Lin Yuchan had scheduled a vaccine appointment and came to the temporary vaccination site at the university gymnasium together with Su Minguan.

Su Minguan gazed from afar at a row of gleaming needles, forcing himself to remain calm while chatting and laughing with her.

Looking at the countless people queuing and waiting, all proceeding with practiced ease, it was clear this wasn’t their first injection.

His gaze moved upward to see the sign above the gymnasium.

“…Feilun Gymnasium?”

“Named to commemorate a senior academic predecessor.” Lin Yuchan’s lips curved in a smile as she told him unhurriedly, “After returning from studying abroad in the late Qing period, she dedicated herself to women’s physical education. In her later years, she single-handedly established the Guangzhou Gymnastics School, which was later merged into our university’s physical education department.”

Su Minguan lowered his head to browse through the vaccination informed consent form, and after a long while said, “It’s not the person I’m thinking of, is it?”

There were many girls named Feilun in Christian families. How could the fighting champion from the orphanage possibly have “studied abroad”?

Lin Yuchan laughed. Who said the 21st century changes quickly? The 19th century world also advanced at breakneck speed. Back in 1866, she never would have imagined that the stinking little girl she desperately rescued, so weak and sickly, no bigger than a little mouse, would actually go abroad to study in the future and choose a career path that directly challenged the label of “sick man of East Asia.”

She kept the secret, saying, “You can Baidu it.”

But before Su Minguan had time to open his phone, his arm felt a chill—the nurse was already wiping alcohol on him.

“After the injection, don’t leave. Sit over there for 30 minutes of on-site observation…”

Lin Yuchan smiled and rubbed his face: “Good boy, don’t be afraid.”

Su Minguan glared at her, his face slightly pale, his inquiring gaze fixed on the needle, watching intently as he observed this tiny achievement of modern medicine.

…

After getting vaccinated, the two of them slept at home for a day. Lin Yuchan had a stronger reaction, with muscle soreness that kept her bedridden. Su Minguan was fine. His constitution, forged through trials in the old society’s virus repository, treated one inactivated vaccine injection like a drizzle.

But seeing that she wouldn’t get up, he also lay sprawled on the bed with her. Not wanting to take advantage of her vulnerable state, he could only touch her and nuzzle there, making her ticklish all over.

She tossed him a tablet to play with, telling him not to provoke her.

Su Minguan sighed, pulled her into his arms, and idly browsed various apps. Suddenly, he scrolled to the drama channel, where the homepage displayed a bright, high-definition image of a young man in a Mandarin jacket with a queue hairstyle romancing a young woman…

The drama was titled “Great Qing XX.”

He frowned slightly and clicked on it out of curiosity.

The opening showed an imitation ancient street in some film studio. Every beggar on the street was well-nourished, with skin free of sores or scars, braids gleaming with oil, complete with clothes, pants, and shoes, and they had even managed to beg meat buns!

Before he could even last until the main characters appeared, he retreated with a disgusted expression.

“In such a peaceful and prosperous age, and I’m still rebelling? I must be sick.”

Lin Yuchan laughed heartily.

“This is just modern people changing clothes to fall in love,” she explained. “You can’t use it to learn history.”

“It will mislead the people.” His expression was stern as he insisted, “Using history as a mirror cannot be treated as a joke.”

“Alright, alright,” Lin Yuchan comforted him, “we’ll give it a one-star bad review.”

Su Minguan was usually carefree and spirited, laughing off any absurd situation. This time, he was being so serious, showing he truly couldn’t bear it anymore.

He found the rating page, switched to handwriting input, and wrote a five-hundred-word scathing review before feeling satisfied.

However, he was also too lazy to continue browsing dramas. Lin Yuchan installed common software on Su Minguan’s phone, linked her bank card, transferred a thousand yuan as pocket money, and sent him to the supermarket to buy things while practicing various payment methods.

A few days later, she discovered his phone was filled with various unknown apps.

“There are QR codes everywhere on the street,” he explained. “Many strange apps. Look at this one—it says it can give you free coffee for life; this one offers lifetime free gaming; and this one gives you 800 yuan just for opening an account…”

Lin Yuchan was both amused and exasperated, warning him: “The vast majority are scams. Games will lure you to spend money halfway through. Some steal your personal information—they give you small benefits to extract your phone number and bank card information. Customer acquisition costs just a few yuan…”

Su Minguan looked skeptical, holding up the Criminal Law book in his hand.

