Chapter 38

Hoisted into the air, Constantine suddenly felt that his whole little self was in a bad way.

"Uncle, what did you just call me?"

Qiao Huan looked at him with utmost seriousness. "Ding Ding. Don't you like it?"

"Uh..."

Constantine protested, "My name is Constantine! Not some... tacky name like that!"

He'd heard this uncle used to work in folk art. Had he never learned English?

"Oh." Qiao Huan thought for a moment. "Have you not started school yet?"

"What?" For once, Constantine found he couldn't keep up with the other man's train of thought. He stuck out his lower lip. "Of course I go to school!"

"Then you're such a little brat. Haven't you ever been punished by having to copy your name?" Qiao Huan asked, puzzled. "If you had, you should be quite fond of the name Ding Ding. You'd probably even wish you could change your name to the single character Ding."

Constantine: ...

What kind of thought process was that?

Then he said stubbornly, "I go to a private school. They'd never use corporal punishment like a public school!"

Qiao Huan didn't find it strange at all that an eight-year-old could say something like that. He went straight for the heart. "So you can't even write Chinese?"

"I can!"

What a joke. Everywhere he went, he was called a child prodigy. No one had ever questioned his abilities!

Qiao Huan took it in stride. He immediately crouched down, set Constantine on the floor, and picked up the red paint beside him.

"Write your name. Let me see."

Constantine watched this uncle casually pick up the fake blood he'd painstakingly mixed, and his face turned red with anger.

"That's the fake blood I made! Aren't you scared?"

Qiao Huan frowned. "I am a little scared..."

A smug look returned to Constantine's little face.

Qiao Huan rubbed some between his fingers. "You used a little too little corn syrup, so it doesn't look very sticky. And you used chocolate syrup and food coloring to color it, right? The color's right, but it smells too sweet."

"So I am a little scared, mostly that it'll attract bugs and be hard to wash out. You know, doing laundry is a hassle."

A crack suddenly appeared in Constantine's train of thought.

His only concern was... that it would be hard to wash out?

Then, for the first time in a long while, he felt a little awe.

It had only been a dozen seconds or so since this uncle walked in, and not only had the fake blood failed to scare him, he'd instantly figured out what was in it!

He'd clearly scared off the previous two aunties with the same trick!

Seeing that he wasn't moving, Qiao Huan simply handed him the fake blood.

"Write your name. Let me see how well you write."

Qiao Huan actually wanted to get a sense of his background.

There were only two private schools nearby. One taught Chinese and the other didn't, and their fees were worlds apart. He wanted to use Constantine's writing ability to estimate just how much savings Fan Hui had left.

Constantine's whole little body went rigid, and he looked to Director Xiao Feng behind him for help.

Weren't the surrogate parents supposed to be gentle? Why was he being tested right off the bat?

Seeing the little tyrant thwarted, Xiao Feng's heart blossomed with joy.

This kid, who had always looked down on their Production Team, had actually looked at him!

This was the first time Constantine had ever asked them for help!

Xiao Feng cleared his throat and nudged Qiao Huan. "Mr. Qiao, isn't this inappropriate?"

"Huh?" Qiao Huan took a moment to process that. "It is."

Constantine had just breathed a sigh of relief when the man radiating a terrifying aura pulled a marker out of some pocket or other.

"Use this."

Seeing the two of them staring blankly, Qiao Huan explained, "In our traditional culture, writing someone's name in red is indeed a little unlucky. It's not superstition; in ancient times, only the names of prisoners sentenced to death were written in red, so it became taboo. I didn't think it through. Sorry."

The uncles and aunties at the Folk Customs Association had taught him that before.

Constantine and Xiao Feng: ...

Even while giving a test, he didn't forget to spread traditional culture. As expected of him!

Left with no choice, Constantine wrote his name on a piece of paper in crooked strokes.

To prove he wasn't bad at writing, he stubbornly added his English name afterward in flowing cursive.

When he was done, Constantine looked at Qiao Huan, thoroughly pleased with himself. "Well?"

One look at the strokes and the way he wrote the Chinese characters told Qiao Huan that the child didn't write Chinese often. He nodded. "For an eight-year-old, you write very well."

"I meant the English..."

"Calligraphy is a vast and profound art. The more you write, the better you'll get."

Thus encouraged, Constantine's face filled with black lines.

Was he really that bad?

"Mr. Qiao," Xiao Feng urged, "we believe in encouragement here!"

This kid already held grudges. They didn't need him causing more trouble!

Qiao Huan found that a little strange. "Doesn't he have an IQ of 140? He should be able to tell the difference between flattery and the truth, right?"

