Taking a bath is a pleasant thing.
In a summer filled with the chirping of insects, taking a cold shower is even more refreshing.
Even after becoming a girl, An Jing still felt that taking a cold shower in summer was the best.
Although she got cold more easily than before, in a sense—she also felt the coolness more intensely.
Besides, even though the solar water heater was pretty useful, when you switched it to hot water, the flow was weak, the hot water came out slowly, and the temperature wasn’t stable—one moment cold, the next moment hot.
Unless there was absolutely no choice and she had to use hot water, An Jing didn’t like using that thing.
The happiest moment right after a shower was the instant she pushed open the door.
The summer breeze that had felt slightly warm before the shower now felt exceptionally cool, swirling through the living room with its open windows, wrapping around An Jing in circle after circle.
“Hah—so cool—” She squinted her eyes, relaxing her body with a look of pure enjoyment.
The best thing about Grandfather’s house was that the entire second floor belonged to her alone at night, and that empty living room with no furniture at all gave her the urge to dance right there on the spot.
The bright moonlight shone on the floor, and the living room without lights on actually had more nighttime charm than it would have with them on.
Wearing only a pair of shorts and a loose short-sleeved shirt, An Jing tilted her head and looked out the window—row after row of old buildings, their yellowed walls never painted, some of the mortar even peeling away, revealing the red bricks with their obvious gaps behind.
For someone who had never been to the old factory dormitory, it was hard to imagine these kinds of buildings:
There wasn’t even a security door at the entrance, just left wide open for anyone to come and go.
The stairwell had no windows, but it was still fairly bright, because the brick walls had deliberate hollow patterns—though they looked more like a brick missing here and a brick missing there.
Whenever someone came up the stairs, the sensor lights in the hallway would flick on one by one, and through the hollow gaps in the bricks, you could see the shadow of the person climbing up—it always made An Jing picture a scene of parents coming home late from work, while the child who heard the footsteps hurriedly turned off the TV and ran back to their room.
She couldn’t help but take a few extra glances at the green windows of the other houses, which seemed to have darkened several shades at night, and then slowly stretched her limbs before staggering over to her bedroom door.
She left her shoes by the door, grabbed the carton of milk she’d brought upstairs earlier, deftly poked the straw in, and flopped onto the bed in one smooth motion.
The room was still without lights.
Not just because she liked the unlit night, but because—with the lights off, it was less likely to attract bugs and insects. That way she could properly enjoy the evening breeze blowing in from outside.
Sure, there was a screen on the window, but it only blocked the bigger bugs; the smaller ones could squeeze through the gaps on the sides of the screen, and as for the ones even smaller than that—the loose weave of this old-fashioned screen wasn’t enough to stop them at all.
In the quiet of the night, time seemed to pass very slowly.
But that only applied when you were paying attention to it.
When you were busy with other things, it would slip away silently, and before you knew it, you’d look up and be surprised to find it was already past midnight.
Still, no matter how you looked at it, it was still early.
An Jing didn’t feel the slightest bit sleepy.
She slurped a couple of mouthfuls of milk, feeling that the small carton just wasn’t satisfying enough.
The computer still hadn’t been taken out of the box, and while her phone could access QQ, she didn’t really feel like chatting with anyone right now.
Mainly because typing on her phone was pretty tiring—nowhere near as convenient as using a computer.
When bored, people always end up rummaging through things.
She casually pulled the window shut, then sprang up from the bed in one swift motion, hopped over to the door, and clicked the switch on with a snap.
Then she stood in front of the bookshelf against the wall, tilting her head up to look for books she might find interesting.
The titles had a very eighties style, and the blurbs were full of that era’s flavor too.
But most of them were works about love and relationships; though her eyes were dazzled by the options, An Jing couldn’t find a single one she particularly wanted to read.
“Re-Attack the Bakery, Norwegian Wood, Wreath at the Foot of the Mountain, Spring in Winter, Wasted Years, Long Street Lantern Language…” An Jing pouted. “Why do they all sound so heavy… Doesn’t Mom have any other kinds of novels? Like martial arts or something?”
Although this wasn’t the first summer vacation she’d spent at Grandfather’s house, it was the first time she’d opened her mother’s bookshelf.
Maybe it was because, back then, seeing these yellowed old books, she’d been just a kid and couldn’t muster any interest in them—after all, back then she’d only ever liked picture books and comics.
“Oh, this one is… martial arts, right?” An Jing suddenly got excited, like she’d found something usable among a pile of outdated old junk. “Flying Red Severing Soul Sword…”
It was a thread-bound novel with a rather antique look, the cover featuring a classical woman holding a sword. The moment An Jing opened it, the pages scattered down like dried leaves, and the paper was so brittle it seemed like it would crumble with just a few more touches.
