Stop Hitting Me, Senior Brother! Junior Brother Really Knows He Was Wrong

"The guide line is half a millimeter off. Your hands are shaking like that, and you still dare use the chisel?"

"Senior Brother... I'll fix it, I'll fix it right now... Don't measure me with the ruler..."

"Stand up straight. Hands at your sides. If you can't recite all of Rule Seven, you'll be on workshop duty tonight."

"Ugh... Zhou Yanjing, my hands are sore... Would it kill you to praise me once?!"

Everyone in the Forbidden City's ancient architecture restoration world knows that head restorer Zhou Yanjing is strict and restrained, a stickler for rules and regulations. With an old red sandalwood carpenter's square in hand, he's the living king of hell who keeps the whole workshop in line.

But Wen Tang, the rebellious young apprentice he made an exception to accept, is a carving prodigy who graduated from an art academy, with a temper wilder than a stray cat's. Nobody can control him.

To test whether his senior brother really considers him one of his own, Wen Tang pushes his luck every day on the massive wooden framework:

He risks his life to save endangered lacquered components, climbs onto high beams without a safety harness, and alters the mortise holes in century-old dougong brackets.

Everyone thinks this arrogant, unruly genius will eventually be expelled from the school.

But no one knows that when the workshop's heavy red sandalwood doors are shut...

The cold-faced head restorer Zhou, who acts like a king of hell in public, pins the feverish, trembling young man to a pearwood chair and sternly scolds him: "These hands are meant to carry on a thousand years of tradition. If you ever recklessly put yourself in danger again, I'll use my ruler to set your bones straight every day."

But after scolding him, the man wordlessly takes the boy's swollen, burning wrist and gently rubs the bruises away with ancestral medicinal salve, inch by inch, then feeds him a bowl of scalding, bitter medicine.

The spoiled little troublemaker who usually acts like he owns the world now clutches the man's sleeve with his nose red and tears in his eyes, trying to burrow into his arms.

"I know I was wrong... Senior Brother, it hurts. Will you hold me tonight?"