[Veteran Returning Home to Run a Farm x Office Worker at a Manufacturing Giant]
[Healing, Realistic Story / Slow-Burn Romance and Everyday Life / Reunion After Years Apart / No-System Rural Life]
I went home for Qingming to pay respects to our ancestors. My mom said the ancestors were turning in their graves, and insisted on setting me up on a blind date.
To scare off my prospective date, I stayed up all night compiling a list of outrageous requirements: at twenty-eight, no house or car, a sky-high bride price, and a nightmare of a mother-in-law. I planned to hit him with the list and send him running.
But after hearing it all, he didn’t even furrow his brow. He said calmly, “I know all that.”
I was stunned. “You know and you still came? Is something wrong with your head?”
He stared at me, eyes burning. “In elementary school, my name was Li Qianjin. We sat together for two years, then sat one row apart for three. We’ve got a pretty deep connection.”
My head went “boom” as the memories came flooding back...
That fat, dark kid who copied my homework, stole my snacks, called me “Beanstalk,” and scared me with skinks?!
Later, that “jerk” returned home from the military and rented farmland to become a farm owner.
Barren hills became orchards, rice stalks bowed beneath their golden ears in abandoned fields, and the ponds teemed with plump fish and shrimp...
He also planted a garden full of sunflowers in front of the house for me, and raised a cat and a dog.
Three meals a day, four seasons, a warm and ordinary life.
One day, he crouched by the stove and asked me, “Li Yan, we’ve been on blind dates for two years now. When are you going to give me an official title?”
I was holding a bowl of wild mountain tea, already being slowly won over. “...Is it too late to change my mind?”
