwing punches yet.

“What do you want to eat?” Qi Yue asked. As he spoke, he walked toward the kitchen, taking off his jacket and tossing it over the back of a chair.

The instant the tattoos on his arm were exposed, Black Jacket and Pumpkin Ass both froze for a moment and stared fixedly at his arm. It was impossible to tell whether they had even heard Qi Yue’s question, but in any case, neither of them answered.

Qi Yue went into the kitchen, took something from the counter, then turned and came back out. When Gu Zhong saw clearly that what he was carrying in his hand was a cleaver, he also froze for a second. In that instant, more than a dozen possible scenes flashed through his mind.

Very bloody scenes.

They were all the kinds of scenes his mother imagined he would run into if he kept staying with Qi Yue. But he was absolutely certain Qi Yue would never let that kind of scene happen. He had never handled things that way before, and now he would do so even less.

Holding the cleaver, Qi Yue walked straight up to Black Jacket. Black Jacket was still sitting there. He looked up at him, and just as he was about to say something, Qi Yue raised his hand. Before anyone could react, he had already brought the cleaver down in a chop at the arm Black Jacket had resting on the table.

Gu Zhong felt like his eyeballs nearly popped right out of their sockets in that instant.

Before anyone could even have any reaction at all, the blade had already come down with a loud bang into the table.

The air in the room instantly froze.

Black Jacket sat there with his mouth hanging half open, staring blankly at Qi Yue as if he had gone into a trance.

Gu Zhong was probably the first person to recover. He quickly tilted his head and looked at the table.

That chop had sunk into the tabletop right next to Black Jacket’s arm. That accuracy. If the situation had not been so inappropriate, Gu Zhong would really have wanted to clap for Qi Yue.

“Awake now?” Qi Yue braced a hand on the table and flicked a finger against the cleaver.

The blade, buried about an inch into the tabletop, let out a crisp ring.

“Ding.”

Black Jacket still could not get any words out. With his mouth half open, he nodded.

“We’re closed,” Qi Yue said. “If you want noodles, come tomorrow. Anytime after ten in the morning is fine. We’ve got a lot of flavors to choose from. I recommend our house special. Add black pepper, it tastes great.”

Black Jacket kept nodding, his mouth still half open.

Qi Yue went over and opened the shop door, making a gesture of invitation. Black Jacket hesitated for a moment, then stood up, glanced at Pumpkin Ass, and walked out toward the door.

Pumpkin Ass followed him out too. Qi Yue held out an arm to stop him, and he jumped backward half a step like he had been scared, staring at Qi Yue.

“That brother there.” Qi Yue tipped his chin toward the one still passed out asleep on the table.

Pumpkin Ass hurriedly turned back, yanked that man upright, smacked him across the face, then half-dragged him toward the door. “Sleep! Why don’t you just sleep yourself to death!”

After they were all gone, Gu Zhong let out a breath of relief and looked at Qi Yue. “I thought that chop was going to take his arm off.”

“You have that little faith in me.” Qi Yue smiled.

“Not exactly.” Gu Zhong rubbed his nose. “Mostly I was worried your swing would go crooked.”

“As long as he didn’t move, I wouldn’t swing crooked,” Qi Yue said.

“But what if he had moved?” Gu Zhong said quietly.

“That’s why you have to be fast, before he moves.” Qi Yue patted him on the shoulder. “Relax. I wasn’t right up against him either. There was still plenty of distance. I wouldn’t dare get that close.”

“Wow…” Xiao Ding, who had been clinging to the stair rail and watching from there the whole time, walked over. “Qi-ge, you were so cool.”

“You two okay?” Qi Yue asked.

“We’re okay, we’re okay.” Xiao Ding waved both hands. “Xiao Gu even protected me, told me to hide upstairs. It’s just that I wanted to take my phone with me to call the police, and they knocked my bag down… my bag…”

Xiao Ding turned and looked around, then went to pick her bag back up.

“They were just some guys who drank too much. They came in right before closing and started throwing a drunk fit,” Gu Zhong said as he walked over and grabbed the cleaver, tugging at it. “No idea what people like that are usually…”

To his surprise, the cleaver did not come out in one pull. Gu Zhong froze for a moment, then put in more force as he continued, “Usually…”

The blade still did not move. Irritated, he went, “Hey!”

“Chicken claws,” Qi Yue said from the side.

“Usually…” Gu Zhong tugged again, this time lifting the whole table up, but the cleaver still did not come loose.

“Can you finish what you were saying first?” Qi Yue sighed.

“Drunks like that aren’t usually common, right? If this happened every few days, wouldn’t it be annoying as hell?” Gu Zhong said.

“You run into it maybe once in a bit over a month. It’s fine.” Qi Yue said, “The police station is right at the corner of the street. There’s a phone by the register. If anything happens, call over there, they get here pretty fast.”

