svetikya 002 Summer
002 Summer
"Brother, traversing the causal relationships between worlds is too exhausting; my body is about to shatter..."
The boy who always wore a black suit hugged him tightly in the orange LCL solution.
"Don't worry, you'll go back to your original world. But I'm so tired, I need to sleep for a very, very long time..."
pain.
Lu Mingfei opened his eyes and saw the ceiling.
A ceiling I've never seen before.
wrong.
He was lying on the ground, his head throbbing and his mind reeling. He turned his head to the side.
A poster of a hero wielding a greatsword was pasted on the wall next to it, but the image was poorly printed, and there was a crease on the hero's face. Below the poster was a chair, with a school uniform draped over the back, sleeves rolled up. The curtains were drawn, and light squeezed in through the gaps, drawing a thin white line on the floor tiles, shimmering in the breeze.
He raised his right hand, looked at it, then touched his neck. There was nothing there. He then stood up, holding onto the table leg.
There was a laptop on the table, its screen still lit.
The twelve human cruisers focused their fire on his Yamato cannons, turning his nest into a pool of blood.
I remember now, this was the last StarCraft game he played before he left this world.
He regretted it for a long time. If he had known it was the last game, he shouldn't have used the red dot; he should have used the mouse instead.
Lu Mingfei sat back in his chair, his fingers unconsciously touching the keyboard, wanting to type "GG" to admit defeat.
The letters "GG" were already there in the dialog box.
He was stunned for a moment. Did he hit him? Yes, he hit him.
That was before he left—left? From where did he leave? Before which "before"? He was sitting in this chair, admitting defeat, and then…and then what?
Then he went to Tokyo-3, where he worked odd jobs at NERV for a long time. He became the Fourth Child, and he was torn apart by Shinji… no, Unit-03 was dismembered by Unit-01. Then he fought against the mass-produced units and failed. Asuka came to save him, but was dismembered by the mass-produced units. He held Asuka, waiting for the Third Impact. Then a boy hugged him and brought him back.
"Lu Mingze?"
Lu Mingfei called out softly, looking around, but no one answered him.
"Beep beep." "Beep beep."
The QQ penguin icon in the lower right corner of the screen was tirelessly bouncing. Lu Mingfei mechanically moved the mouse and clicked it. A message from a friend named "Old Tang" filled the chat box: complaining that hot dogs had gone up by 50 cents, that the unscrupulous owner of the repair shop had ripped him off for 50 dollars for an oil change, and finally throwing a panda emoji at him: "You're only lacking in micro-management, your tactical awareness is very good."
Looking at all this trivial nonsense, Lu Mingfei suddenly felt like crying.
He placed his hands on the keyboard, about to try typing a few words.
"A box of discounted bagged milk, half a pound of Cantonese sausage, and the latest issue of Mingze's milk—"
The sound came from next door, and Lu Mingfei jumped, looking warily toward the door.
"—Buy 'Illustrated Novels,' and come back quickly! Pick the celery off the table for me! Also, go to the mailroom and see if there's any mail from America!"
What did you say? Someone's in the room? No, Auntie!
"...Still playing games? You don't care about your own affairs at all. If no one accepts you, do you think you can even get into a top university? What's the point of spending so much money on you?"
Lu Mingfei stood in the center of the room, waiting for the sound to stop.
Packaged milk? Sausage? Celery?
He went outside, and half of the paint on the stair railing had peeled off, revealing gray iron pipes underneath.
Oh, and I also need to buy the illustrated novel.
Lu Mingfei walked along in a daze, trying to adapt to the world he had lived in for 18 years.
The scorching midday sun beat down, baking the asphalt until it softened and felt sticky underfoot.
There's an old banyan tree at the entrance of the residential area. Several old men sit under its shade, shirtless, fanning themselves with palm-leaf fans and playing chess.
"Checkmate!" An old man slammed the chess piece onto the wooden mat with a loud voice.
