A garden plaza.
Patches of green lawn spread out beneath the air thick with floral fragrance, clusters of tea roses and roses blooming freely with fiery vitality.
People sat leisurely on benches, heads lowered over their phones, occasionally reminding their rambunctious children not to burrow into the flowerbeds, or they would get pricked.
Only one young man sat in a small stone pavilion, hammering furiously at a keyboard, utterly ignoring the curious looks cast his way.
"Mom, Mom, what is that uncle doing?" Little Bean asked.
"If you do not work hard when young, you will become a laborer when you grow up. He is a laborer controlled by a computer," his mother said coldly.
Little Bean immediately covered his ears and ran off to play elsewhere.
Parents always thought they could make children study through all kinds of intimidating words.
Yet children had long learned, just like adults, how to find pleasure in avoidance.
What truly worked was leading by example, and belts.
The laborer, Jin Fei, seemed completely unresponsive, as though he had not heard any of it.
Yet the next moment, the woman who had mocked him got up to grab her Little Bean, only to lose her footing and fall into the rosebushes, her face covered in thorn pricks.
"Ah, help!"
Everyone hurried over and pulled the woman out. Little Bean, who had just run off to the side, hurriedly comforted his mother too, saying, "It doesn't hurt, it doesn't hurt."
Jin Fei remained completely unresponsive and continued hammering at the keyboard.
Lines upon lines of code flashed across the laptop screen.
No one in this world knew what they were for, including himself.
Because he was typing in a frenzy.
Like a monkey trying to produce Shakespeare by randomly striking a keyboard.
Strands of black