Walking Sideways

They reunited amid Green Mountains and Green Waters. They were no longer a young boy and a little girl.

Hearing Li Baoping greet him loudly, Chen Ping'an smiled and nodded, teasing, "You can drink now? No need to hide it. Your Junior Uncle is a drunkard too."

Li Baoping beamed. "I'm an old girl now!"

Chen Ping'an was speechless.

By ordinary reckoning, Li Baoping should have said that she was grown up now and could drink.

Only at this moment did Chen Ping'an remember that Li Baoping and Li Huai were no longer young.

But there was no helping it. In his heart, he always liked to see them as children. By the customs back home, everyone who had gone traveling together back then should long since have married. Perhaps their children had already reached the age to apprentice as potters.

The present Li Baoping needed only lift her eyes slightly to see her Junior Uncle. She blinked and said, "Good. Junior Uncle looks exactly as I imagined, so even if you hadn't greeted me just now, I would have recognized you at a glance!"

Chen Ping'an reached out and patted Li Baoping on the head, smiling. "In your Junior Uncle's eyes, apart from being taller, you don't seem any different."

She still seemed to be that little girl in red who had run through the streets and alleys of their hometown, panting away with a locust branch over her shoulder.

Thinking that way, Chen Ping'an was no longer so melancholy, and quietly gave up on taking out his Sword Nurturing Gourd for a drink.

When he was fourteen, and Little Baoping was the only one accompanying him on his travels, Chen Ping'an would occasionally wonder whether the little girl truly did not get tired after walking so far. She