WRA CH84

Zhou Sicheng didn’t say a word.

Chu Ren asked, “Which cartoon?”

Xiang Zhen rolled his eyes around, then spoke to the little sunflower watch on his wrist, “Xiao Kui, give me a cartoon about snakes eating field mice.”

Xiao Kui: “Okay, here is a cartoon about snakes and crops. Please check it, Master.”

Hearing this, Chu Ren thought there actually was such a cartoon. But upon further reflection—no, Xiang Zhen had just given Xiao Kui a prompt, and the watch had AI-generated an animation on the spot!

At the root of it all, it was the fault of Xiao Kui’s creator, Zhou Sicheng!

Indeed, AI could generate far too many videos nowadays, making the flow of information way too chaotic.

Chu Ren said, “I think we need to limit the kids’ exposure to short videos.”

It was useless to just keep Little Bai Chu from watching them; when the three babies hung out together, if one watched a video, it was basically the same as all three watching it. He had heard that baby Xiao Guazi frequently sneaked peeks at short videos.

Zhou Sicheng smiled. Oh, so he was taking a jab at his wife. He asked sharply, “President Chu, do you not plan on letting your son go to elementary school in the future?”

Chu Ren: “Of course he will go.” Being illiterate was the biggest taboo right now.

Zhou Sicheng said leisurely, “The story Snakes and Crops is right there in the elementary school textbooks. Just accept reality.”

In the standard PEP 5th-grade textbook, there was a text explaining how crop yields dropped for unknown reasons after a flood. Later, an experienced old farmer pointed out that it was because the snakes had drowned in the flood, and without their natural predators, the field mice ran rampant.

Zhou Sicheng didn’t know if the text was still in the current curriculum, but either way, it was enough to effectively counter Chu Ren.

Zhou Sicheng bent down and patted the little white snake’s head. “Snakes that eat field mice are good babies.”

Chu Ren: “Shut up, why are you still teaching him that?!”

Seeing the two of them busy arguing and completely missing the main point, Shen Ku sighed. Did it really matter who taught them?! He squatted down and asked the Coffee Bean baby, “Have you guys caught field mice in the mountains? Did you… did you eat any?”

Thinking of his delicate, Little Prince-like Coffee Bean baby catching mice during those six days and five nights in the mountains, Shen Ku couldn’t help but carefully recall how dirty the baby was every night when he picked him up. Covered in grime from rolling around in the valleys, Shen Ku had previously thought his son just kept tripping on the mountain paths because his legs were too short, and his heart had ached terribly for him. Now that he thought about it, all that dirt could have been from hunting mice.

The Coffee Bean baby shook his head. “We didn’t eat them, Daddy.”

Shen Ku: “So you did catch them?”

Coffee Bean: “The baby field mouse was just too careless!”

Uncle Xiang Zhen had turned into a sunflower and was just standing there, and the baby field mouse had blindly bumped headfirst right into his stalk.

Uncle Bai Qi had said, “This little field mouse wants to nibble on the sunflower’s face. It doesn’t know there’s a food chain here.”

The babies had asked, “What is a food chain?”

Bai Qi: “It means field mice eat the crops, and snakes eat the field mice. Everything has a natural vanquisher.”

Hearing this, Xiao Guazi and Coffee Bean had immediately blocked the little field mouse’s escape path, catching it to feed to their little brother!

Bai Qi then had his son turn into a snake to practice catching the field mouse. They played with it for a bit and then let it go.

Zhou Sicheng softly asked his wife, “They really didn’t eat it?”

He suspected that since Xiao Guazi hadn’t tasted it, he might catch one later just to give it a lick.

Xiang Zhen: “No, our baby isn’t an idiot.”

Zhou Sicheng picked up the soft, sweet-smelling Xiao Guazi: “Stop squatting on the ground. Leave the field mice for the wild snakes to eat; they don’t have money to buy cake, but your daddy has money.”

Xiao Guazi blinked his big, round eyes and thought for a moment. “Daddy, then can I give them some cookies to eat?”

Zhou Sicheng: “You can.”

That night, Xiao Guazi opened a box of cookies and placed them on the ridge of the field. When he woke up the next day, he ran out to check and found the cookies were gone, eaten by some unknown animal.