“Oh.” Hesitating, Gu Zhong leaned close to Qi Yue’s ear. “I thought you didn’t want to call the police.”

Qi Yue looked at him. “Why?”

“Well…” Gu Zhong cleared his throat and lowered his voice further. “Last time, Lame Guy said so. He said you were scared of the police.”

Qi Yue looked at him, and only after a while did he laugh. “How is it that sometimes you’re pretty mature, and other times you’re really… kind of dumb?”

“What?” Gu Zhong snorted.

“But back then I really was scared. If I saw the police, I would circle around them. I never knew whether I might end up getting into something again and falling into their hands.” Qi Yue smiled. “Now what do I have to be scared of? Me, a handsome noodle shop owner.”

“Where’s the face?” Gu Zhong lowered his head and looked around on the floor. “Who saw our boss’s face?”

When he looked up, he saw Xiao Ding holding her bag and standing three steps away from them with an awkward smile on her face.

“Ah.” Gu Zhong quickly stepped back. He and Qi Yue had practically been pressed together just now while talking. “Xiao Ding, head home early. Thanks for your hard work today.”

The moment he said it, he regretted it. That had sounded as though he wanted Xiao Ding to hurry up and leave so she would not disturb their private time together.

“You two work a bit harder and clean this up before you go.” Qi Yue walked over to the table and wrapped his hand around the cleaver’s handle.

“Okay.” Xiao Ding smiled and nodded. “Actually, I’m fine. Thinking about it now, it was kind of exciting.”

“There are still condiment jars in the cabinet upstairs. Gu Zhong, go get a set and bring them down to replace these,” Qi Yue said, tugging at the cleaver.

A miracle happened.

The table bounced, but the cleaver did not move.

“I didn’t even chop that hard, did I?” Even Qi Yue looked a little shocked.

“Wait.” Xiao Ding opened her bag and took out her phone. “Let me snap a picture. We need to commemorate the knife’s unyielding spirit.”

“Shouldn’t it be commemorating the two men in your shop who can’t pull a knife out of a table?” Gu Zhong sighed.

Xiao Ding laughed so hard she could barely stand it. She held up her phone and took several shots of the knife before finally getting a clear one.

Qi Yue lifted the table together with the cleaver still stuck in it. After shaking it a few times, he finally got the cleaver pulled out of the tabletop.

“This table is just too high quality,” Qi Yue said.

“Mhm.” Gu Zhong nodded with complete sincerity.

After they cleaned the shop up and locked the door, Gu Zhong went upstairs. Qi Yue was standing by the window with a cigarette between his lips.

“You’re probably not used to this, right?” Gu Zhong walked over. “You can’t see the street from here anymore.”

“Mhm.” Qi Yue nodded. “But it doesn’t matter. Back then I watched the street because I had nothing else to look at. Now I’m not that picky about where I zone out.”

Gu Zhong smiled and sat down beside him, propping his legs up on the chair. “Hey, I think this place is pretty good. Business is doing really well. At least we don’t have to keep worrying about it shutting down all the time.”

His phone buzzed in the light. Gu Zhong quickly pulled it out.

Ever since leaving home today, he had been a little worried about his mother. Would she be in a bad mood? Would she be upset? Her son had just gotten up and left without leaving her any face at all. Would she feel like she had raised him for nothing?

But his mother had not contacted him again, and he did not know whether he should contact her first. After all, their disagreement had not been resolved. If he called and the topic came up again, unless he caved, they would just end up arguing again…

The screen showed a message from his mother. Gu Zhong hurriedly opened it.

“Son, just now Mom thought it over. You’re not a little child anymore. There are some things parents shouldn’t interfere in too much. Use your own judgment.”

Gu Zhong went blank.

This message from his mother was completely different from the attitude she had shown that morning.

Such an enormous change left him unable to react for a moment. Based on everything he knew about his mother over the past twenty years, this was basically impossible. So what on earth had happened?

“Who?” Qi Yue asked from beside him.

Gu Zhong lifted his head and looked at him. He stared for a full thirty seconds before finally asking, “You didn’t just go…”

“Mhm?” Qi Yue calmly stubbed out his cigarette. “Go do what?”

It was Qi Yue. It had to be Qi Yue. With that reaction of his, if it had not been him, there was no way he would be this calm.

“Did you go see my mom?” Gu Zhong asked.

“Why ask that?” Qi Yue sat down beside him.

“My mom is pretty stubborn,” Gu Zhong said. “It hasn’t even been a full day, and she’s already backed down? How is that possible? That’s not her style at all.”

“She messaged you?” Qi Yue asked.

“Yeah.” Gu Zhong opened his mother’s message and held the phone out in front of Qi Yue. “You went to see her, right? Otherwise there’s no way to explain why she’d say something like this. When I left this morning, she still had that ‘If you won’t reflect on yourself, then go be a drifter, you useless thing’ attitude.”

