After breakfast, He Leqin called to ask if Bai Yang was going to Yan Zhihan’s birthday party. Today was September 7th.

He Leqin was Bai Yang’s best friend—elementary school classmate, middle school classmate, and still classmate in high school. His family had been in Nanjing for three generations with six properties in the city, making him a typical second-generation heir—a housing heir.

Bai Yang said housing heirs were a newly emerged second-generation group. With the saying “have houses, have peace of mind,” He Leqin had already adopted a retired old man’s lifestyle at a young age, loving to take his bird to the park on weekends—the kind with pants. This fellow claimed he learned these decadent Eight Banner lifestyle habits from his great-uncle, who would take his birdcage out for walks every week and had corrupted young He Leqin.

Since middle school, He Leqin’s regular shopping spots had been the Golden Eagle malls in Xinjiekou and Hexi. Those magnificent, hedonistic buildings were places Bai Yang had never even set foot in, but to He Leqin, they were like the vegetable market next door. He often posted high-end, classy moments on social media, but with captions like “This French cuisine at 2000 yuan per person tastes worse than street food.”

How corrupt, too corrupt!

Bai Yang was deeply pained.

If you think it doesn’t taste good, you could bring it back for me to eat!

“Whose birthday?” Dad asked. “Yan, what’s her name?”

“Yan Zhihan,” Bai Yang answered.

Dad searched through his not-so-large hippocampus, barely finding this name, then connected it with an image of a girl with long, soft hair and fair skin. He made an “oh” sound—so it was her.

Bai Yang: You know her?

Dad: No.

Bai Yang: Then how do you know she’s a girl with long, soft hair and fair skin?

Dad: These days, the streets are full of girls with long, soft hair and fair skin.

Yan Zhihan was the famous school-grade-class-group beauty of Nanjing Aeronautics and Astronautics University Affiliated Middle School. Yes, the beauty of their group—their group had eight people, seven boys, and one girl, commonly known as “seven leaves and one flower.”

Among them, Bai Yang, He Leqin, and Yan Zhihan were the closest, dubbed the “Plastic Iron Triangle.”

He Leqin, this wealthy young master, with his philanthropic spirit of helping all under heaven, gave gifts to every girl in class on their birthdays. How could he not do so for Sister Yan? As the class monitor, Yan Zhihan had often given He Leqin the green light when collecting homework, saving young master He from crisis multiple times. A drop of kindness should be repaid with a gushing spring. An eighteenth birthday was a major event—how could the coming-of-age ceremony be taken lightly?

So He Leqin called Bai Yang for advice on what gift to give.

“Little White Sheep! Little White Sheep! What do you think would be appropriate?”

“Young master, you’re so rich, why not give her a Lamborghini?” Bai Yang said lazily. “Or a Bentley, Ferrari, or Aston Martin would do. Sister Yan likes cars, right?”

“Get lost, I’m being serious here.”

“How about erecting a statue of her at the Xinjiekou subway station entrance?” Bai Yang said. “Pose her doing a Kamehameha or Special Beam Cannon. After all, your family built the underground rotunda at Xinjiekou station, putting up a statue should be easy-peasy, right?”

“Then Sister Yan would kill you first, then kill and violate me.”

“Why am I just killed, but you get killed and violated?”

“Because I’m handsome, get it?” He Leqin said on the other end. “If I died and lay there, people would feel they’re missing out if they didn’t violate the corpse. Alright, alright, just come over quickly, stop talking nonsense. I’ll treat you to lunch, I’ll wait for you at Xinjiekou subway station.”

“Where are we eating?”

“Ke Xiang!”

Bai Yang hung up the phone and changed his shoes to go out.

“Xiao Yang, are you coming back for lunch?” Mom poked her head out of the room to ask.

“Not coming back!”

“Then come back early in the afternoon! You still have two sets of practice papers to do!”

“I know, I know!”

Bai Yang opened the door and went downstairs, his footsteps thundering away.

Getting from Meihua Villa to Xinjiekou required taking Line 2, boarding at Musu Garden Station, and getting off at Xinjiekou Station. Bai Yang walked out from the community entrance, along Musu Garden Street towards the subway station, with bowl-thick camphor trees lining the road.

They say Nanjing is full of phoenix trees, but around Meihua Villa there were only camphor trees, short and thin. Walking a kilometer along the Musu Garden Street sidewalk to Zhongshan Gate Road, the French phoenix trees thick as a person’s embrace became more numerous. The phoenix trees in the green belt grew lush and leafy, all decades-old trees, grandfather’s generation compared to Bai Yang.

Nanjing was still hot in September. Bai Yang wore a white t-shirt and beige three-quarter casual pants and was already sweating all over by the time he turned onto Zhongshan Gate Street. The road was busy with pedestrians. Though it was a weekend with no school, there were still students in uniforms riding bicycles in twos and threes, elderly men and women in short sleeves carrying supermarket cloth bags or vegetable baskets filled with eggs and green onions, and young girls who had changed into skirts and shorts, showing off dazzlingly white long legs.

As Bai Yang walked among the crowd, he felt this was a young city, full of beautiful long legs everywhere.

But looking at the white, rough bark of the French phoenix trees, he was also keenly aware of its antiquity.

His phone buzzed. Bai Yang took it out for a look. He Leqin was urging him again on WeChat:

Are you here yet? I’ve waited so long the flowers have wilted.

Bai Yang lowered his head to reply:

Almost there!

For Bai Yang, as long as he had left home, no matter where he was, he was always “almost there.”

He Leqin: Hurry up, I just saw an incredibly beautiful Pansy!

Bai Yang: Coming, coming.

He turned off his phone screen and stuffed the phone in his pocket.

The Musu Garden subway station entrance was ahead. Bai Yang squeezed onto the downward escalator and quickly disappeared into the vast flow of people. Line 2 was one of Nanjing’s busiest subway lines, a main traffic artery of the city. The crowds flowed like blood through the artery—they were the source of the city’s vitality, and Bai Yang was one of these millions of blood cells.

Nanjing was a giant heart.