Part 1:The Convenience Store King and the Arts Club's Elegy
"Dreams are the ultimate tyranny. They can build a magnificent palace in your skull, make you king of the world, and then, when the first ray of sunlight stabs through your curtains, they will mercilessly tear it all down, leaving nothing but the wreckage of a beautiful lie."
--------------------------------------------------
"So noisy!"
With a pathetic groan, Ruby launched himself halfway up from his pillow like a dog whose tail had just been stepped on.
The alarm clock on his nightstand, a demon he had personally set for 5:30 AM, was carrying out his daily torture with the cheapest of electronic beeps. The sound was the real world's sharpest anchor, violently dragging him back to solid ground from a bizarre nightmare of weightlessness and howling wind.
He panted, his heart seemingly trapped by the demonic frequency of the alarm, each beat a drum against his eardrums. Fragments of the dream still clung to his retinas: a pitch-black sailboat like some prehistoric beast, a woman in a moon-white cheongsam whose face he couldn't see, and... the soul-rending terror of falling from ten thousand feet.
"Ruby! Are you dead up there, you little bastard? It's six o'clock! Do you want to open for business or not? If I'm counting on you to inherit this store, we'll all be drinking the northwest wind!"
The roar from the first floor was his mother's signature sonic weapon, powerful enough to pierce the concrete floor slab. He was so familiar with the sound that his brain could automatically predict its entire trajectory and damage radius.
"Exactly. Does he think money grows on pillows?" His father's follow-up was always like a cup of lukewarm soy milk, perfectly neutralizing the fiery temper of his mother's "fried dough stick."
They were the most synchronized duet in Marin Street's early morning, their eternal anthem being "My Son is a Useless Bum."
Ruby struggled to sit up, weighed down by a exhaustion that felt like a hangover. He glanced down at the cracked "GAME OVER" text on his chest, which, in the dim light, looked like a vicious curse left over from the night before.
GAME OVER?
He gave a self-deprecating smirk.
Bullshit. My life hasn't even had a proper START screen.
He bolted downstairs barefoot, his flip-flops likely kicked into some alternate dimension under his bed during a dream he couldn't remember. The layout of the ground floor was as simple as an elementary school math problem. Four hundred square feet, split in half—one part for shelves and the cash register, the other for the kitchen and dining table. A home without a living room. Cold tap water splashed on his face, jolting him awake. The mint of the toothpaste mingled with the phantom aroma of high-end red wine in his head, creating a bizarre, nauseating bouquet.
"What's taking you so long? The congee's getting cold!"
"What do you think? Playing that stupid game until midnight! Good for nothing. You'll go blind one of these days!"
How could he explain? That he was picked up by a gaming company in a sailboat more extravagant than the Titanic, pushed out of a helicopter by a coach built like a bear, and then suffered memory loss from "lack of oxygen"? They wouldn't think he was going blind; they'd think he'd already lost his mind.
He silently ladled a bowl of white congee and tilted his head back, gulping it down like medicine. It was bland, tasteless, just like the past twenty-two years of his life.
Screech—
He pulled up the heavy roll-up metal door, and the cool morning air, mixed with steam from the bun shop on the corner, rushed in. The familiar, human smell of it all finally gave his heart, still dangling at ten thousand feet, a sense of grounded reality.
Maybe last night was just a ridiculously absurd dream after all.
He grabbed a small stool and sat by the entrance, looking like a retired cadre watching the world go by.
"A pack of 'White Feathers'."
A cool, dispassionate voice broke his trance. Ruby looked up. A man stood at the counter, wearing a pure white fedora with a matching white feather tucked into the brim. The getup was so dapper it was practically performance art, appearing in this old street full of the smell of fried dough and the sound of haggling like a prince who'd wandered onto the wrong set—or a cosplayer fresh out of a mental asylum.
"...Right, coming." Ruby responded wearily, grabbing the absurdly expensive pack of cigarettes from the top shelf. He took the money, looked down to make change, and when he looked up again, the counter was empty.
Where'd he go? Did he evaporate? Or is there a Platform Nine and Three-Quarters to Hogwarts hidden on this street?
Ruby darted to the door, only catching a glimpse of a white-clad back disappearing into the morning crowd. The man didn't look back, but his voice seemed to drift back on the wind, "Don't forget to look."
Ruby stood there, muttering about "rich idiots as living works of performance art," and walked back to the counter, only then noticing a USB drive pinned under the cash. It was pure white, with a texture as smooth and warm as jade. He pursed his lips and pulled open the bottom drawer of the counter, tossing the drive inside. That drawer was his "Tomb of the Forgotten," a place to bury all the things he didn't want to face and couldn't understand.
Ding—
A WeChat notification. Ruby swiped open his phone. A profile picture he hadn't seen in a long time was active—Liu Sisi from his university's Arts Club.
