Chapter 75

That summer, the scorching sun blazed like a furnace, and the hot wind surged like a tide. A large group of cicadas, hidden in the lush branches of a big tree, chirped incessantly. A few elderly people, seeking coolness, moved their square stools to sit under the shade, fanning themselves leisurely with bamboo fans, completely ignoring the noisy insects above.

On the main street of the neighborhood, a boy of eight, wearing short pants and a sleeveless shirt, with a fresh scab on his knee, looked like a wild monkey. He proposed to a girl he had just chatted with and found quite compatible:

"Hey, do you want to play together?"

The little girl was a mixed-race child who had just moved to this ancient country. Blinking her clear, innocent eyes, she stared at the boy for a moment with a gaze that seemed to see right through him, then nodded and said, "Sure."

From a very young age, she had an intuitive sense of whether others were pretending or had malicious intentions. It was as if she had some kind of strange, intangible power. Her mother told her that she had inherited some of her father's abilities.

The boy, who introduced himself as Li Pu, seemed to be a very pure and straightforward person, the girl thought. So she didn't refuse, but she didn't have high expectations either.

Every time they moved, she would lose her original neighborhood friends—well, only neighbors, not friends.

Only her mother and books would never leave her.

Despite her young age, she had already grown accustomed to such a life. However, perhaps because she was a bit too childish... she still hoped to have friends besides books and stuffed animals, someone to chat with.

"Where do we go to play?" The little girl followed closely behind the boy, her feet pattering.

"What do you usually like to play?" The little boy waved a willow branch he had picked up, as if it were a soft sword, looking very happy. What a self-satisfied guy!

"Reading!" The little girl held up a comic magazine called "King of Comics."

"Ah, I like reading too, but I've been reading for a long time. Let's try something else for fun," the boy named Li Pu thought for a moment. "Oh, have you ever played with trading cards?"

"What are trading cards?" The little girl was a bit confused. It was probably something the boys in this country liked to play, just like how the boys in her previous neighborhood liked to play baseball.

"These are trading cards, or trading pictures," Li Pu took out a small stack of cards from his pocket and showed them to the girl.

The girl looked and saw that they were small, square, colorful pieces of paper with crudely drawn cartoon patterns. The cards seemed to have been used for a long time, crumpled and old, folded into triangles.

"How do you play with these?" the girl asked.

"You stack them up and slap them down hard, using the wind to flip them over," Li Pu explained. "The ones that flip over are yours!"

"What are these little cards for?" the girl blinked her eyes.

"To use... well..." Li Pu thought for a moment and spread out his cards like a deck of poker. "To look at, they have all sorts of pictures."

"But they're not very well drawn," the girl said frankly. The crumpled little cards had ugly robots and clearly not the original drawings of Saint Seiya, much uglier than the large stack of Magic: The Gathering cards she had at home.

"Uh, well, this game isn't very popular lately," Li Pu was a bit dejected. He used to like this game a lot, and he had even begged his father to buy him a stack of trading cards.

He thought for a moment and suggested, "How about we go play video games? Have you ever been to an arcade?"

"No," the girl shook her head.

"Then I'll take you," Li Pu puffed out his chest. "I have two yuan, which can buy eight game tokens, and I'll give you half!" He thought again, "Or we can buy four tokens and use the remaining yuan to buy two red bean ice pops, one for each of us."

The girl nodded. She had already refused one game, and she didn't want to refuse again.

The arcade the boy often visited was a common unlicensed game center in the mid-1990s. A middle-aged couple, who lived in an old bungalow in the alley, opened the game center after being laid off. For three yuan, you could rent an hour of double-player Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo on several color TVs. Wealthier children usually rented a machine alone and found a friend to play with, while more game enthusiasts found strangers to play with, each contributing one and a half yuan, to save pocket money and play longer.

On the other side, seven upright arcade machines were lined up against the wall, featuring "The Warriors of Fate," "Street Fighter II," "Samurai Shodown 1&2," "Final Fight," "Double Dragon," and the latest "Fatal Fury: King of Fighters 94." Except for "Final Fight" and "Double Dragon," all the others were fighting games—purely because the unscrupulous owner found that fighting games consumed game tokens much faster than side-scrolling beat 'em ups.

In 1994, the regulation "Minors are not allowed in entertainment venues" had not yet been issued, and no shopkeepers cared. The players were fully focused on their games. When Li Pu and the little girl, who were in the lower grades of elementary school, entered, they only received a few extra glances.

