A person, drowsy and muddled, struggles to get up in the morning and heads out to work. Suddenly, a gust of cold wind hits, jolting them wide awake!
Upon hearing the girl's words, He Kao had this exact feeling.
He automatically assumed that the old man running the chess stall had the surname Qi since childhood; it had become a fixed cognitive perception. There's no particular reason for this notion—perhaps he casually heard others call him that, and it just lingered in his subconscious, becoming ingrained over time.
Qi might just be a mistaken rendition of "chess", and the old man who runs the stall is indeed Boss Qi, right? Who'd have thought he actually had the surname Jiang and was from Xiaowan Village...
This aligns perfectly with the situation Elder Lin Qingshuang described about Elder Jiang!
Once the floodgates of memory unlocked, many fragments surged forth, automatically assembling and filling the gaps. He Kao "remembered" even more things.
