Chapter 122: The Small Medicine Box

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When Wang Fatty got home, he deftly pulled a small medicine box from beneath the tea table. In truth, every middle-aged man has one of those little boxes hidden away, and inside is always… something.

He opened it to find six small packets wrapped in wax paper, each containing exactly the same dose. Just as Wang Fatty reached for one, a hand as white as a lotus stalk stopped him.

“Why?” Wang Fatty asked, puzzled, at Deputy Yao beside him.

“Your illness is already better. Why keep taking it?” Yao said, with a disapproving look. She almost thought Wang Fatty had become dependent on medicine.

“You still don’t get it?” He kept moving, tore open a packet, and tipped the dark powder into his mouth, not letting a grain fall.

“Since I started taking Chao?—” he caught himself, correcting, “since I started taking Chang Yu’s medicine, I feel my condition is so much better. It’s as if I’m several years younger.”

“Look at it—you can see my complexion is rosier, my waist doesn’t ache, my back is less painful, and I’ve got strength to climb the stairs again. Honestly, this works far better than goji berries.”

“I’m certain this medicine isn’t only for infertility. It must have other uses too.”

“Like replenishing blood and vital energy, reviving the body’s cells, that sort of thing. In any case, it’s definitely good for the human body.”

“Think about it. This medicine is precious. How could I just waste it? So I decided to take it all.”

“Greedy,” Yao laughed.

“If only I could use this to become ten years younger. Besides, I recently discovered it works for hair loss too,” Wang Fatty continued.

“Look, my left side was terribly bald—no single hair left. I tried ginger rubs, growth cream, even had a transplant, and still nothing really worked…”

“But after I took this, the scalp on that side kept itching in the middle of the night.”

“The next morning, when I got up and looked in the mirror, I wouldn’t have believed it if I had seen it with my own eyes.”

“Areas that used to be completely bare had sprouted new stubble. It made me so happy.”

“It’s one of those things you do by accident that end up unexpectedly useful. I never imagined this could treat hair loss too.”

“Let me see,” Yao said. In recent days, because the couple had been arguing and sleeping separately, she had barely paid attention to Wang Fatty’s hair.

“It’s really growing!” She became almost delirious when she saw the new stubble.

It almost seemed her reaction was stronger than the sufferer’s own.

“This isn’t easy. I’ve never even seen you as you were before you lost your hair. Now, at last, I can see it.”

No wife wants her husband to be a bald man, Deputy Yao no less.

As soon as she heard her husband’s hair might be saved, she would naturally be the happiest of them all.

Yet since she married Wang Fatty, she had never once seen him with hair.

“Come on. Didn’t everyone used to be young? I had thick black hair in my youth, too.”

Wang Fatty objected.

“Oh, now I’ll hear that from you? Even when you were in college you were already bald enough to be a warning sign.”

“Otherwise why did I always hesitate to accept your advances? I was put off by your baldness.”

“Even after we married, I felt too embarrassed to bring you out in public. You know how ugly it was! Too shameful.”

Wang Fatty said nothing.

“Wife, I was cruel to marry you,” he said softly.

“I’m not lying,” Wang Fatty said, trying to salvage himself. “When I was in primary school, my hair was still thick.”

“Really—I have photos to prove it. Think about it: no one is born bald. Even hair loss, even baldness, has to have a gradual progression, right?”

“So you started losing your hair when you were in middle school?” This time Yao was the one shocked.

A shock so great she couldn’t even form words.

She had often wondered when exactly her husband had begun losing his hair.

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She guessed it might have been because high school stress wore him down, with constant all-night studying…
Or perhaps because after college he was reckless in private life, with all his… kidney energy depleted.

But she had never imagined her husband had started going bald as early as middle school.

“Not exactly,” Wang Fatty said with embarrassed fingers in his hair, and suddenly the unmistakable smell of middle-aged oiliness drifted off him.

“Really,” he added, “I started losing hair before I even finished primary school. If I count correctly, the last photo I took with my thick, glossy black hair was when I was around eleven.”

As he spoke, his eyes carried a touch of melancholy and sadness of their own.

A person who has lost hair knows that pain better than anyone else.

People who have never had it cannot understand the humiliation: being mocked, ridiculed, stared at, pointed at. The pain of those laughs is not their own to carry.

They simply laugh and sneer, and set up their joy on another’s pain.

“Good heavens. You started losing your hair in primary school?” Yao covered her mouth in shock, as though she’d uncovered a terrible secret. “How did you get through it? You must have been mocked, maybe even bullied.”

For a moment, Yao even pitied him.

To be frank, if there had been a bald student in her own class back then, she surely would have mocked him too.

“No more, no more,” Wang Fatty said, wiping at tears at the corners of his eyes, forcing a brave face. “You can’t understand.”

“I have no way around it. Baldness in my family is ancestral. Since my grandfather’s generation, it has hung over us like an invisible curse.”

“My father was no better. He was still very young—before nine, he already had receding hair at the temples.”

