Xia City had only just entered the night on this summer day. The city lights had come on, yet they could not outshine the lingering daylight; even the clouds at the Sea-Sky Boundary seemed to ripple with the dust of the human world from the day.
It was still far from the proper stage of nightlife.
If you really wanted to have a good time, you should call up some friends, find a bar or restaurant you liked, have a few drinks, then, once the mood picked up, head to a second or third venue. Keep going until you had thrown all of the day's troubles behind you, then plunge headfirst into a dazzling nightclub and let those relentlessly pursuing worries become completely lost.
Long Qi had plenty of experience with nightlife, but lately, he had basically lost the strength to race against his troubles.
There were fewer and fewer friends around him, and at some point, he had even become unable to gather a crowd. So after the company's routine training ended, all he could do was drive his car or motorcycle through the streets and alleys of Xia City, wandering aimlessly.
Sometimes he received calls from old teammates, and they would shoot the breeze and encourage each other. More often, though, he wandered until late at night, seeing if he could strike up something with a beautiful woman who looked just as much like a wandering soul as he did, so they could decide together how to get through the unbearable night.
He called this behavior "a chess piece's journey of crashing into walls on all four sides of the board." What he thought was, *Maybe one day I'll step in dog shit and tumble right off the board, into a world as vast as the sea and