Volume Four, Chapter One: A letter from Tang Wu
As the plane climbed into the sky, Xiahai City shrank outside the cabin into a city dotted with golden lights. The places where the lights clustered were naturally its livelier districts at night, but most of the city was sparsely lit. Su Can firmly believed that the completion of Xinghai Square had raised Xiahai City's infrastructure standards another notch, giving it a chance to enter the second batch of nationally designated tourist cities that year.
In his previous life, Xiahai City had been in the sixth batch of cities to pass the national assessment and make the list. Now, the course of history had already been changed ahead of time, imperceptibly.
Su Can remembered the first time he had left this city: on a northbound train after getting into university. At this point, the trains in Southwest Province were still the green-painted kind, with narrow seats. Air-conditioned carriages and electric multiple units were things one could forget about in this inland southwestern region. Having one electric fan for every six little bunks was already quite good.
Back then, after struggling to get into a second-rate university, he had boarded the train with his whole family seeing him off. As the locomotive roared forward, tears had welled in his eyes over something his eldest uncle, Zeng Qu anming, had said before he left: "A good man sets his sights on the wider world."
Now, Zeng Qu anming had said the same thing to him at the airport, but everything had changed.
He had never looked down from such heights at his hometown, the place where he had spent more than a decade, where all his fantasies had resided. Now his gaze upon it all was more mature, more composed. He knew what