Chapter 32: Getting old
The bus traveled quietly through the streets of Xiahai City, passing beneath avenues shaded by camphor trees, through the crisscrossing lanes of the old town, and past riverbanks that, in his memory, dried into yellow sand every summer and turned into green pastures for grazing horses in autumn. Ming- and Qing-era buildings lined the old streets, along with old barbershops, watch stalls, and grain and cooking oil shops that would all but disappear in later years. In elementary and middle school, Su Can had passed through these familiar scenes on his way to a school from which graduation had seemed forever out of reach.
The air was misty. Inside the bus, with the lingering haze still undispersed, a breath against the windows would leave a layer of frost. Most of the students aboard had yet to shake off their drowsiness. The whole little city seemed not yet awake; only Su Can brimmed with energy.
Come to think of it, after he had started working in his previous life, all sorts of pressures had often kept him from sleeping in. He would wake automatically at a certain time every day. As a student, though, he had never seemed to get enough sleep. On the bus, in class, and even after reading for only a little while at home, his oxygen-starved brain had been terribly prone to drowsiness.
Now, after his rebirth, Su Can went to sleep at eleven every night and woke at six thirty, his body seemingly filled with inexhaustible energy.
Everything was quiet when he reached school. Beneath a sky still tinged with gray, not yet fully light, incandescent lamps lit up one after another in the classroom building. Only a scattering of students had arrived in his classroom. Xiao Rihua stood at the door