Chapter 106: Returning Home and Working Out

Home is always our root. No matter where we go, no matter how dazzlingly we may flourish out in the world, that root can never be severed.

The most familiar road in life is the road home.

Did you go home this holiday?

Going home is a kind of faith; the farther one drifts away, the more one comes to understand how precious home is.

When young and speaking of ideals, I always thought one had to travel thousands of miles from home to achieve greatness, and I firmly believed that true heroes and worthy children should cast their ambitions to the four corners of the world. I left home full of vigor, convinced that the farther away I went, the more likely I was to make something of myself.

But as experience deepened and I went through more and more of the world’s cold and warmth, I slowly came to realize that my hometown was the true harbor of happiness.

Only then did I understand the meaning of homesickness, and only then did tears begin to fall for my native place, because within that longing there are parents, old acquaintances, the old house that has held so many years, and the simple, happy days of childhood.

What tugs at our hearts most in our hometown is surely our parents. They always say that if we are busy with work, there is no need to come back, but where in the world are there parents who do not wait every day for their children to come home?

The days when their children return are the happiest of their year. And when the children are about to leave again, they wave them off, saying to go on, that work comes first, that there is no need to worry; yet their footsteps follow for a long way, their eyes full of reluctance.

Come home. Come home and see your parents. Cook with them, take photos for them, talk with them about the ordinary things of life. Where a mother is, there is love; where a father is, there is home.

Do not let the regret of wanting to care for our parents only after they are gone become our greatest sorrow. When parents are there, life still has a place of origin; when parents are gone, life has only the road back.

Perhaps one day, after a casual farewell to our parents, there will truly be no reunion in this lifetime.

Da Zhiwei’s home was in a third-tier city in the northwest. In the national picture, a third-tier city is nothing worth mentioning, but in the northwest, this was already one of the few large cities.

After more than a year away, Da Zhiwei immediately sensed that the city had changed somewhat again. There were more buildings and more cars; here and there, more commercial plazas had appeared, more residential compounds had sprung up, and the streets were filled with people. It was already completely unlike the small city he remembered. Even the newly built high-speed rail station beside the train station was under construction, and it was expected to open the year after next.

He crossed the city center and kept heading west. After about twenty minutes of stop-and-go driving, his own three-story row villa came into view.

Together with the garage on the first floor, the villa covered more than 280 square meters. In a first-tier city in China, it would cost at least ten million yuan, but here it required only a little over three million. Da Zhiwei had paid for the purchase, while his parents had covered the interior decoration and furniture.

In the parking space in front of the villa sat a Sorento, the very one provided by his sponsor.

It was a decent car. While he was abroad, he left it with his parents.

Woof! Woof! Woof!

In front of the villa stood a native Chinese village dog. Seeing an unfamiliar taxi stop at its own gate, it immediately let out a loud bark.

Da Zhiwei opened the car door and got out. He called to the dog, “Huanyuan, you don’t even recognize me? Tonight I’ll turn you into hot pot.”

Woof! Woof! Woof!

The dog, still called Huanyuan, kept barking at him, warning its human family that an uninvited guest had come to the door.

“Huanyuan, you’ve really gone soft living this easy life! You don’t even recognize me anymore?” Da Zhiwei set down his suitcase and made a gesture as if to roll up his sleeves.

At the sudden shout, Huanyuan froze for a moment. Then it recognized its owner. Once it did, its tail wagged furiously and it gave a soft whimper, pressing eagerly toward Da Zhiwei, even lifting its two front paws onto his arm, eager to give its long-absent master a big wet lick to show how much it had missed him.

Da Zhiwei could hardly take that. He simply rubbed the dog’s head, scratched its neck, and pushed its paws back down from himself.

“Xiaowei, you’re back?”

At that moment, an auntie in her forties or fifties from next door came out. Seeing Da Zhiwei playing with Huanyuan, she finally recognized him: the son of the Da family had returned. Smiling, she immediately greeted him.

“Hello, Aunt Liu!” Da Zhiwei said with a smile.

“Xiaowei, you’re doing pretty well in Spain. You’ve really given the national team some face!” Aunt Liu was a gifted gossip. The moment she saw that football celebrity had returned, curiosity immediately ignited in her. She walked over smiling and circled Da Zhiwei, looking him up and down.

