After an eventful autumn came an equally eventful winter. 

Following days of light rain, Cliff City finally saw a rare clear day. Beneath the crystal-clear afternoon sky, sunlight bathed the streets, while puddles underfoot reflected the deep blue above and lent the air a faint trace of warmth.

Ji Jue sat in a folding chair, shifted into a comfortable position, and let out a long, contented breath.

He remembered that when he was a child in Shuzhou, he would bundle himself up in thick layers every winter, yet the cold wind would still sneak through every gap in his clothes and bite straight into his bones. Every morning, the short distance between crawling out from under the blankets and reaching for his clothes felt like a journey through hell. It had been awful.

By comparison, winter in Haizhou seemed to amount to little more than a token drop in temperature. You could still get away with wearing a T-shirt under a light jacket. The locals ceremoniously threw on a down vest over everything else, but no matter how cold it got, they absolutely refused to give up their flip-flops.

Even after all these years, now that Ji Jue could more or less count himself half a local, that kind of lifelong devotion to flip-flops through hell or high water was still beyond him.

There was even a certain old Mr. Zhang from North Mount District who wandered all over the city year-round in a tank top and baggy shorts, carrying a huge palm-leaf fan in one hand. You would think he was just built different, but he wasn’t. In reality, that was simply how people dressed...