Brian Clark turned around to grab something and was startled again. “Whoa, how do you walk without making a sound?”

Laura Bennett asked, “Are you an eating video creator?”

Brian Clark was taken aback. “What?”

“Something like this—” Laura Bennett picked out the characters he recognized on the screen and read, “Deep... deep something giant mouth, human meat... ti, is it pronounced ti, human meat ti bone machine? Iron pot tun, no, stew, iron pot stews itself?”

“...” Brian Clark looked a bit confused.

“Today Samuel Grant said you have a million...”

“Ah!” Brian Clark suddenly understood, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Right! Right... let’s just say so, it’s called ‘eating broadcast’ in China.”

An eating streamer with a million followers.

Laura Bennett gripped his phone tightly. What he really cared about was still his cousin’s situation.

“So yesterday at the airport convenience store, were you... uh, livestreaming?”

Brian Clark: “Livestreaming?”

“Yeah.”

Brian Clark shook his head decisively and explained slowly, taking care of his hearing: “I never livestream. Yesterday I was just replying to a few voice messages. I’m really shy—in front of the camera, I only eat and don’t talk, I don’t say anything to my fans.”

Laura Bennett fell silent at that, deeply skeptical about the word “shy,” even wondering if he misunderstood its meaning.

“Bilibili, right? I’ve installed it. What’s your ID?”

Brian Clark froze, and after a long while squeezed out a few words, “Aichide MRX.”

Laura Bennett typed it in and searched. “There’s no such name.”

Brian Clark frowned, thought for a moment, and said, “Slip of the tongue, slip of the tongue, Aichifan de MR.X, I missed the ‘fan’ character.”

This time, he found it.

Laura Bennett glanced at the follower count and exclaimed, “Turns out you have 1.48 million followers, that’s more than just a million.”

“Mm...” Brian Clark paused for a few seconds. “Recently, the follower count has been growing pretty fast.”

Laura Bennett casually clicked on one of the videos.

It really was an eating broadcast, and a professional ASMR chewing sound recording at that. Only audio, no face shown, the camera pointed down at the food on the table. You could tell there was some camera shyness—even the action of reaching for food would be edited out. Let alone the face, not a single physical feature was ever shown.

Laura Bennett scrolled to the latest post, “You’re recording yourself drinking a whole basin of meat sauce this weekend?”

Brian Clark lost all expression. “...Am I? I forgot.”

“Go to sleep already.” He walked over and put his hand on the door. “Adjust your jet lag, good night.”

He had only finished half his sentence before the door was closed, and the rest came through the door. The sign dropped—business was closed for the day.

Laura Bennett didn’t care about these details. His cousin’s situation had nothing to do with a million followers. He felt much more at ease, tapped ‘follow’ casually, and went back to his own room.

There were a few freshly laundered clothes folded on the bed, and a small note.

- Bought in your style, next time buy on Taobao yourself (smiley face)

Signed, “Aunt Zhao.”

Laura Bennett looked at the little note, and after a while, opened a drawer and put it away.

When he took off his clothes, that withered phoenix tree leaf fell out of his pocket. He was about to throw it away, but when his fingertip touched the raised veins of the leaf, he stopped.

His mother’s illness was discovered four years ago. Two years of treatment were ineffective, and then she passed away.

During those two years in the hospital, she would occasionally talk to him in Chinese about her hometown. In the 1990s, outside Wangjiang Lane, phoenix trees grew so tall they blocked out the sun. The campus was the same—every autumn, fallen leaves were everywhere.

Now, Laura Bennett was living outside the old Wangjiang Lane, attending the same school Ethan Shaw had gone to. Time had flown by, and he felt as if he had traveled through time, retracing the path his mother once walked.

He stared at the withered leaf for a while, then put it away in the drawer as well.

*

The first class the next day was Chinese.

Laura Bennett took it very seriously. Early in the morning, he went to the academic office to get the textbooks, and before class started, he had already looked up all the unfamiliar characters in the first three paragraphs of the first text, carefully annotating them in English.

Brian Clark was slumped to his left, dozing all morning, not even moving when the bell rang.

The Chinese teacher’s surname was Qin, a male teacher. He walked onto the podium with a stack of test papers, immediately making everyone’s faces turn green.

David Reed murmured, “Is he really grinding this hard? Grading Chinese overnight?”

Old Qin smiled. “No, this class you’ll preview ‘Preface to the Pavilion of Prince Teng,’ and I’ll keep grading.”

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

“But before that, there’s something else.” Old Qin changed the subject. “I heard there’s a new student in Class Four who made Mr. Martin ten years younger overnight. When I heard about it last night, I was so tempted, I immediately pulled out his test paper hoping to get rejuvenated in advance.”

There was a wave of good-natured laughter below.

Samuel Grant covered his mouth with a book and leaned back. “Here we go, the second teacher you’ve stunned with your skills.”

Laura Bennett: “...”

Hopefully not shattered.

Old Qin pulled out a test paper from the stack. “Student Laura Bennett—”

The whole class held their breath.

Old Qin looked down at the paper, flipped a page after a while, hesitated to speak, then flipped another page after a moment.