Chapter 47: Don't read too much into it
They walked along the street and up onto a pedestrian overpass, with traffic streaming below. At night, the high-rises looked like enormous light boxes. Su Can found something fantastical in that thought. In fact, only the Su Can of the present could have seen them that way.
Most of this city's university students nearing graduation, its workers, and those hurriedly eating cheap dinners at street stalls at night felt that the commercial towers, their lights burning all night, were cold and unreal when they looked up at them. Yet they also harbored an unspoken longing.
Everyone dreamed of standing at the top of those towers, looking through floor-to-ceiling windows, enjoying the air-conditioning and the homey aroma of coffee, gazing down from on high at a world where countless people worked for them. They would no longer have to toil like dogs to make a living under the fierce, scorching sun in a city already gripped by the urban heat island effect.
This was the blunt, naked ideal of those people hurrying through city streets or living in university towns, burying themselves in their studies every day to change their families' fortunes, firmly believing that knowledge was power.
Most people were ordinary nobodies. Everyone struggled, little by little, for better bread and milk tomorrow.
Whether they had left university and entered society or had just begun their freshman year, they would gradually come closer to understanding the world through their struggles, then adapt, grinding away their sharp edges to face the competition of society's food chain, which had no swords or guns but was far crueler.
Su Can was fortunate to have foreknowledge. He could stand on a pedestrian overpass with an old friend and admire the night view without feeling lost about