"Hey! Young man!"
A traveler pulling a suitcase shook Lin Chuan, drawing him out of his deep sleep and back to reality.
He could hear an insistent ringing. It was the alarm he had set on his phone, and it seemed to have been going off for a while.
"Sorry, your phone had been ringing for ages, but you weren't moving. I thought this might be your stop. Wouldn't want you to miss it," the man reminded him kindly.
"Ah, right." Lin Chuan turned off the alarm, realizing he ought to thank him.
"This is my stop. Thanks! May life treat you kindly!"
He sat up straight and let out a long breath, but his hands kept moving briskly. He soon packed all the notebooks and reference books on the table into his backpack and zipped it shut. Then he stood and took his jacket off the seat back.
The platform buildings were already drifting slowly past the window. The high-speed train had noticeably slowed, and a friendly voice came over the speakers:
"Dear passengers, we will shortly be arriving at the station. Passengers getting off, please gather your luggage and belongings..."
Lin Chuan had no time to investigate his bouts of drowsiness. After a slight shudder, the train had come to a complete stop, and its doors slid apart with a hiss.
He tugged twice at his backpack straps and followed the sparse stream of passengers out of the carriage. At first, he walked quickly, hurrying past the people ahead, but as he went on, his steps slowed despite himself.
Looking at the stairs leading down to the underpass, he felt an unexpected urge to return to the train and remain on that journey forever.
But everyone had to set foot on solid ground eventually.
Lin Chuan smiled silently, followed the passage through the ticket gates, and walked out of the arrivals hall one step at a time. Only after he had gone several dozen meters did he turn around and stop in the square in front of the station to look back, momentarily dazed.
He opened his arms to this land, as though he wanted to crush it all into pieces and stuff it into his chest:
The March sunshine was not fierce; it even felt faintly cool against his skin. In its light, the enormous blue glass wall of the waiting hall gleamed softly.
It was not a holiday, so only a few hurried travelers were scattered across the square, and even the taxi drivers outside seemed listless.
A little deserted, but exactly as he remembered.
Beyond the fence, several taxi drivers who had been smoking together spotted him coming out and made a few halfhearted calls for business. One even opened his front passenger door.
Lin Chuan smiled and waved, declining their offers.
"No thanks. I'm heading downtown. It's close."
"Besides... I haven't been back in ages. I'd like to walk around on my own," he added.
After all, the distance really was not great. A few kilometers could hardly compare with the long stretch of five years.
He walked slowly along the curb like that, neither hurried nor restless, saying nothing and thinking of nothing in particular.
He was simply like a child who had lost something precious, gazing eagerly at every still-familiar corner on either side of the street.
That tall wall at the western edge of town, just past the station-when he was little, he had really believed it marked the end of the city. Even standing beneath it and craning his neck, he could not see what lay beyond.
The buffet on the top floor of the department store had not closed down yet. Apparently, a business partner had cheated them. A shame it had shut before he could use up the money he had loaded onto his card.
The older men and women dancing in People's Square were as dependable as ever. It wasn't even dark yet, was it?
Lin Chuan felt as though all the days of the past five years had been nothing more than a dream, a dream a high school senior had while lying in bed, imagining some vague version of college life.
He forgot all about being the protagonist of some urban rebirth story. That was too distant, too distant to feel real. He ought to still be lying in bed looking at his phone, thinking about checking his exam results in a few days. His mother had scolded him again and chased him out to take a walk instead of spending all day cooped up at home.
He had walked the roads of this city hundreds, even thousands of times over countless ordinary days. He truly could have found his way with his eyes closed.
As he walked, Lin Chuan suddenly stopped. Watching the people coming and going around him, he felt an inexplicable warmth behind his eyes.
A strange illusion suddenly came over him:
Five years ago, on the day he had arrived as a college freshman and heard the name "Zhou Mingrui," it seemed he had abandoned a version of himself. He had left that boy on the streets of this city, beneath the shade of the old pagoda tree, in the dusk when his parents had finished making dinner and were leaning by the window, looking down for him.
And the moment he set foot on this land, everything that boy had held dear returned to him.
Lin Chuan kept walking. Around this corner and across a low bridge, the entrance to the alley was just ahead. Before he knew it, fiery clouds had spread across the horizon.
Walking these few kilometers had not tired him at all. He had not even truly felt time passing.
A little farther into the alley, the houses around him seemed both familiar and strange. It was as though he did not know where he was. The feeling resembled dreams he had once had of running through streets and alleys, remembering only the direction of home.
The roads were still where the roads had been, and the bridges still where the bridges had been, but Lin Chuan seemed to have forgotten them a little.
That was only natural. Counting both the five years since he had crossed into this world and the time before that, he had not seen these sights in a full thirteen years.
Then he saw the first shop he recognized completely. It was a little convenience store run by a kindly elderly couple who lived there. Their hair had been gray for as long as Lin Chuan could remember. As a child, he would often browse this way and that in their shop, then invariably spend fifty cents on a packet of crunchy instant noodles to take home.
He still remembered that both their sons were graduate students. Back then, that had been quite an achievement. His mother brought it up every day, terribly envious.
The streets around him grew increasingly familiar. Memories Lin Chuan had left behind lingered outside every home. Only a few steps remained.
This was the house. This was the wall. In 2018, his parents had not yet broken through it to install a glass door. The advertising sign that had yet to be retired was still hanging there.
Spring Festival couplets hung on the courtyard walls on either side, with a pair of large iron gates set between them. Most courtyard gates around here were left unlocked. You only had to reach through the opening to pull them open-a deterrent to honest people, not thieves.
Lin Chuan entered the courtyard and immediately smelled the acrid cooking fumes from the ground-floor kitchen. He looked up at the sky. The sun was sinking in the west, and dusk had just arrived. It was indeed time to start making dinner.
The fumes really were choking. He had never been able to stand them, yet now he actually found them bearable.
Lin Chuan slowly reached out, then hesitated and stopped just before touching the security door.
He suddenly remembered the days when he had been late for school. He had been just as uneasy then, standing rooted outside the door, unable to bring himself to
knock.
Lin Chuan knocked on the door three times.
"Knock, knock, knock."
The door opened.
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