When he'd interned at the Criminal Investigation Unit, he'd handled cases involving a few juvenile delinquents who were geniuses. Not to mention he'd spent so long with someone like Bai Jike, whose head was full of computer data. He thought communicating like this was perfectly normal.

Xiao Feng nodded awkwardly. "All right..."

Well then, good luck to you.

"Next, you'll make him lunch and get him down for a nap." Xiao Feng knew their script for reforming the child would most likely die young, so he became a cold, heartless machine for cueing the next step. "We'll be watching the monitors in the next room. Call me if you need anything."

"Oh..."

Cooking?

Qiao Huan's expression shifted.

"When will the other surrogate parent arrive?" Qiao Huan asked.

Xiao Feng checked his messages. "Probably this afternoon. There's some flight congestion at the airport right now."

"..."

That meant he had to spend a while longer with this child before the real parent, one Mr. Ye, could take over.

After Xiao Feng left, Constantine looked at Qiao Huan with a big smile. "Uncle, what are we eating?"

To be fair, the child was quite good-looking, a mixed-race kid with curly hair, big eyes, a high nose bridge, and skin so fair it glowed.

But no matter how Qiao Huan looked at it, something about that smile seemed off.

Qiao Huan said, "Are you hungry?"

Constantine froze.

The previous surrogate parents had done whatever the Production Team told them to. Why was this one asking him?

He answered honestly, "A little hungry."

"Then that's perfect..." Qiao Huan wanted to take Constantine's hand like other parents did, but the eight-year-old was simply too short, and he couldn't be bothered to bend down. His hand circled in the air before accurately pinching hold of two tufts of the boy's hair. "Show me around your house?"

Constantine, seized by the hair of fate, said, "...Okay."

"This is my bedroom."

"This is my mom's bedroom."

"This is the study..."

As Constantine introduced each room, he felt more and more like a child laborer working as a tour guide.

The tourist Qiao Huan, meanwhile, did nothing but hold his hair and say not a word.

In fact, as they walked, Qiao Huan not only got a rough idea of where the cameras were, but also formed a judgment about Fan Hui's financial situation.

The house wasn't considered expensive in the Coastal Community, and its interior took minimalism to the extreme.

In other words, not much money had been spent on it.

Qiao Huan even noticed conspicuous blank spaces on the floors and walls in certain parts of the house.

Clearly, the ornaments and paintings that had stood or hung there had only recently been removed.

Was she planning to sell off her property and run?

Then why put her child on this show?

"This is the kitchen... Uncle?"

Seeing that the new surrogate parent wasn't paying him any attention at all, Constantine finally reached the end of his patience and plopped down on the floor.

"I'm hungry!"

Drawing on years of interrogation experience, Qiao Huan saw through his lousy acting in a second. "No, you're not."

Constantine said, "I really am hungry!"

"All right, I'll cook, then." Qiao Huan picked up a mop and bucket from the side. "Clean up the fake blood you made. You should be hungry by the time you're done."

Seeing this, Constantine coquettishly grabbed Qiao Huan's arm. "But I want to cook with you, Uncle."

"But Uncle doesn't want to cook with you." Qiao Huan pried his little hand off. "Think about it. Wasn't it uncomfortable when I watched you write? That's because it's uncomfortable to have someone watching you do something you're not good at. You're not good at writing, and I'm not good at cooking."

Constantine said, "Huh?"

Xiao Feng was dumbfounded in the next room, too.

No one in this world liked bratty kids, much less liked talking sense into them. He knew the guests who came on this show only did it to show off their patient, capable-and-virtuous personas.

He'd thought the same was true of Qiao Huan and the other three.

But Qiao Huan had just openly admitted that he couldn't cook?

Clearly won over by Qiao Huan's logic, Constantine left a guest's side for the first time since the show began. He picked up a small mop and bucket and went to clean.

Qiao Huan breathed an instant sigh of relief.

Then he looked at the refrigerator.

The only ingredients inside were a few kinds of greens and some Crayfish.

Xiao Feng had just told him that Constantine wasn't used to Chinese food, and the only ingredient he could accept was Crayfish, which was neither quite Chinese nor quite Western.

Crayfish happened to be a specialty of City B. The city had even once wanted to promote itself as the Hometown of Crawfish, but after Platinum Coast was built, a group of wealthy homeowners opposed it, feeling that such publicity lowered their prestige. The plan had come to nothing.

Meanwhile, as Constantine cleaned up his prank, the more he thought about it, the angrier he got.

The cleaner had always taken care of this before. Later, his mother had stopped hiring a cleaning lady, but there had at least been new guests to clean up.

Since when had he ever had to do it himself?

So he smeared fake blood all over himself, intending to give Qiao Huan a surprise from behind.