“Maybe she… felt sorry for you,” Qi Yue said.

“I only get fifty yuan a week in allowance. I can’t even get it paid half-monthly. If she doesn’t hand it out to me day by day, that already counts as loving me a lot.” Gu Zhong clicked his tongue. “My mom is not an ordinary mom.”

Qi Yue leaned back against the wall and laughed for quite a while.

Then at last he sighed and said, “It was me. But I told her not to contact you first. I didn’t want you to feel like I was meddling between you and your mother.”

“She still contacted me right away,” Gu Zhong said. “See? That’s why I said my mom isn’t an ordinary mom.”

“Don’t mind it,” Qi Yue said. “I didn’t say much else either. I just wanted her not to misunderstand me.”

“I don’t mind.” Gu Zhong looked at him, then lowered his head and looked at his phone. “Not only do I not mind, I’m actually very… emotional. And touched.”

Qi Yue smiled and said nothing.

“When you went out, you mentioned getting serious,” Gu Zhong said. “This never even crossed my mind. I had absolutely no idea you were going to go find my mom.”

“You spent the whole day waiting for her message. I could tell,” Qi Yue said. “I couldn’t very well let you, a little kid, deal with it all alone…”

Gu Zhong shot him a sidelong look.

“I couldn’t very well let you, a… grown man… handle it alone. Is that phrasing acceptable?” Qi Yue asked.

“Oh, come on.” Gu Zhong laughed and sighed. “Where did you meet my mom?”

“At a mahjong parlor,” Qi Yue said.

Gu Zhong burst out laughing at once. “That’s exactly her style. Usually when someone wants to find her, they go there. A friend of hers opened it. Later business got bad, so it turned into a mahjong parlor just for her and her sisters… How did you talk to her? She didn’t just go up and start chewing you out first?”

“At first she ignored me. Then…” Qi Yue lowered his voice, “I helped her win two big rounds, and her impression of me changed all at once.”

“My own mother…” Gu Zhong said.

“Very much your own mother.” Qi Yue nodded.

“You think I’d believe that?” Gu Zhong turned his head and narrowed his eyes at him.

“Believe it. At first she really ignored me, then I really did help her win at mahjong,” Qi Yue said.

“And after that?” Gu Zhong asked.

“Don’t ask.” Qi Yue smiled. “There are some things I could throw caution to the wind and say to your mother, but I don’t want you knowing them.”

“Did you tear up and swear your determination?” Gu Zhong said.

Qi Yue’s smile broke halfway. “Your imagination is way too lacking.”

“Fine then.” Gu Zhong did not plan to keep pressing. He only needed to know that Qi Yue had gotten serious, and to know what he had gotten serious for. As for the process, it did not matter if he never learned it.

If there really had been anything involving tears, he did not particularly want to know anyway… Gu Zhong glanced at Qi Yue’s eyes. They did not look like they had really shed tears.

This new room of Qi Yue’s was far more comfortable for sleeping than before. He could sprawl out however he wanted.

Gu Zhong spread a little blanket out on the floor and went to sleep. This was probably the best and deepest sleep he had had since he was injured and hospitalized.

In the morning, even after hearing movement downstairs, he stubbornly stayed muddle-headed for quite a while before finally getting up.

Qi Yue was no longer in the room. At this hour, the handsome noodle shop owner should already be busy at work in the kitchen.

Yawning, Gu Zhong went downstairs. There was no one in the shop, but there were quite a lot of people outside the entrance.

He was startled and immediately rushed toward the door in a few quick steps. Could there really be some aftermath from last night’s incident? Only after stepping out did he realize that the previous sign that had simply said “Noodles” had been taken down, and several workers were in the middle of installing a brand-new sign.

“Take a look. What do you think?” Qi Yue pulled him aside. “Two.”

Gu Zhong lifted his head and looked. It was still the same simple, rough, direct style, white lettering on a black background, with nothing on it except a single number, 2.

This “2” had been given a bit of design treatment, making it look as though it were swinging its arms, wrapped in wind, and bounding forward as it ran.

“Looks good?” Qi Yue asked.

“Looks good.” Gu Zhong stared at the sign. “Does it mean anything?”

“No. But if you want it to, I can think up a meaning for you right now,” Qi Yue said.

“Come on then, let me hear it.” Gu Zhong laughed.

“This 2, that’s you,” Qi Yue said.

Gu Zhong turned his head and looked at him.

“Really. Can you feel it?” Qi Yue asked.

Gu Zhong said nothing. He stared at the sign for a while longer. “Maybe, possibly, perhaps… I need to force myself to feel it.”

“It’s fine.” Qi Yue said softly by his ear, “There’s plenty of time.”

(End of main text. No extras. No extras.)