Chapter 7

This time, it was Li Pu who felt a bit uncomfortable. He scratched his head and tried to change the subject, saying, "Of course, I met her when I was eight, oh, she was only seven back then."

Qin Xia'er said with a hint of regret, "That's great. I have many friends in my class, but I've never had a childhood friend."

Li Pu winked and pointed to his nose, shamelessly recommending himself, "Me, me."

To be honest, Li Pu had known Qin Xia'er even before Xiao Xian. However, their meetings often ended in arguments or being scolded by teachers. Their relationship was indeed quite strained. They were not innocent childhood friends but rather had a history of mutual mischief.

"You?" Qin Xia'er raised her eyebrows, saying disdainfully, "I don't want you as my childhood friend! You're always getting into trouble, love to fight, and copy homework. You'll end up carrying bricks for the rest of your life!"

"Wow, you really have a grudge, don't you?" Li Pu was speechless.

"Speaking of which, how did you become such good friends with Chen Xian?" Qin Xia'er asked, a bit nosy.

In the past, Qin Xia'er always saw Li Pu as a disgrace to the class and viewed Chen Xian as her academic rival. So she found it quite strange that these two, who seemed so different, had become such close childhood friends.

To be honest, she had been curious about this for a long time!

"Ha ha ha, I doubt you'd believe me even if I told you. Actually, she..." Li Pu, with nothing better to do, patted his thigh like an old storyteller and left a cliffhanger.

The little girl, seeing this, quickly opened her eyes wide, eager to hear the gossip.

But then he suddenly changed the subject, "Actually, there's nothing much to say. After a busy day, my stomach is growling. I should go make some instant noodles first."

The class leader was so angry that she gritted her teeth, repeating the phrase she used to say to Li Pu the most often.

"... Li Pu, you're the worst!"

It was like teasing a cat; the more Li Pu didn't say, the more the class leader wanted to know. However, Li Pu changed the subject and, using the excuse of getting hot water for the noodles, ran to a group of uncles cooling off outside the tent to listen to their gossip.

The rumor about the "alien spaceship crash" had been circulating for several days and had already transformed several times. The latest version Li Pu heard was that the relevant departments of our government had already made contact with the aliens. However, the Americans were not happy and demanded to lead the negotiations and asked China to hand over the wreckage of the spaceship that had fallen into the nearby sea.

"That's not going to happen!" A balding uncle immediately exclaimed, "Whatever falls from the sky belongs to where it lands. If it's not ours, we don't want it. If it's ours, foreigners can't come and take it."

"Don't be afraid, we've fought the Americans before," an uncle sitting on a stool, waving a fan to drive away mosquitoes, said dismissively, "In Korea and Vietnam, didn't we always beat them? They dare to take it? I spit! They dare! Just wait and see, we'll beat them to a pulp."

"Xiao Wu, you're talking nonsense. The Americans are not to be provoked, really not to be provoked."

Another thin, bespectacled uncle shook his head, "Korea and Vietnam are old news. Do you know the current gap? Do you know about the Seventh Fleet? If the American Seventh Fleet comes, blocks the outlet, I think this new China—," the thin uncle, with a reed-like hand, slapped his knee and said, "—is finished!"

Listening to these uncles' endless chatter, sometimes about daily life and sometimes about national affairs, Li Pu occasionally chimed in, but they all ignored him, thinking he was just a child who didn't understand such matters. Fortunately, the topic soon changed to the city's reconstruction, which the public was very concerned about.

Li Pu listened and learned that the rescue supplies delivered by the dozen trucks today were donated by a large private conglomerate. It was said that the boss of the conglomerate was an overseas Chinese, very capable and charitable. This batch of supplies was just the beginning, with more to come.

"Hey, is this true?" Li Pu nudged the girl next to him with his elbow. This chatterbox was the daughter of Mayor Qin, who likely had first-hand information.

"..." Qin Xia'er pouted, her face full of "you don't tell me, why should I tell you."

"Ah," Li Pu raised his eyebrows and sighed, "Forget it, we're just kids. Adults wouldn't tell us such things. You probably don't know either."

Qin Xia'er was trying to get Li Pu to ask her, but he just asked casually and then stopped. She held back for a while but couldn't resist poking Li Pu with her finger.

"My family has a good relationship with Uncle Zhang," the girl said out of the blue.

"Uncle Zhang?" Li Pu thought for a moment, "Is he the boss of that conglomerate?"

