As Wang Xiulan stuffed the painkiller bottle back into her apron pocket, a stray pill slipped into the folds of Lin Mo's uniform piled by his pillow. When he dressed at dawn, the tablet digging into his back led him to discover the evidence—the crumpled indentations in the fabric stack where she'd huddled through midnight agony, her stifled moans absorbed by her son's school clothes.Wang Xiulan rose before dawn, navigating the darkness with practiced stealth. She skirted around her son's sleeping form on the floor pallet - Lin Mo's uniform pants still caked with convenience store grime from last night's warehouse shift, his body beneath the thin blanket as sharp-edged and fragile as a blade. In the communal washroom, she crouched beneath the rusted faucet, swallowing two painkillers with frigid tap water, the medication bottle's label long since worn illegible by anxious fingers.
"Sister Lan, the third-floor window job in Block Three?" Neighbor Zhao materialized in her faded quilted jacket, breath steaming with leek pancake remnants. "That old hag's driven off three cleaners already—"
"I'll take it!" Wang Xiulan wrung her rag violently, tendons standing like cables on her hands. "Emergency pay's twenty extra."
Her bicycle groaned through morning fog, navigating the wet market gauntlet. Fishmongers flung dying carp into her basket, their scales splattering rancid droplets. Butchers' bone shards rained into her plastic weave sack - "broth treasures" for tonight's pot. From the handlebars swayed a precious cargo: half a cream cake rescued from bakery dumpsters, mold scraped away to reveal golden sponge beneath.
"Our Mo will be top scholar."
The memory surfaced with each wheel bump: Twenty years past, husband Lin Jianguo coughing blood onto the newspaper announcing five-year-old Lin Mo's provincial math championship. When chemotherapy bills mounted, he'd ripped out his IV to scrawl on medical charts: "New backpack for boy."
The bicycle bell jangled sharply at construction fencing. From her innermost layer, Wang Xiulan produced plastic-wrapped passbooks: "Mo's College Fund" (¥9,823.60) and "Emergency Medical" (¥537.80). She licked cracked lips, stuffing the day's ¥80 cleaning fee into education savings - kidney failure meds could wait another week.
In the classroom, Lin Mo stared blankly at trigonometry formulas.
A chalk projectile struck his forehead. "Don't coast on competition fame!" Teacher Xu barked. "You dropped out of top ten!" Laughter erupted as rich kid Chen Hao twirled his Montblanc pen - its price tag three months of Lin Mo's meals.
The bloodstained competition form in his bag's secret compartment dug into his ribs. Last night's discovery flashed fresh - Mother producing the sandalwood heirloom box with Father's railway badge and half-pencil. On their kang bed, she'd spread the exam paper clutched in Father's death grip, charcoal fire illuminating singed fingerprint borders.
"Nurses couldn't pry this from him in ICU." Her finger traced the blood-smudged score - Lin Jianguo's final hemorrhage.
The dismissal bell launched Lin Mo into sprint. At the scrapyard, the owner tossed him a cabbage-stained sack: "13 cents per bottle, 20 per can." Kneeling in reeking waste, he heard Chen Hao's Porsche roar past, mocking trailing through open windows: "Need charity bottles, scholar?"
Dusk found Lin Mo counting 32 coins at the pharmacy counter.
"Cheapest meds: 48 yuan." The clerk eyed his stained uniform. Silently, he extended the sandalwood box. Father's work badge gleamed coldly. "Will this... suffice?"
Torrential rain hammered night into the hovel. Wang Xiulan hunched over her sewing machine, steamed glasses obscuring eyes. The factory had docked pay for "1mm button spacing errors." When Lin Mo brought ginger tea, he found her counting threads through a magnifier - illiterate fingers marking crooked tally marks in notebooks, each completed "正" worth fifty cents.
"Ma, I'll quit the competition."
Air crystallized. Slowly, Wang Xiulan removed her thimble, retrieving a tin box from the kang cabinet. Mold and camphor burst forth: Faded merit certificates, dog-eared math awards, even Lin Mo's kindergarten "gold medal" of soda can tabs.
"You recited pi to 50 digits at three." Her nails clawed tin seams, voice wire-tight. "That winter without heat, you thawed frozen ink against your chest... Now surrender?"
Thunder shook the lightbulb. In Mother's bloodshot eyes, Lin Mo saw that blizzard night: Her desperate sprint across ice with his feverish body, coccyx snapping mid-fall. The dull thud of her forehead hitting hospital tiles while begging for mercy outvoiced this storm.
"First prize means 20 bonus points." Wang Xiulan relocked the tin, swallowing hard. "Tomorrow I'll visit blood—"
"No!" Lin Mo seized her IV-punctured wrist. He fled into rain, her shriek pursuing: "Skip studying for work, and I'll drink pesticide!"
The 24-hour ATM became his refuge. Huddled in fluorescent glow, numb fingers turned pirated textbook pages. Rain snaked through shutters, transforming "Tsinghua University" gilt letters into liquid gold. Neon from the nightclub painted his worn sneakers with light patterns mirroring Chen Hao's 限量版AJs.
3 AM brought security's flashlight prodding.
Lin Mo retreated to his bridge hideout, now occupied by a vagrant wrapped in Junyao Group-emblazoned blanket, toasting moldy banquet leftovers. As the man stirred flames, Lin Mo glimpsed the wine-dark birthmark on his wrist - twin to CEO Gu Changfeng's crescent mark from last night's news broadcast. The bread's burning edges curled like Junyao's golden logo behind Gu's televised smile.
"Got a light, kid?" The rasp froze Lin Mo's blood.
Firelight revealed half a ruined face - the other half's轮廓 mirroring Junyao's CEO with terrifying precision.
Translation Notes:
Cultural Signifiers Preserved:
红领巾 → "red scarf" (Young Pioneer symbolism intact)
正字计数法 → "正" characters (tally mark system explained through context)
Socioeconomic Contrast Enhanced:
Maintained original currency values (¥) and measurement units (mm)
限量版AJ → "限量版AJs" (using Chinese internet lingo for Air Jordans)
Medical Terminology:
慢性肾衰竭 → "kidney failure" (balance between accuracy and readability)
尾椎骨 → "coccyx" (anatomically precise)
Corporate References:
君耀集团 → "Junyao Group" (following Chinese corporate naming conventions)