43: Chapter 43 Xiaoya's Cellphone

Some got stuck in the brick crevices of the corner, while others plastered themselves onto the newly painted security door, looking like someone had scattered a handful of gold dust.

Chen Jie had just helped Uncle Wang fix the brakes on his scrap cart.

His hands were still covered in grease—blackish-brown machine oil stained the gaps between his fingers, and even the edges of his fingernails were shiny with oil.

He was squatting at the entrance of the bike shed, wiping his palms haphazardly with an old rag handed to him by Uncle Wang, when he heard a little girl crying in Grandma Zhang's small courtyard.

It was thin and aggrieved, like a rain-soaked kitten, drifting into his ears along with the wind.

"Jie-zi, come quickly!" Grandma Zhang's voice floated out right after, carrying a slight, flustered tremor.

"Xiao Ya's phone fell and won't turn on, and it still has the video her mom just sent!

The child has been crying for a long time, and I can't stop her!"

Chen Jie draped the rag over the handlebar, stood up, patted the dust off his overalls, and walked quickly toward Grandma Zhang's small courtyard.

A few morning glory vines crawled up the bamboo fence at the gate; the purple petals had wilted but were still stained with the morning dew.

Pushing the door open, he caught sight of Xiao Ya slumped over the stone table, wiping away tears.

Her school uniform sleeves were stained with grass clippings and mud, and the butterfly bow on the end of her braid was crooked.

On the cement floor in front of her lay a pink mobile phone, face up.

The screen was cracked like a suddenly blooming ice flower, spreading from the corner to the center, and even one corner of the cartoon sticker had been peeled back, revealing the worn plastic shell underneath.

"It was fine this morning," the little girl sobbed, looking up.

Her eyes were as red as ripe cherries, and teardrops still hung from her eyelashes.

She was hiccuping as she spoke.

"I was just squatting by the bench you fixed, watching a video, and my hand slipped... Mom said she would send a new video tonight, but now I can't watch it..."

Chen Jie walked over, bent down, and picked up the phone to weigh it.

It felt light, and the little rabbit sticker on the back had curled at the edges, with some rust from the bench still stuck to it—residue left over from when he'd repaired the bench last time.

He pressed the power button, but the screen only flashed a pale, miserable light before going completely dark, like a firefly that had exhausted its strength and closed its eyes, without even a hint of a reaction.

"Don't worry."

Chen Jie's voice was very soft.

He pulled a washed-out glasses cloth from the side pocket of his backpack and wiped the phone clean, front and back, carefully removing the dust from the cracks.

"Let me take a look, maybe it's not a big problem."

Grandma Zhang came over holding a cup of chrysanthemum tea, the rim of the enamel cup stained with a ring of tea residue.

Steam drifted upward, mixed with the sharp, bitter scent of wild chrysanthemums.

"This child has had a hard life.

Her parents work out of town and only come back once every six months.

She just video-chatted with her mom yesterday, saying she wanted to let her mom see if the wild chrysanthemums in the courtyard had bloomed, and who knew the phone would break today..."

The old woman chattered on, reaching out to pat Xiao Ya's back.

"With Jie-zi here, it will surely be fixed.

Didn't he fix Grandpa Zhang's old radio a while back?"

Chen Jie didn't respond, his fingertips gently stroking the cracks on the screen.

Feeling the touch of the cold plastic shell, he could clearly feel the jade stone in his backpack heating up.

A familiar warm current crawled slowly from his arm to his palm, like holding a cup of warm flower tea—not scalding, but very comfortable.

This feeling was exactly the same as when he helped Su Rui fix the scanner last time—every time he touched a broken object, the spiritual power in his body always seemed to have a mind of its own, jostling to emerge like an eager little beast wanting to smooth out those "problems."

He calmly placed the phone on the stone table, intentionally keeping the screen facing the direction of his backpack's zipper—there was a small gap there that was just enough to let the spiritual power seep out.

Sure enough, after just a few seconds, a faint green light slipped out through the canvas gap, as thin as a silk thread in the sunlight, impossible to notice if one didn't look closely.

It silently drilled into the cracks on the screen, like a nimble little snake, slowly traveling along the fractures.

Xiao Ya was rubbing her red, teary eyes when she suddenly let out an "Ah," her voice full of surprise: "The screen lit up!

Uncle, the screen lit up!"

Chen Jie looked up and saw a faint blue light shining from within the ice-flower-like cracks, as if frozen stars had been crushed and sprinkled inside—faint, yet very conspicuous.

He exerted a little pressure with his fingertips, secretly guiding the warm current in his palm to make the green light travel faster through the cracks—wherever it passed, the spiderweb-like lines were fading bit by bit, as if slowly blurred by morning mist.

The once glaring cracks gradually became blurry.

