When Jingyuan walked in carrying the soy sauce, Mr. Xie was at the door changing his shoes, getting ready to go out.

"Home from work this early?"

"Came back to change clothes. Still have to head out again, don't I?"

A pair of girls' canvas sneakers sat in the entryway—one right-side up, one upside down. The boy set the plastic bag on the floor beside them, bent down, and put both pairs into the shoe cabinet.

Mr. Xie, already changed, turned toward the house and raised his voice: "Don't wait up for me tonight. I'll be back late. Go to sleep if you're tired. I've got my keys."

Jingyuan looked back. "Working overtime again?"

"Yeah. There's a project with bids opening Monday."

The boy had been about to say something else when a girl's sweet, childish shout from inside cut him off: "Safety first! Don't get kidnapped by a mammoth!"

A mam-moth?

Mr. Xie answered with grave solemnity: "Understood!"

As if getting kidnapped by a mammoth on the streets of Shanghai were a frequent occurrence.

Jingyuan took a moment to collect himself after the door closed, picked up the bag of soy sauce, and was heading for the kitchen when a suddenly materializing deathly pale face scared him so badly his scalp went numb and the soy sauce nearly slipped from his weak grip.

"Dad! Safe travels!" The farewell seemed several beats late. "Huh? Jingyuan, you're home early today." With the face mask nearly dry, she couldn't open her mouth properly; her words came out muffled.

Jingyuan recovered quickly enough—he was almost used to it by now. "Mom. Can you buy slippers that actually make noise when you walk?"

"My mom" wasn't an exclamation—it was an address.

"No. They'll scratch the floor."

Jingyuan knew she would be stubborn; he hadn't expected anything when he made the suggestion. Calmly, he put the soy sauce in the cabinet. "Skipped work again?"

"Mhm. The moment the department head left, I slipped out." She sounded rather proud. "Dad's not eating at home. Will you make dinner?"

"No." The boy refused instantly, decisively, and opened the fridge for cold water on his own. "Played basketball today. I'm exhausted."

Mrs. Xie huffed twice in dissatisfaction and retreated to her room. A moment later, throat-Mai-Mang came bouncing out: "Gege, you cook, okay? I want to eat your cooking."

Jingyuan glanced at her and kept drinking water.

"If I can't eat gege's cooking, I'll get depressed, and then I won't feel like doing homework, and then Monday the teacher will scold me, and after being scolded my self-esteem will take a hit, and before I recover the exams will come, so my grades will slip, and if my grades slip I'll lose confidence, and from then on I'll never recover, and the college entrance exam will drop me into a third-tier university, and third-tier universities have easy coursework so I'll go bad, spend all day at internet cafés gaming, meet handsome bad boys while gaming and mess around with them, then get hot-headed and move in with one of them, then get pregnant out of ignorance while my boyfriend runs away, and I won't dare go home to ask you for abortion money so I'll secretly give birth to the baby, and when my son grows up he'll resent me for giving birth to him so recklessly and growing up in a single-parent home with psychological scars, so he'll be seduced by a scheming girl and marry her and leave me completely, and I'll become a lonely old woman with no emotional support and get fired from work, and finally, when I'm seventy or eighty, I'll become an old lady picking up plastic bottles on the roadside, and my tragic life will be over. And the reason my life became so tragic is all because—gege, you wouldn't cook!"

The boy casually poured a glass of ice water and handed it to Mai Mang, then pulled ingredients from the fridge and started stir-frying.

The girl drank her water and hummed a tune, satisfied she'd done good work.

After a while, Jingyuan said: "Maimai, honestly, I don't think that scenario holds up."

"Huh?"

"The boyfriend you live with would run away before you even got pregnant. Trust me."

Jingyuan felt his family had once been more or less normal—Dad loved overtime and had a cold face (Jingyuan's cold face was pure inheritance). Mom loved skipping work, was childish, lazy, and vain—or, on the bright side, devoted to self-care.

But ever since Mai Mang moved in, it was getting harder to find evidence this household existed on planet Earth.

First, the mammoth problem.

Why would a serious, cold-faced family head severely lacking in romance, humor, and imagination calmly answer "Understood"? The tone practically meant: Mammoths really are a hazard. I nearly ran into a saber-toothed tiger last week.

Fine. Suppose everyone understood "mammoth" as code for some evil force.

Then second—from when did Mom start calling Dad "Dad"? Wasn't that a complete mess of generations?

Fine. Mrs. Xie had long been positioned as the little girl in the house. No one would object if you said Mr. Xie was raising two daughters.

Then last—from when did these two little girls start colluding?

In any case, aside from adapting to this ever-shifting world, he had no other choice.

"Gege, I finished my natural science project. Can you check it for me later?" Mai Mang said, leaning against the kitchen doorframe.

"Hm? That fast? I only heard you say you were starting the day before yesterday." Jingyuan stir-fried the vegetables with his back to her.

"I've had the idea for a long time."

That wasn't surprising. The Cult Leader always had ideas—but they tended to be bizarre, so Jingyuan asked: "What's the project about?"

"Proving that morning exercise is harmful to health."

"Huh?" Thinking he'd misheard, the boy turned around in shock—but Mai Mang repeated it, word for word.

"Why would you choose a topic that obviously can't pass review?"

"Because running when I get to school every morning is so tiring and annoying, and I can't use period cramps as an excuse to skip thirty days out of thirty."

"Whether the project succeeds is secondary. The key is nobody's going to listen, right? You think the school will cancel morning runs just because you wrote this?"

"So I'm not only submitting it as a project report—I'm revising it into a proposal for the student council. If they adopt it, the student council has the power to cancel morning runs."

"Give it up."

Though he'd poured cold water on her immediately, after dinner and dishes, Jingyuan was still dragged off to review the project. He had to admit—the Cult Leader lived up to her title. Sixty pages of twisted logic in size-5 font on A4 paper.

When Jingyuan finally made it from page 1 to page 60, Mai Mang leaned in: "Well? Anything else to add?"

"Submit it as is."

"Really?"

"But think carefully—the world is counting on you." The boy spoke with grave solemnity. He finally understood how Dad had felt answering "Understood" just now.

Mai Mang was electrified, as if an Ultraman whose battery indicator had been flashing sprang to life. She nodded fiercely with the heroic burden of one chosen to save the world: "I understand."

She clearly didn't.

Jingyuan handed back the thick project report, exhaled, turned, left, and tossed over his shoulder: "What I mean is, once you submit it, it won't just be embarrassingly bad—it'll be an embarrassment so catastrophic the world might end."

Mai Mang froze for two seconds, then got angry: "Gege! Why don't you believe in science!"

Jingyuan, already out of the room, leaned against the wall.