When Xie Lan returned home from the supermarket, as soon as she entered the door, she saw a woman in a bathrobe, wearing a facial mask and leaning on the sofa, applying nail polish.
The woman turned around, spread her fingers and waved at him, "Hi."
Xie Lan paused suddenly.
who
Dou Sheng yelled, "Mom."
Xie Lan suddenly realized what was going on and waved to her in a daze, "Aunt Zhao."
"I can't recognize you after you put on the mask. Why are you so cute?" Zhao Wenying stretched out her hand to maintain the mask, tilted her head towards the sky and giggled.
Xie Lan was a little speechless and a little amused, standing at the door at a loss.
"Go in." Dou Sheng urged from behind, "Don't pay attention to her."
"Lanlan seems to have adapted well. I heard that she was assigned to the same class as Douzi." Zhao Wenying blew on her fingers. "By the way, I brought you some small gifts."
Dou Sheng hummed and went upstairs.
Xie Lan watched Zhao Wenying go into the bathroom. After a while, she washed off her mask and came out, and asked in a low voice: "Aunt Zhao... have you contacted my dad?"
Zhao Wenying patted her face with her fingers. "I have contacted them about the student status."
Xie Lan hummed, "Did he say anything else?"
"Does it count as asking me to persuade you to go back?" Zhao Wenying laughed, "I was just kidding. Your dad is also angry and hasn't mentioned it yet. I'll tell you when he mentions it."
Only then did Xie Lan feel relieved.
This time, Xie Jingming encountered less resistance than he had imagined. From the moment he booked the ticket, Xie Jingming looked helpless. He felt that Xie Lan would never pass the college entrance examination in China, and would have to return to the UK sooner or later.
There was a large cream-colored box on the table in the room.
Dou Sheng leaned against Xie Lan's door and said lazily, "What's in your copy? Let's see."
“It’s the same.”
Dou Sheng snorted, "That's not necessarily true."
The box contained Chinese snacks called "Qingtuan", peanut candies and milk cookies. Dou Sheng glanced at them and said, "You have a few more Qingtuan than I do. It's not bad. I'm not biased."
Xie Lan was about to close the box when he suddenly discovered that there was something else lying flat on the bottom of the box.
He pulled it out and looked at it, and was confused.
"Is this clothing?" Xie Lan frowned in confusion and touched it through the plastic packaging. "T-shirt? Why is it packaged like this?"
Dou Sheng walked to the door, looked back, and laughed on the spot.
Xie Lan: “?”
"You'll know when you see it. This is proof that Ms. Zhao Wenying loves you." Dou Sheng's voice spread from one room to another. "Long johns, worn under jeans."
long johns
Xie Lan hesitated, tore open the bag, and shook out the pants.
Cotton, grey, close fitting.
Soft and floppy.
"… "
Handsome guys can't wear this.
I feel a little tired after a day of tutoring on Saturday.
The Chinese class lasted the whole morning, from how to review the topic and formulate the idea, to several argumentative structures, selecting examples, organizing logic... The teacher explained it very clearly, and Xie Lan was able to follow it. But the biology class in the afternoon was frustrating, with a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary, and it was difficult to listen and read. Later, Xie Lan gave up listening and just looked up the dictionary to read the materials.
As soon as I got home, I heard noises coming from the kitchen and a familiar smell filled the air.
Xie Lan was stunned for a moment, changed into slippers and walked to the kitchen door.
Dou Sheng is making sauce.
Simmering over low heat, the tomato meat sauce tastes sweet and rich, very tempting.
Xie Lan suddenly perked up, "Didn't you say you would wait for me to do it together?"
Dou Sheng glanced at him and said, "I'm afraid you'll blow up the kitchen."
Xie Lan: “”
"It's Italian meat sauce, right?" Dou Sheng poked at the recipe displayed on the tablet on the wall. "I just added your two little tips and it's almost ready."
Hearing this, Xie Lan glanced at the yogurt box beside him, which was still two-thirds full.
"You have to put it all in." He sighed, "It's tasteless if you put just this little bit in."
"No need?" Dou Sheng said weakly, "This big box weighs 250 grams. I think you just want to poison me to death."
Xie Lan was too lazy to talk nonsense with him. She simply placed the yogurt over the pot, added it all in, scraped it with a spoon, and stirred it gently.
Silky.
"It must be delicious, you have to believe me."
"… "
Dou Sheng's face began to look haggard.
