“My little brother is being naughty! Not loving to study is not what a good child does! When you grow up, you’ll have to help build the Four Modernizations!” His sister patted Edward Faulkner’s head and said coquettishly.

Faced with his sister’s advice, Edward Faulkner couldn’t help but roll his eyes. Damn, why does this sound so awkward to me?

To use a rather cliché phrase, time flows like water, the years pass like a shuttle, and in a flash, Edward Faulkner was already a year and a half old!

Chapter 4 Growing Pains

Winter passed and spring arrived, spring passed and summer came.

When the cicadas outside on the trees started screeching at the top of their lungs, Edward Faulkner was already a year and a half old. With his innate advantages, Edward Faulkner was outstanding both in height and intelligence. Even at two years old, ordinary children weren’t as tall as he was, not to mention that inside this little guy’s head was the mind of an adult thirty years ahead of his time.

The house where Edward Faulkner’s family lived was a single-story building, the kind where a string of courtyards are connected together, and many families live in a row of houses. Opposite the house was a slightly smaller row of single-story buildings used as kitchens. Between the two rows was a long, wide passageway, at least ten meters across. Around the kitchens and living quarters were two rows of tall trees—poplars, elms, willows, and the like.

In summer, Edward Faulkner’s favorite thing to do was catch cicadas, specifically the nymphs that had just crawled out of their underground mud holes and hadn’t yet shed their hard shells. After catching them, he’d soak them in salt water overnight, then fry them in oil the next day until they were golden yellow—delicious in a unique way.

These things are high in protein, and in an era when meat was relatively scarce, cicadas were an irresistible temptation for kids in need of nutrition. Edward Faulkner was undoubtedly the best among all the cicada-catching kids, even though he was only a year and a half old.

The factory where Henry Faulkner worked was quite large, with five or six thousand employees. In a county-level city with only a little over a hundred thousand people, it was a true giant. Military-industrial enterprises offered good benefits; the factory director was equivalent to a senior colonel, higher than the county-level officials, so much so that at city meetings, seats were always reserved for the factory leaders. The importance of the factory was clear.

But ten years later, things would be very different. As the status of the enterprise declined, the whole factory and its residential area gradually became marginalized. For a while, there was even some mutual resentment; differences in culture and lifestyle made the factory an outlier in the city.

For example, in earlier years, if there was a planned power outage in the city, the factory would always be notified in advance, and only after the factory agreed would the power be cut. Later, this was no longer the case—the city would cut power whenever it wanted, without any notice. Only when the factory leaders called to ask would they get a half-hearted response. In the end, the factory had no choice but to go through higher channels and get a power quota from the ministry to solve the problem.

As the saying goes, thirty years on the east bank, thirty years on the west bank—such are the changes of the world.

The children of the factory were very united. Although Edward Faulkner, with his current perspective, looked down a bit on these little brats, he was still deeply moved when his gaze fell on those familiar faces.

For example, Dog Egg, whose real name was David Yates, was his classmate in elementary school, once helping him bully others and resist being bullied. Then there was Richard Warren, a senior two grades above, a friend who taught him to play chess hand-in-hand. And Emily Lincoln, though now just a snot-nosed, ugly little girl, Edward Faulkner could never forget how much she would surprise everyone when she grew up. The ugly duckling turning into a swan was the perfect way to describe her.

The things remained, the people were the same, but Edward Faulkner’s mindset could never return to the past.

Even though he got excited seeing the loli or shota versions of these familiar people, and remembered many long-buried memories, there was no way he could go back to playing in the mud and sand with these little brats.

Edward Faulkner knew well that his inexplicable return to infancy wasn’t just to give himself a legitimate excuse to run around naked and play in the sand again—he had many important things to do.

Under the shade of the trees, Edward Faulkner, like the other children, was also catching cicadas. But he was different: while other kids either dug aimlessly in the dirt under the trees with shovels, or dug here and there before running off to play in the sand, pull little girls’ hair, or smear mud on their friends’ faces until the crying brought adults’ scolding, Edward Faulkner was certainly not that brainless. And he didn’t even need tools to dig for cicadas.