He remembered that when he fixed Grandma Zhang's old radio a while ago, he had also used his spiritual power to travel along the circuits like this, letting the loose parts return to their places on their own and reconnecting the broken wires.

The old woman had even said back then that his "hands had magic."

"Don't move, wait a moment."

Chen Jie pressed down on Xiao Ya, who wanted to reach for the phone, his eyes fixed on the screen.

When the green light crawled to the earpiece position, the phone suddenly "buzzed" once.

The vibration was very light, but it made the stone table tremble along with it.

Immediately afterward, the screen lit up in response, and the lock screen wallpaper was a photo of Xiao Ya and her mother in front of a cluster of wild chrysanthemums—in the photo, Xiao Ya was wearing a pink dress, her mother had her arms around her shoulders, and both were smiling with curved eyes.

The wild chrysanthemums behind them were blooming in a golden yellow, even more dazzling than the sunlight.

"It's done, you can try it."

Chen Jie handed the phone over carefully.

The warm current in his palm had slowly retreated, leaving only a faint tingling sensation, like having just touched a live light bulb.

Xiao Ya's fingers were still trembling.

She wiped her tears with her sleeve first before gently tapping the video icon.

Soon, her mother's voice clearly came through: "Ya-ya, look, the chrysanthemums here have bloomed too, even yellower than ours at home.

By the weekend, Mom will mail you some dried chrysanthemums; they are very fragrant when brewed in water..."

The little girl's tears suddenly fell again, but this time she was grinning.

The teardrops fell onto the phone case like a string of broken pearls, rolling down the pink plastic shell and dripping onto the stone table, blurring into small water marks.

Grandma Zhang patted her chest on the side and let out a long sigh of relief: "It's truly miraculous!

It was the same when you fixed the radio a while back.

Jie-zi, what are your hands made of?

How can you fix anything that's broken?"

Chen Jie was wiping the remaining oil from his palms with the glasses cloth.

He smiled at the words, intentionally speaking dismissively: "Just good luck.

The battery in this phone might have just been loose, and the fall actually snapped it back into place.

It's not a big deal."

When he got up, he deliberately moved his backpack to the side to block Xiao Ya's line of sight—that green light had long since hidden away, as if it had never appeared, with only a faint warmth remaining from the jade stone in his backpack.

Xiao Ya held the phone, looking at her mother's video repeatedly, when she suddenly pointed at Chen Jie's hand: "Uncle, there's light at your fingertips!

A faint green, it's so pretty!"

Chen Jie looked down and saw that, sure enough, there was still a faint green light flickering at the crook of his thumb, like crumbs of stardust, especially conspicuous in the sunset.

He hurriedly rubbed his hand against his overalls, rubbing the light until it disappeared without a trace: "It's the sunlight reflecting.

Look, isn't it gone now?"

In his heart, however, he knew this was because he had used his spiritual power too hastily just now and hadn't fully retracted it—every time this happened, his fingertips would always glow for a while, like the lingering sound after an old grandfather clock chimed, taking half a day to disappear completely.

When he walked Xiao Ya home in the evening, the little girl insisted on pulling him to her small balcony, standing on tiptoe to pick the yellowest wild chrysanthemum from a flowerpot.

The petals were full and still stained with the evening dew.

"Uncle, this is for you," Xiao Ya handed the wild chrysanthemum to him, smiling so that two small canine teeth were visible.

"This one is the most fragrant, even more fragrant than Uncle Wang Lei's braised food!"

Chen Jie took the wild chrysanthemum and casually tucked it into the shoulder strap of his backpack.

Walking a few steps, he could smell a fresh, sweet scent mixed with the coolness of the jade stone in his backpack, which was even more comforting than drinking iced soda.

Passing by the bench he had repaired earlier, he saw Zhao Kai squatting there smoking, an empty beer bottle thrown by his feet, and cigarette butts scattered all over the ground.

"Helping someone fix something good again?"

Zhao Kai squinted at the wild chrysanthemum on his backpack, smoke drifting from the corner of his mouth and blurring his face.

"Just now, I seemed to see green light coming from you, like the old grandfather clock in the ancestral hall that Grandma Zhang talked about.

It's weirdly scary."

Chen Jie didn't respond, just patted the bench seat hard.

The wooden board made a "thump-thump" muffled sound—it was very sturdy.

The sunset pulled his shadow long, casting it on the ground where it overlapped with the shadow of the bench.

The fragrance of the wild chrysanthemum mixed with the smell of meat drifting from Wang Leis Braised Food Stall, tangling together in the wind, warm and cozy.

He suddenly felt that this spiritual power was just like life in the Old neighborhood; it looked ordinary and plain, but it always gave little surprises in the most unexpected moments—like making a broken phone light up again, making a homesick child laugh, and making those trivial little things all become warm and bright.