Xie Lan scooped some to taste, "It tastes about the same. Do you have steak pie or fried fish?"
Dou Sheng looked at him dimly, "Do you want to join the Stargazing Sect?"
"What kind of pie?" Xie Lan didn't understand. "If there is any, eat it with meat sauce, otherwise it will be a bit salty."
“… No need.” Dou Sheng sighed and said softly, “He can’t bear it any more.”
Xie Lan took a second bite and asked in confusion: "Him?"
"nothing."
Dou Sheng turned off the fire and put the pot on the stove. "I'll go back to my room and record it. Don't knock on my door tonight."
Xie Lan watched him put the disc on, "Can I watch you record it?"
"No." Dou Sheng refused decisively, "ASMR needs noise reduction, and it's not convenient to have one more person in the room."
Too.
Just as Xie Lan was about to say something, Dou Sheng suddenly said, "Oh, yes, I found something for you to do."
"Um?"
"Slip of the tongue, I bought you something." Dou Sheng put down the bowl, "It's on the sofa."
Xie Lan followed him out and found a large cardboard box on the sofa. She reached out to move it but it didn't move at all.
"what?"
Dou Sheng casually cut open the carton with a courier knife. "Some little tricks to enrich your extracurricular life and prevent you from having too much energy. I ordered them yesterday and they arrived today. Wow."
A box full of books.
Xie Lan pulled out a few of the books above in confusion.
How to teach foreigners to learn Chinese
Foreigners learning Chinese: A comparison of the usage of 1,700 pairs of synonyms
A Study on Chinese Grammatical Errors
A Must-Read for Foreigners Learning Chinese Grammar
Learn Chinese with Me Comprehensive Textbook
Tips for learning Chinese
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Xie Lan's pupils began to dilate.
Dou Sheng smiled kindly, "Well, actually this is what happened..."
He spoke slowly, "I had a nightmare last night. I dreamed of a kid with an IQ of 180, who was a disciple of Gauss and Euclid. After much hard work, he won the Nobel Prize in mathematics and scored 300 on the college entrance examination."
Xie Lan was stunned.
Dou Sheng asked him, "Do you know which kid this is?"
Xie Lan: “…”
Dou Sheng patted the box and said happily, "Study hard. I'm going back to the room to record the video."
Xie Lan stood on the ground feeling numb for five minutes before she recovered.
The first floor was empty. Dou Sheng returned to the room carrying the pot of red meat sauce. Only Xie Lan and the heavy cultural fruits accumulated over five thousand years were left in the empty house.
After a long hesitation, Xie Lan took out the book "1700 Pairs of Synonyms Usage Comparison" and slowly walked up the stairs.
His mind was a little blank. He walked to the door of Dou Sheng's house and subconsciously lightened his footsteps.
A faint hissing sound could be heard from the room. The meat sauce was probably too hot, so it had to be eaten one spoonful at a time.
It's not even seven o'clock in the evening yet, and it will probably take me two hours to finish that big bowl of food.
Xie Lan sighed, took the book and tiptoed back to his room.
1700 Pairs of Synonyms This book is terrible.
Xie Lan flipped through the pages casually, and the first group he saw was confusing:
Manipulation and operation.
The former means controlling mechanical instruments, while the latter means controlling a certain program to operate as required.
The exercises are to check the word combinations: ~machine, ~market, ~army, behind the scenes~, by bad guys~
When Xie Lan saw the “bad guy” at the end, his first reaction was Dou Sheng.
His intuition told him that it should be "manipulated by Dou Sheng", but after carefully studying the meaning of the word, he felt that it should be "operated by Dou Sheng."
What the hell is going on.
I read a book in a daze all night, and finally fell asleep in bed listening to the news broadcast on my headphones.
I don’t know if it was because of Dou Sheng’s curse, but Xie Lan really had a nightmare that night.
In the dream, his mother was holding his hand in the hospital ward before she died.
Her organs failed suddenly, and Xie Jingming was blocked by London's damn traffic. Only her son was with her to the end.
Xie Lan remembered that his mother had given him many detailed instructions, but her voice was as fragmented as her consciousness. He could only hear the last sentence, a very low and soft whisper, clearly.
"Actually, I'm a little homesick."
“I haven’t been back for a long time.”
Xie Lan woke up with a start. The room was pitch black. He was lying on the bed without a blanket, his body freezing cold from the air conditioner.
When he sat up, he felt a drop of cold water sliding down his cheek into his neck. He raised his hand to brush it away in a daze, and then he realized that he was crying in his dream.
