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

The No. 6 bus stopped at the stop, and the door opened. Chu Zihang folded his umbrella, stepped onto the bus, and inserted coins. In a blink of an eye, the bus was full of empty seats, with only a few figures sitting quietly in the corner wearing raincoats, holding their mobile phones. The cold light from the screen illuminated the deathly pale faces, sending chills all over the body.

Chu Zihang carried an umbrella and walked to a corner by the window and sat down. The window next to his ears was crackling with rain. Although it was only the evening and it was time to rest and go shopping after work, there wouldn't be much weather like this today. People are willing to go out, but the heavy rain and the gray and dark sky have made everything covered with a layer of gray. The usual flow of people on the street has been cut off by the dagger-like rain. You can only occasionally see cars passing by on the street with their headlights on. The horn was pressed to death, and the wheels pushed up water splashing ten feet high as they sped through the heavy rain.

Chu Zihang sat firmly, and the bus started to move. A slight push on his back pressed him on the seat. The raindrops made sloping tracks on the window glass. He took out the black gift given to him by his father for his birthday. The iPhone screen was turned on, and the screen saver was a family photo of him, his mother, and his father at the entrance of Disneyland. In the photo, he is standing in the middle of the two of them, with 'Dad's' expensive sunglasses hanging on his collar. The expression on his face is as if he is taking a photo of an ID card or something like that. 'Dad' is putting one hand on his shoulder as if to declare. ownership of this outstanding boy.

Chu Zihang just glanced at this kind of photo and unlocked it on the desktop. Unlike the lock screen wallpaper, his desktop background was not a daily photo, but just a Maybach 62. This desktop background was very good, even if it was accidentally picked up by 'Dad' If you see him, you will only think that he loves cars and is full of ambitions. After all, even his father's car is only a Mercedes-Benz S500, but his son longs for a Maybach that is several times more expensive. Children of entrepreneurs always have ambitions. Good thing.

The windshield wipers running at full power in the quiet bus make a constant friction sound. No matter how many pounds of rain are swept away, the line of sight towards the road will always be immediately flooded with new water marks, causing the speeding No. 6 bus in the past to drive too fast. It was very slow, and the driver seemed to have been prepared to hold the steering wheel with a cigarette between his fingers. The green smoke was drawn up by the small gap in the window, and the raindrops penetrated into the car like needles. to a tiny sizzling sound on the hot ashes.

This morning, the mobile phone weather forecast said that the heavy rain will continue until late at night. Looking at the current rainfall momentum, the weather forecast is finally accurate for the first time. I heard that the United States, which is far away from the ocean, has been hit by a typhoon. Perhaps it is due to the butterfly effect. The coast thousands of miles away The city was hit by this heavy rainfall.

Although the current weather is not as good as the typhoon that blew away so many things, it is also a rare heavy rain in recent years. Every rainy night like this, he can't help but want to go out for a walk, trying to survive the heavy rain. Find the gap in time and space in the chaotic world, and step on the elevated road where the abandoned Maybach is curled up again.

Plugging in his headphones, Chu Zihang turned on the 3G cellular network and accessed the chat software. Usually he didn't like to spend too much time and energy on social software, but recently he had to spend half of his day free. Time is spent in class groups, alumni groups, and campus forums.

After logging into the chat software, Chu Zihang saw dozens of private chats popping up in the background. He clicked through each one and then deleted the conversation. Every private chat topic was initiated by him. In just a few months, He had asked hundreds of people the same question, which was about a private aristocratic university far across the ocean, and the answers everyone gave him were uniformly confused and ignorant.

If the relationship between people is like a thread and a balloon, they are holding it in their hands while floating frivolously in the sky, until one day the thread between him and that man is broken, and he looks up and sees the hydrogen balloons flying continuously. , apple-like red reflects the aqua blue sky, I don’t know how far it will float, and where it will float. When I was young and ignorant, I only thought that it would float all the way to outer space, go into the universe, and move alone towards the endless distance. Fly away.

There was no chance of redress. Every time it rained heavily over the years, he wandered like a lonely soul in the rain, searching for the diluted scent of a man in the smell of rain. The only trace he could follow was a sentence he inadvertently said that night. A word, a place, a name.

Kassel Academy.

It was like he was trying his best to seize a glimmer of possibility, a thread lingering in the rain. While he was trying his best to collect all the information about Kassel Academy, he was also trying to improve himself as much as possible, because he didn't want to stand in the real world. When I was in front of that threshold, I was limited by my own shortcomings and shortcomings. Sports, knowledge, talents, all obstacles that may become obstacles have been overcome by him. If Cassel College is a college, then he must enable himself to cross its threshold in its heyday and grasp the roots. A thread wandering in the heavy rain.

Chu Zihang tried searching for Kassel College on the Internet. This is the reaction that everyone would have. However, the relevant entries about this college on the Internet only have two digits. When placed on the search engine, there are only pitiful words. There are two pages, and when you click on the relevant link, there is only one page introducing the private aristocratic university.

Lush gardens, old buildings, green paths, beautiful models in doctor's uniforms, and a few lawns and teaching buildings under the clear sky, Chu Zihang has seen too many of these university official pages.

