After the two-day exam had ended, Luo Qiao said goodbye to Teacher Ge, her homeroom teacher, in advance for the New Year and mentioned she would not return to school to collect her report card, planning to go straight back to Capital City.
The next day, she and Stone took a bus back to Qingshan Village. Upon arriving at the village, she sent Stone off to play with his friends while she went down to the gardens at the foot of Daqing Mountain to check on the growth of the vegetables in the greenhouses and also caught a good number of fish by the pond there.
During winter, people would only start working in the gardens after 9:30 am due to the cold. Luo Qiao found a basket and filled it with quite a few fish, planning to drop by Auntie Gao's later and ask her to distribute them among the villagers as a New Year's benefit.