My phone is out of battery and turned off, and I don't know the time.
After a long while, Xie Lan sighed softly, fumbled to charge his phone, and wanted to go out for some fresh air.
The clock on the wall in the corridor on the second floor pointed to 2:15, which was already the late night.
Xie Lan stared at the hour hand for a while before realizing that an old floor lamp in the corridor was on, and the dim light illuminated the clock face.
Then he heard footsteps down the stairs.
Dou Sheng held the water cup in one hand and kept stroking his chest with the other hand. When he reached the top of the stairs, he looked up and saw Xie Lan, and was stunned.
"Not asleep?"
"woke up?"
They both spoke at the same time.
Then Dou Sheng took a sip of water and said speechlessly, "I drank a big bowl of meat sauce and had heartburn. How about you?"
"I had a bad dream." Xie Lan's mind was still a little empty after the nightmare. After a long while, he murmured, "What does heartburn mean?"
Dou Sheng exclaimed, "Are you having a nightmare?"
He stood two steps away and looked at him. The dim light cast a shadow on Dou Sheng's face. Half of his body was in the shadow, and the other half was under the light. Perhaps because of the uneven light and shadow, the pair of black eyes that were usually cold or smiling seemed a little gentle.
Dou Sheng came over, moved the cup from right to left, and raised his hand above Xie Lan's head.
Xie Lan looked up in confusion, but before he could see the palm of his hand, he felt something pressing lightly on his head.
“Touch the fur, it won’t scare you.” Dou Sheng said in a voice as if coaxing a child, repeating it three times, then retracted his hand and muttered in a low voice, “You’re already this old, and you’re still having nightmares.
"Can't you have nightmares when you grow up?" Xie Lan asked.
Dou Sheng muttered, "That's right," put down the cup and said, "You wait."
Xie Lan stood there, watching him push open the bedroom door, take out an iron box from the bedside table, and open it.
After a while, Dou Sheng came over and handed him a sycamore leaf.
This time they are not dead leaves, but fresh leaves that have been picked and coated with some preservatives. Although they have turned yellow after being stored for a long time, they are still soft when pinched.
"Put this under your pillow." Dou Sheng muttered, "To ward off evil spirits."
Xie Lan was a little surprised. He had heard of some folk customs, but he didn't expect that sycamore leaves had such an effect.
"Of course not." Dou Sheng said, "I just made this up."
Xie Lan: “…?”
"But as long as you believe it, you can sleep better." Dou Sheng muttered twice, "Go back to sleep quickly."
Xie Lan was confused and dazed when he went back to the door of his room before he remembered.
"What does heartburn mean?" he asked. "Isn't that meat sauce tasty?"
Dou Sheng paused at the door, seeming a little hesitant.
After a long while, he said, "It's delicious. It's like heartburn. I feel warm inside after eating it, like there's a small flame."
"Oh." Xie Lan breathed a sigh of relief and curled the corners of his lips, "That's fine. I was afraid you wouldn't be used to it."
I went back to the room and closed the door, and the noise from next door soon died down.
But perhaps because he met someone and talked to someone, Xie Lan felt that the bedroom was not as empty and silent as before. His cell phone was charged and lit up, and the dream just now seemed to have faded away.
He opened the pink TV app and a small 1 lit up in the dynamic area.
Mr.x, who loves to eat, submitted a video.
The time was five minutes ago.
The video cutting is pretty fast.
Xie Lan put on his headphones and clicked play, and soon the sound of chewing meat sauce came from the headphones.
It was thick, rich, and juicy. The sound went from my left ear to my right ear, and then became binaural, as if it penetrated my entire head.
Dou Sheng's ASMRs are very professional, worthy of his 1.5 million fans. Xie Lan has seen ASMR producers with 4 to 5 million followers on YouTube, but their level is not much higher than Dou Sheng's.
After watching for a while, he felt a little sleepy due to the chewing sounds. Just as he was about to turn off his phone, the picture in the video flashed.
That was a shot that was not cut cleanly. Previous videos would cut out the shots of reaching out for food, and the only thing in the field of vision was the food on the table and the elbows resting on the table.
But in this shot, the up-host showed his hands.
Xie Lan paused, pressed the pause button, and slowly sat up.
Those were a pair of slender, white hands with distinct knuckles.
Very similar to Dou Sheng's hand.
But, it wasn’t Dou Sheng’s hand.