Edited 10/12/25. I fixed chapter 113 and 114 please read again .
He took her to the mountains to play, and ran off to catch crickets, leaving her alone with a cricket cage. Unable to find her father, she burst into tears. Later, when he caught crickets but had no cage to put them in, he remembered to come back for his daughter.
Later, when she was in university, they argued over the phone, and didn’t speak for over a month. Although the reason for the fight was long forgotten, the impression of her father’s unreasonable stubbornness lingered.
After graduation, she stayed in Shanghai to work and live alone. When he called to urge her to go on blind dates, she stubbornly remained silent, infuriating him so much that he scolded her over the phone, causing her to hold the phone and cry.
Her memories were filled with unreliable influences from Comrade Hua Zhaoyuan, but now, they seemed to have more understandable, deeper explanations.
In the past, whenever she returned home for the New Year, she thought he was indifferent and uncommunicative, believing he didn’t welcome her home.
Perhaps it was just that he had exhausted all his energy dealing with noisy, bizarre passengers on the train and just wanted to quietly enjoy family life.
Maybe in his eyes, just seeing her was satisfying enough, and he simply didn’t know how to express it more warmly.
His nagging about blind dates was annoying, but perhaps it was also driven by a desire to see her settled and cared for, clinging to the old mindset of his generation, afraid that she would end up lonely.
All in all, living life over again, she was better able to understand her father’s perspective and gradually forgave those past unreliabilities, the stubbornness, and the misunderstandings.
She gently kissed her father’s hand, then ran back to her own room, fetched her sketchpad, and began to delicately sketch out the coarse, hard hands that lay on the thick, wrinkled northeastern quilt.
Despite the hardness of the hands, her strokes were soft, and her colors tender.
Hua’s mother, who held her liquor better than her husband, had already sobered up.
She pulled over the kang table, sat cross-legged on the kang, and while preparing fried cakes for the next morning’s breakfast, she watched her daughter paint.
The warm light illuminated the family of three, with Huanhuan, their pet, curled up and sleeping soundly.
Hua’s mother shared the day’s achievements of Hua’s father with her daughter.
After finishing her drawing, Hua Jie reviewed the various details her father had recorded, feeling increasingly confident.
In their household, it was always the mother who dealt with strangers. Her father was a man of few words, defiant and seemingly disapproving of everyone he met, limiting his friendly interactions to close friends and family.
He was most lively when playing mahjong up in the mountains or by the river, spending most of his time silently working with wood in the yard alone.
Appearing unsociable and introverted, Comrade Hua Zhaoyuan, not usually adept at social interactions, turned out to be quite reliable when it came to matters he was interested in, even considering such a major change as switching careers.
Perhaps he had just been lazy before.
Feeling reassured and tucking away the still-drying painting, she returned to her room to study until midnight. After washing up, she spread out her papers again to plan the business strategy for opening a furniture store.
She thought about the practices of various furniture malls in Shanghai and the product positioning issues of foreign luxury brands.
She considered whether to aim for a high-end brand, leasing a couple of small storefronts, and splitting off the lower market into a separate brand.
She also thought about packaging, logos, and promotions like “buy more, get a gift.”
She listed various practices of the furniture brand IKEA, such as printing brochures that clearly introduced all aspects of the furniture.
Planning for soft furnishings went beyond just tables, chairs, and beds; it included matching sheets and duvet covers with a coordinated setup, making the shopping experience like visiting a show home, giving a very direct sense of how each piece of furniture could look in a home.
She also planned several sets of furniture styles, drawing on her memories and probing the popular styles and tastes of the present and coming years, drafting several furniture sets.
Busy until after 2 a.m., she had developed several comprehensive positioning strategies—
Buyer segmentation and targeting;
Pricing strategy;
Furniture style positioning;
Brand positioning;
Store layout and service positioning;
After-sales positioning and more were all included.
The next day, Hua Jie enriched her several plans during breaks between classes, and when she got home in the evening, she presented them to her father.
Hua’s father, already accustomed to Hua Jie’s precocity and sensibility, affirmed her reliability.
Father and daughter, based on the new information Hua’s father had gathered during the day, engaged in more detailed discussions and further advanced the plans for opening their furniture store.
The blueprint for their entrepreneurial venture gradually became clearer, leaving the family both nervous and excited.
On Wednesday, Hua’s father went on a trip, putting matters on hold, which was just as well because it gave everyone the next three days to think through the details more comprehensively, avoiding the risks of rushing and making mistakes.
Major changes always bring a mix of anxiety and anticipation for a better, new life.
By Saturday morning, the family’s emotions had stabilized, and the fear of last-minute issues had lessened.
As Hua Jie left the house, she recalled Shen Mo’s words—
Adventures are like this; there are storms, but there is also the other shore.
Filled anew with strength, she patted her parents’ shoulders, boosting each other’s confidence.
They split into two groups; one headed straight for the city center to rent a shop, while the other turned towards the best residential area in the city to pursue painting.
Hua Jie carried her sketchpad, which contained several paintings.
“Chasing the Wind,” depicting Shen Mo ice skating, and “Youth in the Snow,” showing Shen Mo modeling at the Snowy Mountain Lodge, were gifts for Shen Mo.
“Carpenter,” a watercolor portrait of Shen Mo and her father working together, and “Waiting for the Bus to Return to the Village,” a detailed gouache painting sketched at the bus station and refined at home, along with the last watercolor portrait “Countless Selves in Ice Crystals” painted at the Snowy Mountain Lodge, were to be submitted to her teacher for selecting one to enter a competition.