That startled her enough that she didn’t dare flip through it anymore, hastily shoving it back in.
Still, this gave her some encouragement. It showed that her mother’s bookshelf didn’t just have classics and romance novels.
Even if it was martial arts romance, at least it had some martial arts elements… Maybe there would be something in there she’d enjoy reading.
Before long, she found quite a few martial arts novels. Maybe because martial arts novels were popular in that era, a lot of people used the genre to tell the stories they wanted to write.
An Jing browsed for a while, then finally picked out a novel that seemed to be of better quality and better preserved than the others.
It was also thread-bound, but the materials were sturdier, and it still carried a faint scent of paper.
And the cover was the prettiest of all the old martial arts novels—it looked like it was drawn with colored pencils. It depicted a woman with braided pigtails walking down a country path, wearing an ornate Western-style gown, with a long sword featuring red vertical stripes slung across her back, while her other hand formed a sword seal, her stance looking like she was about to vanquish demons and evil spirits.
The figure was drawn very meticulously, with the same rigorous human anatomy as an oil painting, but thanks to the coloring medium, it didn’t look quite so heavy…
It was just that the background and the figure felt rather disconnected.
There was even a harvester in the background—clearly not ancient times.
And the clothes on the figure, combined with the sword, gave off a sense of East meeting West…
The title was <Sunset Sword>, and the author’s name was even more “bizarre”—it was called ‘Eastern Air’.
It didn’t look like a person’s name at all, and even as a pen name, it felt a bit too out there…
This was the eighties, not like now where all sorts of strange pen names existed—when An Jing first read <Panlong>, she’d always thought the big characters “I Eat Tomatoes” couldn’t possibly be a pen name.
But it was precisely this strange and unusual combination that made An Jing even more curious.
She propped open the bookshelf door with her head, eagerly sat down at the desk, glanced around, opened a can of coconut juice she’d bought today, and carefully took a small sip, afraid she might finish it all in one go—then sat down properly and opened the book with relish.
When she flipped open the pages, she discovered that this book actually had notes left by her mother—or rather… some thoughts and impressions.
It seemed that back then, her mother had also been curious about this book, which was why she’d bought it.
On the title page, a few lines of writing that looked very youthful and immature.
Recognizable at a glance—
The characters had no brush flair, looking thin and simple, without any connected strokes, each character written separately, as careful as a junior high school student’s test paper.
Thinking of the handwriting her mother, now an accountant, had these days, An Jing felt a subtle sense of novelty.
—No matter what kind of person someone becomes, they all have such an immature period.
「Because I’d never heard of a sword called ‘Sunset Sword’ before, I bought it. I think Sunset Sword isn’t actually a sword, but a sword technique.」
That was what her mother had written on the title page.
An Jing studied it closely several times, as if she’d traveled back to her mother’s youth and was sitting beside her, reading the book together.
Writing was just so magical—it let people converse across the river of time.
After flipping to the first page, she’d occasionally come across her mother’s thoughts left in the margins. Not on every page, and not always a full sentence.
Most of the time, they were just simple words like “pleasant,” “a bit,” “nonsensical,” “too proper,” “harsh,” or sometimes just a wavy line drawn with nothing written next to it, leaving its meaning unclear.
An Jing found it a little dull at first, but slowly she got drawn into the story.
Actually, the story was about a stage actress and her emotional entanglements with several different men.
On stage, she performed as a sword-wielding heroine; off stage, she liked wearing Western clothing and didn’t care for stories about kings and generals or tales of home and country.
Every time the heroine broke up with a man, she would carry that prop sword and part ways at sunset.
It wasn’t the character’s intention—it was a coincidence crafted by the author.
「The meaning of Sunset Sword is probably farewell.」That was the thought her mother had written down.
At the end of this chapter, there was a large blank space, and her mother had written a great many words in a flowing hand, revealing a sentimentality completely different from the person she was now.
How to put it… she simply couldn’t imagine these were her mother’s words.
Because it had the vibe of a little girl through and through.
「This is my favorite male lead, but in the end, he still couldn’t understand the heroine. Actually, the indecisive heroine just doesn’t know how to love the world, but he thinks her sadness is fake and affected… Will I ever meet someone who truly loves me? If possible, I hope he’s a bit tall, with an oval face—not one of those square, boxy faces—with a slender build and a gentle way of speaking… Just thinking about it gets me all excited—when will I ever get to have a relationship?」
“Hiss—” An Jing felt goosebumps all over, quickly flipping past the page to continue reading.
This book wasn’t very thick, and the story wasn’t hard to follow. Each major chapter covered one of the heroine’s relationships, and her life changed with each one.
Even though it wasn’t a martial arts novel at all, since she’d already started it, An Jing decided to finish it in one sitting.
With her mother’s notes scattered throughout, it wasn’t boring in the slightest.