Going Out for a Walk

But then again, this attempt born of curiosity had indeed been a little too hasty.

After pondering for a while, perhaps finding it somewhat dull, Li Yun simply stopped thinking about such things and casually closed the window.

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Go out for a walk and change his mood.

When he pushed open the apartment building's heavy entrance door, the afternoon sunlight surged over him like a tide, making Li Yun instinctively raise a hand to shield his eyes.

—The traffic on the distant street, cicadas chirping in the nearby treetops, indistinct voices drifting over from the neighboring residential complex, all mingled with the warm, damp wind of a summer afternoon...

Completely different from the quiet yet poorly circulated air inside, the noisy, jumbled warmth and humidity outside licked at his skin, nearly immediately wrapping around this tenant who had not left home in a long time.

It gave him the vague feeling of having returned from another lifetime.

He had indeed stayed in this rental for quite some time. Recently, he had been wholly occupied with his "work," never stepping beyond the front door. Now that he had truly walked back into this vast, almost disorienting sunlight, a faint sense of discomfort seemed to rise from his eyes to his heart...

How interesting.

He casually glanced back at the small apartment behind him.

It was an old three-story residential building, its exterior painted pale yellow, though years of rain had washed gray-black water stains into parts of the walls. Among the surrounding rows of buildings, it was hardly conspicuous.

The three floors were evenly divided among three different households. The landlord's family lived on the top floor, with several potted plants on the windowsill and occasionally some brightly colored clothes hanging out to dry. The second floor was probably rented by a man who worked nearby; usually, Li Yun only heard someone returning and opening the door at night.

And the room he currently lived in was on the first floor, which was somewhat dark and damp, but also had the cheapest rent.

A few years ago, when Li Yun had just started working, that was precisely what had attracted him to sign the lease after negotiating. He had never expected to remain there for years.

Time passed swiftly.

Come to think of it, over the past few years, this landlord had barely raised the rent at all. Aside from slight differences in the quarterly water and electricity readings, everything else had remained the same.

That surprised Li Yun somewhat.

After all, the land beneath his feet in Shu Capital was never cheap, even if this was still far from the inner ring.

From that standpoint alone, the landlord, who usually contacted tenants by phone and had no real personal dealings with them beyond the occasional nod when passing by, was actually quite decent.

But when considered carefully, this place truly was no longer very suitable for him.

Li Yun did not care much about the effects of the living environment, but considering his future "work," he would most likely need the convenience of a relatively secluded area.

Thinking it over, perhaps he should move somewhere better... or simply acquire some property and find a place to settle down?

After all, he still did not have a "home" in the true sense of the word.

...Of course, Li Yun had not sprung from a rock like some monkey.

It was simply that not long after he was born, his parents divorced and later each started new families. Thus, that so-called "home" no longer had anything to do with him.

As an unwanted little burden both sides kept shoving back and forth, he was eventually taken in by an elder in the family who could not bear to watch any longer.

Li Yun's childhood was spent in a township near a mountain city, not far from the Shu Capital beneath his feet.

Later, before the elder passed away, he readily left the house in town to his eldest son in his will. The sole condition was that his family support Li Yun through university.

...Li Yun still clearly remembered the day the elder, bedridden, summoned him over from school while he was still in middle school.

The sky had been overcast that day, and the room was dark. The old man lay in bed, reeking of sourness and sweat, barely able to open his eyes. His throat seemed clogged with phlegm, making his speech slurred and indistinct.

"Kid... Grandpa's about to go. Study hard..."

"Don't blame Grandpa. This house can't be left to you... If I leave it to you, those two heartless people will come and take it... You're too young. You can't, can't hold onto it... I've spoken to your uncle. As long as you get in, they, they will support you through college..."

"After this, you won't have a home, kid. Grandpa can't help you with anything anymore... You have to, have to make something of yourself..."

"There's some money under that cigarette box. Take it to buy food. Quietly—don't tell anyone... Don't, don't go hungry..."

...That night, the old man passed away.

And just as expected, the "two heartless people" the elder had spoken of—Li Yun's parents, who were somewhat related to him by blood—set their sights on that small inheritance after the man returned to handle the elder's funeral with the relatives. They even fought with his brother twice over it...

None of that had much to do with Li Yun.

After seeing the elder buried, he sat beside that newly raised mound of earth for a long time.

In the end, he washed his face, took the rusty tin box beneath the wooden table in the elder's room—the one beside the old dry tobacco pipe, normally used to hold loose tobacco leaves—and with it the stack of bills the elder had painstakingly saved bit by bit during his lifetime, mostly one-, five-, and ten-yuan notes totaling more than two thousand yuan, returned to school as though nothing had happened...

Later, he was admitted to the county high school.

Later still, as the elder had instructed, he was admitted to a fairly good university.

And later, his life slowly got on track. Even as an ordinary wage slave constantly working overtime, he silently left his hometown and came to this relatively prosperous Shu Capital, doing his best to make a living.

Aside from occasionally sending some money back to his uncle's family and exchanging a few greetings during the New Year, or taking a bus back to that little hill on holidays to stay for half a day or a day, sweep the elder's grave, and offer a few sticks of incense, his days seemed visible from beginning to end—neither good nor bad.

