Dragon Raja: Us in an Ordinary World

This is a story without dragons.

Just an ordinary boy who goes to an ordinary university, meets a group of not-so-ordinary friends, and slowly becomes someone a little less ordinary himself.

Chu Zihang, the legendary senior who never showed emotion in high school, still wears the same unreadable expression. But he'll bring him a soda in the computer lab, take him home for Thanksgiving dinner, and silently slip him the notes he's put together.

Renata, a top mathematics student and teaching assistant, so quiet you might wonder if she can speak at all. But her graded assignments always come back with half a page of handwritten comments. When Lu Mingfei gets stuck on a problem, she'll draw diagrams and explain until he understands. And when someone asks how the exam went, she answers with two words: “Not bad.”

Nono, the red-haired Ferrari, girlfriend of the Student Union president. One ordinary day, she'll appear at the computer lab door and drag him out of class to go downtown, listen to an underground band, and eat hot dogs late at night. Then she'll say, “The world is big. You should go see it.”

Caesar, the blond guy who stands ramrod straight and smiles politely. He'll invite an ordinary freshman to dinner, tell him, “People like you are rare,” and give him a fountain pen with a note: “I hear you did well on your exams. Congratulations.”

And then there's Erii, a Japanese girl he's never met in person. From a teammate matched with him in a game to emails sent across the ocean, she sends him a photo beneath the cherry blossoms and says, “You're taller than you looked in the game.” By a rainy window in Tokyo, she writes to ask, “What's the weather like where you are?” On every ordinary day, in the simplest words, she tells him: “You're alone, but you're not alone.”