Old Liu gazed up at the sky, watching the drifting clouds fly away and the scenery around him change.
When he looked down again, he found his consciousness floating to a lakeside. Green grass carpeted the ground, wildflowers gave off a faint fragrance, and the cries of birds and beasts formed a chorus all around.
Beside the lake, Shen Yuan sat on a small folding stool, a slender blade of grass between his lips and a fishing rod in both hands.
Behind him, Gao Mingyue spread a white picnic cloth over the grass, took off her shoes, stepped onto it barefoot, and laid out the food from a wooden lunchbox.
The locals called this natural lake Lover’s Lake. Tucked away in the mountains, it was remote and seldom visited, though young men and women secretly drawn to each other sometimes chose it for their trysts.
When Shen Yuan was little, before the Shen Family had fully made its fortune, he, Ming Yue, and a whole crowd of children their age from the village often came here to catch fish and splash in the water. They would play all afternoon and always went home utterly exhausted.
Now that he was grown and the Shen Family had prospered, his childhood playmates had become strangers. Friends from his memories-Ergou, Haoming, Xiwa... whenever they saw him now, they would stand several meters away and call him Young Master Shen, polite and reserved.
The price of growing up was watching everything around you change. Places remained, but people were no longer the same; you could not keep what you wanted to keep, or push away what you wanted gone.
Fortunately, Lover’s Lake had hardly changed, and neither had Ming Yue beside him. She was still as cheerful and optimistic as ever, like a sunflower in