Lu Qingyuan stayed in her hometown for three days before heading to the Shu family, where she spent another two days. Only then did she return to the machinery factory.

She brought back plenty of fresh vegetables and fruits, all grown in her family’s garden.

Since leafy greens spoil quickly, she shared some with Sun Yue and a few friendly neighbors. Then she stored the rest and took a look around the house.

Everything was spotless. The blankets were folded neatly like tofu cubes, and the pots, bowls, and chopsticks were all clean.

Lu Qingyuan liked this about Shu Beiqiu—he was very tidy.

This time, she hadn’t brought any bamboo strips with her.

So after resting for a bit, she boiled some water for a bath and washed her hair. When it was about time, she started cooking.

She made tiger-skin green peppers, stir-fried chives with eggs, a mixed stew with green beans, eggplant, and cucumbers, along with rice cooked with beans.

When Shu Beiqiu arrived home, he saw Lu Qingyuan setting the dishes on the table.

“You’re back,” she greeted.

“Wash your hands and eat,” Lu Qingyuan called out.

Shu Beiqiu smiled and did as she said.

“I missed you while you were away,” Shu Beiqiu said, hugging her before sitting down.

“I see you managed just fine on your own,” Lu Qingyuan teased as she ladled soup into his bowl. “Everything is neat and tidy. You really know how to keep things in order.”

“I can’t stand a messy house. It has to be clean,” Shu Beiqiu replied.

Then he asked about the wedding banquet.

“Sister-in-law Baozhen is really pretty. She and Brother Qingguo make a great couple. I stayed home for three days, and they were inseparable. Second Aunt was grinning every day.”

Only then did Shu Beiqiu recall this cousin-in-law of his—Cheng Baozhen, from their production team.

“I just remember she always kept her head down and spoke so softly that you could barely hear her. But after learning about her past from my mother, I understood why.”

“I heard about it too,” Lu Qingyuan’s face darkened with disgust. “Even a tiger wouldn’t eat its own cubs, but her father was downright cruel. Why didn’t the production team step in?”

Shu Beiqiu placed some food in her bowl. “Domestic matters like that are tricky. If you interfere, you might bring trouble upon yourself, so most people don’t want to get involved.”

“So, if someone beats their family member to death, it’s still considered a domestic matter?” Lu Qingyuan asked as she picked up a tiger-skin pepper and took a bite.

“In some remote mountain areas, if someone is killed, they just bury the body and claim the person died of illness. Nobody digs them up to verify. After a while, they register a death certificate and close the case.”

Shu Beiqiu’s words sent chills down Lu Qingyuan’s spine.

“I don’t even want to think about that.”

Seeing her frightened, Shu Beiqiu quickly reassured her. “I’m just saying. The world isn’t all that dark.”

“Hopefully not,” Lu Qingyuan murmured.

After dinner, she washed up. Feeling exhausted, she lay down, and Shu Beiqiu gave her a full-body massage.

As he massaged her, he realized she had gone completely still. Looking up, he saw that she had already fallen asleep.

Shu Beiqiu chuckled, leaned forward to kiss her cheek, then lay beside her and gently fanned her with a palm-leaf fan.

When Lu Qingyuan woke up, Shu Beiqiu was already gone.

As expected, breakfast was neatly placed on the table.

After eating, she went out with Sun Yue.

Since she already had vegetables at home, she didn’t need to buy any. The two of them were heading to the moat, which had just been repaired. Today, they were filling it with water and beating drums to celebrate.

With such a lively event, they didn’t want to miss out.

There were a lot of people there. Worried about getting separated in the crowd, Lu Qingyuan and Sun Yue held hands the entire time.

When the river water surged forward, Lu Qingyuan joined everyone in shouting excitedly.

She couldn’t even remember what she had yelled. Caught up in the moment, she was simply swept away by the excitement of the crowd.

It wasn’t until she calmed down at home and started preparing lunch that she realized she had accidentally left her livestream running. To her surprise, she had even received gifts.

She had been so immersed in the excitement of the event, with her eyes fixed on the river, that she hadn’t even glanced at the barrage of comments.

After carefully thinking back, she made sure she hadn’t said anything inappropriate. Then, she went back to cooking.

【Life here is so peaceful and beautiful.】

【When the floodgate opened and the river water rushed out, I got goosebumps.】

【This entire river channel was dug by hand. It’s nothing like the fully mechanized construction we have today.】

【Yes, human progress is truly visible.】

While eating, Lu Qingyuan saw these comments on Shu Beiqiu’s head.

Shu Beiqiu chatted with his wife as he ate. “We got a new worker in the technical department today,” he said. “His name is Pang Dahai, he is in his forties, he joined the technical department directly without an apprenticeship period, and everyone is discussing his background.”

“No apprenticeship?” Lu Qingyuan asked.

“Yeah.”

Shu Beiqiu nodded. “Technically, that’s against the rules. But the higher-ups didn’t say anything, and since it was an official decision from above, no one questioned it.”

“I’m really curious about his skills,” Shu Beiqiu continued. “If he skipped the apprenticeship, he must be very capable. I’d like to learn from him.”

“I’ll ask around later and see what the neighbors know,” Lu Qingyuan said.

She glanced at the screen and saw the comments exploding with exclamation marks.

