Chapter 17. Majing Hutong

     It snowed in Zhangjiakou on Monday morning.

     There was a traffic jam on the road. Ye Mo arrived at the company at 9 o’clock, close to the working time. She took out the makeup mirror to look at her face. Her makeup was complete, and she opened the door and got out of the car.

     “Good morning.”

     “Good morning-?”

     While waiting for the elevator, she met a male colleague from the next department. He was stunned as if he had seen a ghost.

     When the elevator door opened, Ye Mo walked into the elevator, and he hurriedly followed her into the elevator.

     The atmosphere along the way was too quiet.

     When the elevator reached the 14th floor, the male colleague walked out of the elevator in advance without knowing it. Until Ye Mo disappeared at the corner wall leading to the locker room, he slapped his forehead and said “Fuck” three times in a row.

     “Is that Ye Mo from the engineering department?!”

     It happened that his position was near the office in the public area, and his colleagues who had just seen Ye Mo had the same “Fuck” on their faces as he did.

     For a while, the men were more lively than the women when they gossiped.

     “Manager Ye has become so beautiful.”

     “Stupid, that’s because she put on makeup, changed her hairstyle, and changed her glasses. Have you forgotten that our manager always amazes a lot of people at the annual meeting every year? Of course, she only wore light makeup back then, but now it’s much heavier.”

     “You can’t tell how heavy her makeup is. You women are really amazing at putting on makeup. The same person, but you don’t look like the same person.”

     “She has a better figure, and those legs. Could it be that Manager Ye is in love?”

     “It’s possible. Manager Ye took two days off last week. Maybe she went on a blind date.”

     “Which man takes the only beauty in our project team, let’s beat him up!”

     After more than an hour of work, a few people were still talking about it, and they extended this discussion to other departments of the company during lunch time.

     The men were generally quite reserved.

     There are also groups of women who come to the engineering department to take a look around and compare.

     It’s not that Ye Mo is so stunning or independent. She has a beauty rating of 85 or above, but she doesn’t look like a celebrity walking on the street.

     The main problem is the ‘freshness’, ‘magic’ and ‘change’. Even the cosmetics she uses have been consulted by several female colleagues next door. It’s a woman’s nature to love beauty.

     Also, the reason is that the departments are really idle at the end of the year.

     When Ye Mo took the project information to the office of Xie Xin, the manager of the engineering department, she couldn’t avoid being teased by her boss.

     “Spring comes a little early this year!”

     “…”

     Ye Mo put the documents on Manager Xie’s desk, with her resignation report on top. “Old Xie, you think too much. It’s still a cold winter with a temperature of minus eight degrees.”

     “The Spring Festival is coming soon. I want to find a companion to go home for the New Year. I understand.” Manager Xie looked like an experienced person, and narrowed his small single eyelid eyes into a slit. “But it’s not worth giving up your career for a man. Our company is one of the leading groups in the mechanical industry in China.”

     Ye Mo nodded: “That’s right. Thank you Manager Xie for your care and teaching over the years.”

     “Thank you so much.”

     After a failed persuasion, Manager Xie could only take over Ye Mo’s resignation letter helplessly: “The project will not be announced to the public before it is fully completed. If you regret it, I will pretend that I didn’t see this.”

     Ye Mo hesitated for a moment, but still did not change his words: “Please ask Manager Xie to arrange someone to take over as soon as possible!”

     She went to work in Chuanming Group directly after graduation. She still had feelings for the group. When she resigned, she was not very happy, but felt a lot of loss. 

     To put it in a more hypocritical way, this company is really an important period of her youth.

     “Old Ye, when you leave, even the mosquitoes in our engineering department are male, and it has really become a Buddhist temple!”

     Manager Xie wiped away the non-existent tears in a dramatic way, and his performance was very eye-catching.

     Ye Mo watched him pretend calmly.

