“Hey?
Young man!”
A traveler pulling a suitcase shook Lin Chuan’s body, pulling him back to reality from his deep sleep.
The urgent, non-stop ringing of “ding-a-ling” could be heard; it was the alarm clock he had pre-set on his phone, which seemed to have been ringing for a while.
“Sorry, I saw your phone ringing for a long time without any movement, and wondered if you were getting off at this stop?
Make sure you don’t miss your stop,” the other person kindly reminded.
“Ah, okay,” Lin Chuan turned off the alarm, realizing he should express gratitude.
“It’s this stop, thank you very much, kind people live a safe and peaceful life!”
He straightened his posture and let out a long sigh, his hands moving quickly to pack all the notebooks and reference books on the table into his backpack, zipping it up.
Then he stood up and took his jacket from the back of the seat.
At this moment, the platform buildings outside the window had slowly flashed past, and the high-speed rail’s traveling speed had noticeably slowed down, with a friendly broadcast coming from the intercom:
“Passenger friends, the train is about to arrive.
Passengers getting off, please prepare your luggage and belongings…”
Lin Chuan didn’t have time to dwell on his habit of getting sleepy, because after a slight tremor, the train came to a complete stop, and the train Door slid open to both sides with a “hiss”
sound.
He tugged twice on his backpack straps and walked down the carriage with the scattered crowd.
At first, he was quite fast, hurriedly passing the pedestrians ahead; but as he walked, his steps uncontrollably slowed down.
Gazing at the stairway leading to the underground passage, he actually had a sudden impulse to return to that train and stay on that journey on the road forever.
But after all, people must eventually land on the ground.
Lin Chuan smiled silently, swiped through the ticket gates along the passage, and stepped out of the exit hall step by step.
Until he walked dozens of meters out, turned around, stood on the square in front of the train station, and stopped to look back, for a moment he felt somewhat dazed.
He opened his arms, facing this land, as if wanting to knead them all into pieces and stuff them into his chest:
The March sunlight was not scorching, carrying even a slight coolness as it fell on people.
Under the sunlight, the huge blue glass wall of the waiting hall glowed slightly.
Because it wasn’t any holiday, only a few hurried travelers were sparsely scattered across the square, and the taxi drivers outside lacked spirit.
A bit desolate, but exactly the same as in his memory.
Outside the fence, a few taxi drivers who had been gathered together smoking saw him come out and symbolically shouted a few times; even one of them had already opened the front passenger Door.
Lin Chuan smiled and waved his hand, refusing the driver’s solicitation.
“No need, master, I’m going to the city center, it’s close.”
“And…
I haven’t been back for a long time, I want to walk by myself,” he added.
After all, the road was actually not long, a few kilometers, but it couldn’t compare to the five years of length.
He just walked slowly along the roadside curb, neither hurried nor impatient, making no sound and having no thoughts to speak of.
He was just like a child who had lost something precious, eagerly looking at every still-familiar corner on both sides of the street.
That high wall at the west end of the city coming out of the train station—when he was a child, he really thought that was the end of the city, and standing under the wall tilting his head up couldn’t see behind it.
The buffet restaurant on the top floor of the department store hadn’t gone out of business yet at this time; it was rumored that it had been cheated by a partner, and unfortunately it closed down before the money he recharged into the card was spent.
The aunts and uncles dancing square dance on People’s Square were still performing as stably as ever; it wasn’t dark yet, right?
Lin Chuan only felt that all the days of his previous five years were nothing more than a dream, a dream of a high school senior lying in bed, imagining his abstract college life.
He forgot about any urban rebirth protagonist; that was too far away, so far as to be impractical.
He should still be lying in bed looking at his phone, thinking about the days of checking scores a few days later.
And he would be scolded by his mom again, driven out of the home Door to take a stroll, told not to just stay cooped up at home all day.
The roads of this city, he had walked hundreds and thousands of times on countless ordinary days before, and could truly walk through them with his eyes closed.
Walking and walking, Lin Chuan suddenly stopped, looking at the hustle and bustle around him, his eye sockets inexplicably growing warm.
He suddenly had a strange illusion:
Five years ago, on the day he landed as a freshman and heard the three words “Zhou Mingrui”, he seemed to have abandoned a part of himself; that youth was left behind in the streets of this city, in the shade of the old locust tree, in the twilight where his parents had finished cooking dinner and were leaning against the window looking down.
And at the very moment he stepped onto this land, everything that youth had engraved in his heart returned to him once again.
Lin Chuan continued walking, turned this bend, waded across a low bridge, and the entrance of the alley was close at hand.
Unconsciously, the edge of the sky was dyed with a patch of rosy clouds.
Walking these few kilometers wasn’t tired at all, and there wasn’t even a realistic sense of time passing.
Walking into the alley for a while, the residential houses around him appeared both familiar and strange.
He seemed not to know where he was; this feeling was just like the dreams he had once had of running through major streets and small alleys, where he only remembered the direction home.
The location of the road was still a road, and the location of the bridge was still a bridge, but Lin Chuan seemed to have forgotten them a bit.
That was normal too; after all, counting these five years since his transmigration and the time before transmigration, such scenery hadn’t been seen for a full thirteen years.
Until he saw the first completely familiar shop.
It was a small grocery store lived in by a kind old couple whose beards and hair had been graying ever since Lin Chuan could remember.
When he was young, he often went to their store to look around here and there, and then invariably spent fifty cents to buy back a pack of crispy noodles.
He still remembered that both of their sons were graduate students, which was truly an incredible achievement back then; his mother mentioned it every day, envying them to the utmost.
The surrounding streetscape was becoming increasingly familiar; in front of every Door there were memories left behind by Lin Chuan, and it was just the last few steps.
It was this household, it was this wall.
Back in 2018, Mom and Dad hadn’t broken the wall to install a glass Door yet, and at this time, the wall still hung that yet-to-be-retired GG sign.
The courtyard walls on both sides hung spring couplets, and embedded in the middle were two large iron Doors.
Locally, most courtyard Doors were unlocked; as long as you reached your hand through the open hole, you could pull them open—preventing gentlemen but not petty villains.
Lin Chuan walked into the courtyard, and then smelled the choking oily smoke from the first-floor kitchen.
He looked up at the sky; the sun was setting in the west, and twilight was suddenly appearing.
It was indeed time to prepare dinner.
This oily smoke was truly choking; he had never been able to stand it, but now he actually felt it was acceptable.
Lin Chuan’s hand slowly reached out, then hesitated and stopped when it was about to touch the security Door.
He suddenly recalled the days of being late for school in the past; at that time, he was similarly constrained, standing awkwardly at the Doorway, hesitating for a long time and not daring to knock on the Door.
…
Lin Chuan knocked on the Door, three times.
“Dong, dong, dong.”
The Door opened.