The Tsinghua University of Arts competition was the first official painting competition Hua Jie had participated in her life.
It was a national competition primarily for university students.
Any high school students who made it into the selection would undoubtedly be the most outstanding.
The competition will select the top ten nationally, and although it’s not many, each position comes with a prize.
The top 30 will be chosen for an exhibition, newly renamed as Tsinghua University of Arts, which will host an official half-month art exhibition in the capital, inviting art lovers from all walks of life nationwide.
During this half month, the displayed paintings may find buyers who appreciate them, or might even help undiscovered new artists become shining stars in the art world.
Teacher Shen, one of the country’s top artists, received a personal call from the organizers inviting his students to participate.
Not just Hua Jie, but Fang Shaojun and others also felt the pressure.
No one wanted to disappoint their teacher. It was acceptable for a painting to not sell, but not to be eliminated before the finals.
Everyone was determined to make it into the top ten.
After today’s class, Shen Jiaru began collecting each student’s submissions for the competition.
Fang Shaojun spent the week perfecting her chosen painting, constantly revising her portrait of Shen Mo, carefully making adjustments wherever she saw room for improvement.
Throughout this process, she continually recalled Shen Mo’s face, his demeanor, his posture, and the charm that attracted her.
Her painting depicted a young man at a leisure resort, with a wall of segmented glass windows behind him.
Though the light was coming from outside, the painting gave the illusion that the youth was the source of the light.
Hua Jie also admired it.
However, she noticed that Fang Shaojun’s depiction of Shen Mo had a different aura; amidst the typical youthful arrogance and laziness, there was a deep melancholy and heaviness.
When she saw the title of the painting, Hua Jie understood the source of this strange sadness and heaviness.
It wasn’t inherent to the Shen Mo in the painting, but stemmed from the artist, Fang Shaojun herself.
The painting was titled “Secret Love.”
Everyone in the studio stared at the clearly written title Fang Shaojun had boldly inscribed, their expressions ambiguous as they looked at her.
Shen Jiaru watched the painting with mixed feelings. A teenage girl artist had used her bubbling affections and the bittersweet torment of unrequited love to portray the boy she cherished in her heart.
This was actually quite beautiful, but the model happened to be his son.
Shen Mo might not even be aware that besides Hua Jie, there was another girl among his students.
Even if Shen Mo did know, he probably wouldn’t remember Fang Shaojun’s face. To his son, she might just seem like a ghost, merely a fleeting, insignificant shadow who came to their home to paint and then drifted away.
Thinking this, he looked again at Fang Shaojun’s painting and felt even more strongly that the murky colors and strokes in the shadows were filled with the most bitter and sour emotions of a young girl’s heart.
He did not scold her for puppy love or anything of the sort; instead, he simply patted her shoulder silently, praising her for a job well done.
“…” Fang Shaojun felt the weight of Teacher Shen’s hand on her shoulder, and she vaguely sensed his attitude, which weighed heavily on her heart. She straightened her chest again and said candidly:
“Thank you, Teacher.”
Qian Chong glanced sideways at Fang Shaojun. He had always been critical of all his classmates in the studio, taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes.
But looking at Fang Shaojun’s painting, and her deliberately stiff posture, he only snorted coldly and refrained from any further mocking.
Before coming to Teacher Shen’s house, Fang Shaojun had anticipated that Qian Chong might mercilessly mock her, and that even Hua Jie and Lu Yunfei might show either sympathetic or dismissive expressions, and Teacher Shen might even reproach her for being precocious and fanciful.
But for this painting, she could only think of this name.
So even though she had prepared for the worst, she still gritted her teeth and wrote those two words on the name card.
She just hadn’t expected that everyone in the studio would be so restrained.
The worst scenario she had feared did not materialize, and she quietly breathed a sigh of relief.
Hua Jie’s gaze withdrew from Fang Shaojun’s face, recalling her own real youthful years.
Back then, she didn’t have Fang Shaojun’s courage. She liked someone but didn’t even dare to speak to them, afraid of being discovered and mercilessly mocked—
At that age, it felt like a huge deal, an unbearable shame.
Reborn with the soul of an adult in her body, she finally had the courage to treat others kindly and learned to express her admiration, affection, and goodwill.
She gradually became friends with Shen Mo, the very person she had silently loved for three years in her previous life without ever daring to approach.
Compared to her, Fang Shaojun was much braver.
However, if the object of her affections was Shen Mo, it was probably destined to be an unrequited love.
Shen Mo was an extreme case of face blindness, always solitary and forgetful of people.
Fang Shaojun, proud as she was, seemed like a swan who would never show her softer side to others, never the first to smile at someone.
How would she ever make her way into Shen Mo’s heart?
If Fang Shaojun doesn’t speak up, Shen Mo might never know that someone named Fang Shaojun ever liked him, he might not even know there is a person called Fang Shaojun.
Hua Jie pursed her lips, a thought suddenly flashing through her mind:
She wondered who would be loved by Shen Mo, who would become his girlfriend.
She slightly furrowed her brow, feeling a strange emotion quietly surfacing in her chest.
With a forced smile, she lowered her gaze, concealing the light in her eyes.
Who wouldn’t like Shen Mo?
If Fang Shaojun had the chance to get closer to Shen Mo’s life, she’d probably like him even more.