"Chen Mengtong, married woman, bad woman."
"Chen Wenwen, slightly green, stupid woman."
"Chu Zihang, good Senior Brother, gossiping busybody."
"Lu Mingze, Little Devil, stupid younger brother."
"Herzog, dead man."
The translucent, amber morning light slanted through the glass window onto the desk. At this point, the boy could not help taking a deep breath and staring at the black, hard-covered notebook before him. Then, as if mustering all his strength, he wrote the following sentence on the final line:
"Uesugi Erii, beloved."
Lu Mingfei gazed at the last line of words for a long time, as if the girl who haunted his dreams yet whom he had never met was hidden right there within the pages, leaping off the paper. The boy rested his chin in his hand, looking at her with meticulous care, his eyes and the corners of his mouth filled with gentleness.
Day after day, year after year, this was something Lu Mingfei would do without ever growing tired of it, as if writing down those words with his own hands day in and day out was still not enough—as though the boy needed to carve that final name deep into his very marrow.
"Lu Mingfei, have you forgotten that a professor from an American university is coming for an interview today? You don't care about going to college yourself, and you make other people worry about you instead? Why aren't you changed and ready to head out yet?"
"Oh."
Aunt's urging voice rang continuously outside the door, but the boy at the desk did not mutter any cynical clichés like "the emperor isn't worried, but the eunuch is." He merely replied indifferently, showing no anger at all.
He gently closed the notebook, as if afraid he might accidentally crush the precious name hidden inside.
"It's not that I like to nag, but lately there have been way too many cases of people using prestigious universities as a front to swindle others. Besides, this Cassel College thing—I've never even heard of it. Yesterday I had your Uncle look up information on their official website, and guess what happened?"
"As soon as you click on it, it's all garbage ads like 'Sexy croupier, dealing live online' and 'If we're brothers, come hack at me'!"
"That probably has nothing to do with the school itself. Uncle's computer must have caught a virus," Lu Mingfei replied helplessly.
Aside from Uncle himself, the only person who usually used Uncle's nearly obsolete HP laptop was his cousin Lu Mingze. But every time Lu Mingze used the computer, he would lock himself alone in his room, under the high-sounding pretext that he didn't want to be disturbed and needed to focus entirely on his studies. Yet whenever Lu Mingfei opened the browser history afterward, it was always full of all sorts of bizarre VPNs, so how that computer virus got there went without saying.
"Anyway, don't just spill everything the second someone asks, blurting out all our family's information to an outsider. You have to know that even sayings like 'Chinese people don't cheat Chinese people' can't be completely trusted. Those shady foreign faux professors are sly as foxes—if you aren't careful for even a second, you'll be scammed out of the very underwear off your back. Not that you have many pairs of underwear to begin with, Mingfei..."
Once Aunt started nagging, there was no telling when she would stop. It was something the whole family was helpless against yet entirely used to. Still, Lu Mingfei couldn't help thinking: if physics ever broke through the Sophon barrier and invented the first perpetual motion machine, it would most likely be Aunt's mouth!
"Mingfei, are you listening, Mingfei!"
"I'm listening."
Actually, Lu Mingfei wasn't listening at all, because he knew that Cassel College genuinely existed.
Ever since a certain day shortly after he entered high school, Lu Mingfei had repeatedly dreamed the exact same dream every single night. In the dream, he sat day after day on a windowsill covered in green ivy, reading a story called *Dragon Race*, which happened to feature an unlucky loser named Lu Mingfei.
And it wasn't just Lu Mingfei; the book also featured too many figures from his own real life: Lu Mingze (fat otaku version), Chen Wenwen, Chu Zihang... as well as many names he had never seen or heard of before: Fenger, Caesar... Erii. The entire story came to an abrupt halt right when he read about the helpless death of the girl named Erii.
At first, Lu Mingfei hadn't taken the dream story as anything terribly significant. After all, concepts like the Four Great Monarchs or the Shieki Eight Families sounded far too fantastical, and they had absolutely nothing to do with the world he currently lived in!
Besides, the story of that loser underdog looked for all the world like some bitter autobiography written by an old hack suffering from acute literary sentimentalism.
Could you really believe something like that?!
It was like running into a strange blind man on the street one day, and the blind man says, "Hey, do you believe in light? I can see that you possess extraordinary bones and a rare innate talent, kid; one day you're bound to be the prodigy who saves the world from catastrophe." As he speaks, he shoves a Spark Lens into your hand.
How do you know that Spark Lens isn't just a free giveaway item bundled with a Tiga Ultraman action figure bought at a boutique store? Could you possibly be fantasizing that one day a Gatanzoa will actually crawl out into the world, and you'll ride the music of the miracle-rebirth playback to transform into a Giant of Light and save humanity?
If this were back when Lu Mingfei had just started middle school, he would have thought that slaying dragons was such a cool and magnificent enterprise that he simply had to get in on the action. After all, what if the Earth started spinning just a fraction slower without S-grade Lu Mingfei? Wouldn't that mean a day would have twenty-five hours? Wouldn't the gravitational difference between the Earth and the Moon increase, triggering tidal shifts, global warming, melting polar ice caps, plunging tsunamis that would blot out the skies to flood cities, and ultimately leading to the end of the world? That would be catastrophic!
Yet Lu Mingfei was already a mature high schooler by then. Of course he believed that Jotaro Kujo possessed Star Platinum, that Luffy's body could stretch at will, and that Yusuke Urameshi could come back from the dead. Lu Mingfei was willing to believe—and firmly believed—that these things definitely existed!
They just wouldn't happen to be in Lu Mingfei's world, that was all.
