"Ha—ha—hey—"
When the sun came up, a little girl's clear, spirited shouting rang out across the grass. In the middle of a crowd of old folks doing their morning exercises, a pretty girl with two horn braids was going through a Wing Chun routine with proper, earnest form, while a little boy named Gu Jiaming lay on the slope above, watching the lot of them practice with a bored look on his face.
It had been two months now since he had been restored to this child's body.
For the first ten days or so he had put on a show of amnesia, playing deaf and dumb, and after that he had gradually worked everything out. The city he was in now, Jianghai, was one of the foremost big cities in the country.
Since Reform and Opening Up it had profited enormously, its economy growing at a furious pace. Broadly speaking, high society in Jianghai was now carved up among a handful of family conglomerates.
Most of these families had deep roots and plenty of connections in both the central government and local officialdom, and they had come through those years of turmoil without taking much damage. The Huang family was one of them.
His mother had to be direct Huang blood. But the Huang family had a house rule: any man who married a Huang daughter had to marry into the family. His father was proud and stiff-necked; he had eloped with his mother, and not long after he was born, a landslide had killed them both. The Huang family had already disowned the pair, but seeing how young he was, they'd felt a flicker of pity and taken him in.
Given that background, the stewards and servants might call him "young master," but he had no real standing as one. The family considered his mother's business a disgrace, and plenty of the children his age knew all about it, so they took every chance to mock and bully him. This latest running away from home had probably been because he couldn't stand the treatment anymore — and who could have guessed that once he was out, he'd run straight into two of Pei Luojia's killers, out hunting fresh blood.
In the half year since, the one person he'd gotten reasonably close to was the little girl called Ye Lingjing. Her family counted as a branch of the Huang family so distant you couldn't reach it with eight poles. His father and Lingjing's father Ye Han, who ran a martial arts school, had been close friends. After his parents died, the Ye family had wanted to take him in too, only the Huang family had the more legitimate claim to raise him.
Over the years, though he lived at the Huang house, he actually spent more time playing at the Ye house. Lingjing was a girl, but whenever he was bullied or wronged, she would step up for him like a guardian spirit. So even now, reborn, Jiaming did his best to follow the little girl's arrangements and live the life of a child.
Going to school for the first time in his life was a novelty. No harsh instructors, no bloodshed along with every lesson, no threat to his life at any moment — everything was unbelievably free. The one constraint was that whenever his mind drifted off in class, Ye Lingjing, who shared his desk, would smack him hard and make him put both hands on the desktop and sit up straight and proper. She was the school's Young Pioneers brigade commander, and she took her duty to keep an eye on her classmates very seriously.
He worked hard at copying his old handwriting and kept his exam scores hovering around the passing line; none of that was difficult for Jiaming. A child's world was entertaining — he liked sitting quietly off to one side and just watching.
But a child's world was also maddening, because children were forever playing games and doing activities so childish and dismal they drove a man up the wall. Ye Lingjing, as a conscientious brigade commander, dragged him into every performance and every after-school game.
Every time the kids were having the time of their lives, Jiaming was on the verge of collapse.
As for the family, he was not one of the Huang children anyone thought much of. Apart from the other kids remembering him when they wanted someone to bully for fun, the adults treated him like air.
He never got a seat at the big table for the nightly dinner; he ate in the side hall off to one side, or went back to his own room and ate slowly by himself.
Every month Steward Bai gave him an allowance, the same share as the other children got — and every month it was snatched away by those other children the very night it was handed over.
For the person he was now, being ignored was exactly the state he'd dreamed of. As for the money being taken, he took it back that same night, and on his way out he took their homework books too and burned them. The next day the whole mansion would be thrown into chaos. Of course, since this bunch always had terrible grades, the adults generally took the missing notebooks as a made-up excuse for dodging homework, and they'd get a thorough cursing — while Jiaming smirked wickedly off to the side.
Every day at three in the morning he got up and went out to the edge of the city to train. This ten-year-old body was still too weak for anything; forget fighting — even firing a gun with a bit of kick could dislocate his arm.
He ran through his old assassin training once, and by about five thirty he could go home and crawl into bed. At six, little Lingjing in her tracksuit would come in through the back door and knock on his window.
Lingjing didn't like the children he lived with, and since Jiaming's room was the last one on the ground floor of the mansion, it was actually easier to pull on his clothes and jump out the window. After that the two of them would jog out to the outskirts again.
