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 tedious, Li Yun simply stopped thinking about such things and casually closed the window.

He should go out for a walk and change his mood.

When he pushed open the heavy entrance door of the apartment building, 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, the cicadas chirping in the nearby treetops, the vague voices drifting over from the neighboring complex, all mingled with the warm, damp summer afternoon breeze...

Completely unlike the quiet yet poorly ventilated air indoors, the noisy, chaotic, warm, and humid sensations outside licked across his skin, almost immediately enveloping this tenant who had not gone out in a long time.

It gave him a faint feeling of having been separated from the world for ages.

He really had spent quite some time in that rented room. Recently, he had been wholly occupied with "work," never stepping beyond his door. Now that he had once again truly entered this expanse of sunlight so open it made him dizzy, a vague sense of discomfort rose from his eyes to his heart...

How interesting.

He glanced back faintly at the little apartment behind him.

It was an old three-story residential building, its exterior walls painted pale yellow. Years of rain had washed away the paint in places, exposing gray-black water stains. Among the surrounding rows of buildings, it was hardly conspicuous.

The three-story building was evenly divided among three different tenants. The landlord's family lived on the top floor, with several potted plants on the windowsill and, occasionally, brightly colored clothes hanging out to dry. The second floor was probably occupied by a male tenant working nearby; usually, the only sign of him was the sound of someone returning and opening the door at night.

The room Li Yun currently lived in was on the first floor, somewhat dark and damp, but also the cheapest in rent.

When Li Yun had first started working several years ago, that was precisely why he had signed the lease after discussing it with the landlord. He had never expected to live there for years.

Time passed swiftly.

Come to think of it, over the past few years, the landlord had barely raised the rent at all. Aside from slight changes in the utility bills recorded each season, everything else had remained the same.

That surprised Li Yun somewhat.

After all, even though the land beneath his feet in Shu Capital was far from the inner ring, it had never been cheap.

From that perspective alone, this landlord—who mostly contacted tenants by phone and, aside from occasionally meeting them in passing and exchanging nods, had little personal interaction with them—was actually quite decent.

But when he thought about it carefully, this place truly was no longer suitable for who he was now.

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

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

After all, he still did not have a true "home."

...Of course, Li Yun had not popped out of a rock like some monkey.

It was simply that not long after he was born, his parents divorced and later each started new families. That so-called "home" had therefore ceased to have anything to do with him.

As an unwanted little nuisance neither side wanted, passed back and forth between them, he was eventually taken away by an elder in the family who could not bear to watch any longer.

Li Yun spent his childhood in a rural town near the mountain city not far from Shu Capital.

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

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

The weather outside had been overcast that day, and the room was dark. The elder lay in bed, reeking faintly sour and stale, barely able to open his eyes. His throat seemed clogged with phlegm, making his words muddled and unclear.

"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 bastards will come and snatch it... You're too young. You can't... can't hold on to it... I've made an arrangement with your eldest uncle. As long as you can get in, they... they'll support you through college..."

"From now on, you won't have a home, kid. Grandpa can't help you with anything anymore... You 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 let yourself go hungry..."

...The elder passed away that very night.

And just as expected, the "two heartless bastards" the elder had spoken of—Li Yun's parents, who were related to him by blood—set their sights on that small inheritance after his father rushed back and joined the relatives in handling the elder's funeral. They even got into two fights with the elder's sons over it...

None of that had much to do with Li Yun.

After sending the elder up the mountain, 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, usually used to hold loose tobacco leaves—and carried away the stack of banknotes inside. The elder had saved them bit by bit through thrift and hardship, mostly one-, five-, and ten-yuan bills, totaling a little over two thousand yuan. Then Li Yun returned to school as if 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 undergraduate university.

And later, his life gradually got on track. Even if he was only an ordinary office worker constantly putting in overtime, he quietly left his hometown and came to the relatively prosperous Shu Capital to make a living as best he could.

Other than occasionally sending some money back to his eldest uncle's family and exchanging a few greetings during the New Year, or taking a ride back to that little hill during holidays to stay for half a day or a day, sweep the elder's grave, and burn a few sticks of incense, his life seemed to stretch plainly to its end at a glance—not particularly good, not particularly bad.

