Fluffy WangXian Oneshots Book Two

Out Of Balance

Every morning without fail at half past eight in the morning, come hell or high water, Lan Zhan can be found walking down the road from his quaint little cottage, to the main street in Yiling Town centre, and to the bank where he works as the manager of Gusu Bank International.

Today is a pleasant spring day, and Lan Zhan enjoys the warm sun on his face as he strides past the only florist, coffee shop, grocery store, post office and bakery on this side of the little High Street.

He prefers walking on this side because he gets to experience the sweet fragrance of peonies and roses depending on the season, that quickly morphs into roasted coffee beans - he likes the smell but loathes the taste - and it goes marvellously well with the hearty aroma of baking bread, just as he reaches his place of work.

The entire town knows him, and it makes a change from the fast pace of city life where every customer was a bank account number, not a person. Here, he nods at every familiar face, feeling a warmth of a different kind.

Yiling is a small town but no less important because of the distance it has between the rest of civilization, a sort of stepping stone between Qinghe and Qishan. Here, the residents are older, some already retired, and others well on their way to being so. As such, they are stuck in their ways and refusing to keep up with the newer, modern ways of banking.

Before Lan Zhan came to live here, he would have agreed with those teenagers who would roll their eyes back in Gusu, if they had to wait for an older customer to first put their glasses on, then needing extra help to fill out a form, or if they were hard of hearing, for the conversation to make sense. The youngsters always picked up the necessary skills to navigate mobile and online banking faster, and it was those youthful customers that stopped using the physical banking structures rather than the aged, for whom trying to do everything they wanted to do on their phones was like speaking a foreign language without a teacher.

But the more he's had to interact with people like Wen Popo, who is everyone's grandmother, and Uncle Four - Lan Zhan still hasn't figured out why he's called that, but he's getting close - and Uncle six (no relation to Uncle Four - they'd laughed at him when Lan Zhan had suggested it), the more Lan Zhan is beginning to realise why banking in person is still so necessary for them.

The older generation is seriously trying to keep up with modern day living, but it's as if their minds have become their enemy. Their brains simply do not retain whatever Lan Zhan tries to teach them, and it's no one's fault. They don't have dementia, they're not senile, they're simply tired of learning new and complicated methods of doing something that was straightforward only a few years back.

Lan Zhan has a lot of patience, and he doesn't mind giving the necessary time to help his customers. As a result, not a day goes by when he doesn't take home gifts from them, a cake one day, a cherry pie on another, or homemade biscuits. He shares with the other people who work here, whom he sees daily.

There is Lan JingYi, a distant and much younger cousin, and Luo QingYang, or MianMian to her friends. Lan Zhan feels quite honoured to be included In that definition as he's never had his own friends before. It was always his brother's friends or acquaintances from work, more colleagues than people he wanted to see after work.

The bank has two security guards, Wen Qing and Wen Ning, a brother and sister duo that are efficient and pleasant to be around, though Lan Zhan suspects Wen Qing is hiding a mean streak for potential robbers. Not that they have been robbed in many months; Gusu is more popular for that type of attention and another reason why Lan Zhan's former place of work closed down.

Bank robbers tend to stick to cities and Lan Zhan hopes it stays that way, though he's heard from the customers that there's a gang targeting banks that escaped from Qishan a few days ago.