Chapter 46

Chapter 47

I walked ahead with a trembling smile, Xu Jiajia followed with her head lowered and a dark expression, and Zhang Xin brought up the rear, her steps slow but firm. The three of us walked into the Ten Thousand Homes at Night hotel, past the countless people waiting for tables at the entrance, and entered our reserved private room under their astonished gazes.

We sat down, had tea, and ordered. The waitress turned on the television in the room and left, leaving us facing one another in silence.

I kept my head down and drank tea. Zhang Xin lowered her head without speaking, while Xu Jiajia still looked displeased. I had said nothing yet, only invited the two of them out for dinner, but they could already sense something was wrong. A woman's intuition really was a cut above a man's.

After holding back for ages, Xu Jiajia finally lost patience. She took a big gulp of scalding tea and asked, "Zhou Xingwen, do you actually have anything to say? Is this a dinner party for mutes?"

I stared at her, dumbfounded. "Don't... don't you think that's a little hot?"

Xu Jiajia thumped her cup onto the table with all the swagger of a wandering swordswoman. "My dad's in the tea business. A little hot tea like this is nothing."

Every village really did have its own tricks... With a look of dismay, I considered how to explain why I had invited them to dinner. This was rather difficult to put into words.

It was actually a fault of mine. I often had a habit of doing meaningless things, and most of the time I did them simply because I thought they meant something.

Xu Jiajia stared at me. "What exactly are you trying to say?" Her tone and expression were both so aggressive that I had no way to fend her off.

I said slowly, "Maybe... I might not go to No. 13 Middle School..."

At those words, Zhang Xin's previously wandering gaze suddenly fixed on me. Xu Jiajia looked at me in surprise too.

"You, you..." Xu Jiajia pointed at me. "Where are you planning to go?"

Now that I had said it, the burden on my mind was not as heavy as before I came. I smiled. "Probably a private school, in Yulin County."

Zhang Xin looked away from me and gazed at the middle of the table. "There aren't any private schools in Yulin County," she said quietly.

I shrugged. "There will be soon. I've only told you two about this. Nobody else knows yet." The implication was that I considered them my own people, which did improve Xu Jiajia's expression a little.

Xu Jiajia slumped over the table and said glumly, "Why go to that lousy place? What good schools could they have there?"

I lowered my head and replied just as glumly, "There aren't any good schools. My parents want me to start boarding school early. You know how it is. An imperial decree can't be defied."

Xu Jiajia raised her head. "It's decided?"

I spread my hands. "I wish it weren't."

Beside us, Zhang Xin said quietly, "It's all right. It's not as if you're moving away."

Zhang Xin's words helped Xu Jiajia come around a little. She was a young girl, after all, not the sort to worry about things years into the future. She stood up and swatted me. "Exactly. You're just going to school in Yulin County. It's not as though we'll never see you again. Why are you acting like we're parting forever?"

I lowered my head and murmured, "Well... someone's been throwing her weight around for so long that she's got my poor little heart going pit-a-pat. Now I can't even get my words out properly..."

At that, Xu Jiajia's face immediately reddened. Zhang Xin also lowered her head, covering her mouth as she chuckled. I knew I had managed to steer the conversation away.

Putting on an innocent look, I clasped my head in both hands, tilted my face upward, and sighed. "Ah, life. As lonely as snow..."

Xu Jiajia rolled her eyes at me. "You're nuts."

I smiled. "Birds of a feather."

Zhang Xin laughed again, as captivating as the girl in my memories.

Xu Jiajia had been trading barbs with me for years without ever getting anywhere. Defeated once again, she could only change the subject. "Hey, this place doesn't look cheap. Neither of us brought any money."

Heh, I knew you'd bring that up. I've already got it covered.

"My sister's paying," I said, looking every inch a wastrel. "My sister's pretty rich. Spending a little of her money doesn't hurt me."

Xu Jiajia had no particular reaction to that, but Zhang Xin frowned out of habit. I knew she disliked waste. So be it. I did not want to leave too good an impression anyway. I could sense her gradually growing fond of me over the past few years. Now, let everything return to where it started.

"Your sister's really rich?" Xu Jiajia's family was fairly well-off too, and this perked her up. "How rich?"

"Why are you so materialistic?" I snickered wickedly. "You perk right up as soon as money comes up. What do you think?"

Xu Jiajia pursed her lips. "How much could she have? Your sister runs a magazine. A few hundred thousand, I suppose."

I shrugged. "A few hundred thousand? Not that little. A bit more."

Zhang Xin glanced at me but still said nothing. Presumably this sort of showing off had lowered her opinion of me a little more?

Xu Jiajia and I began shooting the breeze about anything and everything. Zhang Xin sat quietly watching us talk, occasionally putting in a word. Before long, the dishes began arriving. I sent the waitress attending our private room away and raised my wineglass, filled with Sun Juice, toward my two old classmates of twelve years. "Come on. A toast to our boundless futures."

Both girls raised their glasses too. Everyone was smiling at that moment, but I knew none of us really felt like smiling.

I raised my glass and drained it.

I had no idea what had gotten into the head of whoever handled the hotel's sound system, but they actually played Su Rui's "Holding Hands" at that moment. The lilting melody was thoroughly unpleasant to listen to.

I simply sat there and watched Xu Jiajia and Zhang Xin finish the meal in a very ladylike manner. By the end, I had only drunk one mouthful of juice. Both were sensible enough not to ask why I was not eating.