When 'Dad' learned that he intended to study abroad, he also took the initiative to find several prestigious foreign private schools for him that were highly sought after by wealthy people. Most of the homepages of those so-called aristocratic universities looked like this, but 'Dad' didn't know. What he was looking for was not a university with strict teaching staff and excellent students. What he had been looking for was the god who stepped on the thunderstorm on the rainy night, and the man's trousers that were blown by the wind when he turned his back. Swing angle.

Based on his intuition, Cassel College must not be a common and simple college. Speaking of the name of this college from the man's mouth in the situation that night is enough to show that this college hides many unknown things. thing. A place that can be called a gathering of madmen must be able to accept the crazy scenes he saw that night. For this reason, he is looking for madness and does not hesitate to become a madman, a madman questioned by the world, giving up his great future and a bright future, regardless of... He rushed into the rainy nights with everything he had and ran towards that man's past.

Relying on Chu Zihang's family background and his own strength, his choices are not limited to prestigious private schools. With his grades and comprehensive qualities, he can get into any Ivy League college even if he relies on hard skills exams. He is trying to get into Cassel College and Compared with the difficulty of admission to those Ivy League colleges, in the end he found that he didn't even know what the admission requirements of this college were. On the surface, it looked like a private aristocratic university, but when he got closer, he found that everything about it was covered up. It has a layer of eggshell-like film, and looking in from the outside it looks like flowers in a fog.

Forgetting the information about Kassel College from the Internet search engine, Chu Zihang focused his search on the surrounding social circle. Although his own social circle was very small due to his usual style, as a local entrepreneur Lu Tianming He is an only son, and his circle of friends can be very large. As long as he declares his family status, most of the circles are willing to open their doors to him.

After collecting information from various circles for several months, Chu Zihang gradually sketched out some outlines of Cassel College. He learned that this is a private university located in the outer suburbs of Chicago in the Great Lakes region of Illinois, USA. The school emblem is a A half-decayed world tree, it is said that it is a fraternity school with the University of Chicago. When asked about the specific address, street and sect, no one can tell me exactly.

However, someone mentioned that they held a sailing and surfing competition on Lake Michigan every summer, and won the championship every year. This actually made Chu Zihang think that Cassel College was a sports college for a while, so his 'dad' I took my whole family to the beach to spend the whole summer vacation. During this period, I learned several lessons about sailing and surfing skills locally. The black teacher who taught me gave him a thumbs up and praised him for being able to ride on the waves for the first time on a heavy board. Balance on the tip, I haven't seen such a talented person in a few years.

It's just a pity that after he became a master of sailing and surfing, he still didn't find the way to Kassel College. The half-dead world tree gradually sprouted and flourished in his heart over time, and the dark cloud-like branches laid a heavy A shadow cast over his mind.

He once thought about giving up looking for this mirage-like university, but the heaviness and sense of fate on each heavy rainy night awakened his memory. The fortress on the seaside was shattered many times but still rebuilt. Every time it rained heavily, he would I repeatedly took out my mobile phone and mechanically searched for the name of Kassel College over and over again. I was a little confused, but more of an indescribable pain.

The contact on the phone was scrolled to the last one. After clicking on it, the other party's reply was to recommend a private university in Germany to him. He just glanced at it, replied with a thank you, and deleted the conversation.

He sat blankly for a while by the window where the rain was crackling with bananas. He moved his finger accidentally and clicked on a contact, entering the history page of chatting with him. There was a chat record that spanned almost half a year. .

For half a year, he tried to re-contact the other party countless times without success. All inquiries and greetings came to nothing. There was no effective way to find him on the Internet. He even thought that the owner of this account had encountered something unexpected, and his avatar might have changed. It will never light up again in my life.

Even though he asked people around him and found the place where the other person once lived, he only found empty houses. But despite this, this contact became the reason why he never gave up looking for Cassel College from beginning to end. Because of the words left by the other party in the last communication with him.

"Don't come to Kassel College, this college is full of lunatics!"

The handwriting on the phone was reflected on the rain-smeared bus glass, and the note ID of the contact only had two simple words.

Lin Nian.

The bus stopped at the station, and the few passengers on the bus swayed slightly. A sweet female voice on the radio reminded the passengers to "get off the Guanyin Station" and the next stop was "Haitang Road", which was still far away from the station entrance of "Metro Line 2". There are three stations.

The bus door opened, and rain mixed with cold wind drifted in. The driver shivered and waited for the only female passenger to get on the bus. He immediately closed the door and the air conditioner heated up the car again.

Most of the people who can take the bus on this section of the road are going to the "Metro Line 2". I think this passenger who got on the bus at the current "Xiaguanyin Station" is no exception. She walked into the warmth wearing a black raincoat. In the bus room, Chu Zihang passed by Chu Zihang, all wet.

Just at this moment, a car with its headlights on outside the bus sped past. The high beam shined through the rainy glass window and shone on the side of the passenger in the street. A silvery-white light coincidentally reflected on Chu. The corners of Zihang's eyes.

Chu Zihang, who was sitting in the window seat, subconsciously turned his head to look. He was shocked and couldn't move his eyes anymore.

Beside him, the passing female passenger opened the corner of her raincoat to reveal a shoulder bag she was carrying. On the side of the bag was a bright silver badge similar to a school emblem.

A silver half-dead world tree.