Xiao Liang went back to his room to pack a change of clothes. Ge Minglan still hadn’t quite recovered from the earlier conversation. She turned to her husband, puzzled.

“Why did the younger one sound so strange today? And what exactly were you two talking about? The more I listened, the less I understood.”

Xiao Changhua rubbed his hands together, as if trying to scrape away the dullness that had weighed on him these past two years and sharpen his edge again.

“People like Xiao Yujun are insatiably greedy. They’ve embezzled tens of millions from the juice factory over the years, and they’ve shown no hesitation in retaliating against anyone who tried to report or investigate them. Do you think they’ve ever felt a shred of guilt? If you want to fight people like that, can you afford to be gentle, kind, and rule-abiding?” he said.

“Your son has figured that out. That’s why, after escaping the crash site, he refused to turn himself in properly to the county police.”

He paused, then continued,

“The factory’s in this state now. If we want to save it, we can’t afford to be overly cautious or cling to rules. And there’s another thing he’s understood: if this fails in the end, the biggest responsibility still lies with Xiao Yujun and his crowd for siphoning off those millions. No one’s going to pin the blame on Xiao Liang or Gu Peijun. At most, people might bring up their promises as a joke. What, are they going to blame the collapse of the factory on them? The world isn’t that unreasonable.”

“This is probably why Wang Xingmin is willing to let them take a shot at it now. If it’s going to fall apart, better sooner than later—while responsibility can still be clearly assigned. If it drags on, things get murky. But if they actually pull it off—” he added, “and ‘pull it off’ doesn’t necessarily mean hitting the sales target in two months, just that the factory survives—then everything becomes negotiable. Even if some promises can’t be fulfilled right away, they can be made up for later. No one will hold onto them.”

He looked at her. “Do you understand now?”

“I understand even less,” Ge Minglan said, pressing her temples.

“In any case, it’s not a big problem. Let the boy go all out,” Xiao Changhua said with a sigh, patting his eldest son Xiao Xiao on the shoulder. “And you—stop overthinking it. Go to your unit tomorrow and apply for unpaid leave. Even if this doesn’t work out, you and your brother are both college graduates. You’ve got ability and character. You won’t starve.”

“Dad’s finally seeing things clearly,” Xiao Liang called out from his room, laughing as he packed.

Just then, someone knocked on the door.

Curious, Xiao Liang leaned out to look. His brother had already gone to open it. Their mother, sitting at the table, immediately darkened at the sight.

Standing in the doorway were his cousin Xiao Fang and his grandmother.

“So something this big happens in the family, and you don’t even say a word?” the old lady demanded as she walked in, fixing her son and daughter-in-law with a sharp glare. “Have you really cut ties with us?”

“It’s nothing serious,” Xiao Changhua said, quickly standing to help her sit. “There wasn’t really anything to report. Look—” he gestured toward a full unopened case of Luzhou Laojiao in the corner, “I just got this for you. I was planning to visit you in the next couple of days.”

Xiao Liang finished packing, slung his bag over his shoulder, called out a quick goodbye, and headed for the door.

Behind him, his grandmother’s voice rose in complaint: “What’s wrong with this child? He just shouts something and leaves—does that count as greeting anyone?”

His grandmother’s life had been nothing short of extraordinary.

Born into a landlord family, she had yearned for revolution in her youth. Her first husband had joined the Red Army in the early 1930s, and together they had three children.

During the War of Resistance, her husband’s unit was relocated, and for a long time there was no word from him. Left alone with three children, she struggled to survive in the countryside of Shishan.

Eventually, unable to endure the hardship, she remarried—a simple, honest tenant farmer. That man became Xiao Liang’s biological grandfather, and they had a son together: Xiao Changhua.

But when Xiao Changhua was still very young, his father died of illness. After the founding of the new regime, her first husband returned to Dongzhou after transferring out of the army. She remarried him again, bringing along all four children—including Xiao Changhua—and later had another son with him.

That first husband thus became Xiao Changhua’s stepfather, and Xiao Changhua took his surname.

On the surface, her life seemed almost perfectly rounded. In reality, it had been anything but peaceful.

Her second marriage had been born of necessity—she simply couldn’t raise three children alone. But she had always looked down on her second husband, the quiet farmer. After reuniting with her first husband, she even regarded that remarriage as a stain on her life—and, deep down, she never truly liked Xiao Changhua.

Of her five children, four were from the Xiao line. That alone ensured Xiao Changhua would always be the overlooked one in the family.

Though she didn’t favor him, she remained domineering, determined to control his life.

When Xiao Changhua married Ge Minglan, she opposed it fiercely. When her opposition failed, she simply washed her hands of his household affairs. After Xiao Liang and his brother were born, they were raised entirely by their parents, without any help from the older generation. When Xiao Liang was four or five, before company childcare systems were restored, he had no choice but to trail after his older brother to school like a tagalong.

It was no surprise, then, that relations between Ge Minglan and her mother-in-law were cold.

The real rupture came two years earlier, during the Chen Fushan case.

At the time, Xiao Liang’s eldest uncle was serving as deputy county magistrate of Ninghai and had originally been promoted by Chen Fushan, the former municipal party secretary. But when the political winds shifted, he was the first to defect to the opposing camp. He even helped fabricate charges to bring Chen down—and went so far as to pressure Xiao Changhua to switch sides as well.

Those grudges had long been etched in place.

In Xiao Liang’s previous life, after misfortune befell him, his parents had gone to those same uncles for help—only to be met with indifference, and worse, open ridicule.

At the root of it all was human jealousy.

Xiao Changhua had never truly been accepted as one of the Xiao family’s own, yet his career had outshone that of his elder brother, who had been groomed with all the family’s resources and connections.

That elder brother had only managed to reach deputy county level in his fifties—widely considered the ceiling of his career. Meanwhile, Xiao Changhua had been promoted to the municipal level in his forties by Chen Fushan himself, seen as a rising star in Dongzhou.

And in the third generation, the least favored branch of the family—Xiao Liang’s—had produced two university graduates in succession, while the other four branches hadn’t managed even one.