Chapter 2

Li Lan sat on the kerbstone looking at her personal information. Two days on, it had changed a little.

[Host: Li Lan] [Points (L1): 200 — convert to a higher grade?] [Stamina: 25] [Spirit: 20] [Focus: 10] [Memory: 20] [Comprehension: 15]

Apart from the points going up, she hadn't rushed into raising her stamina or anything else. Partly it was her habit of hoarding, and partly she could never decide. She still hadn't settled on what to put them into.

Two days of poking at it had taught her a few things the interface didn't say outright. First, the plant had to be alive when she touched it. She'd tried the vegetables in the kitchen and the system hadn't reacted at all, while anything growing in the ground gave her points.

Then there was the L1 to L5 business. Li Lan guessed the grades went by how much the use was worth. With the gardenia, L1 was simply clearing heat and drawing out poison, while L3 was extracting gardenin — and the points bore that out. So although she'd touched close to twenty plants in two days, she hadn't yet found one where the shop offered anything at L5.

Not that it was much use to her. She looked at the interface. Where two days ago there had been one lonely gardenia, the system now held nearly twenty species: foxtail grass, jointed goatgrass, wheat, morning glory, a fig tree, a poplar, tomatoes, chillies. Over those two days she had gone round touching every plant growing anywhere near her, and hadn't spared the weeds at the roadside either.

---

Li Lan, still thinking about which plants she hadn't got to yet, answered her mother and got up. She walked the short distance to the lean-to behind her, a rough thing built out of a few lengths of timber, where the scrap came in.

The family were in the scrap trade. Chen Ying and Li Quan had put up a scrap station at the east end of town, and besides the yard where the collected material went, there was a shed at the gate where the pedlars' deliveries were weighed.

There wasn't much under the shed — a batch of scrap just taken in that nobody had carried into the yard yet, a red platform scale, and beside it a table for the money. Li Lan kicked aside the plastic bottles at her feet and opened the drawer. Small change lay scattered thinly across the bottom. She took two coins, told Chen Ying she was going, and set off for the buns.

It was only five in the afternoon but the light had gone early. Li Lan walked along the main road, levelled just before Spring Festival and not yet surfaced, her head full.

Two days. Rebirth and a system shop had knocked over a view of the world she'd spent twenty-eight years building. Somewhere not far off there was the sound of fireworks again, and she looked up to see whose they were. The fifteenth had been and gone a day ago and people were still at it, tireless. As if by agreement, a few more households joined in, and bursts came scattered across the sky overhead.

Walking under the crack and boom of them, Li Lan thought that compared with twelve years from now, the sound of a few fireworks was about the only thing that hadn't changed.

---

What could you do with a rebirth? What could the system shop actually get her? These were the first things she'd turned over once she was calm.

Her last life had been all right, but a person reborn with a golden finger who then did nothing had no excuse. Even if she couldn't strike it rich like the leads in those period novels, she ought to do something. Only — what?

And how was she supposed to turn the shop into a business? That was what she'd been chewing over for two days.

Judging by what it had shown her, the possibilities were endless. In the short term, though, the shop was no use at all. Even following its instructions step by step, she had no grounding in any of it and couldn't hope to turn out anything up to standard.

Never mind that she was sixteen. Who was going to believe that a sixteen-year-old with no experience whatsoever had produced an anti-inflammatory, or extracted the essence out of a plant?

That settled it. Apart from improving her own attributes, she wasn't going to trade for any of the plant methods for a good while. Even if she did, it would have to wait until she was at university. Maybe until after she'd graduated.

Which left the other problem, the practical one — money.

If she wasn't going to use the shop, the ways of making it were harder to find.

Shares came to mind first, but she'd never touched them in her old life and barely watched the news. That road was closed. Bitcoin in ten years' time was worth catching, but that was hardly a short-term prospect either.

Business, then. Her family were in business, but there was no real capital behind it, and 2008 wasn't a year when you set up a stall and got rich. On top of that, Li Lan knew that even if she said nothing, Chen Ying and Li Quan would move into trade themselves in a couple of years. Hard-earned money, but it kept them comfortably enough.

She knew property was the thing and prices were still low, but unless she was misremembering, the family's savings at this point wouldn't have bought a toilet in a city flat. And the main trouble was that she was sixteen. Old enough, in her own view — but to her parents she was a child, and children got no say.

Round and round, and apparently there was nothing for it at the moment but to study properly.

Damn it.

Li Lan sighed to herself, bought two yuan of steamed buns at the crossroads, and dawdled home.

---

Home, in the sense that it was where Chen Ying and Li Quan were living for the time being, at the scrap station on the east side of town. Besides the space for the scrap itself, they'd put up three small earth-walled rooms by the gate, and that was where the family stayed. Her parents had the bedroom on the far left.