But just as he turned around—

Qiao Huan picked up a cleaver, twirled it rather confidently in his hand, and brought it down on the chopping board with a bang.

The shells on the Crayfish's backs split open instantly. One of them even flew through the air in a graceful arc and landed right in front of Constantine.

Eep.

Constantine was scared silly.

Xiao Feng was scared silly too.

When he'd just heard Qiao Huan say he couldn't cook, he'd thought the man was trying to come up with a novel way to establish an honest persona.

He hadn't expected it to be true.

But for a salted-fish big shot to be unable to cook somehow made him a little... cute?

Xiao Feng spoke with the editor behind him. They had to include all this footage in the final cut.

"Pick it up for me," Qiao Huan told Constantine. "Thank you."

His tone was as ordinary as ever, and he expressed no opinion about the thick corn syrup covering Constantine from head to toe.

But to Constantine's ears, that voice somehow conveyed impatience and a faint hint of threat.

He instantly tossed the Crayfish back, feeling that it was the fate awaiting him if he kept courting death.

After that, he cleaned with great care.

Meanwhile, Qiao Huan continued dealing ruthless blows to the Crayfish.

Although he wasn't much of a cook, he'd eaten Crayfish quite a few times and felt that their only flaw was how troublesome they were to eat.

If the two of them spent an hour eating, how much would that affect the efficiency of the investigation?

He wondered if he could peel all the shrimp meat out and make a Pirate Shrimp Rice Bowl, which would be convenient to eat.

He was a dab hand with a knife, but peeling shells...

Forget it.

The Production Team had taken the guests' phones, so Qiao Huan didn't even have a chance to look it up online.

But there was a cookbook beside him. Qiao Huan casually flipped through it. At first he paid it little attention, but the more he read, the more he felt the door to a new world had opened.

Eating vegetarian was healthy!

Qiao Huan abandoned the idea of making Crayfish in a second.

Then, as he picked through the vegetables, he wondered whether he was slacking off.

Before he and Ye Yiwei revealed their identities to each other, outsiders had thought him a real salted fish, but he himself knew he worked very hard. To gain the trust of a smuggling organization's big shot, he'd once stayed up all night memorizing the rules of the underworld without finding it tiring.

That was much more complicated than a cookbook.

But recently, especially when they were writing songs together, he and Ye Yiwei had spent a long time eating and sleeping together. He'd gradually come to feel that there were some things he no longer wanted to do personally.

Besides, Ye Yiwei had his own strengths. His sensitivity to art and his attentiveness, always ready to take care of others, happened to be the areas Qiao Huan himself wasn't very good at.

Watching more and more water come out of the greens as he stir-fried them, Qiao Huan increasingly wished Ye Yiwei would hurry up and get there.

Though he didn't want to, he had to admit it in his heart: he had changed.

Qiao Tang had always scolded him for throwing himself into his missions and paying no attention to anything else.

So did he now want to work with Ye Yiwei because he wanted to finish the mission quickly, or because he found "working together" itself rather interesting?

But reality gave him no chance to finish pondering the question.

Splash!

The sound of something falling into water came from behind him.

Qiao Huan turned around alertly, only to see a splash in the small swimming pool in the backyard.

"Constantine fell into the pool himself!" Xiao Feng shouted from next door. "This kid's stirring up trouble again!"

It took Qiao Huan a moment to react, but he immediately took off his shoes and prepared to rescue him.

How on earth did this kid develop such self-destructive tendencies? This is no ordinary little terror.

In the blink of an eye—

A black figure vaulted over the fence and plunged straight into the water!

Xiao Feng, who had rushed over, froze on the spot.

Is this the other guest's grand entrance?

What kind of immortals are the people on Xiu Si? Do they all take such unusual paths?

Qiao Huan, however, felt a wave of relief.

It must be Ye Yiwei. He's always had a particular obsession with rescuing people from the water—

*!!!*

What?!

Constantine's head surfaced first. He struggled and shouted, "I can swim. You don't need to save me..."

Then another head surfaced, that of an adult man.

But it wasn't the curly-haired man Qiao Huan had been longing for. It was a dark-skinned man with a buzz cut!

Zhuo Yang held Constantine under his arm and pushed himself up with one hand, standing up in the pool. He looked at Qiao Huan and grinned.

"The other guest is here! Bet you didn't expect it to be me! Mr. Ye and I swapped groups!"

Faced with Zhuo Yang's sudden appearance, Qiao Huan naturally had a thousand questions.

But behind them, steam puffed from the pot of rice, and the wok under which Qiao Huan had turned off the heat early was making an unpleasant watery sound.

Right now, Qiao Huan only wanted to know one thing.

Would they still get to eat this meal?