Chapter 7

Early April, a Saturday.

Li Lan, Li Cheng and Zhao Xinxin were eating lunch and trading gossip from their respective classes, and were well into it when there was a knock at the door.

Li Lan put down her bowl and went to open it, and she and Li Cheng — who had also turned to look — said the same thing at the same moment. "Dad. What are you doing here?" Neither of them could keep the delight out of it.

Their father, Li Quan, was standing in the doorway.

He came in and put down what he'd been carrying. "Well, it's been over a month since term started. Your mother wanted me to see how the three of you were getting on."

Then he noticed the plain meal on the table and was mildly surprised. "Noodles? You can all cook now, can you? I thought if you hadn't eaten I'd take you out."

"We've been cooking for ages. Li Lan made this, it's good," said Zhao Xinxin, smiling.

Li Quan wasn't surprised it was Li Lan's. She had cooked a few meals at home when the family were too busy, and could manage a simple stir-fry. Still, credit where it was due. "Well now. Lanlan's quite the capable one. Making noodles."

"It's nothing special, it won't kill anybody. Dad, didn't Mum come?" Li Cheng trailed after him like a small tail, plainly excited. Ordinarily the flat held three people and there was nothing to do but study and talk, which was dull, so Li Quan's arrival genuinely delighted her, and she followed him about chattering.

"There's too much on at home. She couldn't get away." That was the truth: the scrap trade needed someone there, and even Li Quan could only spare a few hours in the county town, since the bigger loads depended on him.

"You carry on eating. When you've finished I'll take the three of you to buy some clothes. Xinxin, this is from your mother — she rang and said you were to get some too." He sat down on the sofa and produced five hundred yuan from his pocket for Zhao Xinxin.

Li Cheng cheered. She was sorry her mother hadn't come, but new clothes were new clothes.

Li Lan was rather less moved. She wasn't actually a middle-schooler, and they were only clothes. She had no particular requirements beyond comfort — and even if she had, a small county town like Minhe couldn't have met them.

She did feel she'd lost a fair amount of weight lately; her old clothes hung loose on her now. A month of exercise and watching what she ate had left her still on the plump side but noticeably slimmer, and even Li Cheng said her face had shrunk.

Zhao Xinxin, being with somebody else's father, was pleased but didn't show it as openly as Li Cheng did.

Li Quan had eaten at home before coming and wasn't hungry. He watched his daughters eating with great appetite and felt thoroughly content — and then, as he watched, noticed something wrong. "Lanlan, Chengcheng. Have you two lost weight?"

The Li family had never had money, but they had never economised on food, and neither girl was a fussy eater, so neither had ever been especially thin.

Now, though, a good deal of the roundness had gone out of Li Cheng's face — and Li Lan looked worse. Two months ago at home she'd been plump, and here she was thin enough for her clothes to hang off her.

"Is the food no good? Or is it the pressure? How have you lost so much?" He couldn't help the pang of it. Clearly leaving three children to live on their own wasn't good enough. They needed someone to cook for them. Look at the state of them.

"No, it's not pressure. We've got the PE component, remember, so we've been out running," Li Lan said quickly, to settle him.

Li Quan doted on his daughters, and on Li Lan especially, who was most like him; he had never once spoken harshly to her. Seeing her that much thinner after a single month away, of course it caught at him.

"If you're training you need to eat better. Hang on — your grandmother pushed a load of food at me before I left, let me find it." He got up and went through the bags he'd put down, and produced Song Qiulan's tea eggs from a small package.

"Only a few eggs? I should have bought some meat on the way. Wait here, I'll go and get you a roast chicken." He was unimpressed by the eggs and made to go out for meat dishes.

"Dad, there's no need, we're all full. A couple of tea eggs is plenty." Li Lan headed him off, with the other two joining in.

"Uncle, really, we don't need it. We eat meat all the time — look, today's noodles have got pork in." Zhao Xinxin held up her bowl as proof.

Between the three of them they talked him out of it; they'd nearly finished eating anyway, and the trip would only waste time. He couldn't quite leave it alone, though. "Have another egg each. And I'll buy you some meat after we've done the clothes."

Under his eye, and under Zhao Xinxin's frankly entertained gaze, Li Lan and Li Cheng forced down two more tea eggs apiece, produced an enormous burp, and told him they could not eat another thing. He was grudgingly satisfied.

Once they'd eaten, the girls sat with him while Li Cheng chattered through everything that had happened in the past month, with the other two filling in.

Hearing about the timetable that ran from five in the morning to eleven at night, Li Quan very nearly told them not to work so hard. But he knew this stretch mattered, and sore as it made him, he sensibly kept it to himself.