"Hey, what a cute little foreign girl!" The old woman selling game tokens at an old table saw the girl following Li Pu and her eyes lit up. "I haven't seen you before. Whose child are you?" She even reached out to touch the girl's rosy cheeks.

The girl, a bit shy in the face of the overly enthusiastic auntie, hid behind Li Pu like a timid kitten.

"Auntie, don't worry about it. I want to buy one yuan worth of game tokens and two red bean ice pops!" Li Pu took out four crumpled fifty-cent bills from his pocket.

After receiving the game tokens and ice pops from the old woman, the boy, as promised, gave half to the girl.

Li Pu asked, "What do you want to play? A fighting game or a side-scrolling game?"

"Hmm~~~ I'll watch you play first?" The girl, with her still babyish, slightly upturned pink lips, slowly sucked on the cheap red bean ice pop—so cool! Although it wasn't particularly sweet, it felt great after walking a long way on the scorching asphalt road, feeling a bit dizzy.

"Okay, after I finish my ice pop, I'll play the latest 'King of Fighters 94'!" Li Pu tossed the two golden copper tokens in his hand.

"Are you very good at this game?" the girl asked.

"Hehe, do you know that playing fighting games has different levels of skill?" Li Pu crossed his arms, looking like a little master, and teased.

"I don't know," the girl, who had never played video games, shook her head obediently.

"Then I'll explain it to you one by one. These are all my carefully observed and summarized experiences," Li Pu leaned close to the girl, as if he were imparting a secret, and whispered in her ear, "Do you see that big brother playing 'The Warriors of Fate' over there?"

The girl opened her eyes wide and looked over. In front of an arcade machine, a junior high school boy was operating a bald monk character in orange robes. He was frantically shaking the joystick with his left hand and randomly pressing the four buttons with his right hand. The bald monk in the game was shouting "Hah! Hoh! Ha!" while kicking and punching, but most of his attacks missed. Occasionally, he would hit the opponent by luck, but he took more hits.

"This is the weakest 'machine-smashing' style of play. He doesn't know how to play, so he just shakes and presses buttons randomly. Occasionally, he hits the opponent a few times by luck, and he might pass a level," the boy shrugged. "But generally, people who play like this often can't even pass the first level without inserting more coins."

"Um, it looks like he has no strategy at all," the girl, feeling her ear tickled by the boy's breath, couldn't help but shrink her neck.

"There's another big brother," Li Pu guided the girl's gaze to a slightly overweight high school boy playing "Street Fighter II" a bit further away. "He already knows how to perform special moves and keeps using the Hadouken. With this, he can pass three or four levels without a problem."

The boy deliberately paused, as if boasting, "But I'm better than him because I not only know that pressing the punch button after a quarter-circle motion releases a Hadouken..." He drew a counterclockwise arc with his hand, "I also know that pressing the punch button after moving down and then up releases an invincible anti-air punch!"

"Are you the best here, then?" the girl tilted her head, asking with interest.

"Uh, I'm okay," Li Pu scratched his head and said honestly, "But even if you know how to perform the Hadouken and the anti-air punch, there are still players who are better. Like that guy over there..."

Li Pu pointed to a bespectacled boy who was intensely playing "King of Fighters 94" against someone else. He said with admiration, "His nickname is 'Four-Eyes,' and he's the best here! He can usually clear the game with just one token."

"That's the level I've always aspired to. Reaching his level is my dream."

He set a very unambitious life goal with a serious face.

"I'll give it a try too," the girl, with a wide range of interests, didn't mock this unambitious goal that would be scolded by teachers as "losing one's will to study."

Unfortunately, the bespectacled boy was using his superb skills to dominate the machine, and all other players couldn't defeat him. Li Pu watched for a while and couldn't resist trying to challenge him with the "Mexican Team" in the game—this team had skills most similar to "Street Fighter." However, he lost badly. When the character "Kyo Kusanagi" waved her fan, her breasts jiggled as she struck a victory pose, mercilessly declaring that the boy had been defeated one-on-three.

At this moment, the battle statistics for the "British Team" controlled by Four-Eyes showed that he had defeated twelve challengers.

The "King of Fighters 94" was the latest game board the shop owner had just bought, and it was very popular. Although Li Pu liked it a lot, other players were also attracted. The boy, holding the last golden copper token, hesitated about whether to continue challenging—another loss would mean no more play, only watching.

The girl, who had been watching from the side, suddenly extended her white, tender little hand, inserted a game token into the coin slot, and smiled brightly at the boy, "It looks fun. I'll give it a try."