There were so many small animals in the countryside, all cute little creatures. The sprite babies had no natural enemies out here; essentially, you could just let them loose in the fields and not even have to keep an eye on them.

When they came back covered in dirt from playing, they would just be washed nice and clean before eating dinner.

The summer sun scorched the earth. At noon, Li Guihua would fill three bathtubs with water and place them in the backyard to catch the afternoon sun. By dusk, this water would become the perfect warm temperature for the babies to bathe in, infused to the brim with the power of the sun.

The bathtubs were huge; one could fit all three babies at once, looking like a pot boiling three plump, white sesame tangyuan dumplings.

Li Guihua would first pluck the three cubs into the first tub to wash the mud off their hands and feet, scrubbing them like white radishes, before dunking them into the second tub for a thorough washing.

During this step, she let them play on their own; soaking a bit longer was good for their health. Li Guihua would open a game of mahjong on her phone.

The sprite babies splashed and played in the tub, each holding a gourd dipper, scooping up water to pour over their own heads, or—

Zhou Sicheng poked his head out of the kitchen and stopped the three cubs’ actions just in time: “No drinking the bathwater.”

Oh, okay.

Xiao Guazi moved his mouth away from the gourd dipper; the baby was just a little thirsty.

Once they had soaked enough, they were transferred to the third tub for a final rinse.

Li Guihua thought to herself, Washing three grandsons every day is awfully tiring.

Why was she the one washing them?

Because the three human daddies were working online and cooking dinner after work. As for the three sprite daddies, due to the “Field Mouse Incident,” they were forced to take remedial classes together all day long.

Human nutrition, bacterial infections, zoonotic diseases…

Even Dou Manning hated learning about it. The three sprites desperately wanted to skip class.

But this time, their three husbands took a very tough stance. And when the three of them got tough, it was a force formidable enough to wage war against the sprite alliance.

Why were the sprite babies allowed to play in the fields all day? Because their instructor was Xiao Kui, who was casting a PowerPoint presentation onto the 70-inch color TV Chu Ren had bought for Auntie Guihua’s house.

Xiang Zhen, Dou Manning, and Bai Qi sat in front of the TV, receiving their education.

With no real human teacher supervising them, as the class dragged on, they eventually started whispering to each other.

Xiang Zhen: “Bai Qi, when you were secretly living in Chu Ren’s house and he discovered you, did he kick you out?”

Bai Qi: “No.”

Dou Manning: “When you two met, Chu Ren had just finished his college entrance exams.”

This was different from the sunflower and coffee sprites’ experiences. When they met their husbands, the men were already elegant, mature, handsome master’s graduates from prestigious universities.

Although the sprites had just entered society, they had all gone through a long, drawn-out wait from gaining sentience to taking human form. Their mental age was definitely over eighteen; having been tempered by time, the sprites’ emotions were also incredibly stable.

Did Bai Qi think Chu Ren was childish back then?

Bai Qi thought for a moment: “Occasionally, because Chu Ren would skip class and come back home.”

He wouldn’t say exactly what Chu Ren came back to do.

Xiang Zhen said, “Skipping class is just human nature.”

Bai Qi stared at the TV. For the very first time, he felt that TV was so boring he actually wanted to skip class too.

But back then, skipping class had been a complete violation of the natural order in Bai Qi’s eyes.

There was a cypress tree at the entrance of the villa he lived in. Every time, Bai Qi would casually snap off a branch and give Chu Ren a thrashing with it before the boy was willing to go back to school.

The opportunity to go to school is so precious, how could someone just not go?

…

Seventeen years ago.

Bai Qi was the first sprite Li Guihua had hosted independently. Although he was a snake, Li Guihua was a farmer and wasn’t afraid of such little critters.

People often say you raise your first child strictly by the book, and you raise the second one like a dog. Towards her first little sprite, Li Guihua had that exact kind of strict, loving mother mentality. Bai Qi went through the longest schooling period out of fear that he would enter human society without understanding things clearly and end up getting hurt.

Back then, the internet wasn’t as developed as it is now. Unlike today—when Xiang Zhen left the mountains, handing him a smartphone was enough for him to self-study and cram three days’ worth of knowledge into one.

