About Best Friend, About You and Me

This should count as a periodic ramble.

The last time I rambled was August 21st. In the blink of an eye, it was almost December. This year's Spring Festival would come early; there were fewer than forty days left until the New Year.

The final year of the 2010s in the twenty-first century was about to end.

Thinking about it, people my age really did feel as though we had been swept along by an unstoppable tide.

We had not lived through the War of Resistance, nor had we been born in an era when the world was being remade. By the time we were born, our predecessors had almost paved the road for us. The year I was born, a Chief Designer completed a life of upheaval and unparalleled grandeur.

It seemed to have been that very year,

that a rest marked the divide between the legends of the old era and the legends of the new.

I still remembered the shabby yet vivid colors of childhood.

Later, as I grew up, I came into contact with many trendy new things—like the Internet.

I also remembered the first time I went to an internet café in middle school, got caught by my homeroom teacher, and was viciously slapped twice. That left me with a lingering fear of internet cafés throughout middle school.

By then, online literature had already been budding for five or six years, and many widely circulated Western fantasy webnovels had become quite accomplished.

Many of the tropes that shaped our tastes had been pioneered by one predecessor after another.

It was an era brimming with passion and vitality.

It was just niche, and like online games, it was branded a poison that distracted students from their studies.

That was also when I got hooked deeply and