Chapter 129: A new beginning
The coming Saturday and Sunday were the last two days of Nanjing University's Homecoming. As it drew to a close, preparations to wrap things up could be seen everywhere.
At hotels outside campus, the brilliantly lit nights of revelry among Nanjing University alumni from across the country and even overseas gradually subsided. Traffic on the roads outside, several times heavier than usual, also began returning to normal. Students in the old dormitories no longer had to answer a knock one day and find middle-aged men surnamed Zhou, Wu, Zheng, and Wang standing outside, coming in and offering cigarettes with both hands as they explained that this had once been their dorm room, and that had been their bed.
Nanjing University, previously bustling and the focus of outside attention, also returned to its usual tranquility after a Homecoming that had brought a scare but no disaster. After dinner, men and women still walked among the campus's tree-lined avenues and lawns with backpacks or books in their arms, and bicycles carrying lightly perched girls on their rear seats still threaded through the late-autumn campus.
Compared with the surrounding restaurants, which had enjoyed the prosperity Homecoming brought and then grown somewhat quiet afterward, the snack stalls inside and outside campus, made up of a few folding tables and greasy, shiny chairs, seemed to enjoy a steadier prosperity.
Night had fallen over Room 602 in Nanjing University's Dormitory Building 13. Many beer bottles stood on the table in front of Zhang Xiaoqiao, Xiao Xu, and Li Han. They drank in a rather subdued atmosphere.
"Related posts keep popping up on the university BBS, and they're getting a huge amount of attention. One of Wang Dongjian's buddies is a forum moderator. The university sent them a notice telling them to