Chapter 102: On the Elevated Bridge

At 16:40 in the afternoon, the train moved smoothly along the high-speed railway. The car windows were sealed, while the air-conditioning wind seeped through every corner of the ceiling of the train carriage via the central control system.

In the rear carriage, every seat had been meticulously tuned; this was a private train, the gap between seats far greater than that of a usual business-class compartment, and the seats themselves were adapted from genuine leather sofas, so wide they nearly allowed one to stretch out and sleep upon them.

Within the entire carriage, there were only these five rows of seats, plus the service staff, totaling no more than ten people.

And Yang Luo sat upon the frontmost seat, as if lost in quiet meditation, his expression neither joyful nor sorrowful.

At this moment, the train had long departed from the starting station and had even reached the next stop. Yet the figure he longed to see still had not appeared, it seemed today would not succeed.

A faint disappointment stirred in Yang Luo’s heart, though it was merely a passing shadow, not deep or lasting.

—There was still plenty of time ahead; there was no need to hurry. Opportunities would arise later.

However, at that instant, the wind outside the train howled fiercely, his sharpened senses capturing every gust of the gale beyond, yet in Yang Luo’s mind strange and chaotic thoughts inexplicably flickered.

In the darkness behind closed eyes, many faces and old memories faintly emerged.

In childhood, every evening upon returning home, he had helped his parents with the farm work, boiled water, chopped firewood, cooked, and fed the pigs. At the time his parents had clearly been only in their thirties; had they been city folk, perhaps their faces would have been unwrinkled, but amid their hair steeped in the stench of oil and sweat, some white strands had already begun to appear.

As a youth in the countryside, because of the “5-5 stream” policy, most urban children could enter high school directly, while the majority of students from the village junior high had to go to vocational school or enter the factories at once. Yang Luo, because of his diligence and talent, was the only one among dozens of students in that small junior high who passed the high-school entrance exam. In memory, that summer when the list was posted, his body had been drenched in sweat of excitement, yet when he turned his head he saw the face of the girl second in the grade, flushed red with unwilling resentment, her family even poorer than his own… He remembered that after that he never saw her again, only heard that she had married young.

After entering high school, he studied almost like clutching at a lifeline, devoting himself tirelessly to the sea of exam questions. Finally he succeeded, rising from the bottom fifty out of just entering the county high school to the top ten in the positive numbers after three years. From the edge where teachers were indifferent and classmates wrinkled their noses in mockery—“you smell good”—he became the object of gentle, kind conversation from the teachers, the center of ever-more respectful attention from his classmates, and even before the college entrance exam, people still sent him love letters—though Yang Luo had not even glanced at them before secretly throwing them into the trash.

After the college entrance exam he entered university, finally joining Shengyi, where his circumstances gradually improved from poverty to relative ease. It was the first time in his life that Yang Luo realized he could earn so much money, and he came to believe more and more firmly that he could personally create a beautiful future… Though he later fell into the abyss, he received the greatest opportunity of his life and rose once more, growing to this point.

Yang Luo sat quietly thinking.

Faces emerged one by one in his mind—his parents, that girl, his high-school teachers and classmates, the friends he had just met through campus recruitment after work, Wang Ruo, Huang Cheng, Wang Changming…

“Why would I suddenly have a whim and think of these things?”

Yang Luo asked himself.

“Could it be because I am soft and weak in my heart, so a bit nostalgic for the past?”

He closed his eyes.

Yet a firm smile immediately appeared on his face.

“No, not so.”

In the darkness, a series of figures rose before his eyes—those were the figures of his past self.

—He who had been frightened in childhood, he who had been single-minded in school, he who had been diligent after work.

And the current him, holding great power.

In an instant all the figures of his past vanished like smoke, leaving only the present him.

Thus Yang Luo fully understood.

“The reason I recall the past… is not because I am nostalgic for the past. But because I have already overcome the past.

“The present me—has already severed the previous weak and powerless self… I have thoroughly transcended the original self.

“The present me is so powerful that, except for the distant gods, no one on earth can block my path.

“…And next I will continue to walk forward. Until I reach a position no one can touch, even no one can look up to. This is my future, infinitely bright.”

Yang Luo finally settled his heart.

Then he opened his eyes.

Yet he saw Xu Jingyuan standing before the train carriage, listening to a phone call, his brows furrowing tighter and tighter for some reason.

Slightly loosening his perception, Yang Luo immediately heard the content of the call and understood why Xu Jingyuan was so panicked.

In a brief moment Xu Jingyuan finished the call, put down the phone, picked up the walkie-talkie, and issued orders to the driver and the train control console:

“…Stop at once, disperse and board the train, gather nearby troops—”

But before he could finish, Yang Luo had already stood up, stretched lazily, and came to his side:

“Now which station are we at?”

Xu Jingyuan’s gaze turned to him.

“…Du Long Mountain Station.”

Yang Luo gave a soft laugh, turned his head, and gazed out the window.

“No wonder, below this station are bottomless cliffs filled with miasma, uninhabited. No wonder he chose this place.”

Xu Jingyuan’s pupils suddenly dilated.

“Mr. Yang, you mean…”

“I mean you needn’t get off to disperse and regroup, because he has already arrived.”

And just as those words left Yang Luo’s mouth,

“Crash!”

On the glass window of the originally speeding train, spiderweb-like cracks suddenly appeared, then shattered into pieces!

Then—the entire carriage—a black shadow swept through like a storm, howling away in an instant. The next instant, both Yang Luo and that shadow crashed out through the opposite car window, carriage-side door fragments and glass shards flying, the two leaping down from the high viaduct in the mountains with intertwined forms, instantly vanishing into the vast miasma fog below the Broken Dragon Mountain Cliff!

The train applied emergency brakes, sparks flying along the tracks.

In that instant, whether Xu Jingyuan or the other staff, they all rushed to the twisted and broken carriage door on that side, dumbfounded, staring down at the vast miasma fog below, faces meeting one another in expressions of utter incredulity.

…You know, falling from this viaduct could be hundreds of meters deep.

(End of chapter)