Half an hour later he checked the time. "Come on then. Let's get you some clothes."

Minhe at that point had no brands to speak of — everything came off the wholesale market or was knock-off sportswear. Neither Li Lan nor Li Cheng had much of an eye, and they picked two tracksuits each that fitted and pronounced themselves done. Li Quan, being a grown man with no eye either and looking at his own daughters, thought both of them looked lovely in anything, and had no objections.

Zhao Xinxin cared rather more about how things looked, and would have liked to choose properly, but he wasn't her father and she didn't want to take too long, so she picked two she liked and said that would do.

Clothes shopping with dad was efficient. The four of them were out and finished inside an hour.

Back at the flat, Li Quan said a few things and made ready to leave. Taking them shopping had been the point of the trip, the clothes were bought, and there was work waiting at home. He didn't forget the cooked-meat shop on the way, though — a roast chicken and a good deal else besides — and told them firmly to eat properly.

---

"First. Two minutes fifty-six." Li Lan came round ahead of the pack, and heard the PE teacher call it out as she passed, thumbing the stopwatch.

A month and a half earlier the eight hundred had taken her four minutes and left her gasping. Now she finished breathing hard but recovered quickly. She nodded, satisfied, at the time. Half an hour of easy running a day was clearly working, and her Stamina had crept up to 28.

The PE exam was on the twenty-fifth of April, only days off now, and she felt reasonably sure of it. On today's showing, full marks wouldn't be a problem.

With PE settled, she set herself another mock exam that evening. Before starting she had a look at the system shop, which she hadn't done in a while — once new plants got harder to find she only checked it every ten days or so, since without points there was nothing to do but stare.

Collected plants: 74. In a month and a half she'd added only a dozen or so, nothing like the twenty she'd picked up in the florist's in one go.

Then her personal information:

[Host: Li Lan] [Points (L1): 190 — convert to a higher grade?] [Stamina: 25] [Spirit: 30] [Focus: 25] [Memory: 30] [Comprehension: 35]

She looked at the hundred and ninety and thought about it.

Seventy per cent of the past month had gone on physics and chemistry, and over that month she'd noticed that her memory and her grasp of things had both improved considerably.

Take memory. Learning the classical poems quickly might be explained by a residue left over from her last life — but the periodic table she had not retained at all.

She'd expected it to take a long time, since last time round she never had it properly by heart even by the point where she chose her stream in high school. This time a few readings and it was in her head. It did need going over every few days; her guess was that thirty was still on the low side, and that at a higher figure it would come to reading something once and keeping it.

This time she could buy nineteen points, and she put fifteen of them into Memory and Comprehension. Spirit and Focus mattered too, but the urgent thing was the exam a month away.

After buying:

[Host: Li Lan] [Points (L1): 40 — convert to a higher grade?] [Stamina: 25] [Spirit: 30] [Focus: 25] [Memory: 40] [Comprehension: 40]

---

When Li Lan had finished every paper and looked at a total that came near full marks — physics and chemistry, which she had learned from scratch, included — she went quiet. So this was what better memory and comprehension bought you.

A month ago both subjects had been complete strangers. She'd assumed answering seventy per cent of them would count as meeting her target, and instead, apart from a few careless slips, she hadn't dropped a mark.

Some of that was middle-school material being simple. But mostly it was the memory and the comprehension. Getting reacquainted with something you once knew and genuinely understanding and retaining it are different things. Last month, working the maths paper, she had forced her way through on old familiarity, with her head in a muddle and no clear structure to any of it.

This time was different. Her thinking as she worked was extremely clear; she could see a point and follow the threads out from it to everything related.

Two experiences barely two months apart, and the difference between them settled it: the shop's advantages were enormous. If forty in Memory and Comprehension did this, what would a hundred do? What would a hundred in everything do?

So this was what being a top student felt like. Wonderful. Li Lan looked at her near-perfect total, thought about all five attributes at a hundred, and grinned until her face nearly came apart.

"Er. Li Lan. Have you lost it? What's that revolting look for?" Li Cheng, on her way out to the toilet, had caught her leering at the papers on the desk.

"Heh. You've lost it. I've just had a nice surprise, that's all." Li Lan and her sister lived on mutual insults, so she paid no attention and carried on happily.

Li Cheng rolled her eyes. Having shared a bed with Li Lan all her life, she had noticed that since term began her sister seemed to have become a different person — genuinely not reading novels, and genuinely studying properly until late every night.

Was the exam pressure really that bad? she wondered, and got to the toilet and back and sat down at her desk again quickly. If Li Lan was working that hard, she wasn't going to slacken either.

Li Lan, having no idea what her sister was thinking, went on grinning foolishly at the future.