The middle room was kitchen and living room together. The one on the right held the scrap metal worth money — brass, red copper, aluminium fittings and the like.

She smelt the chillies before she was through the gate. It had been a long time, and Li Lan couldn't help taking two good lungfuls of it. She knew that smell: Chen Ying was making tiger-skin peppers.

The chillies were erjingtiao out of the vegetable patch beside the scrap station. They didn't look as good as shop-bought but they had plenty of heat, and done as tiger-skin peppers they were the best thing to eat with rice. The family cleared the dish every time, mopping up what was left of the sauce with their buns.

"Mum, tiger-skin peppers again?" Li Lan came into the kitchen-cum-living-room with the buns, where Chen Ying was serving up.

"That's right. It's what you all like, isn't it. Put the buns on the table and go and call your father in."

"Righto." Li Lan set the buns down and ran out to the scrap-iron end of the yard, where Li Quan was cutting up a large block. "Dad, dinner's ready."

"All right, coming." He stopped what he was doing and washed his hands at the tap — they were black with grease from the cutting — and had barely got inside before the chilli fumes had him sneezing.

"Achoo. Achoo. Tiger-skin peppers again?"

Father and daughter, word for word the same.

"Yes, and you all like it anyway. Chengcheng, Jingyu, turn that television off and come and eat." Chen Ying called through to the bedroom.

Two of them came out one after the other from the room on the left of the living room: Li Lan's sister Li Cheng, just turned fourteen, and her brother Li Jingyu, twelve.

They liked chilli as much as anyone, and at the sight of the dish on the table they cheered and sat straight down. "Oh yes. Tiger-skin peppers again."

"Days of it and none of you sick of it yet. You have me make this every single day, and never mind the heat." Chen Ying looked at the family sat round the table, all with exactly the same taste, and found it funny.

There was clutter everywhere and not much floor, and the five of them filled the little table completely. It was nothing like twelve years from now, but the talk and the laughing hadn't changed at all.

"Lanlan, why aren't you having a bun?" Chen Ying's eye had landed on Li Lan, who was drinking her soup.

"I know why. She says she's on a diet," said Li Cheng, looking up.

"On a diet at your age? You're still growing. Diet when you're grown up. Eat properly." Chen Ying disapproved entirely, and picked up a bun to put in Li Lan's bowl.

"Mm — no." Li Lan covered the bowl quickly and swallowed her mouthful of congee. "It's fine, soup is fine. I'm not hungry."

Li Lan wasn't listening to a word of it. She remembered perfectly well: once she got to high school, her weight went up by ten jin a year. It wasn't that she'd never thought about dieting. It was that every time she raised it, the family told her there was no need, that the pressure in her final year would take it off by itself, and produced a long list of examples.

Being a straightforward high-school student at the time, Li Lan believed them, and by that final year she'd reached the point of a jin for every centimetre. Her height, for the record, was 166.

And right up to the day she was reborn, she never got more than twenty jin back off. It was the permanent sore spot of her life.

So this time, while she was only — a hundred and twenty jin, she was going to get on with it. Even if it didn't work, at least she wouldn't put on ten a year like last time.

Chen Ying tried a few more times, got nowhere, and gave it up, though she wasn't happy. "A child your age dieting. You've got the zhongkao coming. What are we going to do if you're undernourished?"

Li Quan nodded along with his wife. A child that age, dieting. And she looked nice with a bit of weight on her.

Li Lan gave her mother a sideways look. That's all very well now. Let's see you keep it up later, when you can't look at me without saying I'm fat.

"I'm fine. I'm not hungry," she said, firmly.

Li Cheng and Li Jingyu watched the attack and defence going on and sniggered at the entertainment, and since more trouble only made it better, they joined in from the sidelines. "That's right. What does she want to diet for."

Li Lan gave the pair of them a look, sniffed, and went back to her soup.

---

"Oh — Lanlan, Chengcheng, it's back to school for you tomorrow, isn't it? Do you want us to run you into the county town?" Li Quan asked, halfway through the meal.

"Hm?" Li Lan looked blankly at her father, then at her sister, and then went pale. School, tomorrow? Between studying the system shop, working out how to touch more plants, and trying to think of a way to make money, she had plainly forgotten all about when term started.

"You don't need to take us. There won't be many people on it now, we can get the bus in ourselves," said Li Cheng, after thinking about it.

"All right. I'll ask Zhao Shu in a bit, see how they're getting there," said Li Quan.

More than a decade on, her middle school years were still among the things Li Lan remembered most clearly, and she'd known what the two of them were talking about the moment her father opened his mouth: how they were getting to the county town for the new term.

Unlike the other children their age in the town, she and Li Cheng hadn't gone to the middle school just down the road. They went to school in the county town, a dozen kilometres away.