At the back wall of Yunlong No. 3 Middle School, when Chen Lang put out the cigarette butt of his lotus cigarette in the stagnant water for the first time, no one could have imagined that this boy in a wrinkled school uniform would stir up the gray area of the entire city a few years later.
At that time, he was just a classmate who would fight against vocational high school gangsters with clenched fists to protect his pocket money. The box of Lotus cigarettes he occasionally smoked in his pocket was one of the few "decencies" he could put on the table. The cigarette case was wrinkled by fingers, just like the calluses he had worn out by life - from helping others solve minor troubles around the campus, to being involved in the fight for night market stalls, to overpowering the established forces that had been entrenched for many years, Chen Lang's name was always intertwined with "ruthlessness" and "righteousness".
He has his own rules: don't touch students' money, don't bully people at the bottom who are struggling to make a living, and open lotus cigarettes will be placed on every negotiation table. In the smoke, his eyes are clear, and he will either resolve conflicts with a glass of wine, or draw the line with absolute toughness. Some people say that he rose to power through his desperate efforts, but no one saw him smoking a whole box of lotus flowers by the river late at night, facing the river water. The burn marks on his fingertips were as obvious as the struggle in his heart.
When he finally stood at the top of the gray area in Yunlong City, watching his once arrogant opponent lower his head and handing out cigarettes, and watching his brothers place newly opened lotus flowers in front of him, Chen Lang's fingers holding the cigarette paused. The neon lights outside the window reflected in his eyes. The box of lotus cigarettes that had been with him since high school still had the familiar packaging, but when he lit it again at this moment, the weight of a kingdom was already entangled in the smoke. The era that belongs to him, when the tobacco is burned out and continues
