The X-Family · Chat

The noon sun of the Iron Dimension hangs overhead, the heat making the asphalt road surface slightly soft.\n\nIn the Xia family living room, Xia Yu sits at the dining table, his left hand tapping a calculator while his right hand flips through a stack of bills. The numbers are jumping too fast, and his brow furrows deeper and deeper. Last month's electricity bill went up again, A Gong drinks three cups of pearl milk tea a day, and the gas money for Xiong Ge's truck hasn't been reimbursed yet. He sighs, scribbling a string of numbers on the edge of a bill.\n\nXia Mei is curled up on the sofa, one leg draped over the armrest, intensely focused on applying nail polish. The TV is on, showing a woman crying her heart out. Xia Mei glances at the screen, sniffs along with her, and then continues to paint the next finger. The nail polish is a bright pink, with a "Limited Edition" label on the bottle—she had to visit three stores to find it.\n\nThe kitchen door is closed, but it can't contain the noise within. The clatter of spatulas, the bubbling of boiling water, and then a thick plume of smoke squeezes through the door crack—white, burnt, and mixed with a certain sickly sweet scent. Xia Yu doesn't even look up; he pulls a mask from a drawer and puts it on. Xia Mei screams, "Mom! My nail polish!" and rushes toward the balcony with her wet fingers held out, her slippers slapping against the tiles.\n\nA Gong sits in a rattan chair in the yard, sunlight bathing his face. He holds a cup of pearl milk tea; the pearls have all sunk to the bottom, and he pokes around with the straw for a long time without catching a single one. He squints, chewing on something for a long while before finally swallowing.\n\nThis is just an ordinary afternoon for the Xia-Lan-Xing-De family.\n\nNo one notices the Wu Feng gun leaning against the wall in the corner of the living room, where a small new patch of rust has appeared on the barrel since yesterday. No one notices that the edge of the Feng Long Tie beneath Xia Mei's collar has slightly peeled back. And no one notices that when Xia Tian left the house, the third string on the old guitar in his backpack was on the verge of snapping.\n\nThe weather is too hot; even the wind is too lazy to move.\n\nThe sign for the Old Pub casts a long, slanted shadow in the afternoon sun.\n\n<choice_group>\n <choice id="1">Change the topic</choice>\n <choice id="2">Observe the current details</choice>\n <choice id="3">Advance the plot</choice>\n</choice_group>