That was until Lu Mingfei accidentally ran into Senior Brother Chu Zihang—who existed simultaneously in both his dreams and reality—after school one day.
On that torrential rainy evening, Chu Zihang—who sat atop the Execution List at Shilan High School and commanded more popularity even than the principal—had refused everyone's company. After all his classmates left the school holding their umbrellas, he stood alone, watching the rain shroud the entire world in dim gloom, the sorrow in his eyes thick as a surging tide, as though it could drown the world.
Lu Mingfei froze instantly, because he couldn't understand. In his eyes, Chu Zihang already lived the life of a distant celebrity; why on earth would he display a gaze even more helpless and desolate than his own, unless...
Just as Chu Zihang's figure was about to vanish into that rainy night, Lu Mingfei chased after him.
"Senior Brother!"
"Lu Mingfei?"
"Yeah, Senior Brother actually remembers me."
"Mhm, is there something you need?"
"Are you heading home alone after school too, Senior Brother? Your... parents?"
Chu Zihang gave Lu Mingfei a strange look. Plenty of people cared about everything from his appearance to his grades and hobbies every single day, but not a single person had ever asked him something like, "How come you're still leaving alone after school? Where are your parents?"
Yet Chu Zihang instantly let it go, because the person asking this question was Lu Mingfei—the only guy in the entire school who consistently left later than he did whenever it rained.
"They're divorced," Chu Zihang said.
"I remember seeing Senior Brother's father once before. It was a rainy day back then too, and he was driving a very luxurious car. At the time, Senior Brother even asked me if I wanted to get in," Lu Mingfei said softly, staring fixedly into Chu Zihang's eyes.
"Mhm... There was a car crash on the elevated highway that day, and my father went missing. I was the only one who walked away." Chu Zihang's eyelids drooped into silence, the depths of his gaze hiding a sorrowful, unspeakable elegy.
"I have to hurry to my saxophone lesson. Be careful on your way home alone."
Thinking that Lu Mingfei was just feeling homesick, and not being particularly skilled at comforting others, Chu Zihang could only pat the other boy's shoulder as a gesture of solace.
Long after Chu Zihang departed, Lu Mingfei stood rooted to the spot as if caught in a binding spell, unsure how long he remained there while the story from his dreams played back in his mind like clips from an old film.
That heavy rain beat down upon his body like countless bone-piercing, skin-drilling nails, stabbing him with a searing, heart-wrenching pain.
"Erii, Erii, Erii..."
Recovering his senses, Lu Mingfei muttered the name like a madman as he sprinted all the way home. He didn't even have time to take a shower; he just wanted to fall asleep as quickly as possible.
Yet Lu Mingfei made the despairing discovery that, starting from the very day dreams and reality overlapped, he had lost the ability to dream.
"How can this be... why can't I dream anymore..."
Lightning cleaved through the clouds, and thunder crashed across the four directions. Struck as if by a heavy thunderbolt, Lu Mingfei utterly lost his soul. Tears slipped out from the corners of his eyes without so much as a warning, taking the boy from silent weeping to soft whimpering, and finally to a heartbroken howl.
Lu Mingfei cried for an entire night.
Outside the window raged a torrential downpour that seemed intent on drowning the entire world; inside the room huddled a boy weeping bitterly beneath his quilt.
That flood of tears, fiercer by far than the storm outside, finally washed completely through the stagnant, dead waters of Lu Mingfei's life, extinguishing the cowardice hidden deep within his bones.
It was as if someone were wielding a blood-dripping boning knife, slicing open Lu Mingfei's skin and dissecting the heart within—a heart stuffed full of childishness and decadence. That person merely fished out the heart, handed it to Lu Mingfei for a single glance, and then, with a disdainful smile, shoved the heart back inside without a word. The other party hadn't spoken a single syllable, yet Lu Mingfei distinctly heard an abundance of disappointment and mockery within that disdainful laugh.
The one whose heart had been laid bare was his present self; the one holding the knife was the past version of himself who had failed to save that girl; and that sharpest knife in the entire world was named "Regret" and "Remorse."
Of all the three thousand blades in this mortal realm, regret is the most lethal.
From that day onward, Lu Mingfei was transformed.
He gradually put down his mouse and keyboard, walking away from Warcraft and StarCraft; instead, he picked up a bamboo shinai and books, shuttling back and forth between the kendo dojo and the library.
It was also from that day onward that Lu Mingfei knew there truly existed a place called Cassel College, a gathering ground for madmen and monsters; and he knew that far away across the Japanese sea, there was a girl destined by fate waiting for him to save her.
Lu Mingfei stopped dreaming, but the story that had appeared in his dreams contained too many details and far too much tangled content. Consequently, he formed the habit of writing down some of the people he was about to meet and the important events in his notebook every single day. He did not want to forget, nor did he dare to.
"It's time to go, Mingfei."
Aunt's call dragged Lu Mingfei out of his memories and back to reality.
Lu Mingfei threw on an inexpensive, somewhat cheap-looking suit he had borrowed from his Uncle, brushing his hair back into an adult style. The boy in the mirror already looked quite reliable and steady. As he pushed open the bedroom door, the boy whispered softly—both to himself and to the distant shores far beyond the mountains:
"Not far now, Erii. Through a thousand mountains and rivers, we have a long way ahead of us; please be sure to wait for me to find you!"
"Definitely!"
Lu Mingfei, an ordinary teenager living in a southern coastal town, had grown up without ever seeing a helicopter or an express train with his own eyes. Yet ever since three years ago, Lu Mingfei no longer felt any yearning or secret dejection over such things, because the youth had long since known that his life was strung across a path dense with thorns.
He was destined to be extraordinary!