During the day, Li Guihua made Bai Qi go to school, instilling in him that the chance to study was precious and he absolutely couldn’t miss a single class. At night, they would watch primetime TV dramas together, and she would tell him that the TV portrayed the complexities of human nature, so he couldn’t miss a single episode of that, either.

Bai Qi stayed in Fairy Village for two years, becoming completely and utterly addicted to primetime TV dramas.

But the sprites had a mission. They had to take the Guide to Becoming Human out into society and use their own life experiences to update the manual.

As times changed, Li Guihua had Xiang Zhen work as a customer service rep, and Manning open a small street stall. But for Bai Qi, she suggested he become a security guard.

A neighbor in Fairy Village happened to work as a security guard in a high-end villa complex. All day long, he just read books and newspapers, bored out of his mind.

This job was perfect for a little sprite who didn’t understand anything yet. All he had to do was familiarize himself with all the residents, and sprites happened to have photographic memories.

Thus, Bai Qi took up an image-based security guard position at a certain high-end residential community.

Security guards were allowed to read newspapers, but they couldn’t watch TV.

Villa A09 had been vacant for a long time. One day while on patrol, Bai Qi overheard someone mentioning that a snake had crawled in through the air conditioning exhaust pipe.

“When a house is left empty, little animals will just move in.”

“Last year a stray cat even birthed a litter of kittens in there.”

“The owner only comes to air it out and clean it once every six months, what a waste.”

Bai Qi was deep in thought. Other snakes can live there? Can I live there too?

That afternoon, the owner of A09 asked the property management to look for the snake in the house. Finding a snake in such a massive house was no easy task. Property management dispatched five security guards.

As soon as Bai Qi entered, he sensed a small pregnant snake hiding under the sofa.

Opposite the sofa hung an enormous TV; he had never seen one so incredibly large before.

“Do you want to watch TV too?” Bai Qi whispered softly.

He followed the other security guards up and down, pretending to search everywhere. When he finally moved next to the sofa, he squatted down, reached out, scooped the little snake up, and stuffed it right into his pocket.

“Caught it. It’s a non-venomous snake, I’ll go release it outside.”

The other guards all praised Bai Qi’s bravery for shoving a snake straight into his pocket like that. None of them wanted to touch it: “Alright, you go handle it.”

“It really is a waste that no one lives in this house; it deserves to be occupied by snakes. This TV, this fridge, this AC—appliances break down faster when they aren’t being used!”

“The landscaping in our community is too good. Now that a scent is left here, more snakes will probably show up in a couple of days.”

That very night.

Underneath the sofa in A09, another snake appeared.

On the first night, Bai Qi was extremely cautious and merely stared at the TV without daring to turn it on.

Late on the second night, Bai Qi turned on the TV and watched for two hours.

Late on the third night, he watched for four hours.

On the fourth day, Bai Qi quit his job, dedicating himself full-time to taking care of the owner’s TV.

The heavy curtains were tightly drawn, and the cold light of the television reflected on Bai Qi’s pale, pristine face.

The TV will break if no one watches it.

He wasn’t doing anything bad; he was going to pay for the electricity.

Bai Qi didn’t sit on the owner’s sofa. He just sat cross-legged on the floor, back perfectly straight, completely and utterly engrossed.

When he got tired, he would lie on his side on the floor to watch. When he got sleepy, he would turn into a snake and hide under the sofa to sleep. Aside from the TV, he didn’t touch a single thing in the house.

Whenever he witnessed major twists and tragedies in the TV dramas, Bai Qi would quickly pull out his Guide to Becoming Human and jot down the lessons and experiences. There were many public service announcements on TV during that era, and Bai Qi meticulously copied them all down word for word.

Every six months, the owner would send a crew over for a thorough cleaning and maintenance. Bai Qi had figured out the schedule and successfully avoided them in advance every single time.

Every week, he would go out and work a day job. Once he got his wages, he would eat until he was completely stuffed, then take the rest of the money back and place it in the TV cabinet drawer to serve as his electricity payment.

He comfortably watched TV dramas like this for five years.

Then, one day, the villa door opened. The person who walked in wasn’t the cleaner, but a handsome young man.

Dragging a suitcase behind him, the young man sat heavily on the sofa, pondering who knows what, and didn’t move an inch for half an hour.

“Where’s the remote?”

Bai Qi, whose tail was currently curled tightly around the remote control: “…”