Chapter 30: The first battle
Su Can occasionally thought that perhaps this was as uneventful as life could get. There was no need to battle in the business world, maneuver among calculating powers of every stripe, or struggle desperately to climb another rung just to catch his breath. In this quiet time, when everything could be started over and savored slowly, being in the same place as the person he liked while his life and career developed steadily, making progress every day, might well be a pleasant thing.
Watching most of the students around him complain about this stage of their lives, growing weary and then numb to everything they were experiencing, Su Can felt as though he were seeing a real slice of life. In the increasingly hot weather, they fanned themselves with books or gritted their teeth over science problems as though facing mortal enemies, and it seemed that the person sitting there was his former self.
That boy, holding a towering stack of books, immersed himself in his own world through a whole classroom's worth of lecturing, lost and unwilling to look toward the future-or rather, avoiding a future that seemed so uncertain to him, avoiding its cruel competition and fighting.
Back at the beginning, perhaps everyone wished they could say something to their former selves. What would the you of ten years ago say to the you ten years later? What was the one thing you most wanted to say?
Every day, as Su Can went upstairs, he saw himself in the stairwell mirror, vibrant and sunny, utterly different from the pale, dispirited face he remembered seeing at the washstand every morning. That latter face had been filled with exhaustion and the gloom of having to put on all sorts of masks each day. The former