It all started with a strong wind blowing through City A.
A pair of men’s underwear Zhou Hao had hung out on her balcony was blown into a large tree in the residential complex.
By the time Zhou Hao discovered this, it was already ten in the morning, and she had just woken up.
The enthusiastic neighbors were brainstorming in the residents’ group chat, trying to find the owner of the underwear.
[This direction… it should belong to someone in Building 16, right?]
[Not necessarily. The wind was really strong last night. It could have blown over from somewhere else.]
[After carefully studying the photo in the group, I can confirm that it’s a pair of men’s boxer briefs, suitable for a fashionable, handsome guy between twenty and thirty.]
[You can tell the age from that? And how can you tell he’s handsome?]
[Whose are they? Hurry up and claim them. They’re hanging right outside my window, and I laugh for two whole minutes every time I walk past.]
[Big.]
Zhou Hao scrolled past a string of messages before finally seeing the photo taken by one of the helpful neighbors.
A basic pair of men’s boxer briefs in a gradient ice-blue color.
Zhou Hao’s mind went blank.
She had hung a pair exactly like that on her balcony last night.
No way, no way. Could those boxers actually be hers?
She sprang upright in bed. She did not even bother putting on her slippers before rushing to the balcony. The screen window, which had been securely closed before she went to bed, was now wide open. The men’s underwear that had been hanging on the drying rack was nowhere to be seen.
This was how the sky must feel when it falls.
Zhou Hao stood motionless on the balcony for two seconds, then reached out and closed the window. Numbly, she walked back to the bedroom.
The residents’ group chat was still buzzing with discussion about the underwear hanging in the tree. Zhou Hao did not say a word from beginning to end, and certainly had no intention of claiming it.
Because she still wanted to keep living here. :)
The best solution now was to sneak over and take the underwear down while no one was paying attention.
After a quick wash, Zhou Hao dug a T-shirt out from the bottom of her wardrobe and put it on. Then she donned a baseball cap and a mask, covering herself up as thoroughly as possible before opening the door and heading out.
The large tree stood diagonally in front of the building Zhou Hao lived in. She crept over to it and looked up.
…The tree really was enormous. Its canopy reached almost as high as the tenth floor.
Zhou Hao was five feet six inches tall.
So the idiom “an ant trying to shake a tree” really was that literal.
Zhou Hao shifted her stance and continued staring at the tree overhead.
She had never expected to reach a point in her life when she would wish humans had never evolved. At least monkeys knew how to climb trees.
No, that wasn’t right. If humans had never evolved, there would be no need to wear underwear in the first place.
Zhou Hao shifted into a third pose. The reason fragile humans had managed to reach the top of the food chain was because they knew how to use tools.
So Zhou Hao pulled out her phone and searched for a handy tool: property management.
She composed a message and sent it to the property manager, then opened the residents’ group chat again.
[There’s a young woman standing under the tree with the underwear hanging from it.]
[I see her too. She’s been standing there for a while. Maybe she’s trying to figure out how to get it down.]
[At that height, she should call her boyfriend and have him come over.]
[Huh? At that height, unless her boyfriend can fly.]
Zhou Hao: “…”
The prerequisite for having a boyfriend who could fly was having a boyfriend.
Of course, Zhou Hao did not have a boyfriend. She had simply believed the advice she had seen online and hung a pair of men’s underwear on her balcony to pretend she was not a woman living alone.
There was a gentler option: hanging a men’s shirt. But the boxer-brief faction claimed that underwear offered better value for money. You could buy several pairs to rotate through, and the visual impact was much greater.
…They certainly had a lot of visual impact.
At that moment, the property manager replied. The property management office did not have the equipment for high-altitude work. How about calling the fire department?
Zhou Hao: “…”
There was no need to involve the fire department over something like this, was there?
The property manager helpfully added that it probably would not cost anything.
Zhou Hao: “…”
This wasn’t about the cost!
Zhou Hao: I’ve seen workers using those tall lifts when the landscaping in the complex gets trimmed.
Manager Little Li: They do have those, but they don’t work for property management. You’d have to pay them.
Manager Little Li: Or you could wait. If the wind picks up again, it might blow down on its own.
Zhou Hao: “…”
If the group chat had not been discussing the matter with such enthusiasm, she would have been perfectly happy to wait for another strong wind.
In the end, citing the negative impact it was having, she asked property management to contact the workers for her.
The garden gate of a first-floor resident’s home suddenly opened, and an auntie walked out with a curious look on her face.
Her gaze quickly locked onto Zhou Hao, and she smiled at her. “Hey, little sister, did this blow down from your place?”
“…” Zhou Hao really did not want to admit it. But if it was not hers, then she would look even more like a pervert lurking beneath the tree.
“Haha, sorry about this. I’ve already contacted property management. The workers will be here in half an hour.”
“Oh, is that so?” The auntie looked at the underwear hanging in the tree, then at Zhou Hao. “Are you just going to stand here and wait? It’s so hot today. Why don’t you come inside and have some water?”
“No, no, it’s fine.” Zhou Hao hurriedly refused.
But the auntie was extremely warm and welcoming. “Oh, don’t be shy. I live right here, and when the workers arrive, they’ll be able to see them immediately.”
Zhou Hao was about to refuse again when two more aunties walked out of the garden. They appeared to be friends of the first one.
