As usual, lunch beneath the ginkgo tree consisted of four dishes and a soup. Today, Lu Menge had made garlic pork ribs, braised chicken wings, stir-fried vegetables, and tomato egg-drop soup. Wu Changkong's cold cucumber salad sat in the center of the table. Last week, he had said he would add more vinegar, and this week he really had added an extra spoonful. It was sour enough to make Xie Xie frown, but his chopsticks never stopped moving.
"Teacher Wu's cooking is good enough that he could open a restaurant if he ever stopped teaching," Xie Xie mumbled around a cleaned rib bone.
Wu Changkong did not answer. He merely placed the last rib into Lu Menge's bowl. Zhang Yangzi flipped his tactical handbook open to the meal record page and wrote under this week's cold cucumber salad: Too much vinegar, but still better than the cafeteria. Tang Wulin and Gu Yue sat opposite each other and reached for the last chicken wing at the same time. Their chopsticks collided in midair, and both paused. Then Tang Wulin picked up the wing and placed it in Gu Yue's bowl. Gu Yue said nothing, merely putting the braised rib from her own bowl back into his. Xie Xie could not even be bothered to complain anymore—he saw scenes like this every week, and his initial shock had long since turned into numbness.
Leaning against the ginkgo tree with a thermos in hand, Lu Menge watched the children fight over the last piece of meat and suddenly felt that this was what life was. Not divine thrones, not war, not the grand cause of reviving the dragon race, but afternoon sunlight filtering through ginkgo leaves onto the tablecloth. Someone fighting over a chicken wing, someone complaining that there was too much vinegar,