There was no use forcing things.

It was true that the education the elder had pinned his hopes on could change one's fate, but it could only change one's fate.

Everyone had their own life, their own convictions. Other than moving forward step by step, there was no need to think about anything else.

...Yet now, recalling those things, he felt only a low sigh, as if the past had drifted away on the wind.

It was not that he did not care, nor that he cared deeply.

Other than that old house, which remained the clearest image in his memory, and the elder who had once lived there, the rest... did not seem very important.

Adjusting his glasses, Li Yun wandered aimlessly along the sidewalk, though his gaze never truly focused.

Walking, listening, watching...

He let the endless stream of motorcycles and electric scooters around him blare their piercing horns, even brush past the hem of his clothes by accident.

Perhaps he truly had been stirred by traces from those memories, or perhaps he had been indoors for too long and had yet to adapt to this "liveliness."

In a brief moment of distraction that even Li Yun himself failed to notice, invisible mental ripples naturally spread out, and the perception he had deliberately "sealed" suddenly became a little sharper...

Thus, in that fleeting instant, the horn of an electric scooter abruptly separated in his ears, becoming wave after wave of high and low "vibrations" at different frequencies—

The wind roared, and every sound surged like a tide.

He could even "hear" the faint hum of current between the batteries beneath that chaotic clamor, along with the soft hiss of the rider's clothes rubbing against each other in their folds...

Honestly, it did not feel good at all.

He came back to himself almost in the blink of an eye and noticed his momentary "loss of composure."

His eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body—every one of his five senses had stirred.

For that brief instant, even the rich aroma drifting from fried food at a roadside stall was no longer merely a muddled blend.

His abnormal sense of smell instantly distinguished the scent of oil released as rapeseed oil was repeatedly heated to boiling amid the heavy automobile exhaust carried on the wind, as well as the equally impossible-to-hide bitter smell of scorching beneath it.

He could even carefully taste the faint pungency released after Sichuan peppercorns had been ground, and even the precise degree to which the gluten in the flour at the bottom of the pan had caramelized...

—They had obviously added too much water while kneading the dough... And the oil was excessive; it had probably been in use since yesterday...

Through his hazy thoughts, he gave a rather fair assessment faster than instinct.

Now that his senses had crossed beyond the ordinary, foods that Li Yun had previously thought smelled rather nice... suddenly seemed full of flaws.

Especially within those dark pupils...

As he passed the entrance of a hotpot restaurant, many diners inside were already drinking enthusiastically. Some had simply grabbed beer bottles and chugged straight from them, and the boisterous waves of noise no longer seemed like mere noise...

They were an ocean of countless mixed fragments of emotion.

Excitement, relaxation, seemingly friendly contempt, false flattery, exhaustion after driving all night, drunken truths, or deliberately using alcohol as an excuse to speak the truth, the slight exhilaration brought by alcohol being rapidly absorbed...

Fine mental ripples were like colored bubbles, constantly forming and bursting, reflected in the corner of a passerby's eye.

He saw them clearly.

...And so he frowned slightly.

At the very moment his excessive senses returned to the level of an ordinary person and all the "illusions" before him abruptly vanished.

In front of the hotpot restaurant, a broken chicken bone discarded by someone on the ground suddenly sprang up, bouncing with seemingly "gentle" force but at a speed invisible to the naked eye toward an empty beer bottle beside a cardboard box near the door!

This was undoubtedly a scene normal people could not understand... Who could have imagined that such a small hollow bone could shatter a beer bottle?

But it did.

The instant the dark green glass shattered beneath that "insignificant" impact, a tiny fragment not even the size of a fingernail shot straight out, flying toward a table farther inside where guests were playing finger-guessing!

More precisely, it flew toward the liquor glass in the hand of a dark, fat man who had already flushed red, stripped off his shirt, and was pouring himself another drink bare-chested!

Bang!

A not particularly noticeable cracking sound suddenly rang out. It seemed only the two or three nearest diners noticed anything.

Of course, compared to that tiny disturbance—which had merely passed precisely through someone's fingers, shattered a transparent liquor glass, and went unnoticed by the customers...

It was nowhere near as eye-catching as another intact bottle that also flew up. Rather than being hurled at him, it came crashing down like a sudden punch, neatly slamming into the dark, fat man's belly!!!

Pfft!

The two or three friends drinking with the dark, fat man had barely reacted before he suddenly doubled over, spraying them all over the face and body with the grand force of an uncontrolled floodgate opening!

They immediately jumped to their feet!

Among everyone present, only the dark, fat man whose abdomen had suffered a "heavy blow" from a liquor bottle thrown from nowhere, and who was vomiting out huge mouthfuls of both yellow and white, vaguely heard an indifferent voice from an unknown place.

"...Good. If you drink any more, you can start preparing your own coffin."

The man, who had unexpectedly taken a "bottle" to the waist so hard that his eyes nearly bulged out, naturally had no time to tell whether the voice was a drunken hallucination.

Before the people beside him could even steady him, his eyes rolled white.

The dark, fat man half-convulsed as he continued vomiting, then toppled headfirst into the puddle of sludge he had just created on the ground...

And where was there any trace of a person left at the hotpot restaurant's entrance?