Zhang Qiang sat blankly in front of his computer for an entire day. On the screen was his father's WeChat profile picture - a gray, empty space.
Three months ago, his father passed away. A sudden cerebral hemorrhage took away the quiet old man, and also took away one of the few sources of warmth in Zhang Qiang's life.
Ao Bing looked at the words "Dragon Palace" on the stick and fell into deep thought. It was an ordinary wooden stick painted with cheap red paint, originally used to support the Dragon Palace's crumbling coral reef walls. Now, it was casually discarded in the corner of the Dragon Palace Property Management office, covered in the fishy smell of seaweed and the dust of time.
He had to face a reality: he was likely to inherit his family's property management company.
Xiaoming, clutching a thick stack of New Year's money, excitedly arrived at the bank entrance. Today was the eighth day of the Lunar New Year, a day of good luck for starting work, and also the day he could "liberate" his New Year's money from his parents' "safekeeping."
There was a long queue in front of the Automatic Teller Machine (ATM), mostly children like him, all holding bulging red envelopes. Xiaoming stood on his tiptoes, watching the adults skillfully operate the ATM, his heart filled with anticipation.
Old Liu's grocery store was located in the east end of town and had been open for decades. It wasn't a big store, selling things like needles and thread, soy sauce and vinegar, and also collecting utility bills. His most prominent trait was being stingy; he wouldn't turn on the lights if he could avoid it, saying he could save a little money.
Li Mei is a careless person. This problem, from childhood to adulthood, has never changed.
During the Spring Festival, she returned to her hometown, and her relatives gave her a lot of snacks, such as candies, cookies, and melon seeds, which filled her backpack. On the day she returned to the city, she was waiting at the train station and felt a little bland in her mouth, so she casually took out a "milk candy" from her bag, peeled off the wrapper, and threw it into her mouth.
Lao Liu's grandson, Xiaobao, received a thick stack of red envelope money this year. On the eighth day of the Lunar New Year, Xiaobao insisted on going to the bank to deposit it. Lao Liu couldn't dissuade him, so he took him.
Li Xiaoming, an ordinary screenwriter at a well-known animation film company, spends his days in front of a computer screen, racking his brains to write all sorts of bizarre plots. Originally, his dream was to become an animation master like Hayao Miyazaki, creating works that touched people's hearts. However, the reality is that he is busy every day with various projects like "IP adaptation" and "traffic first," and has long forgotten his original dream.
Until the movie called Ne Zha was released.
Li Ming felt like an ant trapped in a giant gear. Every morning at 7:30 am sharp, he would wake up, squeeze onto the crowded subway, and then begin his unchanging workday. His job was to review the answers of the artificial intelligence, DeepSeek, ensuring they aligned with the company's values. Li Ming always found this work a bit absurd—having a human review an AI’s answers was like having an elementary school student grade a university professor's thesis, but this was what he needed to do.
The "Spring-Dodging Agency" opened a storefront at the end of the old street, the entrance so narrow it looked like a crack squeezed between two buildings. The sign was handwritten, the characters crooked and twisted, like the "ancestral secret recipes" found in old, neglected neighborhoods.
As the Spring Festival approached, the sound of firecrackers grew louder, seemingly about to shake the city. But inside the agency, it was eerily quiet. Old Liu sat behind the counter, slowly sharpening his kitchen knife, which was rumored to "dodge all disasters." He wore a grease-stained apron, his face wrinkled like an old newspaper crumpled by time.
Old Li, a diligent programmer at his company, had recently felt like a wind-up toy, repeating the same code, the same routes, and even the same coffee-drinking posture every day. But this year's Start of Spring was a little different. The company issued a notice that, in response to the "dodge spring" initiative, all employees would have a day off.
Old Li didn't quite understand what "dodging spring" meant at first. Later, through various push articles and WeChat groups, he gradually realized that dodging spring was to avoid clashing with "spring" on the day of the Start of Spring, which was said to ward off evil and eliminate disasters. Although Old Li found it a bit superstitious, the company had requested it, and he couldn't do much about it.