"You're smart," Qin Xia'er smiled slightly and whispered, "There are two Uncle Zhangs, one is Uncle Zhang, and the other is Uncle Zhang Xie Zong. This time, it's Uncle Zhang Xie Zu. He was standing next to my dad just now."

"Zhang Xie Zu, Zhang Xie Zong?" Li Pu laughed, "If you put them together, it's 'Thank Ancestors,' right?"

Hearing this, Qin Xia'er giggled, covering her mouth to stifle her laughter, and then whispered, "Don't say that. Uncle Zhang is very capable. His conglomerate overseas is said to have billions of dollars in assets. This time, he donated a lot of money for disaster relief and promised to allocate several billion RMB to help rebuild the city."

"Wow, so he's a great person?" Li Pu scratched his head, looking at the class leader with a bit of admiration. Thinking about it, this girl was indeed from a powerful family.

"Class leader, with your family's connections, you won't send assassins to kill me, right?" the boy asked, his mind wandering.

"I wouldn't do anything illegal," Qin Xia'er said guardedly, "If you bully me, I'll definitely tell the teacher!"

Li Pu muttered, "Tell the teacher, fine, just don't tell your dad or your relatives."

After listening to more of the true and false rumors, Qin Xia'er was taken back by her father's secretary. Before leaving, she left her contact information and instructed Li Pu to contact her if he saw any surviving classmates.

Li Pu agreed casually. However, he had a vague premonition that he might not be classmates with Qin Xia'er again.

He became her classmate because his household registration was in the school district of that key junior high school. But after seeing the school these past few days, not to mention the students and teachers who had perished, the ruins of the school would likely take two to three years to be rebuilt.

With his deadbeat dad gone, the house destroyed, and no idea where the family's savings were—there probably wasn't much anyway—his future education would likely depend on the Hope Project.

A girl from a family like Qin Xia'er's would hardly end up in the same school, let alone the same class.

But Li Pu wasn't very concerned about this. He had only one true childhood friend.

"Is the hospital very busy today? Why hasn't she come back yet? Has she eaten?"

Li Pu sat cross-legged on his bedding, wondering if he should run a few kilometers to the hospital. The rescue supplies they received included a large bag of Man Nian Qing cookies, which Xiao Xian loved.

Thinking about it, he decided to act. Li Pu picked up the bag of Man Nian Qing cookies and ran towards the hospital.

---

In the hospital filled with injured patients, Sebastian had been observing the girl for a long time.

Sebastian was a white man in his sixties, a retired TIME journalist who had just come to China for a tour when he encountered this unprecedented disaster. As a former journalist, he keenly sensed an opportunity.

A truly excellent journalist's most important and rarest quality is the chance to face first-hand facts.

These past few days, he had taken many powerful and moving photos with his camera. This time, he came to the crowded hospital to gather material and discovered another scene worth capturing, though different in nature.

A girl, dressed in a simple, slightly worn dress, looked to be around ten—no, Sebastian shook his head; if judged by Asian standards, she might be a year or two older, but her delicate features had a hint of mixed heritage.

Like a little nurse, the girl sometimes gently comforted the weak elderly lying on stretchers, and at other times skillfully changed bandages or gave injections to the injured. She seemed to be well-liked by everyone, both the injured and their families.

When the girl once held a tin cup in both hands, carefully feeding a patient who might have been paralyzed from the waist down due to compression, Sebastian pressed the shutter without hesitation.

For a while, his camera lens followed the girl. Then a slightly older boy ran in, waving to her, seemingly holding a bag of cheap cookies in a recycled plastic bag. The girl happily ran over.

The boy and the girl sat on the cement ground in the corner. The girl took the cheap cookies from the boy, holding them in both hands, and ate them like a little squirrel. She looked at him, her clear eyes filled with innocent tenderness, and her smile, under the dim light, was like that of a little angel.

Innocent childhood friends are a common theme in Western oil paintings, but the background is usually green grass and warm sunshine, swings, and wooden houses—warm but lacking depth. The background in front of Sebastian, however, was a dirty cement floor, a hospital filled with pain and death, and a devastated city in a third-world country that had just experienced a major disaster.

Sebastian knew he had to capture this moment. His experienced photographic eye told him so.

The Asian boy and the extraordinary girl, embedded in this scene of intense tension. The precious image captured by the photographer from the fleeting moment. The old journalist Sebastian felt a bit excited, thinking: Perhaps I can win the Pulitzer Prize with this.

Suddenly, the boy seemed to notice the photographer. He turned to the girl and said something, and the girl immediately looked in Sebastian's direction with a hint of surprise.