Ming Cheng stood up, placing the buckets aside and unsure of what he was supposed to do.
He looked around for Lan Chang, scanning the kitchen for her and finding not even a trace of the swishing, green robes of her uniform - the same uniform that he wore and all the other's in the room, with the sole exception of the head cook who had the honour of wearing a blue robe, her station higher than all the others.
Ming Cheng had to conclude that Lan Chang had been tasked today with serving the palace servants with food, making her rounds to deliver dishes to the various servants' rooms and stations, where they would eat earlier before making their own rounds to place food in the various offices of the bureaucrats, concubines, and official members of the royal family.
With narrowed eyes filled with frustration, Ming Cheng knew that this was the only real opportunity that he would have to speak to the other children here, with Lan Chang gone.
This felt too coincidental, as if the ghost was responsible for creating the whole situation.
(Xiao Ying sneezed and wondered whether it was possible for a dead man to catch a cold.)
Ming Cheng, his chest heavy and his throat filling with bile, slowly walked towards the children, keeping his head down at first, before realising that his morose expression wasn't going to help his cause to survive at all.
He schooled his expression into something blank and inoffensive, before making his way over.
He stood next to the trio, all three of them crouched down on the floor, their messy hands sprouting little puffs of flour, looking like clouds, in the air, as they waved them around and excitedly gushed about whatever they were whispering to each other.
Ming Cheng caught the words 'frog' and 'cake' a few times, repeated over and over again, with giggles increasing and the glow of happiness in their words only getting stronger and stronger.
He didn't want to interfere.
He really didn't want to.
But he had to.
He had no idea what he was doing.
Was he supposed to break them up?
Was he supposed to inject himself into the conversation?
Was he supposed to wait for them to finish first?
He didn't know what to do.
He wanted Lan Chang.
She at least knew what she was doing.
She was the one who took him with her to eat all their meals together.
Ming Cheng gulped and forced himself to look at them.
He really didn't know what would happen unless he tried.
If the children rejected him and were mean, then it just meant that they were a bunch of little shits who didn't recognise the value of him, or what he could offer them.
It meant that they were brats who didn't understand the value of networking and connections, and that if they were ever to live the life that Ming Cheng had, they would probably die, too proud to take the support of someone calmly offering, refusing to learn from somebody who was in a better state in terms of skills.
Ming Cheng tapped the closest child on the shoulder once, and waited for him to turn around.
The kid startled first, before freezing, and awkwardly shuffling around on stiff legs that hadn't been stretched and moved every so often to remain nimble and always ready for use.
Ming Cheng blinked, reminding himself to keep his face neutral.
"Hi, can I join you for lunch?" he calmly stated.
Ming Cheng inwardly recoiled at his own voice. He didn't ask.
He just stated his request as if it were an undeniable fact, too used to needing to fight for what he wanted.
He blinked again.
He needed to resolve that issue.
"Uhh... yes! Yeah, you can! We were just talking about you, you know that? Yeah," the boy eagerly spluttered out, his voice uneven and uncertain, as if he was second guessing every word that just escaped his mouth.
"I did not know that," Ming Cheng replied, keeping his vision centred on the boy in front of him, whilst maintaining the other two in his periphery just in case.
The other boy and the girl weren't nearly as shaken as the boy he was talking to - the girl almost looking a little bored from her company, her face particularly flat and bored.
Closer up, Ming Cheng could see the features of their faces much more clearly.
The boy who he had been speaking to had hair lighter than all the others - a distinct mahogany shade - with the other boy with the darkest shade of hair of pure blackness, with the girl having a shade somewhere in between, depending on where the light hit her head.
Ming Cheng stared into the lighter haired boy's eyes as he waited for an answer from him.
The boy spluttered over and over again, spitting out a few half words and mumbles to say in reply, before awkwardly trailing off.
The girl face palmed hard, groaning quietly.
"My name is Qi Qing. This is," she gestured over to the silent, dark haired boy next to her," Wang Yuan, and that idiot is Qi Tao."
She was actively scoffing at the lighter haired boy as he awkwardly ruffled and mussed up his own hair, giving an awkward smile and showing off the prominent gaps between his teeth.
"We were talking about your initiation. A-Yuan went through it, so you have to as well. To keep everything fair," she explained, moving her hands and arms about as she did so, enunciating each and every word.
"A-Tao's my twin brother. We started at the same time and the newest cook decided on our initiation. We had to pull a hair pin from the bottom of the well. We got to decide A-Yuan's initiation, and he had to eat a mud cake. A-Yuan wants you to kill all the frogs in the garden-" the girl, Qi Qing, explained before she was interrupted by an elbow to her ribs by Wang Yuan.
"Oh, fine! He wants you to just catch five frogs from the garden and give them to him for his evil brother to experiment on!"