Qingchen sat down opposite him, and the cannon moved from the second to the seventh rank.
The old man's eyes lit up when he saw him: "You rascal..."
Qing Chen smiled and said, "Let's play chess first."
Five minutes later, the old man angrily threw down his chess piece: "Did you come here specifically to win a game against me?"
Qingchen got up and took twenty yuan from the supermarket's coin bin: "Yes."
"Have some decency!" the old man said angrily. "I saw on the news, you're so rich now, and you still come here to try and win twenty dollars from me?"
Qing Chen laughed: "It's not the same thing."
The old man then looked at Yangyang next to Qingchen and asked with a smile, "Is this your girlfriend?"
“Yes,” Qingchen nodded, “Her name is Chen Yangyang.”
Yangyang said obediently, "Hello, Grandpa."
The old man's eyes almost disappeared from smiling: "Okay, okay! Would you like something to drink? Just grab whatever you want from the supermarket!"
“Okay!” Yangyang went and got two bottles of Nongfu Spring water without any hesitation.
The old man was even happier.
However, his smile faded as he smiled: "You must have had a tough time lately?"
People only care about how powerful Qing Chen is now and how much wealth he has. But when he returns to where he started, the person who helped him back then still only cares about how hard he worked.
Qingchen poured out his grievances: "It's been so hard, so incredibly hard. You have no idea how much I've suffered these past few months..."
Yangyang found it somewhat novel, because Qingchen rarely talked about his pain with others, keeping everything hidden in his heart.
But once I got to this place, I became a chatterbox.
He talked from noon until afternoon, from afternoon until evening, and from evening until midnight, until the old man got a headache.
The old man sighed, "I don't know how you managed to get through it. Just listening to it makes me feel like I can't take it anymore."
"Now you know how hard I worked," Qing Chen said. "...Thinking about it now, it seems like it wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't become a Time Traveler. I kind of regret it."
The old man spat and said, "If you didn't become a time traveler, where would you find such a good girlfriend? Right, girl?"
“Yes, Grandpa, you’re absolutely right!” Yangyang replied with a smile.
The old man suddenly looked at Qingchen and asked, "Do you really regret it?"
After pondering for a long time, Qing Chen smiled and said, "I don't regret it."
This past year has been filled with hardship, exhaustion, hurt, loss, and sorrow.
The result is not important; the process is.
Without Yi Cheng, he would not have met those important people.
Those who radiate light make his life seem to radiate light as well.
Qing Chen stood up: "Let's go! I have something very important to do!"
The old man had a thought: "Will they come back?"
Qing Chen paused for a moment: "Yes!"
He took Yangyang's little hand and walked towards the end of the alley in Junmin Lane.
Suddenly, he turned back to look at the dilapidated alley, everything seemed like yesterday, forever young.
As the two walked out of the alley, a girl looked at them with a puzzled expression. Her boyfriend asked her, "What are you looking at?"
"I think I saw Qing Chen!"
"Is that the legendary Lord of Daylight?" The boyfriend's eyes lit up.
"It seems so, but it also seems not," the girl wondered.
Her confusion stemmed from the fact that she felt Qingchen was already a celestial being and shouldn't be walking so ordinaryly on the street.
Just then, the old man under the awning walked into the supermarket, only to find his change basket piled high with gold bars.
He muttered to himself, "They didn't even hide it properly. What if I get robbed?"
The countdown has reached zero.
Time travel.
Chapter 950, Predicting the Future
Return countdown: 168:00:00.
midnight.
In the wilderness 700 kilometers west of City 10, members of the parent-teacher association are traveling through the night.
"I'm so hungry," someone whispered.
"Me too," someone whispered in response.
In the mountains and fields, the 381,241 members of the parents' association were divided into thousands of columns and dispersed slowly in the mountains.
To avoid being detected by satellites, they chose to walk at night and sleep in the shade of trees during the day.
They all have an average skill level of E, but the difficulty of the Shu Road in Southwest China is unimaginable.
The Long March involved traversing more than 2,000 kilometers on flat ground.
Traveling southwest from the Central Plains, one must cross countless rivers, countless valleys, and countless peaks.
When encountering impassable terrain, it is necessary to detour a long distance to find a suitable place to pass.
The straight-line distance is 2,300 kilometers, but if you take into account the rugged terrain, it's probably more than 7,000 kilometers.
They had only walked over 600 kilometers when many of their shoes were worn out.
My feet are rotting too.
This is still a relatively easy road to travel in the Central Plains region.
Next, they could only walk barefoot on the uneven mountain path, stepping on dead branches and pine needles. Even after their soles were rotten, they still couldn't stop.
Some people started to flee. The more than 300 kilometers of mountain road shattered the faith of many families, reducing the number of people from 381,241 to 324,109.
