Chapter 187: Two kings
Then came the start of the new semester in March. Nanjing University emerged from the holiday quiet, when there had been only students staying in the dorms, study rooms, and the occasional bicycle speeding through the dusk, and returned to the bustling scene of a university town.
Su Can's university life continued. Li Han, Zhang Xiaoqiao, Xiao Xu, and the others all came crowding noisily back into the dorm, unaware of the harrowing events that had unfolded during Su Can's holiday in Huangcheng. Some people there had gone to prison, some had lost power and wealth, some had brushed past seemingly dazzling happiness or misfortune, and someone had nearly vanished from his life. He and his family had almost become casualties of a political struggle. These were all stories left behind in that city, stories people would probably still relish recounting long afterward.
Lin Luoran had rejected Wei Yuanhu's advances, and Wei Yuanhu had returned to Beijing. But Lin Luoran did not know whether he would come again that summer or winter.
Su Can and Tang Wu returned to Nanjing University and entered the second semester of their second year. Su Can liked his dorm at Nanjing University, with its piles of books giving off the scent of ink, its printer and shredder that always smelled a little of plastic, even its washing machine with its smell of suds, and the richer aroma of coffee beans ground to powder drifting from the coffee machine.
This was the enviable Room 602. This was everything about campus: bicycles and study rooms, the library and the person you hoped to meet, ordinary differential equations, functional analysis and topological vectors, and Nanjing University's old C++ textbook on generative programming without Loki or MPL.
Li Han would sleep until nearly noon,