Lu Mingfei shuddered in fright and instinctively wanted to shrink into the shadows.
He continued walking forward, stepping on his shortened shadow, as memories began to rewind in his mind.
Lu Mingfei is a senior in high school and will soon turn eighteen.
Living under someone else's roof, his grades were terrible. The college entrance exam was in three months, and everyone in his family, from his uncles and aunts to the neighborhood aunties, would give him a long, earnest lecture, as if the world was ending on the day of the exam.
He used to hide under the covers and think, how wonderful it would be if there really was a good, decisive apocalypse! No one would have to take exams or take the TOEFL; meteorites would fall and everyone would be treated equally—how wonderful!
Unexpectedly, this mouth of his was blessed, and he actually went to a post-apocalyptic world.
I should slap myself!
There, he became a junior high school student in Tokyo-3, attending classes on time every day. Apart from having to go to the hospital for a medical check-up once a week, life seemed no different from before.
Later, he was recruited by NERV in a daze when he graduated.
The beautiful older sister who led him in was named Katsuragi Misato. She patted his shoulder and said, "Mingfei, I'm entrusting you with an important task. Go and take care of those drivers' daily lives, do some odd jobs, and incidentally, be a helpful and caring older brother."
The qualified ones are all strange.
The emotionless, blue-haired girl named Rei sat by the window, her gaze fixed on a distant, unseen place. She never spoke, and it was impossible to guess what she was thinking. The red-haired girl Asuka was the complete opposite. Once, when she was angrily scolding Shinji, Lu Mingfei just happened to pass by and glanced at her. As a result, she suddenly turned her head and glared at Lu Mingfei, as if he were one of the culprits: "What are you looking at? Don't you have anything better to do?!" He was so frightened that he quickly ran away.
However, the third eligible candidate is more normal.
In NERV, the only thing Lu Mingfei could find a sense of presence for was by advising Shinji in a "been there, done that" tone.
"What's there to be afraid of? If the sky falls, there are tall people to hold it up; if the Angels come, there's the Commander to take care of them." Lu Mingfei often sat by Shinji's bedside, secretly eating apples from the fruit basket, and said shamelessly, "For people like us, living a carefree life is the proper thing to do. Don't put too much pressure on yourselves; at worst, we can just skip out together."
He felt that he and Shinji were the same kind of people, both unlucky guys who were forced into the game. It's just that Shinji was forced to hold a straight flush, while he, Lu Mingfei, didn't even have a single card.
The sunlight suddenly flickered, and he squinted as a blue figure passed by at the edge of his line of sight.
Lu Mingfei stopped, his heart pounding. A woman in a blue dress had already walked past.
He stood there, unable to recall why his heart had been racing. Blue, just blue, but he felt there was something else going on...
A white ceiling, red eyes, and the green waveform on the monitor jumping around.
Forget it!
"Mingfei, everyone's saying you're going to study abroad."
The old man at the newsstand spoke, his voice slow and deliberate.
"Study abroad?" Lu Mingfei looked up at the old man, who was fanning himself with a palm leaf fan, smiling broadly, his face full of wrinkles.
What is this person saying? Does he know me? Oh right, buying novel illustrations!
"Studying abroad is great. You become a 'sea turtle' (a term for someone who returns from studying abroad), and you earn a lot of money," the old man said, fanning himself with a palm leaf fan.
Lu Mingfei looked down at the magazine in his hand.
What should he say?
What would he say before?
He said: I don't want to make a lot of money, I just want to help you watch the stall and buy PS2 game discs.
He looked at the magazine cover, which featured a two-dimensional hero wielding a greatsword to save the world, and felt a sharp, stabbing pain deep in his neck.
"It's good." Lu Mingfei slowly stood up, clutching "Novel Illustration" in his hand.
He suddenly realized he couldn't see the words on the magazine.
A drop of water fell on the cover, staining the words "Novel Illustration" into a small blot of ink.
He has learned a lot.
But in this world, it seems like none of them are useful.