If I don't have money to go to college, I can only go to slay the dragon.

Take Line 3 of the subway station to the terminal station, get out of the subway, and then take the bus.

Lu Mingfei remembered the scene when Lin Nian showed him the way to his house for the first time. Lin Xian and Lin Nian, the siblings had lived in the inland suburb of this coastal city since they left the orphanage. A housing exchange community where there is no community property system.

The so-called housing exchange community is that after the residents who have been demolished due to urban construction planning receive compensation, they can use the issued construction project planning permit and state-owned land use certificate on the divided land according to the urban construction planning draft. Rebuilding a self-built house.

Originally it was still a wasteland, but now there are rows of old houses standing together. The tall ones are seven or eight stories, and the short ones are four or five stories. While they serve as residential buildings, most of the shops on the ground floor are also rented out. It has become a breakfast shop or a hot pot restaurant, and the street is full of vitality and has the atmosphere of life.

Lu Mingfei's goal is very clear. He has been to this community countless times. Every piece of land is already worn out. Which restaurant sells buns earlier and has thin skin and thick meat? Which fried dough sticks never use gutter oil is definitely a good one. Qing Qing, including now that he was standing in front of the pizza stall at the corner of the street in a daze. The lady who made the pizza was still wearing the same decent white chef's hat as he remembered. She was skilled in her craftsmanship and the aroma of the pizza was fragrant, but the stall no longer There's the iron basin that collects change and you change it yourself, and there's just a simple QR code.

Lu Mingfei pinched the bridge of his nose and felt dizzy. Seeing that he had been standing there for a while, the lady at the pizza stall asked him kindly if he wanted to buy some. After he declined, he casually asked if Lin Nian had come to buy anything recently. The result should have been right. The aunt who was deeply impressed by Lin Nian looked confused, Lin Nian? Whose baby is it from? Don't know, don't know.

He walked into the streets with a heavy heart, surrounded by scenery and layouts he was familiar with. The only difference was that the decoration of the store had become more refined due to the advancement of the times, but generally the things that should not have changed remained the same. And... downstairs of the Malatang restaurant where Lu Mingfei stood at the end, the signboard was "Good Brothers Malatang", which seemed to indicate the beginning of the friendship between Lu Mingfei and Lin Nian. They had eaten Malatang here many times, the boss Discounts were often given, and because Lin Xian had worked as a part-time worker here before, the two of them were even exempted from work once or twice for the sake of old friends and neighbors.

They were all familiar memories. Lu Mingfei walked through the Malatang store and walked into the stairs leading upstairs. He climbed all the way to the fourth floor and stopped in front of the familiar anti-theft iron door. He looked at the stickers on it. Fuzi felt a little inexplicable nervous in her heart.

He knocked on the iron door, and from time to time there were footsteps inside, and then there was a "click" sound of the iron door lock being opened. The door was pushed open. Lu Mingfei subconsciously took a step back, and then saw a bald uncle. Wearing slippers, he scratched his head and looked outside, "Pull over (who is it?)."

"I'm sorry, is this Lin Nian's house?" Lu Mingfei's heart had sunk to the bottom.

"Lin Nian? Where did you go? I can't admit it. Did you find the wrong one?" The bald man spoke authentic Sichuan dialect and looked at the boy at the door strangely, "We have always lived here, my dear. You must have found the wrong place. After asking for details, come back to Shimen, early in the morning."

The security door was closed. Lu Mingfei stood at the door for a long time. The light from outside the corridor made some white reflections on his jeans. He slowly squatted down, held his head in his hands and stayed there for a long time, and then suddenly He stood up again, turned around and ran downstairs, rushed out of the Malatang shop and ran towards the subway station.

Take Metro Line 3 to Guanyin Temple and then transfer to Line 2. After getting off, take bus No. 12 at three stops and get off at City Children's Palace Station.

Lu Mingfei ran directly into the Children's Palace without taking a breath, and went straight to the Kendo Hall. The guard at the guard booth who was checking out the short video looked up.

After a while, the guard saw Lu Mingfei running out the same way.

He got on the subway, changed stations, got off and ran all the way. This time, Lu Mingfei stood in front of Shilan Middle School, his alma mater. There were no classes today so the door was closed. He walked around in a big circle and came to the place where he used to be with Lin. Outside the low fence where I sneaked out to study for self-study in the new year to surf the Internet, I sprinted and jumped over with one hand. After landing, I turned my head and glanced at the broken surveillance camera on the inside of the fence, and then ran towards the teaching building without looking back. .

Go upstairs, enter the classroom office, find the workstation of your homeroom teacher, take out the test paper of the third model or the second model from the drawer, and quickly flip through it, Su Xiaoqiang, Chen Wenwen, Liu Miaomiao, Xu Miaomiao, Liang Wendao are all familiar names. Lu Mingfei turned over the paper, and the faster he turned, the darker his expression became. Until the last paper was finished, he slammed the paper on the table, "No. He has already left school at this time." .”

