My Mom Is a Fitness Buff

[No rebirth or transmigration], [no golden finger], [no harmful guidance or implications]

The summer he turned eighteen, Lu Ming lost two things at once: his college entrance exam results and his job at a printing factory.

By day, he was the youngest temp on the factory floor, stuffing paper scraps into woven sacks and listening to the veteran workers talk about mortgages and their kids. At night, he was the quietest cleaner at the gym, mopping floors, wiping down equipment, and changing trash bags. At one in the morning, he would catch sight of the dark circles under his eyes in the mirror.

Then, one night, he met Su Nian outside a convenience store. She was eighteen too. She handed him a bottle of water and said, “I didn’t get in either. I’m working, too.”

Two young people forced to grow up too soon by life began learning to keep each other warm in the city’s midnight streets.

But Lu Ming didn’t know that behind him, a mother had spent twenty years holding up the sky above his head.