【Pang Dahai?! The top-tier technician who got kicked out of the provincial machinery factory and sent to the county factory!】

【In the original story, he was an excellent technician. But after witnessing some shady dealings among the leadership, he was pushed out to the county, separating him from his family for so long that his children grew distant from him. Later, he fell into despair. While working, he had an accident, and a machine severed his palm. A skilled technician ended up being demoted to logistics.】

【I remember now! Not long after he was moved to logistics, the factory went through a wave of layoffs. Pang Dahai was one of the casualties. When he returned to the provincial capital, his children saw him as an embarrassment. To support his family, he did hard labor, which eventually led to a fatal accident.】

【A talented technician who got destroyed just because he was too honest. And his kids turned out to be ungrateful brats. Disgusting.】

After reading all of this, Lu Qingyuan sucked in a breath.

Pang Dahai’s life was way too tragic.

That afternoon, after ending her livestream, Lu Qingyuan sat in the courtyard downstairs with Sun Yue, chatting with the other women in the neighborhood.

As they talked, someone brought up Pang Dahai.

Sure enough, a few people knew he was from the provincial capital, but that was all they could say about him.

In the evening, when Shu Beiqiu came home, Lu Qingyuan shared what she had heard.

“I think,” she said thoughtfully, “since he came from the provincial machinery factory and skipped the apprenticeship, he must be a highly skilled technician. You should learn from him.”

“I already had a feeling,” Shu Beiqiu said, his eyes lighting up. “Watching him work today, I could tell he’s no ordinary technician. He might be a hidden expert. I just don’t understand why he ended up here.”

“Me neither,” Lu Qingyuan said, feigning ignorance. “But if you get close to him and learn from him, maybe one day we can invite him over for a meal.”

“Good idea,” Shu Beiqiu agreed. He was eager to build a connection.

At that moment, Zhuo Bin and Sun Yue were also eating.

“That Pang guy is so arrogant,” Zhuo Bin complained. “Someone asked him a question, and he snapped, ‘You can’t even figure that out? What did you do during your apprenticeship, eat dirt?’ He’s really unpleasant.”

“You better stay away from him, or he’ll tear you apart,” Sun Yue said.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Zhuo Bin muttered.

In the following days, Zhuo Bin noticed that Shu Beiqiu got along surprisingly well with the sharp-tongued Pang Dahai.

Zhuo Bin asked Shu Beiqiu privately, “You don’t think he’s arrogant and rude? Most of our coworkers don’t even want to talk to him.”

“He’s arrogant because he’s skilled,” Shu Beiqiu said. “And as for his sharp tongue…” He rubbed his chin. “Compared to how my master trained me, he’s not that bad.”

Zhuo Bin thought back to his own apprenticeship. He had been scolded all the time back then.

“You really think he’s that skilled?”

“Extremely,” Shu Beiqiu said seriously. “Zhuo Bin, we have a lot to learn from him.”

Zhuo Bin frowned.

He had worked hard to become a full-time employee. He wasn’t eager to be berated like a rookie again.

But since Shu Beiqiu insisted, Zhuo Bin reluctantly tried getting close to Pang Dahai.

He got torn apart.

Pang Dahai bluntly told him that his technical foundation was weak and that he shouldn’t have passed his apprenticeship in the first place.

That was the last time Zhuo Bin went anywhere near him.

Soon, it became clear that Shu Beiqiu was the only one in the technical department brave enough to stick around Pang Dahai.

Even though Pang Dahai scolded him too, Shu Beiqiu didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he kept improving, treating Pang Dahai like a second mentor.

His colleagues didn’t understand why.

When Lu Qingyuan heard that Pang Dahai was coming over for dinner, she went to Heizhu Town and bought a two-kilogram carp and two kilograms of pork belly.

She prepared braised carp, braised pork, cold eggplant salad, stir-fried chili peppers, a bottle of rice wine, and a plate of salt-and-pepper peanuts.

The meal was exceptionally generous.

When Pang Dahai arrived, carrying a watermelon, he hadn’t expected such a lavish spread.

Dinner was lively and enjoyable.

At work, Pang Dahai was sharp-tongued and merciless. But at the dinner table, he was polite and respectful toward Lu Qingyuan.

After drinking for a while, he started talking about his daughter.

“My youngest daughter is fifteen,” he said. “She’s in that rebellious phase. When I was home, she would pick fights with me every day. Now that I’m here, I write her letters, but she never writes back.”

Pang Dahai sighed, “I really don’t know how to communicate with them.”

“Have you had conflicts before?”

“We’ve had plenty,” Pang Dahai smiled bitterly. “Too many to count. I just hope they can behave at home, listen to their grandparents, and not cause any trouble.”

“What about their mother?”

Shu Beiqiu had never heard Pang Dahai mention his wife before.

Hearing this, Pang Dahai sighed. “She passed away a few years ago.”

For a moment, Shu Beiqiu and Lu Qingyuan didn’t know what to say.

But Pang Dahai continued, “My family wanted to arrange for me to remarry, but I refused. However, my son and daughter thought I had already moved on. They started giving me attitude, treating me with cold stares and harsh words. Since then, we’ve been unable to communicate.”

“If I scold them, they cry and shout for their mother, saying I want to marry a stepmother and abandon them.”

“If I try to talk to them properly, they ignore me completely and then tell me to shut up.”

Pang Dahai looked troubled. “It’s tough. Ever since I came here, without those endless arguments, I do feel a little more relaxed, but I still worry about them.”

Especially his younger daughter.

His father wrote him a letter saying that his youngest daughter had started dating someone—she was only fifteen.

Pang Dahai wrote back, telling her not to date so early, but she never replied.

In the end, Shu Beiqiu was the one who sent Pang Dahai back home.

Right now, Pang Dahai was staying in the same dormitory Shu Beiqiu had lived in before.

By the time Shu Beiqiu returned, Lu Qingyuan had already finished tidying up.

“Go take a bath.”

“I’ll mop the floor later,” Shu Beiqiu said.

“Alright,” Lu Qingyuan replied.