Going Home

In the end, Wen Ning decided to go home. There was no special reason—he missed his mom.

He filled Big Yellow's dog-food bowl and asked Xiong Batian to stop by every other day to look after the shop. As for his regular customers, he put a sign by the door: Closed temporarily.

Before leaving, Wen Ning spent quite a while browsing the supermarket.

He bought his dad two cartons of cigarettes and a case of liquor.

He bought his mom several boxes of health supplements. Everything filled two plastic bags.

They felt heavy in his hands.

Wen Ning's hometown was a small town outside the city, about a two-hour coach ride from the urban village where he lived.

He didn't fly straight home, even though his current cultivation would have let him get there in the blink of an eye.

Landing from the sky outside his front door with two plastic bags in his hands would have been hard to explain if any of the village aunties saw him.

It was already afternoon when the coach stopped in the village. Not much had changed; the same concrete road was still there.

The same crooked locust trees stood on either side of the road, and the old men and women at the village entrance's gossip hub were still the same people. They just looked older than they had a few years ago.

When the aunties spotted a young man at the village entrance, they squinted at him for a long time, then slapped their thighs.

"Isn't that the Wen family's boy? Haven't been back for months, have you? How are things out there?"

Wen Ning answered with a smile, saying he'd been busy and had come back today to see his parents.

His family's house was at the western end of