Crack… boom—

Flames roared, the circuits crackled and sparked, and as he crawled out of the overturned car, his vision blurred.

It was a park by the river, under night’s cover, and across the water the city’s dense lights shimmered like flickering fire, as if a great fortress were floating on the surface. That scene of prosperity stood in stark contrast to the desolation and solitude of this side of the park — he remembered that he himself had overseen this park’s development project more than a decade ago.

“What a failed development…”

The wind blew past him. He sighed and staggered toward the hazy shimmer of water. Behind him, the car suddenly erupted in a massive explosion, flames surging upward, a wave of heat sweeping over him from behind as if to drown him in it. The sound of a helicopter came from the sky, followed by a bright beam of light sweeping across his vision. Someone was shouting down from above. The pursuing vehicles on both sides of the park had already arrived — mostly police cars — a chaotic mess of lights in every direction.

His head was still foggy, blood trickling down from his forehead. He reached up and wiped it away, tightened his coat. Along both banks of the river, hovercraft and speedboats swarmed in, to keep him from leaping into the water and escaping.

“Honestly… I’m not some kind of assassin…”

All around him, the dense encirclement by land, sea, and air pressed in, suffocating. His vision was no longer clear, and in his heart he understood that this time there was likely little chance of escape. A cold wind blew past, and what rose in his mind instead were some inconsequential things. This was the city he had grown up in. Back then the city hadn’t been so grand — standing on this side of the riverbank, he couldn’t yet see the whole city glittering like a palace of splendor, but it had felt warm. This side of the bank had all been dirt slopes then, a yellow earthen path, and on his way from home to school he had often ridden his bicycle through here, together with a few friends.

“When I grow up I’m going to build a park right here, make it more beautiful, fill the city with tall buildings everywhere, and we’ll all live in them…”

He had been young then, and it was after visiting the prosperous provincial capital that he’d made that great vow. What a spirited age that had been. In the two or three decades since, he had pushed forward with astonishing drive, like some primitive man who had just invented the stone axe, crossing through countless dangers that others could scarcely imagine, and had built one of the largest financial empires in the world. Sometimes, thinking back on it, even he found it hard to believe, as if it had all been a dream.

In others’ eyes he had become a financial titan who could never be brought down, and he himself had come to believe it too. And yet now, returning to this old place, he was gradually coming to understand — this park, in the end, had been a failure.

Its original purpose had been to make everyone happy…

A failed project could still have been salvaged — all it would have taken was a large sum of money, and by now, that kind of money meant nothing to him. So why had it never been done? Back when he’d still wanted to do it, he hadn’t had the means. Now, it was simply neglected because it wasn’t profitable. Thinking back on it now, so many things he’d thought he remembered had actually been forgotten, and so many things he’d thought he’d forgotten had, in fact, come back to him…

Those friends and companions from back then, the hope that the world could be made better, the promises made, the road once walked. He sat down on a stone bench along the embankment. The lights dazzled his eyes, his thoughts a tangle. He patted at his pockets a few times — right now, he really needed a cigarette, even though he’d quit long ago…

Someone held one out to him.

The man stood beside him in a suit, wearing gold-rimmed glasses — he didn’t even need to look up to know who it was. He took the cigarette, and the man in the gold-rimmed glasses pulled out a lighter, shielding it from the wind with his hand, and lit it for him.

“I was just thinking about the old days — the two of us riding bicycles to school together, along with Qingyi, Ah Kang, Ruoping… Qingyi died a couple years back, didn’t he? I never made it to his funeral…” He took a drag and exhaled; the cold wind scattered the smoke at once. “How’s Ruoping doing?”

“Two kids now. Doing pretty well.” The bespectacled man sat down beside him.

“Ah… you told me that already, I’d almost forgotten…” He thought for a moment, then laughed. “She was the prettiest of all the girls. I remember I had a crush on her the whole time, never had the nerve to say it.”

The man beside him was silent for a moment, then took out his own lighter and lit a cigarette. “I know you liked her. I confessed to her before you could — got rejected. She said the one she liked was you.”

“You never told me that.”

“What else could I do? Afterward everyone was busy fighting for the future, and you forgot about her. She couldn’t wait around forever. You never said anything, so she got married.”

“Ah… I let a lot of things slip by…”

“You always did chase perfection.”

“You know something?” He thought it over, then held up a hand to gesture at some imagined height. “Once you reach the top, you realize — apart from that one moment of triumph, there’s really nothing there. You always end up feeling… regret… The road I’m walking now, maybe it was never really what I wanted, deep down, all along…”

“Yeah,” said the man in glasses.

They fell silent for a while. He looked at the cigarette in his hand — it had burned down low. “That deficit of over ten billion — sorting it out is going to be a real headache. I figured it out months ago, already drew up a plan, it’s on my computer… I just didn’t expect you to react so drastically. A change of leadership at the company could shift the deficit onto certain people’s shoulders, make things a lot easier — go ahead and revise the plan, just try not to drag too many people down with it. We did fight our way here together, after all, for a long time.”

“…I—” The man beside him hesitated, as if wanting to explain something, but in the end he only said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. All this time, I’ve always been the one standing out front. We’ve been brothers — it was bound to be your turn eventually… This scheme’s well laid out. The company’s yours, it won’t collapse — just, afterward, take some money and actually develop this park properly. I always meant to. I always thought I remembered, but whenever it came to mind, I figured there was no rush, and kept putting it off…”

“I already told them — after this, you can still live well…”

“Cut the weeds but not the roots, and they grow back with the spring wind. Return the tiger to the mountains…” He turned his head, his calm gaze carrying a sudden edge. “What do you think you are?”

“As long as I’m alive, I’m a threat to you!” He paused, dropped the cigarette butt, and ground it out under his heel. “It’s cold at the top. This life has gone far enough. Even if I had to start over, I’d want to do it with nothing weighing on me, clean and unburdened. All that filthy scheming, all that infighting… if I could do it again…”

He smiled, and stood up. “If I could do it again, I think I’d tell her how I felt…”

The helicopter circled overhead, boats sped across the water, and vehicles ringed the park on every side. There, on the embankment lit by searchlights, the man who had stood up suddenly drew a gun and aimed it at the bespectacled man beside him. Seeing the motion, the man in glasses rose at the same instant, raising his hands and waving them at the people around them: “Don’t shoot—”

Gunfire rang out in a dense volley. Blood bloomed across his back. After a long moment, he turned around and looked at the body lying in the pool of blood, then, dazed, took off his glasses, wiped them, and put them back on before bending to pick up the gun still gripped in the corpse’s hand.

“I told you not to shoot… there were no bullets in it…”

In the night wind, he murmured the words to himself.