     It happened that the administrative assistant came in to deliver the information, and he couldn’t help laughing so hard that his shoulders were shaking. Following Manager Xie, it was definitely a sin to have a low sense of laughter, because Manager Xie often made jokes like this.

     Manager Xie also looked quite festive, with a tall and strong body, a round face, and round eyes. I really don’t know how he won the beautiful lady in the financial department of the neighboring group.

……

     As soon as the resignation report was submitted, the project was nearing its end.

     Ye Mo’s work became easier. She put the practice of mental control in the office during the day and trained her physical fitness from early morning to late evening.

     Occasionally, she would take the paid annual leave left over from last year.

     In addition, she used the excuse of “using public power for personal gain” and used the group’s equipment to conduct project experiments, and forged several fire axes.

     The hardness and sharpness were improved to a certain extent compared with the fire axes used on the market, but the special properties were not good. Just imitating the patterns on the axe body could not imitate the essence of it.

     Ye Mo could not help but feel a little disappointed.

     She encountered setbacks in the fire axe, but in other aspects of mechanical design, Ye Mo discovered many more new possibilities.

     For example, she found that the primary mental control technique can improve the precision when it acts on metal materials or composite materials. The materials are all non-living substances. There is a paragraph in the front of the control skill book.

     Using mental power for work, Ye Mo can not only quickly discover the basic characteristics of various materials, but also have unexpected advantages in the production process of some precision equipment.

     As we all know, China’s industrial development is very comprehensive, but on many high-precision equipment, it is subject to a joint blockade from developed countries such as the United States, Japan, and Germany.

     It is not difficult to find the secrets of some high-end equipment design. Ye Mo seems to have found the possibility of a breakthrough, and her professional ability has also made a very obvious leap forward.

     If it were not for the desperate situation of the copy, She would have become a winner in life, allowing domestic industrial high-end technology to catch up with the United States and Germany, and help China to reach the top of the world’s industry…

     Ahem, cough, cough.

     Compared to boringly training mental power at home, there are more interesting materials in the company for her to toss. Different materials, different hardness, and different density are more beneficial to primary manipulation.

 

   【The survivor Ye Mo was detected to have broken through the mental critical value, and the mental attribute was +1. 】

 

     When exploring high-end bearing steel, there was an unexpected surprise discovery, and suddenly I couldn’t bear to leave the company.

     It happened that the last CNC bending machine equipment project at the end of the year in Group 3 had a flaw.

     The group could not recruit an engineer to replace her at the end of the year, and there were still some small and small miscellaneous items in the subsequent production of the project. Ye Mo agreed to extend the working hours for a while.

     She even began to think about whether to resign.

     Will not resigning help her train her mental strength better than resigning?

 

…

 

     It is worth mentioning that in addition to training herself, Ye Mo has also been following the news on the Internet on December 21, the Winter Solstice Festival.

     There is no news on North Korea and Mongolia, and it is not available on the hot searches in Japan and South Korea.

     As for China, on the evening of the 21st, two or three social news about strange deaths appeared one after another on Sina’s hot searches.

     Except for that trainee, these hot search news were quickly occupied by entertainment news, and only limited words could be searched.

     When Ye Mo went to look for it again on the 24th, many news had been forcibly “404 removed from the shelves”.

     The mass deaths at almost the same time undoubtedly attracted the attention of relevant national departments.

     As for the superpowers, Ye Mo did not see anyone pop up.

     Perhaps someone popped up but she didn’t know, and she would not pop up for this because she was afraid of trouble.

     Regarding whether the props produced by the system can be used by ordinary people, whether other people can see the system app, the conditions for logging into the game, whether the Government father has discovered the app…

     There are many questions, Ye Mo chose to temporarily suppress her curiosity and carefully cover her vest.

 

…

 

     On January 19, two days before the start of the second copy, on Friday noon, Ye Mo asked for half a day off again. It was said that there was still a lot of annual salary leave left last year, so it would be a waste if she didn’t deduct it.

     Manager Xie had no choice but to say: “Let’s go!”

