Dragon Raja: A Lament for Feng Tong

Lu Mingfei was reborn.

Not in the way he wanted. There was no System voice, no golden finger status screen, no countdown. He simply closed his eyes, opened them again, and found himself back in his senior year of high school, with his aunt's shrill scolding still buzzing in his ears.

This should have been a wonderful thing. He could start over, go through all the things he had messed up in his previous life, and at least prepare what to say when he saw a certain old friend again.

But he could not feel happy at all.

Because he remembered everything: how each person had left, those burning nights and cold rooftops, everything he should have cried over, laughed about, and never forgotten. Those memories weighed heavily on a sixteen-year-old boy, as if he had grown old before he had even lived.

Still, life had to go on. His aunt scolded him, and he hunched his shoulders. Professor Guderian's letter arrived, and he still had to go enroll at that school full of monsters.

Nono was the first to notice. Looking at Lu Mingfei in the rain, she suddenly felt she did not know him anymore.

But Lu Mingfei did not know what was happening to him either.

He just sometimes felt that his reactions were half a beat slow, and that something inside his chest was hollow. Some things should have made him sad, but the tears simply would not fall.

While playing StarCraft against Old Tang at an internet cafe, he always felt there was something resonating within the person on the other side. On a sonar screen at the bottom of the Qikou River, an intact ancient bronze city was emerging from the darkness. Deep in Norma's servers, a reply with no traceable origin was quietly intercepted:

“Welcome back, Mingfei.”

He thought he was someone starting over from the start.

But perhaps he was just a chess piece being placed back on the board.