“Xiaowei!”

Hearing that her son had arrived home, Da’s mother hurried out at a jog. As soon as she stepped out and saw the sturdy young man standing in the open space by the door, playing with the dog, who else could it be but her son?

Seeing her son should have made her happy, but all at once Da’s mother felt her nose sting, and before she knew it, tears were falling.

Seeing his mother come out, Da Zhiwei quickly took a few steps forward, supported her by the arm, and said, “Mom, I’m home!”

With that, he tightly embraced his mother, who was a head and a half shorter than him. After holding her for four or five seconds, he let go and turned to hug his father as well.

Da’s father was stunned by the embrace and did not even react for two or three seconds.

As a traditional Chinese father, he believed in discipline through the rod and had never shared such tender gestures with his son, Da Zhiwei.

Yet once he came to himself, he too wrapped his arms around his son and gently patted his back.

Holding his son, Da’s father felt an endless flood of emotion. Who would have thought that the child who once sat on his shoulders had grown so much that he was now more than half a head taller than he was?

“It’s good that you’re back. Good that you’re back.” For a moment, Da’s father’s eyes also grew misty.

“Right, Dad, Mom, let’s go inside first. I brought you a lot of things……”

“What a waste of money.”

A scene of perfect harmony.

But the next few days left Da Zhiwei a little dumbfounded……

First day home.

“Oh my, the child is back. What do you want to eat? Mom will make it for you!”

“Leave the trash there; let your dad take it out!”

“Mom bought you two new sets of clothes. Hurry and try them on!”

“Is the hot water warm enough? Do you want to have a sauna later? That sauna room hasn’t even been used twice since it was installed.”

……

Third day home.

“Why are you still playing on your phone? Go take out the trash!”

“Fold the blanket!”

“Stop staying cooped up at home all the time. Go out and run a bit.”

……

Fifth day home.

“You come home and all you know is playing games. When are you going to train?”

“You don’t sweep the floor, you don’t wash the dishes, and every day all you do is lie around at home.”

“You can’t get up in the daytime because you don’t sleep at night. Is it like this at Villarreal too?”

“Look at the mess you’ve made of your room.”

“What did you come home for on vacation? You might as well have stayed with the team!”

“When are you rejoining training?”

......

“Mom, didn’t you say you missed me?” Da Zhiwei could only feel his world spinning.

Fortunately, on the sixth day, though it was still unclear how the partnership talks between Mendes and Jin Chang were going, the fitness coach they had found for Da Zhiwei had finally been arranged.

Da Zhiwei drove the Sorento he had left at home straight to the destination.

This place was near Wanda Office Tower, one of the most prosperous parts of the city, mainly an office district for finance, law firms, and the like. The nearby residential area was also a high-end neighborhood populated chiefly by lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and other such people.

The gym Da Zhiwei was going to was in a building of more than forty stories. Besides the fitness club, the building also housed many well-known companies. The exterior might not look as dazzling as those in first-tier Chinese cities, but once inside, its sense of class was in no way inferior.

“Hello!”

The one who came down to receive Da Zhiwei was a young man in his late twenties, not very tall, just over one meter seventy. But he looked extremely solid, a textbook muscle-bound type, the sort of man whose arms could not even hang straight because of all the muscle. Anyone could tell at a glance that this was a genuine fitness enthusiast.

“Uh, Coach Zhang?” Da Zhiwei asked.

“Zhang Haolin!” The fitness coach introduced by Jin Chang shook hands with Da Zhiwei cheerfully and joked, “When they said you were coming to train with me, I honestly couldn’t believe it. Now I’m finally seeing the real thing!”

“Haha, what do you mean, the real thing? You’re being way too polite.” Da Zhiwei laughed along.

“Come on, follow me upstairs. I’ll show you around.” As he spoke, Zhang Haolin gestured toward the two security guards at the entrance to the lobby.

Following Zhang Haolin into the elevator, Da Zhiwei asked, “Brother Zhang, is this your gym?”

