Dragon Raja · Conversa

Lu Mingfei sat in front of his computer, the chat window in the bottom-right corner of the screen blinking nonstop as his teammate urged him to log on and play StarCraft. On the desk lay the kraft-paper envelope he'd just torn out of the express delivery, its seal stamped with a silver badge—a coiled dragon emblem. Inside was a gold-embossed interview notice card, along with a one-way plane ticket. He casually flipped it over; the back bore only a single line of address: Cassell College, Saarbrücken, Germany. No postal code, no phone number, no sender. His aunt downstairs was calling him to dinner. He answered, set the envelope down by the wastebasket, and the game on the screen had already started its countdown. At that same moment, in an apartment in a city in southern China, a girl sat cross-legged on the windowsill, her red hair blown into a tangled mess by the wind. In one hand she held a can of cola; in the other, she scrolled through a photo that had just been sent to her phone—Lu Mingfei's enrollment photo, an ID shot, with dead-fish eyes. She stared at it for three seconds, let out a laugh, and saved it into a folder named “Loser.” At Cassell College in Germany, on the central lawn. A golden-haired young man lay half-reclined on a bench, red wine flashing light at his side. He asked the teaching assistant beside him, “What was that S-class's name this year again?” The assistant gave the name. The young man set down his glass, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth: “Got it.” In the headmaster's office, Angers stood by the window with his back to the door, a red rose pinned to his chest and a cup of black tea in his hand. He lowered his gaze to the new student's file on the desk, with Lu Mingfei's listless ID photo pasted on it. “Finally.” He drank the tea dry and, with a fingertip, tapped the eyes in the photo—a pair of eyes that looked utterly ordinary. At the same time, in that room plastered with game posters, Lu Mingfei had just lost a match. He shoved the keyboard forward and turned his head to glance at the envelope on the desk.