“They were all disguised—some as your teachers, some as subscription salesmen, others as electricity meter readers…”
“I knew it! That meter reader was sneaky! Looking everywhere when he entered—it turns out he wasn’t any good!” Lu Mingfei suddenly realized.
“You are our hope, and though others may think I show you strange favoritism, in my heart you’re just as promising as hybrids like Caesar and Chu Zihang,” Anjou said. “I’ve been observing you for eighteen…”
Lu Mingfei covered his face. “Something strange has mixed into our serious conversation… Alright, I understand what you mean. You’re like an old man growing gourds, and now that ‘pop!’ the gourd has split open, here I am. My skills are nonsense and playing StarCraft, and you send me to fight monsters? But, Principal, are you really sure that the offspring of two exceptional hybrids are always going to be exceptional hybrids?”
“Hmm,” Anjou pondered for a moment, “there’s indeed a chance of producing a defective one, like you inheriting only your parents’ garbage genes.”
“Hey… even if it’s true, could you not use a term like ‘defective’ that hurts my pride?”
“But you’re not defective. Your performance in the bloodline tests was outstanding. Your blood even managed to make the ‘Living Spirits’ guarding the Bronze City retreat. You are exactly what we hoped for!” Anjou said. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
“‘Great power’… But Principal, I really don’t think I’m suited for the great task of saving the world. Bloodline tests and the Bronze City… it was just good luck,” Lu Mingfei thought. One burst of power drained a quarter of my life—you think I’m a cat with nine lives? Is this supposed to be my Yanling ability? It’s like a video game party, where there’s a strange character—everyone else uses mana, but this guy uses health. He uses all his HP for a big attack, dies after bleeding out, and the boss is defeated. The ending shows everyone placing white flowers at his grave, with lovers confessing their love.
“Mingfei, have you ever thought about why you’re alive in this world?” Anjou took a deep drag on his cigar.
Lu Mingfei hesitated for a moment, then cautiously said, “If I said it was for the games I haven’t played, the manga I haven’t finished… and the girlfriend I haven’t gotten… would you kick me out of the car?”
“The girlfriend you haven’t gotten—is it that girl who always wears red, Chen Motong?”
“Hey! Principal! Could you not bring up such sore subjects? Let’s go back to your philosophical and profound topic—about the meaning of our lives!” Lu Mingfei blushed and forced himself to endure.
“Oh,” Anjou nodded, his eyes distant, as if his thoughts had traveled to the end of time. “When I was at Cambridge, people’s tastes were different from today. The girls wore long white silk dresses and Oxford-style white heels. I would hold a book of poetry by the Sighing Bridge, pretending to read, watching the girls walk past, hoping the wind would lift their silk skirts.” The old man blew out a puff of smoke, a look of longing on his face. “So I could see their beautiful calves. Oh, dear God! It was marvelous! Back then, I thought that was what I was alive for!”
“Hey! How is that philosophical or profound in any way? You’re just like me, aren’t you?”
“But now they’re all dead. Sometimes, I bring a bouquet of white roses to visit their graves,” the old man said wistfully.
“Hey! How do you manage to blend such deep emotions with that lecherous tone so seamlessly?” Lu Mingfei couldn’t help but exclaim.
The old man ignored him, continuing his own story. “I still often go back to Cambridge, but there’s no one I know left there. All the evidence of my time studying there has been erased by time. I can’t exactly pull out my old diploma and tell people I graduated from the Cambridge Divinity School in 1897—they’d think I was either crazy or a monster. I tell people I’m just a tourist, that I had always admired Cambridge in my youth. I walk around campus, watching students passing by, dressed in T-shirts and sneakers, holding various handheld electronic devices. They no longer discuss poetry, religion, and art; they’re focused on finding a job in London’s financial district. But what about the things I loved? The girls I admired? Their beautiful white silk dresses and Oxford-style white high-heeled shoes? The pear tree under which we discussed Shelley’s poems? They’ve all become history in old photographs. I pass by the young people like a lonely ghost from a hundred years ago.”
Anjou paused. “How do you understand ‘Blood Sorrow’?”
Lu Mingfei was stunned. Blood Sorrow? He had never understood it. Guderian once said that hybrids lived like lost lambs among humans, full of sorrow, but Lu Mingfei always thought it was nonsense. Sorrow for what? Because normal people couldn’t use Yanling while you could? That’s hilarious! If he, Lu Mingfei, had Caesar’s Kamaitachi, he could just listen to a girl’s heartbeat while she talked to him and know if she was interested; or Chu Zihang’s King’s Blaze—carrying around a portable gas stove, he could cook fried rice during a picnic with one hand while boiling water for tea with the other.
What sorrow? Why should anyone be sad just because they have more than others? People only feel sorrow because they lack something others have, like when it’s raining and others have a car to pick them up while you have to take off your clothes to cover your head as you run home; or during a parent-teacher meeting when everyone else has both parents sitting behind them like guardians, while you lean against a bare, empty wall; or when someone else is going abroad, and their whole family sends them off, tearfully bidding farewell at security with passionate embraces, while you drag a huge suitcase alone down the long airport security lane…
Come to think of it… his life really had been quite miserable.
He used to daydream in class and read Legend of the Condor Heroes. In it, the great master Huang Yaoshi saw his daughter disobediently sticking by the fool Guo Jing and couldn’t help but think of his deceased wife. He killed two fine horses in a fit of sorrow, reciting an ancient poem by Jia Yi, a scholar of the Western Han dynasty: “The world is a furnace, with creation as the workman; Yin and Yang are the coals, and all living things are the copper.” The second-rate swordsman Han Baoju, whose reputation wasn’t high and whose martial skills weren’t great, didn’t understand and asked his brother Zhu Cong, “What is the old man doing?” Zhu Cong, who was slightly cultured, explained that the old man meant life was like being roasted in a great furnace, full of suffering. Han Baoju scoffed and said, “What nonsense! The old man is a top martial artist—what does he have to be troubled about?”
Nine out of ten people would think Han Baoju was ignorant, but only Lu Mingfei thought he was right. Huang Yaoshi, a master so cultured yet so easily saddened—if he and Han Baoju switched places, would he change back? Han Baoju, carefree and happy, stuck with his brothers until his death—his martial arts may have been lacking, but if Old Huang wasn’t willing to switch, it meant his sorrow was hypocritical.
The strongest warrior is the loneliest? Only posers pretend to be lonely—if you keep posing as lonely, it’s because you haven’t suffered enough from being lonely and still think it looks cool.
Those who are truly lonely never think about it—because if you’re truly lonely and can’t save yourself, all you can do is not think about it. But back then, Lu Mingfei hadn’t understood this. He used to sit on the rooftop late at night, gazing at the distant lights, imagining a day when he’d become amazing, smiling silently to himself.
Anjou fell into a long silence until the cigar butt burnt his hand.