As if thinking of something, he opened the drawer and rummaged through to find a class photo. He made sure that the timestamp in the lower right corner was the photo when he was enrolled in school. He then searched through the sunny smiling faces in the photo one by one, and finally punched it angrily. On the tabletop, the entire table was overwhelmed and collapsed with a "squeaking" sound!

Lu Mingfei stood in front of the ruins of his desk, looking at his lonely appearance in the photo on the ground. He sat back on the ergonomic chair he bought at the second-hand market, put his forehead on his face and took a deep breath.

The clock on the wall in the office was ticking, ticking. Lu Mingfei sat motionless on his chair. He didn't know how long it took before he suddenly stood up and left.

When he walked out of the teaching building, the sun was already setting outside.

—

"It must be a scam! And it's an acquaintance in the community! Only acquaintances know our family's situation!" Auntie slapped the letter with her palm, her tone unquestionable.

"Didn't Chu Zihang also go abroad to study? That means this kind of fraternity college recruits foreign students." Uncle said.

"It must be a scam! Last year, Chu Zihang, a genius in our school, went abroad to a fraternity college of the University of Chicago. The fraternity colleges of famous schools are almost the same as Ivy League schools, and it's difficult for Americans to get in!" Lu Mingze rarely cares so much about his brother's future.

Auntie's family rarely held a serious family meeting, just to check the authenticity of the interview notice that Lu Mingfei brought back. Lu Mingfei sat aside without saying a word, silently watching the saliva splashing in the family of three.

Auntie, uncle and Lu Mingze, the three relatives Lu Mingfei is most familiar with, all look the same as in his memory, almost unchanged. He tried to find some flaws in these three people, like loopholes or bugs in the program, but unfortunately, his intuition told him that these three people are real, not illusions.

Lu Mingfei was not unfamiliar with this scene, except for some different details. For example, when the family meeting discussed the interview, there was almost no dispute about the authenticity of the interview, because it was Lin Nian who brought the notice. As a student who had been enrolled in Kassel College for a year, Lin Nian hardly spent much effort to make Lu Mingfei's family believe that there was such a Chicago Friendship University.

Now Lin Nian seems to have "evaporated" from this world. Naturally, the existence of Kassel College and the authenticity of the interview notice have become the biggest controversy.

Lu Mingfei had a feeling that if everything about Lin Nian evaporated from the world, according to the influence of the butterfly effect, the things he encountered seemed to be really staged in an orderly manner according to the scenes in front of him now - there was no Pearl Tower incident, no leech potion incident, and naturally he would not contact Su Xiaoqiang in advance about the mess over there. He would honestly wait at home for the reply letters from the rejected American universities until this interview letter that looked like the admission letter from Hogwarts was sent, but the letter was not sent by an owl, but by FedEx.

Lu Mingfei stood up and left the table. He didn't care what the final conclusion of the family meeting was. He would go to the interview anyway, because the person he wanted to meet would also appear in that interview, and he still had some things to confirm.

He left the living room quietly, opened the door and didn't go downstairs, but walked up the quiet corridor. The higher he went, the louder the "humming" sound of the air-conditioning unit became. There were old furniture piled on both sides, and he had to step on those furniture to continue climbing until he came to the door of the rooftop. He pulled open a gap and crawled through. What came to him was the starry sky and the city with bright lights under the night sky.

Lu Mingfei raised his hand to block the wind on the rooftop, walked to the edge of the cliff, stepped on it, and turned to look at the corner of the rooftop. It was empty there. The roads below were like bright streams of light extending to the lush steel forest. Every point of light flowing in the light stream was a lost firefly, looking for its own exit in this forest.

Lu Mingfei looked down at his palm, turning it over once. In the shadows where the city light could not reach, the sword-and-shield-shaped hair on his palm surged like a magnetic fluid, and finally sank under the skin. The golden pupils under his frown were full of confusion, irritability and dullness.

He stood for a long time, got enough wind, and left without waiting for the person he wanted to wait for.

Going downstairs, the discussion in the living room did not stop, but became more and more intense, but even their protagonist was not at the table. Lu Mingfei went straight back to his room. Lu Mingfei opened the familiar second-hand notebook on the table and touched the patina on the keyboard. He connected to QQ and wanted to look for Lin Nian's traces for the last time, but saw the avatar of the girl in the baseball cap jumping.

Clicking on the chat bar, he saw a simple line of words:

"Go! See you the day after tomorrow."

The day after tomorrow, Lu Mingfei naturally knew when the day after tomorrow was, but it was obviously not the time to think about such trivial things. Emotions like embarrassment also need to choose the right time to appear.

"Cut a plate?" In the "StarCraft" group, a big-faced cat avatar suddenly started a private message to him, and the chat box vibrated and popped up to the top of the computer page. The other party's ID was displayed as "Nono".