“Impossible.”

“In any society, there’s no shortage of people who knowingly break the law,” she explained helplessly. “Besides, some don’t even count as illegal—they’re just borderline cases. Some are capital games…”

She transformed into a worried mother, explaining information security and a hundred ways capitalists harvest leeks for ten minutes, when she suddenly noticed his eyes held laughter.

It was a very bright kind of laughter, restraining a hint of apology.

She suddenly realized. Su Minguan was nearly two hundred years old this year, but how could he really be like a stubborn old man, easily falling for cyber scammers’ hooks?

He was using his method to explore the boundaries of this social order.

His life experience was right there. Only associating with proper, law-abiding people would never allow him to understand the full picture of this world; only by witnessing various extreme practices could he truly enter society.

Of course, he wouldn’t be foolish enough to take risks himself. Instead, he watched from the sidelines, observing how others frantically tested the edges of the law.

He proactively took back his phone and shared his research results with her: which were garbage apps, which were scams, which were relatively reliable. Even if software might be profitable, which were the result of money-burning startups that would fail within three months…

“I just couldn’t find the uninstall method. Otherwise, I would have deleted them long ago.”

Lin Yuchan kissed him and taught him to delete the garbage apps, keeping only a stock trading app where he could view comprehensive indices of various exchanges and real-time quotes for bulk commodities in the information section.

Su Minguan was extremely fascinated by those constantly flashing and changing numbers.

“If only we had this back then,” he said enthusiastically. “No need to go through the trouble of organizing merchant associations, organizing people to run all over the country just to copy down a few prices…”

Lin Yuchan suddenly remembered something, a small light bulb flashing bright in her mind.

“Come on, let’s go out and have fun.”

“Former Site of Guangzhou Seventy-Two Trades General Chamber of Commerce.”

On Haizhu Island, across from Xidi Wharf, at the entrance of an unremarkable small arcade building, a low-key wooden sign with black characters on a white background was erected.

Admission was free. Inside were mainly several display boards, explaining that this was one of Guangzhou’s earliest commercial guilds, which had once provided price information for local merchants and served as a meeting place for mediation. It had also participated in the funding industry, advocating domestic goods, fundraising for disaster relief, and other activities. In 1910, it was closed and sealed by the Qing government for harboring revolutionaries, and afterward continued to serve as a warehouse and residential building. During recent renovations, cultural relics such as scales, weights, coins, abacuses, and firearms and ammunition hidden by revolutionary predecessors were discovered, so the district government allocated funds for restoration, turning it into a small museum and patriotic education base.

Su Minguan quickly scanned through the exhibition content and said flatly, “I’ve never heard of this chamber of commerce.”

Lin Yuchan smiled.

The current him certainly hadn’t heard of it. This was a branch opened in the Guangzhou area after the Shanghai Yixing Business Association grew larger. As telegraphs became widespread and the Suez Canal opened, the difficulty of obtaining information decreased, and the chamber’s function of “transmitting intelligence” weakened, taking on more responsibilities for fellowship and mediation. After she resigned from the board and Su Minguan fled to America, the chamber’s name was also changed several times. This “Seventy-Two Trades General Chamber of Commerce” was probably renamed around the end of the Guangxu period.

She was still sorting out the timeline when suddenly Su Minguan gripped her hand tightly.

“Don’t tell me,” he said in a low voice.

Lin Yuchan also asked quietly, “You guessed it?”

His eyelashes fluttered lightly, the corners of his mouth holding a barely perceptible smile as he deliberately shook his head.

“Are there any more places like this?”

For him, the future still held infinite possibilities. He would rather piece together the puzzle bit by bit himself, searching for vague hope from fragments, than have someone else lay a ready-made blueprint before his eyes and tell him which leg to step with.

Lin Yuchan spent a few minutes understanding his thoughts.

“Then we’d need to buy tickets to Shanghai,” she said, leaving the museum and casually scanning a QR code to stuff a rose salt milk cap matcha into his hands, smiling. “There are things there that seem familiar everywhere.”

Su Minguan was very interested in this suggestion and asked her, “How many days does the journey take?”

