"Brother, crossing the causality between worlds takes too much power. My body is about to fall apart..."
The boy who always wore a little black suit held him tightly in the orange LCL.
"Don't worry. You'll return to your original world. But I'm so tired. I need to sleep for a long, long time..."
Pain.
Lu Mingfei opened his eyes and saw the ceiling.
A ceiling he had never seen before.
No, that wasn't right.
He was lying on the floor, the back of his head throbbing, his mind foggy. He turned his head.
On the wall beside him was a poster of a hero holding a greatsword. The printing was flawed, and a crease ran across the hero's face. Beneath the poster stood a chair, with a school uniform draped over its back, the sleeves turned inside out. The curtains were drawn. Light squeezed through a gap, drawing a thin white line across the floor tiles that shimmered with the breeze.
He raised his right hand and looked at it, then felt his neck. There was nothing there. He braced himself against a desk leg and stood up.
A laptop sat on the desk, its screen still lit.
Twelve Terran battlecruisers focused their Yamato cannons on his hive, reducing it to a pool of blood.
He remembered now. This was the last game of StarCraft he had played before leaving this world.
He had regretted it for ages afterward. If he had known it would be his last game, he would never have used the little red pointing stick. He should have plugged in a mouse.
Lu Mingfei sat back down in the chair, his fingers instinctively finding the keyboard, ready to type "GG" and concede.
The two letters "GG" were already there in the chat box.
He froze. Had he typed them? Yes, he had.
That had been before he left-left? Where had he left from? What "before" was he thinking of? He had been sitting in this chair, conceding, and then... then what?
Then he had gone to Tokyo-3 and spent a long time doing odd jobs at NERV. He had become the Fourth Child. Shinji had torn him apart... no, Unit-03 had been dismembered by Unit-01. Then he had fought the Mass Production Units and lost. Asuka had come to save him and been dismembered by the Mass Production Units. He had held Asuka, waiting for Third Impact. Then a boy had embraced him and sent him back.
"Lu Mingze?"
Lu Mingfei called softly, looking around. No one answered.
"Beep-beep." "Beep-beep."
The QQ penguin icon in the lower-right corner of the screen was bouncing tirelessly. Lu Mingfei numbly moved the mouse and clicked it. Messages from a friend called "Old Tang" filled the chat window: complaints about hot dogs going up by fifty cents, about the crooked owner of an auto shop swindling him out of fifty dollars for an oil change, and finally a panda reaction image lobbed his way: "It's just your micro that needs work. Your tactical sense is great."
Looking at all this trivial trash talk, Lu Mingfei suddenly felt like crying.
He rested his hands on the keyboard, about to try typing a few words.
"A case of discounted milk pouches, half a jin of Cantonese sausage, and the latest issue Mingze wanted-"
The voice exploded from the next room. Lu Mingfei jolted, his eyes turning warily toward the door.
"-of Novel Painting. Hurry back once you've bought everything, and pick the celery on the table for me! And check the gatehouse for any letters from America!"
What was she saying? Was someone in the room? No, it was Auntie!
"...still playing games? You don't care about your own future at all. If nobody admits you, do you really think you can score high enough for a top-tier university? We've spent so much money on you, and for what?"
Lu Mingfei stood in the middle of the room, waiting for the voice to stop.
Milk pouches? Sausage? Celery?
He walked out. Half the paint had peeled off the stair railing, exposing the gray iron pipe beneath.
Right, he also had to buy Novel Painting.
Lu Mingfei walked on in a daze, struggling to adjust to the world he had once lived in for eighteen years.
The vicious midday sun beat down, baking the asphalt soft and sticky beneath his feet.
An old banyan tree stood at the entrance to the residential compound. Several old men sat shirtless in its shade, waving palm-leaf fans and playing Chinese chess.
"Check!" one of the old men boomed, slapping a piece down on the wooden board.
