After getting off the ship, Asuka and Huang Zhetian took a taxi, then made their way onto a high-speed train.
After two and a half hours of traveling, they finally reached a small county town at seven that evening.
Huang Zhetian looked at the quiet, unremarkable town before him. It felt so familiar, yet so foreign.
Asuka took off her straw hat and asked curiously, "Is this your hometown?"
After a long silence, Huang Zhetian slowly breathed out. "It used to be. It still is. An unfamiliar familiarity..."
"That's so contradictory... your sentence doesn't make sense," Asuka corrected him with a pout.
"Yeah, it is pretty contradictory. Come on, there's a night market tonight. I'll take you around." Huang Zhetian shook his head with a bitter smile, took Asuka's hand, and headed into a familiar alley.
Everything here looked exactly as it had before. The buildings still had that nineties style. It had been the same in his previous life; even in the twenty-first century, that style had never changed.
The neighborhood was the same, too. Everything around them was rather run-down, but even after the disaster, people still lived here.
Nothing had changed.
I hope that when I get home, it'll still be just as it was before, too...
Holding Asuka's hand, Huang Zhetian slowly walked the route home he had taken in two lifetimes.
Two of the three trees outside the entrance had been cut down, and an unfamiliar tree had been planted on the other side.
The buds on its branches had yet to bloom.
A light hung above every household's door, casting a dull yellow glow onto the concrete, but the place was no longer as lively as it had once been.
Old men playing chess and smoking their bamboo pipes.
Children playing and roughhousing.
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