     Back home, she put on a lighter makeup, wrapped the cashmere scarf that was almost forgotten by the owner, and covered it with a thick white down jacket, and led Bandit to the parking lot.

    “Woof woof woof!” The big black dog was temporarily fixed in a limited position, and his tail kept shaking.

     “Be obedient, play with your toys.”

     Ye Mo drove out of the community and headed towards the capital Beijing. The destination was where she grew up-Majing Hutong.

     Hutong is one of the city’s business cards of Beijing, the capital of China. Majing Hutong, where Grandma Ye lives, is the prime location in the hutong.

     Not only is it located within the Second Ring Road of Beijing, it is also not far from prime attractions such as Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, Nanluoguxiang, and Jingshan Park.

     Ye Mo has been quiet and taciturn since childhood, and has strange interests.

     Even though these attractions are right at her doorstep, she has never thought of playing and frolicking. She doesn’t know much about them, and the only thing that impressed her the most is the flag-raising ceremony.

     The hutong in her memory is more like an old photo.

     In the 1980s, fields and graves could still be seen on the Second and Third Ring Roads of Beijing. The hutongs were dark and messy, and the mess was really messy, dilapidated, and noisy.

     The hutongs now are very different from before.

     The ground is clean and tidy, and every household has more plants. The alleys are winding and winding. Even in the cold winter, in the noisy city, you can hear one or two crisp chirping birds.

     It is both poetic and strange.

     After parking the car in the community parking lot, Ye Mo led the bandit and walked deep into the hutong.

     In the past, a courtyard house was allocated to several families to live together, and there were even dozens of families. However, people at that time preferred to move to buildings, and they were very unhappy when they were allocated.

     Unfortunately, Mr. Ye was a conservative man. In the chaotic era, he secretly hid antiques and broken wood. So he bought a courtyard house with three entrances together with Mr. Ling, who shared the same ideals.

     Now it seems that they made a fortune.

     The courtyard house has three entrances. The middle courtyard of the second entrance belongs to the Ling family, and the north courtyard of the third entrance belongs to the Ye family. The public areas such as the front yard are shared by the two families. If they are not taken into consideration, a line is drawn in the middle to separate them.

     The relationship between the Ye family and the Ling family has always been good.

     After Grandpa Ye, Grandpa Ling and Grandma Ling passed away one after another, the Ling family still tried their best to help Grandma Ye. The evidence is that the newly opened side door in the northwest corner of the third entrance is rarely opened.

     Ye Mo and Uncle Ling spend much more time together than seeing her biological parents.

     Uncle Ling and Aunt Zhang’s only son Ling Xiao is studying at Peking University in Kyoto. He comes home less often, so they rent out the west wing of the second courtyard.

     Of course, 90-year-old Grandma Ye doesn’t live alone in the empty North Courtyard. She lives with Aunt Yang, a part-time cook, and Uncle Li, a protective gatekeeper.

     Ye Mo used to go back to Beijing once or twice a month.

     Since her half-brother often sent his twins here, the number of phone calls has increased, and the meetings have become less frequent, only once every three months.

     Whether it’s a half-brother or a half-sister, they are basically strangers with blood. What’s more strange than strangers is that when they bump into each other, they will have awkward conversations.

     To be realistic, money moves people’s hearts.

     Siheyuan is so valuable that Wang Qiulan, Ye Mo’s father’s current wife, doesn’t seem to want to see this cheap daughter too many times in the courtyard and make indirect comments behind her back.

     Ye Mo doesn’t care much about other people, but she doesn’t want Grandma Ye to embarrass the remaining relatives.

     “Woof woof woof!”

     Bandit was a big black dog that was very arrogant both inside and outside the hutong.

     Although he had rarely come to the alley, facing the unfamiliar environment, bandit still held his head high, strode with his head held high, and walked towards the main gate of the courtyard at an unhurried and unhurried pace, showing the demeanor of a king.

     Ye Mo: “….look at the stupid face you have!”