Outside the hotel, Xu Jiajia shook my hand with easy confidence. "See you at school tomorrow."

Zhang Xin stood there with her hands clasped, looking at me. The evening breeze lifted her long hair, and a tenderness that could knock me down suffused her face.

"Be happy."

I nodded to them both, then turned and waved down a taxi to take them home. After watching them get into the car, I looked up at the sky alone. It felt like a familiar night, when I too had once walked the streets by myself like this, the faint strains of music all along the street evoking a sky filled with tender imaginings. Back then, I had stood alone on a night like this, so excited that my relationship with a certain girl had taken another step forward that I did not know how to express it.

Walking back along the street from the hotel, I reached a grocery store and remembered a friend from back then who had eaten ice cream for months at a cold-drink shop near his home because the owner's daughter was exceptionally pretty.

I was rather lazy. That night, I had merely been happy enough to buy a can of cola, drinking and spilling it all the way.

The cold wind that night was much like today's. Even after so many years, I could still remember these things with exceptional clarity.

Standing outside the grocery store, I bought another can of our own juice, took a sip, and set it on the ground. I gazed into the distance. Rows of streetlights stretched neatly away, just like the future I had chosen, long and unknown.

I would no longer continue living within the bounds of what I knew. Everything I would face over the next three years, and even beyond, was gradually becoming unknown. Love, career, life-in the end, all of it had changed.

I stood on the cold street and called Zhang Xiaotong.

Zhang Xiaotong's voice sounded somewhat sultry. "Hello?"

"Xiaotong, it's me."

"Mm, I know."

I glanced at the cars coming and going along the street. "Dinner's over."

"How was it?"

"I said goodbye." I took a deep breath. "To my lovely elementary school days."

And my memories, I told myself.

"Then come back," Zhang Xiaotong said. "I miss you. We've picked out a site for the school too. We'll wait for you to come back and decide."

"It's the same if you decide." I joked in the darkness. "What's mine is yours, isn't it? Your decision is my decision."

"You rascal!" Zhang Xiaotong teased me. "Hurry back. It's cold all alone."

"Mm-hmm, I'm coming back now. Hanging up."

That night, Zhang Xiaotong slept with her arms around me. It was warm, and my heart felt clear, without a single distracting thought.

After that meal, Zhang Xin and Xu Jiajia smiled at me noticeably more often at school, and I responded with grins of my own. But we all understood that some things had changed, after all. We simply refused to express what was in our hearts.

As for the school's location, I approved Zhang Xiaotong's proposal and bought a bankrupt pencil factory to renovate, aiming to begin enrollment before I graduated from elementary school. This was no small challenge. We contacted the construction crews that had worked on the first phase of Sun Homeland to handle it. Apart from frequently sending people to supervise the work, there was little we could do. I essentially settled down to work on our new game.

Regarding our partnership with Sony, I privately coached Liu Mingyao: do not get too close. Maintain some distance. Make them feel they needed us, but that we were not their only option.

Sony had always had a very "exclusive" way of doing things. The clearest manifestation in their products was their frequent creation of unique formats, establishing distinct technological barriers to strike at other electronics. For years, Sony had hoped one of its products could dominate the market the way VHS tapes once had, only to fail repeatedly, leaving many Sony users dependent on its constant so-called "services" to keep up with its products. I held this practice in contempt. Like Apple's insistence on selling its own hardware and software, this approach would never amount to anything great.

Having only just entered the video game industry, Sony was still reasonably modest. CD-ROM technology was widely used, and its product quality was decent. Over the next few years, however, it slowly revealed its true nature. Its ambition to monopolize the industry's top position always showed too early, and it did many immature things before the time was ripe, ruining a great deal. Almost every bankrupt software company I knew of had some connection to Sony's covert strategies. Moreover, the company's eagerness for quick success and immediate gains in its later years really did seem rather inappropriate.

Making money by hitching myself to Sony was not my goal. Sony had only taken a liking to our products because it was short of software. We were merely using each other. There was no need to take it too seriously.

I told Liu Mingyao to absorb Sony's technical support as quickly as possible, learn everything they had to teach, then hurry up and send those commercial spies with ulterior motives packing. As for recruiting, we still needed people who were dead set on leaving their old companies, the more the better. Later, we would set up several game development departments, some made up of overseas staff and others of domestic staff. Let those people who always thought they were so extraordinarily capable compare themselves against one another. Perhaps they would improve and work harder much faster.

We also needed to streamline the intermediate procedures between development teams and senior management as much as possible. Move those useless supervisors and the like elsewhere. Transfer them if we could, and fire them if we could not. Let technical staff communicate directly with senior management, and do not let people handling trivial matters restrict development. We Chinese just loved this rotten business of suppressing talent and abusing authority for personal gain.

Liu Mingyao carefully noted it all down, briefed Cai Qing on Sun Electronics' affairs large and small, and set off for Fusang to recruit talent with a fortune in cash in his pocket and an entourage of four bodyguards, two interpreters, and two business managers.

On the day Liu Mingyao left, I called him and said only two things.

"Do your best in everything. If you can't make it work, settle for the next best thing."

"You're worth far more than those bullshit game producers. Be careful those schoolgirls don't suck you dry."

Apparently, Liu Mingyao looked solemn while listening to the first remark. After the second, he nearly crawled down the phone line to beat me up.