There will definitely be even more people fleeing in the future.
The parent-teacher association has expanded too quickly. Some people who have not experienced war and disaster joined the association simply because they heard about it and wanted to express their determination. After observing the situation, they joined the parent-teacher association.
The problem is that some resolve can be broken, and some people's faith is not firm.
Sometimes Qingchen thinks that parent-teacher conferences really need to be a test, a process of weeding out those who are not fit to go into battle.
It's like putting a steel billet into a furnace and heating it until it's red-hot, then hammering away the impurities one by one to forge it into a steel knife.
Xiao Qi and Luo Wanya, along with other core members, mingled among the crowd. After escaping the first day's black magic, they quietly returned to the team and silently led it.
Luo Wanya counted the number of people, his brows furrowed.
Xiaoqi said from the side, "We can use the Key Gate to transport some supplies, so that everyone won't have to suffer so much. Even if we can't supply food for more than 500,000 people, transporting a batch of sturdy and durable work shoes shouldn't be a problem."
Luo Wanya shook his head: "The boss said in advance that the Qing family has more important matters to attend to and cannot provide us with supplies. We have to rely on ourselves for everything. We must follow the planned route and reach the target area within 28 days before we can stop."
Xiaoqi hesitated for a moment: "Why did the parents make us completely abandon the Key Gate during this evacuation?"
Luo Wanya shook his head: "I don't know."
Xiao Qi said, "If we use the Key Gate, at least half of the people can evacuate faster, or even cross the Mianchi Bridge over the Spring Thunder River directly."
Luo Wanya chuckled: "Are you complaining about your boss?"
Xiaoqi muttered, "Don't make a big deal out of this. It's not that I can't handle hardship, it's just that I don't quite understand. My parents are easygoing people, they won't be unwilling to listen to my opinions."
Luo Wanya said, "Let's follow his arrangements. He must have his reasons for doing this. Let's move forward."
Along the way, skillful family members began to weave straw sandals for everyone, but only those who have worn straw sandals can understand that modern people also feel unbearable pain when wearing them. Their ankles are rubbed raw, and the straw sandals slowly turn red, then dry and turn black.
The hands of those who weave straw sandals are worn out, but they still persist. When someone advises them to stop, they will laugh and say, "Worn-out hands can't stop us from moving forward, but if everyone's feet are worn out, we won't be able to keep going."
However, the most difficult part of the journey was not the mountain road, but the hunger.
What does it mean to have hundreds of thousands of people? Even if they are scattered in the mountains and fields, it would be difficult for them to find food on their own.
At first, many people optimistically imagined that they could go to the mountains and fields to catch wild game and dig for wild vegetables. With so many resources in nature, they were sure they could find something to eat.
If all else fails, we can just eat tree bark.
However, the reality is that a large population is a disaster for any ecosystem.
They would find that if the wild game they caught were divided among everyone, ten people could only get one bite at most, or even one hundred people could only get one bite.
At most one percent of the plants along the road are edible.
Those at the front of the line could eat tree bark, but those at the back couldn't even get any.
Finally, everyone started eating insects, but the aftereffects were vomiting and diarrhea, and many people even developed fevers and became ill.
If you enter the mountains alone, have a strong physique, and have wilderness survival experience, then surviving should not be a problem.
But if you go in with hundreds of thousands of people, it will be very difficult for everyone.
Rugged mountain roads, hunger, disease—they lived a life unlike any modern person.
During the day, people would rest under the shade of the trees. Sometimes, a sob would suddenly be heard from the crowd, first by one person crying, and then by a group of people crying together.
I woke up crying, and then I fell asleep from exhaustion.
I don't know when this kind of life will end.
Luo Wanya leaned against the tree, silently watching the sunlight stream through the gaps in the canopy onto his face: "Xiao Qi, what did you do before?"
“Unemployed,” Xiao Qi said with a laugh, chewing on a blade of grass beside him. “He spends his days clubbing and living a carefree life.”
“Before I transmigrated, I was a hoodlum who did all sorts of things. When I was smuggling myself to Japan, I hid in the smuggler’s cabin. Every time it was mealtime, the smuggler would open the cargo hold and pour a pot of white porridge directly onto the ground. Then all the smugglers would rush to grab it,” Luo Wanya recalled. “Everyone fought tooth and nail for that little bit of porridge. Even if we won, we still had to use our bleeding hands to scoop the porridge up from the ground and eat it.”
Luo Wanya: "Those days were really tough. I swore in the warehouse that once I made something of myself, I would kill that smuggler. But before I could make anything of myself, the smuggler was already stabbed to death..."
Luo Wanya: "However, the suffering back then was meaningless suffering. Although the suffering now is even more painful than that, I feel it has meaning."