Lu Mingfei flinched, instinctively wanting to shrink into the shadows.
He stepped on his shortened shadow as he continued forward, the memories in his mind beginning to rewind.
Lu Mingfei, third-year high school student, almost eighteen.
Living under someone else's roof, with abysmal grades. The college entrance exam was only three months away. Everyone, from his uncle and aunt to the neighborhood ladies, had solemn advice for him whenever they saw him, as though the world would end on exam day.
He used to hide under the covers and think how wonderful it would be if the world really did end, quick and clean. No one would have to take exams or the TOEFL. When the meteor came down, everyone would be equal. How liberating.
Who would have thought his lousy mouth would actually make it happen? He really had gone to a world facing the apocalypse.
He ought to slap himself!
There, he had become a junior high student in Tokyo-3, going to school and coming home on schedule every day. Apart from a weekly hospital checkup, life hadn't seemed all that different from before.
Later, when he graduated, he had somehow been recruited into NERV.
The pretty older woman who had brought him in was named Misato Katsuragi. Patting him on the shoulder, she had said, "Mingfei, I've got an important job for you. Take care of those pilots' daily needs, help out with the odd jobs, and put your talents to work as a big brother they can confide in."
The Children were all strange.
The quiet, expressionless, blue-haired girl named Ayanami would sit by the window, her gaze resting on some invisible point in the distance. She never spoke first, and he could never tell what she was thinking. The red-haired girl, Asuka, was the complete opposite. Once, while she was yelling at Shinji, Lu Mingfei had merely glanced over as he passed, only for her to suddenly turn and glare at him as though he were one of the culprits too. "What are you looking at? Got nothing better to do?!" She had scared him into beating a hasty retreat.
The Third Child, though, was relatively normal.
At NERV, the only thing that made Lu Mingfei feel he mattered was counseling Shinji in the tone of someone who had been through it all.
"What's there to be afraid of? If the sky falls, the tall guys will hold it up. If an Angel comes, the commander will handle it." Lu Mingfei would often sit beside Shinji's hospital bed, stealing apples from the fruit basket as he shamelessly pontificated. "For people like us, freeloading and waiting to die is the proper way to live. Don't put so much pressure on yourself. Worst case, we can skip out together."
He felt that he and Shinji were the same kind of person: unlucky bastards dragged to the card table against their will. The only difference was that Shinji had been forced to hold a straight flush, while Lu Mingfei didn't even have a single card up his sleeve.
Sunlight suddenly flashed across his eyes. He squinted as a blue figure passed through the edge of his vision.
Lu Mingfei stopped, his heart pounding. It was a woman in a blue dress. She had already walked past.
He stood there, unable to remember why his heart had suddenly raced. Blue, just blue, but he kept feeling there ought to be something else...
A white ceiling, red eyes, the green waveform on a monitor pulsing again and again.
Stop thinking about it!
"Mingfei, I hear you're going abroad to study."
The old man at the newsstand spoke, his voice slow and unhurried.
"Study abroad?" Lu Mingfei looked up at him. The old man waved his palm-leaf fan, smiling, the wrinkles on his face bunching together.
What was this man talking about? Did he know him? Oh, right. Novel Painting!
"Studying abroad is good. Come back from overseas and you'll be a returnee. You'll make lots of money." The old man waved his fan.
Lu Mingfei looked down at the magazine in his hands.
What should he say?
What would he have said before?
I don't want to make lots of money. I just want to help you run the stand and buy PS2 game discs.
He looked at the illustrated hero on the magazine cover, holding a greatsword and saving the world, and felt only a needle-like ache deep in his neck.
"Sounds good." Lu Mingfei slowly stood up, clutching Novel Painting.
He suddenly realized he could no longer make out the words on the magazine.
A drop of water fell onto the cover, bleeding the title Novel Painting into a small blot of ink.
He had already learned so many things.
But in this world, none of them seemed to be of any use.