Chapter Three: The Future Is Never Free

He remembered boarding the train, carriage seventeen, rain beyond the window. But the person on the platform had no face. What Ji had worn, what she had said, whether she had hugged him—gone. He called her on video. She answered with red-rimmed eyes. "You won! Zhou, you really did it!" He smiled because he knew she was the person closest to him. But he could not find the sister from the rainy platform. "Your clothes look nice today," he said softly. After the call, he wrote: Ji took me to the academy. It rained. She must have hated letting me go. Outside, He Linchuan gave an interview, proudly announcing that Obsidian had found "the genius jungler of a new era." Farther down the corridor, a man in a cap waited in shadow.