Zhou Hao had no chance against the enthusiasm of the three aunties. By the time she came to her senses, she was already sitting in the auntie’s garden, with a bowl of iced mung bean soup and some snacks set out in front of her.
“Have some mung bean soup. You must be sweating under that hat and mask.”
One auntie pushed the bowl toward Zhou Hao. Another asked, “Where’s your boyfriend? Why didn’t he come down himself? How could he let a young woman stand out in the sun?”
“…” Zhou Hao felt even sweatier beneath her disguise. But she had hung men’s underwear on the balcony precisely to pretend she had a boyfriend, so now she could only grit her teeth and make something up.
“He’s… working overtime today.”
“Working overtime on a Saturday? What does he do?”
“…”
Zhou Hao had not thought that far ahead.
The three aunties stared at her without blinking. Zhou Hao swallowed and continued making up her story.
“He works in artificial intelligence.”
One of the aunties looked astonished. “Artificial intelligence? You mean AI?”
Another immediately said, “I know AI. I use Douya all the time.”
The auntie who had pulled Zhou Hao inside clapped her hands. “Douya is an AI developed by Shijie. Does your boyfriend work at Shijie?”
“…”
Zhou Hao swallowed again, then nodded with a smile. “Yes, he does.”
“Oh, that’s a big company. No wonder he has to work on Saturdays.” The three aunties nodded in understanding.
Then they began asking about the salaries of Shijie employees.
“Um… he only graduated from university recently, so his salary isn’t very high yet.”
Zhou Hao sounded a little hesitant. The auntie immediately comforted her. “That’s normal for someone who just graduated. His salary will definitely go up later.”
“That’s right, even pensions increase year by year.” Another auntie opened a packet of snacks and began eating as she chatted. “You don’t look very old either. Did you just graduate? Did you and your boyfriend meet at university?”
“……” No, to be precise, they’d only just met.
As the conversation continued, Auntie Wang asked which universities they had graduated from and what their job prospects were. Then, out of nowhere, she asked, “What’s your boyfriend’s name?”
“……” The first time Zhou Hao hung a pair of men’s underwear on the balcony, she never imagined she would have to create such a fully fleshed-out boyfriend for herself.
A gentle breeze drifted through the garden, carrying a faint, indistinct fragrance. Zhou Hao took two seconds to come up with a name for her boyfriend.
“His name is… Wang Sen.”
The moment Auntie Wang heard the name, her smile widened. “Wang? Same surname as me! We’re practically family!”
By the time the worker hired by the property management company arrived, Zhou Hao had already finished the bowl of mung bean soup in front of her. At first, she had been determined not to take off her mask under any circumstances. But after sitting there and chatting with the aunties for half an hour…
She really had needed that bowl of mung bean soup.
Standing on the lift, the worker retrieved the pair of boxers hanging from the tree without much trouble. Zhou Hao paid him, took back the conspicuous underwear, and deliberately went around an entire apartment building before returning home.
Only after she got inside did she discover that someone had taken pictures in the residents’ group chat. Fortunately, they were mostly photos of the worker up in the tree. In the occasional shot that included her, all anyone could see was her baseball cap and mask.
Zhou Hao relaxed.
Someone who saw the pictures asked, “So, is he a young, fashionable hunk?”
[The underwear was taken down by a young woman.]
[What’s the matter? She was too embarrassed to go down herself?]
[Her boyfriend was working overtime today. He’s doing 996 at a major tech company.]
[Auntie Wang, how did you know that?]
[I was chatting and having snacks in the garden with the girls today, and we happened to run into Little Zhou, so I invited her in for some mung bean soup. [giggle]]
Little Zhou: “……”
Whatever. There were plenty of people surnamed Zhou in the group, and Auntie Wang hadn’t tagged her. So it wasn’t her.
The incident kept the residents’ group chat buzzing for two days. Once Monday came and everyone went back to work, hardly anyone said anything in the chat anymore. Looking at the group as it returned to its usual quiet, Zhou Hao contentedly set down her phone.
People really did need to have jobs.
In the blink of an eye, three years passed. By then, hardly anyone in the complex remembered the ice-blue pair of boxers, and Zhou Hao never hung that particular pair of underwear on the balcony again. Every now and then, though, when she ran into Auntie Wang and her friends around the complex, they would still ask her how things were going with her boyfriend.
Thanks to them, Zhou Hao had been dating her boyfriend, Wang Sen, for three years. During that time, their relationship had remained steady, their careers had been progressing nicely, and even Wang Sen’s fictional profile had grown increasingly detailed—
Wang Sen, male, twenty-six years old, blood type A. Graduated from Imperial Capital University with a degree in artificial intelligence. Currently works in AI research and development at Sejie Group. Likes blue, prefers sweet-and-sour flavors, enjoys listening to light rock, loves cats and dogs, and once fed a stray cat in the complex.
Apart from that stray cat, no one in the complex had ever seen Wang Sen—not even Auntie Wang or her friends. Yet they had never once suspected that Wang Sen might not actually exist.
After all, working 996 at a major tech company meant it was perfectly normal for someone to be so busy that no one ever saw him.
Sometimes, though, things developed in unexpected directions—just like that pair of boxers that had suddenly ended up hanging from a tree.
Zhou Hao never imagined that ten hours later, she and Wang Sen would be engaged.