Jianghai at this time still had hardly any parks for leisure, so this grassy slope on the city's edge was popular with the morning-exercise crowd. Jiaming generally lay on the grass resting, while little Lingjing practiced her forms twice, very much in earnest, off to the side.
Lingjing had trained in boxing with her father since she was small; Wing Chun and Tai Chi were what she knew best, and with those two sets she had even won a regional championship in a martial arts competition — the kind judged purely on how pretty it looked, of course. On the way back after morning exercises they would usually run into an uncle pushing a bicycle cart, selling steamed buns. Lingjing dug out a dime, bought two, and gnawed on them all the way back to the Ye family's martial arts school.
Lingjing's father Ye Han had a scholarly-sounding name, but he was in fact a burly, whisker-covered bruiser of a man. These days, to open a martial arts school, a master of that type was what it took to keep the place in order.
Ye's mother was named Duan Jingxian, a well-known surgeon; she was, true to her name, beautiful and gentle. One of them specialized in fighting, the other in patching up injuries — the husband led and the wife followed his lead, each setting the other off to advantage. Both were warm and kindhearted people.
In a sense, perhaps this family alone were Jiaming's kin in this world.
Time slipped slowly by and the weather turned colder and colder. With the New Year approaching, Red Star Elementary had already started winter vacation. New Year's Eve that year fell on February 3; Jiaming and Lingjing finished their exams on January 23 and went in to school on the 27th to collect their report cards.
This time Jiaming had managed a 70 in Chinese and a 75 in math, a big improvement on his old scores. Little Lingjing was happier than if she'd gotten two hundred out of two hundred herself; she was certain it was all thanks to her fine instruction as brigade commander, and that the backward fool had finally come around.
The whole Ye family was pleased too. Ye Han figured the gunshot wound had knocked some sense into Jiaming, the implication being that he ought to get shot a few more times; after Duan Jingxian scolded him all evening, he said what he'd meant was that he wanted Jiaming to come over during winter vacation and learn martial arts.
Jiaming naturally busied himself thinking up excuses — piles of winter homework, those Huang family fatties coming to look for him every day, and so on.
In his heart, though, he was thinking: The kids studying there now are all from well-off families, and some of them are probably even "young lords" and "young masters" from established houses. In the old days I was only ever the one getting bullied; now I have to watch out that my opponents leave too many openings. If I go and make a mistake like that bit in The Eagle Shooting Heroes — "Your stance was so damn inviting I couldn't help kicking you, and I haven't had such a satisfying kick in ages" — I'll have another pile of trouble on my hands. What I want now is just an ordinary, unremarkable life.
So then, what did an ordinary life look like for Jiaming?
It should be a life like anyone else's, he thought.
He should go through elementary school, middle school, high school, and college like an ordinary person; date a few times in high school or college; then step out into society and find himself a job that was neither high nor low; a few years later find a wife who suited him, and just go on like that.
There might be one or two dreams in a life, and he would work hard to make them come true — and of course, so long as he'd tried, it didn't matter if he failed. Then, with children and grandchildren filling the house, at sixty or seventy, he would quietly die, just like that.
Some people would cry, and soon forget him; some would be glad, and soon forget him too. Sure, it's hard to picture right now what a nuisance of a brat who does nothing but howl all day would even look like, but isn't that the happy life all those books describe?
Holding such thoughts, he blinked and it was the end of the year. In the end he still hadn't dodged the martial arts lessons, because Ye Lingjing could see through his excuses without even using her brain. On February 2, goose-feather snow began falling on Jianghai. The TV station said it was a timely snow, an omen of a bumper year.
The third was New Year's Eve. In the morning he went out the back door to train with Lingjing as usual; on the way back, cars were streaming in and out of the Huang mansion's gate, mostly Audi 100s. That was a very flash car to have back then, because officials all rode in them.
In the main hall the crowds came and went, people paying New Year calls and people working their connections in an endless line — proof enough of the Huang family's standing in Jianghai. The children chased each other around the garden off to one side, throwing snowballs or setting off firecrackers.
Jiaming and Lingjing watched for a while, then Lingjing looked at those children with disgust and said, "We're not staying here. Come on, back to the school — Dad secretly bought loads of firecrackers."
At the thought of spending another whole boring morning setting off firecrackers with a little kid, Jiaming was tempted to blow up the entire planet with firecrackers. He was just turning over ways to slip away when a few voices suddenly called out to him from the courtyard, and then a pack of little fatties came charging over this way, thump-thump-thump-thump.