After crushing the Ultraman toy, Jiang Ning got on his motorcycle and rode off toward South Lake with carefree ease.
Once he left the village, the flat cement floor gave way to a dirt road. It was the dead of winter, and a bone-piercing chill filled the air. The ground was frozen solid, and the wheels crunched over it, accompanied by the crisp crackle of breaking ice.
He traveled south, parallel to the ditch beside the dirt road.
The winter morning wilderness was silent and vast. A faint mist seemed to hang in the air, like wandering ghosts drifting through the desolate loneliness.
Jiang Ning was no longer frightened by this uninhabited stretch of land as he had been in childhood. He merely felt a touch of melancholy.
Jiang Ning had been born in the countryside. When he was little, his parents had followed the tide of the times and become two of the countless rural migrant workers featured in the news. Yet when a grain of sand from the era fell upon his family, it became a mountain.
Left-behind children usually lived with their grandparents. The older generation had little education, and the affection between generations made them especially indulgent toward their grandchildren. Coupled with the poor education in rural areas, growing up as a left-behind child was practically like opening a Blind Box. Most turned out to be ordinary little delinquents; becoming a college student required rare-tier luck.
Jiang Ning had barely counted as rare, thanks to his grandparents' care. His childhood had been happy enough.
That bond of being raised by them meant that, compared to his parents who worked away from home, Jiang Ning had been closer to his grandparents. Many left-behind children felt the same way.
Yet when his grandparents died, Jiang Ning had not