"@everyone, my dearest club members! It's been a year since graduation! To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Arts Club, we're holding a reunion at 5 PM today in the Vienna Hall at the M Hotel. Please grace us with your presence and catch up with old friends!"
Ruby's heart skipped a beat. He wanted to ask, but the question was a fishbone caught in his throat.
What he really wanted to ask was: Will Ke Yuxing... CoCo... be there?
He knew that the moment he asked, his position at the bottom of the "unrequited love" food chain would sink even lower, demoted from "silent guardian knight" to "creepy guy with an obvious agenda."
Screw it. What if? What if she really did come back from Italy? After all, she had once been the quietest, most dazzling member of the Arts Club. And he had only joined that pretentious, bourgeois club in the first place just to get a few more chances to look at her.
Thinking of this, Ruby felt like a pathetic, whipped dog.
But so what if he was? CoCo was the one and only Valentine's Day in his barren youth. He started humming a tuneless little song, and even his hands felt lighter as he made change for a grade-schooler.
...
At 4:50 PM, Ruby arrived at the M Hotel ten minutes early.
The Vienna Hall was already buzzing with people. He wore his "battle armor," carefully selected by his mother: a brand-new blue-and-white plaid shirt and a pair of knock-off track pants with a giant "NICE" printed on them. The combination made him feel like a provincial entrepreneur who had stumbled into a high-society party—so out of place it was almost a statement. He was a speck of dust blown into a concert hall, disturbing their carefully orchestrated melody.
He found an empty table farthest from the crowd and sat down alone, an isolated island abandoned by the civilized continent.
His phone buzzed. A WeChat sticker from Liu Sisi: a Psyduck with a dazed, mocking smile. He hated that sticker, just as he hated all insincere, roundabout malice.
His phone buzzed again, this time with a message: "You actually came?"
In that moment, Ruby felt the cheerful chatter around him turn into a grating cacophony.
Finally, someone approached his table. Chen Meng, the Arts Club's former belle, arm-in-arm with a man he didn't recognize. The price tag on the man's designer shirt could probably cover his family's convenience store's inventory for a month.
"Here, let me introduce you," Chen Meng said, her tone like a zookeeper presenting a rare animal. "This is that Ruby I told you about, the classical literature nerd of our club. Super book-smart."
The man gave a perfunctory smile. "Oh, I can tell." The undisguised superiority in his smile was like a glass of spoiled milk.
Liu Sisi glided over with a cocktail, her own smile dripping with sweetness. "Ruby, what are you performing for us today?"
Ruby was floored. Performing? The message didn't say anything about performing!
"Oh, dear, everyone has to perform something at this reunion. You didn't know?" Liu Sisi covered her mouth in mock surprise, her acting so over-the-top she might as well have flunked out of drama school.
Chen Meng immediately chimed in, her voice loud enough for the whole hall to hear, "Ruby is so good with the classics, why don't we have him recite a poem for us! What do you all say?"
A scattered, lukewarm chorus of agreement rippled through the room, the sound of an audience eager for a spectacle.
He was being roasted over a fire. The entire world was waiting for you to make a fool of yourself, and you didn't even have the right to refuse.
He heard himself say, "Okay."
Liu Sisi's piano performance opened the evening. Ruby's "act" was "thoughtfully" scheduled for the very end.
When he walked onto the small stage, he felt the lights turn into interrogation lamps. He took a deep breath, channeling the humiliation of the moment and the bizarre, weightless, wind-whipped experience of the previous night into an unprecedented, violent rage.
He recited the only poem he could dredge up from the chaos of his mind.
"Do you not see the Yellow River's waters move out of heaven, entering the sea, never to return...?"
His voice wasn't loud, but it had a strange, penetrating quality, an ancient sorrow that didn't belong in this room.
"Heaven gave me talent, I can't be useless! A thousand gold coins scattered, I can get them back again...!"
By the time he reached the final line, he was almost roaring.
"With you, I'll drown a thousand years of sorrow!"
He poured all of his frustration from the day, the terror from the night before, and twenty-two years of mediocrity into that line. It wasn't a recitation. It was the first defiant roar of a beast trapped in a cage.
Then, a dead silence.
No applause.
He deflated like a punctured balloon, hung his head, and prepared to walk back to his cold, "desert island" seat.
And then it came.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
A crisp, deliberate, solitary applause, as if in defiance of the entire world, echoed from a corner of the hall.
The only applause in the entire room.
Ruby's head snapped up, his eyes following the sound.
A girl in sharp, clean-cut clothes was sitting there, a faint smile on her lips, applauding him with genuine focus. Her eyes were clear and intent, like a beam of light that cut through all the hypocrisy and noise of the Vienna Hall and landed squarely on him.
In that moment, Ruby thought she looked like an angel who had wandered into the wrong church.