“Every photo of my father is basically bald. Even me,” he added with a wry smile, “I’ve never even seen him in his full, dense-haired days.”

“This is terrifying,” Yao said, half aching, half sorrowful, pressing her own flat, un-blooming stomach in confusion.

“Your family genes are so strong. Do you think that baldness gene could be passed to our children?” At this she couldn’t hold back tears. The thought of a child born with his father’s plight made her heart sink.

“If that day ever comes…” Wang Fatty said with solemn grandeur, “then I’ll go back to Chang Yu once more and have to beg another batch of this medicine!”

………

Master Lu Xun of the Fuling Lineage once said: “The joys and sorrows of people do not truly touch one another; all I hear is noise.”

Chang Yu found this absolutely true.

At least Katerina and Yangyang did not really understand how he felt.

As embarrassing as it was, Chang Yu quite liked the two embroidered banners Wang Fatty had given him.

Even though Katerina and Yangyang both said they couldn’t understand his vulgar taste.

He kept staring at the two bright red, gold-glittering banners on the sofa, and the longer he looked, the more he found them handsome, the more he liked them.

Male-Medicine Master. Healer who hangs his medicine flask to save the world.
Marvelous hands that restore spring—renewing even parents…

What a beautiful compliment. From the bottom of his heart, Chang Yu felt the world could hardly find words so elegant and melodious.

“I’ll hang them soon,” he said. “That wall above the sofa is empty; it fits perfectly.”

He was already measuring the wall while he spoke.

No matter how you look at it, this was proof he had helped build a household into bliss and harmony.

Whenever he saw those banners, he felt a deep sense of accomplishment, as though he himself had become one of those divine doctors who saved the sick.

So he decided to place them where they would be most visible, so he could admire them all the time.

Ignoring the objections of Yangyang and Katerina, he brought out nails and a hammer, drove two large nails into the wall, and hung both banners there.

“A woman like you will never understand my feelings,” Chang Yu said to Katerina.

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And when he said it, Chang Yu even flashed just the right expression—lonely, sparse, and cold as fresh snow.

Katerina: ???

How has he suddenly started putting on airs? Katerina asked, not understanding him at all.

She was silent for a while, then seemed to come back from a daze and said something else.

“For the past few days, Zhao Dashen has been inquiring about you,” Katerina said.

“He’s been checking your personal information through the police station. You should be prepared.”

“Why does he want to find me? Is something of mine exposed?” Chang Yu paused, but felt little tension or worry.

He was no longer the same man as before; Chang Yu did not fear Zhao Dashen taking revenge.

After all, he is also a member of the Disaster Adjustment Bureau and has strong official protection.

Even if Zhao now knows who beat him up that day was Chang, what can he do? At worst, he can only glare.

“Perhaps. After all, what you did then wasn’t exactly flawless,” Katerina said vaguely.

In truth, she also had no idea why Zhao was searching for him.

But that doesn’t matter.

To an ordinary citizen, Zhao Dashen may seem like a mighty national entrepreneur, a figure who could make H City tremble with a single stomp.
But to Katerina, and to the Disaster Adjustment Bureau behind her, that fellow is just an ordinary man with a little ability.
Nothing to raise waves.

“Still, don’t worry. We have already encrypted your information,” Katerina said after a moment.

“Your personal file is now classified by the military at the highest level of top secret. Across the province, there are very few who can even access it.”

He could search till he’s worn out, but Zhao will never find out anything about Chang Yu.

“I don’t worry at all about what he’ll do to me,” Chang Yu replied. He had grown a spine of his own now; he’d even learned how to brandish bluster like a banner of courage.

“If he dares to come and start yakking and whining and dragging this out, I’ll knock him down again and beat the life out of him.”

“Even if he reports me, I’m not afraid. I’ll tell the police I’m an operative from a special unit on a covert mission.”

“Then I’ll call Comrade Xiao Li and have someone from the bureau send men to clean up for me. Don’t you see, that fool won’t survive my threats.”

An uncanny stillness spread, strange and thick. Katerina stared at Chang Yu, and the air seemed viscous, pressing on his nerves.

“Well… I was just saying it casually. I’m not going to do anything,” Chang Yu said, awkwardly ruffling his hair and silently cursing himself for being a fool.

What kind of person is Katerina, after all?

She is the sort of person with proper values, law-abiding, honorable and magnificent, wholly devoted to protecting the people’s safety.

And in front of her he had been saying nothing but lawbreaking nonsense, speaking over and over about beating Zhao so hard he’d be ruined.

Was he challenging the limits of what she could bear?

Just as Chang Yu grew uneasy under her piercing gaze, fearing his impression in her eyes might be lowered, Katerina suddenly tilted her head and said,

“It’s not that it can’t be done.”

“Just hit him lightly. Don’t leave him disabled.”

“Huh?” Chang Yu looked as though he were learning Katerina for the first time, and for a moment he was at a loss.

Chapter complete.
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