Lin Yuchan pursed her lips in a smile, letting him guess.

Su Minguan gave her a slight eye roll, opened his phone somewhat clumsily, and used the almighty search function.

However, after searching for ten minutes, his expression gradually became frustrated, and finally, he couldn’t maintain his composure and asked her for help.

“Why are there no passenger ships at any of the wharves?”

Lin Yuchan burst out laughing, hugging him as she laughed until her whole body shook.

“Because everyone thinks ships are too slow,” she opened 12306 China Railway Network, “they’d rather take the land route.”

Su Minguan stared at those strings of code-like numbers, silently converting them in his mind, his brow furrowing.

“You’re not seeing wrong.” Lin Yuchan taught him to read the timetable. “Guangzhou South to Shanghai Hongqiao, fastest is 6 hours 38 minutes, arriving the same day. But the ticket price is quite expensive—second-class seats cost 800 yuan. If you want to save money, you can also choose to spend 20 hours in a hard seat, with tickets costing less than 200.”

Su Minguan still couldn’t believe it, pointing to the only K-prefix train on the timetable and asking softly, “The slowest train takes 20 hours to reach Shanghai?”

When he traveled by carriage from Shanghai, 20 hours would at most get him to Suzhou!

“Or we could fly there.”

Lin Yuchan opened another airline’s official website, continuing the assault.

“Oh, it takes two and a half hours. Slower than I thought…”

She cleverly stopped there, not exposing the fact that she had never been on a plane either.

Su Minguan: “…”

He took a big gulp of milk tea to calm his shock. The shipping industry had no future. He should start a Yixing Airlines in the future.

Lin Yuchan tempted him: “Want to take a plane to Shanghai?”

Su Minguan continued drinking his milk tea, accidentally biting through the paper straw and absent-mindedly throwing it away.

He wondered what the principle behind airplanes was. How could mortal flesh and blood endure it?

He was never afraid to try new things. He was the first to buy Western steamships, unafraid that the monster would swallow him whole.

But… to have him fly into the sky, entrusting his fate to an iron cage soaring through the air—and the key was that he wouldn’t be piloting it himself, with all the ups and downs controlled by others. This was somewhat beyond his ability to accept.

But he was also too embarrassed to say he didn’t dare, so he changed the subject, saying Guangzhou wasn’t familiar yet and there was no rush to travel far.

Lin Yuchan laughed until tears came out, holding him and kissing him again and again. He definitely wouldn’t imagine the excitement of that old-era Su Minguan when he first saw an airplane take off. At his advanced age, he insisted on going up himself, piloting Feng Ru’s biplane around San Francisco Bay in a circle, and when he came down, his legs were so weak he fell headfirst into her arms…

A faint floral fragrance drifted over. Behind the fence wall was a small garden where lotus flowers were blooming magnificently, white petals with a touch of red at the tips, charming and eye-catching. Endless lotus leaves rolled with water waves, sending waves of sweet, refreshing wind.

Su Minguan suddenly froze, turning to look at that pond of lotus flowers.

“This is the Lingnan Opera Museum,” Lin Yuchan introduced. “There’s a big opera stage inside, and also a garden. But it definitely can’t compare to what you saw as a child…”

As she spoke, seeing the momentary dazed expression in his eyes, her heart suddenly shook tremendously, and she ran to the museum ticket office to find the introduction display.

Lingnan Opera Museum was originally part of the famous Lingnan Garden, the Su Family Garden. During the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty, the wealthy Su merchant purchased a hundred acres of land here, built ancestral halls and residences, creating the premier garden of Lingnan. During the Xianfeng period, the Su family descendants went bankrupt and were convicted of crimes, and after the garden was confiscated by the government, it was broken up and sold. After the Republic period, most traces no longer existed. Only one three-story opera stage in Qing Dynasty Lingnan style remained, along with the surrounding garden—a rare physical artifact that has now been converted into a museum aimed at promoting Cantonese opera culture…

Lin Yuchan held her breath, as if a needle had pierced through a membrane, connecting ancient and modern times, her heart filled with an extraordinary sensation.

She whirled around abruptly. Su Minguan’s eyes restrained surprise as he smiled coldly: “It’s my home. Why do they still charge admission?”