The night glittered with splendor, its lights as dense as the sea.
Neon skyscrapers rose one after another, brilliant avenues stretched in every direction. The prosperity of America's fourth-largest city sprawled vast beneath the night.
Compared to Calgary, which relied heavily on the oil industry, Houston had diversified as early as the eighties, with highly developed medicine, aerospace, transportation, education, international trade, and finance.
Houston's nights were noisier, and more prosperous.
And atop a building not far from downtown, a place with a perfect view of all that prosperity,
there was nothing but the bleak darkness swept by the night wind.
A man stood there with vacant, lifeless eyes. He looked at the dazzling cityscape in the distance. No one knew what he was thinking at that moment.
Then,
he jumped from the roof.
Six or seven stories was already enough to kill someone. The moment his feet left the roof, the night wind suddenly howled, and the ground rushed toward him, rapidly enlarging in his vision!
No one noticed the scene in the darkness of night.
But at the very instant the man fell toward the ground—
A red ring bound in cords appeared out of nowhere. A streak of darkness shot violently out from it, and everything beneath the falling man rose into the air!
His vision blurred as he fell, and all he felt was a flash before his eyes.
The next second, the man found himself still standing at the edge of the roof. The cold night wind blew past him, and the few seconds he had just spent jumping from the building
felt so unreal that they seemed like a hallucination from a momentary daze.
Perhaps he thought so too. But after giving his surroundings a bewildered glance, the man silently looked down again and