There was no point forcing things.

It was true that education, on which the elder had placed such hopes, 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 when he recalled these things now, there was only a low sigh, like the past drifting away on the wind.

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

Aside from that old house, the elder who had lived there, the memories that remained most vivid in his mind... the rest did not seem all that important.

Pushing up his glasses, Li Yun walked aimlessly along the sidewalk, though his gaze was not 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 edge of his clothes by accident.

Perhaps he had truly been stirred by the traces left in his memories, or perhaps he simply had not been out in too long and had yet to adjust to this "liveliness."

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

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

The wind roared like the sea; all sounds surged like tides.

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

Honestly, the feeling was not pleasant at all.

He almost immediately came back to himself, realizing that he had lost his 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 the fried food at a roadside stall was no longer merely a muddled blend.

His altered sense of smell instantly distinguished the fragrance of oil released when rapeseed oil was repeatedly heated to boiling amid the heavy odor of car exhaust carried on the wind, as well as the equally impossible-to-conceal bitter smell of scorching beneath it.

He could even savor the faintly irritating scent released by crushed Sichuan peppercorns within it, and even the precise degree to which the gluten in the flour at the bottom of the wok had caramelized...

They obviously added too much water when kneading the dough... And the oil is even worse. It's been in use since yesterday...

His hazy thoughts offered a fairly objective assessment faster than instinct.

Once his senses had already surpassed the ordinary human level, the foods that Li Yun had once thought smelled rather good... suddenly appeared full of flaws.

Especially within those dark pupils...

As he passed the entrance of a hotpot restaurant, many of the diners inside were already deep in their drinking. The noisy waves of sound from them simply grabbing beer bottles and drinking straight from them no longer seemed like mere noise...

They were an ocean of mixed emotional fragments.

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

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

He saw it all clearly.

...So he frowned slightly.

Just as those excessive senses instantly returned to the level of an ordinary person, and all the "illusions" before his eyes abruptly vanished.

Outside the hotpot restaurant, a fragment of chicken bone someone had tossed onto the ground suddenly sprang up. With what seemed like an extremely "gentle" force, yet at a speed the naked eye could not perceive, it shot toward an empty beer bottle beside a cardboard box near the entrance!

This was undoubtedly a scene difficult for ordinary people to comprehend... Who could have imagined that such a tiny hollow bone could shatter a beer bottle?

Yet that was the truth.

The instant the dark green glass shattered under that "insignificant" impact, a tiny fragment smaller than a fingernail flew straight out without deviation, shooting toward a table farther inside where several diners were playing a drinking game!

More precisely, it flew toward the liquor glass in the hand of a dark, fat man who was already flushed red, had taken off his shirt, and was continuing to pour himself drinks bare-chested!

Bang!

A burst of shattering that was not particularly attention-grabbing suddenly rang out. It seemed that only the two or three nearest diners noticed it.

Of course, compared to that tiny disturbance—where a fragment had merely passed precisely through someone's fingers, shattered a transparent liquor glass, and gone unnoticed by any diners...

It was nowhere near as eye-popping as another intact beer bottle that also flew up. Rather than looking as though it had been hurled over, it came crashing down on the dark, fat man's belly with the force of a sudden punch, cleanly slamming into him!!!

Pfft!

The two or three friends drinking with the dark, fat man had almost no time to react before he suddenly doubled over and, in an unrestrained display like a floodgate bursting, opened his mouth and sprayed vomit all over their faces and bodies!

They immediately leapt to their feet!

Among everyone present, only the dark, fat man whose abdomen had suffered a "heavy blow" from a beer bottle thrown from who knew where, and who was now vomiting out mouthful after mouthful of both food and drink, vaguely heard an indifferent voice from an unknown source.

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

The man, who had taken an unexpected "bottle" to the waist so hard his eyes were nearly popping out, naturally had no time to determine whether that voice was merely a drunken hallucination.

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

Half-convulsing and still vomiting, the dark, fat man toppled sideways into the pile of filth he had just created on the ground...

And where was there any sign of a person at the entrance of the hotpot restaurant?