“That’s right. Brother Zhang? Heh, you figured that out?” Zhang Haolin kept smiling. “Guess how old I am this year?”

“At most thirty-five!” Da Zhiwei blurted out.

To be honest, Zhang Haolin looked around twenty-seven or twenty-eight, but Da Zhiwei was no fool. Since he had been asked to guess, there had to be some gap between appearance and reality.

Zhang Haolin laughed twice and held up four fingers. “I’m forty this year, full years.”

Now it was Da Zhiwei’s turn to be surprised. He stared at Zhang Haolin in disbelief, sizing him up and down, and only after a long while replied, “You’re kidding me, right?”

If Zhang Haolin had not said so himself, Da Zhiwei would never have believed he was forty. With that build, even saying he was twenty-five would have been believable.

“I’m dead serious. Ten years ago I was already the national bodybuilding champion.” Zhang Haolin said proudly.

No sooner had he finished speaking than the elevator chimed with a crisp ding, and the doors slowly slid open to either side.

“Come in. I’ll give you a tour.” Zhang Haolin led Da Zhiwei out of the elevator and to the front desk of the fitness club.

The moment he entered, Da Zhiwei was stunned by the place’s level of refinement. At a glance, it seemed to cover nearly a thousand square meters. As for the equipment, that was nothing unusual—fitness gear is all more or less the same. But here, the same things came with a great deal of added luxury.

If he had not known better, Da Zhiwei would have thought he had wandered onto the set of some science-fiction film.

Take the treadmills, for instance: each one had three large touch screens in front of it, almost enclosing the machine. A glance at someone working out on one of them made it feel like a game. The screens were lit up, and the person was now “running” through a snowy mountain scene.

“This is our treadmill. On it you can choose from several modes, each paired with its own environment. You can choose snow, rain, and more than a dozen other settings. The experience is completely different……” Zhang Haolin explained while demonstrating it to Da Zhiwei.

Da Zhiwei wanted to try almost every piece of equipment himself. As he played around, he kept sighing inwardly at how high-tech it all was.

Here, once a member entered, facial recognition and other checks were completed quickly. No staff needed to interact directly with the member; simple body indicators would appear on every machine the member stood before.

The member only had to tap a few times on the machine, and it would immediately generate a corresponding training plan, the required exercise volume, and even a recommended diet.

Though all were fitness clubs, after comparing this place with others, Da Zhiwei felt that even the ones at Evergrande and Villarreal could not measure up to it.

He fiddled around out of curiosity for more than ten minutes, still not having tried everything. Zhang Haolin suggested that unless he wanted to become a professional bodybuilder, there was no need to go further.

Da Zhiwei asked him curiously, “Coming to a high-end gym like this must cost a lot of money, right?”

“The lowest annual membership is fifty thousand. And that’s just the basic fee. It only lets you use this floor, and it doesn’t include coach guidance……”

Hearing that, Da Zhiwei could not help drawing in a breath. Fifty thousand a year was nearly half a year’s income for a local basic-level civil servant.

As he marveled inwardly, something unusual suddenly flashed at the edge of his vision.

He could not help turning toward the source of that magnetic pull. When he saw it clearly, he froze, his eyes going fixed all at once.

About fourteen or fifteen meters away from Da Zhiwei, a door had opened, and a group of girls in swimwear were walking out side by side. Their figures were fully exposed to his view, while the whole space seemed suddenly filled with the soft, tinkling laughter of their voices.

Setting aside their faces for the moment, all of the girls had excellent figures, especially the female instructor in a bikini who stood surrounded at the center. She had a delicate oval face, standard willow-shaped brows, a proud nose that was firm without being as overly prominent as many Western features, and a pair of cherry-red lips. She was simply breathtaking.

When she smiled, two tiny dimples appeared beside her mouth, adding three more points of loveliness to an already exquisite face.

Not only was her face beautiful, her body was superb as well. Not a trace of excess flesh could be found at her waist; with a waist like that, not only would she have abs, she could have a defined washboard stomach.

Just as Da Zhiwei was staring blankly at the young woman, Zhang Haolin spoke up and explained, “They’re here for paddleboard yoga. It helps with balance and core strength. You can give it a try too.”

“That sounds great!”

The End