Chapter 22: So — Reuniting with Old Classmates Isn’t Necessarily a Good Thing

The air above the barbecue stall seemed to freeze.
The two pints slammed onto the table lay like the fuses of two grenades between Lin Yu and the swaying drunk.
The surrounding noise dropped as if an invisible hand had turned down the volume.
All eyes drifted, intentionally or not, toward the scene.

Lin Yu’s gaze landed on the drunk.
He was a burly man in his forties, broad-shouldered with a big beer belly that strained against a filthy gray work jacket.
A faded circular patch embroidered on the jacket’s chest marked him as an old hand at Huaxia Heavy Industries’ factory.
His face was flushed purple from alcohol and years of pent-up resentment, and his bloodshot, murky eyes fixed on Lin Yu like an animal that had carried anger for too long.

“Brother, drink up!”
He repeated the demand, voice thick with menace and gunpowder.

Before Lin Yu could answer, a thinner workmate at the drunk’s side surged forward like a hyena riding a tiger’s back and jabbed a finger in Lin Yu’s face, shouting:
“Hey kid! Didn’t you hear Brother Zhang offering you a drink?! Brother Zhang is honoring you—don’t you dare take the face and spit on it!”

Another drunk at the same table leaned back and sneered in a mocking tone:
“Oh, look at you city kids—brand shoes, a new phone—think you’re better than us factory men who bust our asses for a living? You think the oil on our clothes dirties your fancy cola?”

Wang Wei’s face went white.
He tugged Lin Yu’s sleeve and plastered on a flattering grimace, ready to smooth things over by taking the beer.

But Lin Yu did something unexpected—he didn’t move.
He sat quietly and watched, and rather than raw fear, an odd observational calm settled in.

…This guy’s look is wrong.
A strangely calm voice piped up in his head.
Not just drunk—there’s a long-simmering grievance here… that sort of toxic rancor that sees offenses everywhere and needs a reason to explode. My dad’s laid-off coworkers who spent all day in little taverns had this exact look.

Chen Bing’s icy poker face and the phantom pain of being slammed in training flashed reflexively through his mind.
…This is trouble. He’s not just a lush—he’s a powder keg at the edge. Reasoning won’t help.

Lin Yu inhaled, tamped down his racing heartbeat, and forced a harmless smile.
He didn’t glance at the goading accomplices; he fixed his eyes on the main drunk, Brother Zhang, and spoke calmly, neither servile nor proud:
“Brother Zhang, and sirs, truly I mean no disrespect. I’m on duty at five tomorrow morning and really can’t drink… if I do, I’ll mess up and get chewed out by my boss.”

He pulled out his phone, opened the payment screen with practiced fingers, and added:
“Look, since fate brought us together tonight, this meal and the beers on your table are on me. Consider it my apology in advance—how about that?”

Spend money to stop trouble—that was the most dignified, least risky approach he could think of.

But when Brother Zhang saw the new Huawei Mate 90 and the payment screen, the drunk’s murky eyes flared with the humiliation of someone who felt mocked.
To him, the gesture wasn’t an apology—it was flaunting.
A kid in brand shoes and a new phone parading wealth that cost nothing to show, mocking the factory men who’d ground their youth into scrap and been left behind by the times.

“You—f*ck your mother!”
Brother Zhang swept the offered beer across the table and onto the floor.
The sound of shattering glass was a battle horn.
“How many of your stinking yuan make you think you’re something?! When I was pouring steel by the furnace at Huaxia Heavy Industries, you were still wearing open-crotch diapers! Now you wanna act high and mighty?!”

He was enraged, veins bulging, face twisting in fury.
His huge work-worn hand lunged for Lin Yu’s collar like a gust.

Lin Yu’s mind went blank.
There was no time to think of Chen Bing’s fighting techniques or any plan; his body reacted faster than his head.
A heartbeat before the hand hit his collar, he recoiled like a spring, all awkward muscle and panic.
The plastic stool beneath him scraped and slid half a foot—an ugly, graceless backward flail.
That terrified recline was exactly enough to make him miss the grab.

The drunk, off-balance from booze and lunging with full force, reached out and caught nothing.
Inertia carried two hundred pounds of wet, reeking mass forward like a runaway locomotive.
A huge shadow swallowed Lin Yu’s vision.

“f*ck!”
The scene of being thrown repeatedly by Chen Bing on the training ground replayed itself.
His hands pushed out blindly, and he let out an animalistic scream.

The shove was small, but it was the last straw.
The drunk’s momentum failed him and he stumbled—his dirty work shoe slid right onto an empty beer bottle someone had kicked.

Clunk!
One dramatic slip, and the drunken giant crashed to the ground with a comic, thunderous smack.
He didn’t even grunt; he lay there like a stunned hog, the back of his skull twitching.

Everything happened in a flash.
From the grab, to Lin Yu’s recoil, to the drunk’s fall—no more than two seconds had elapsed.
To the stall’s patrons, it looked like a drunken fool had simply lost his footing and eaten pavement.
Only Lin Yu knew that if he hadn’t trained all afternoon with the stun gun, that greasy hand would’ve been wrapped around his collar.

Three seconds of stunned silence stretched over the barbecue stall.
The skewer-flipping boss forgot to turn the meat; fat hissed and black smoke curled up.
Wang Wei sat with his mouth hanging open, staring at the heap that used to be Brother Zhang, his brain shorting out.

Then rage erupted.
“You touched our Brother Zhang?!”

The thin hyena-like accomplice reacted first.
Seeing his big brother on the ground, he reddened with humiliation and fury, then smashed the bottom off a half-full beer bottle on the table’s edge, exposing a jagged shard of glass.

“Boys! Kill this blind little—!”

With that yell, the other drunks rose.
Some grabbed plastic stools; some balled fists; they swayed and closed in around Lin Yu and Wang Wei.
A street brawl was about to spark.

“Lin… Linzi!”
Wang Wei’s face drained of color as he grabbed the still-stunned Lin Yu, voice trembling:
“Run! Get out of here!”

Only then did Lin Yu snap back to reality.
He looked at the surrounding circle of drunks and the bottle-wielding man, and a cold, bone-deep terror shot up his spine.

…Run?! Where? The wall’s behind us. We’re boxed in. The only exit is toward the guy with the bottle!

Panic propelled his mind into overdrive.
Memories of being repeatedly thrown by Chen Bing played like slides: observe in chaos; find the pattern.

Calm down. Chen Bing said, when chaos hits, observe. Their positions… they’re scattered. No formation. The bottle guy is the direct threat, but his stance—he’s sloppy.

He instinctively dragged Wang Wei behind him, dropped his center of gravity, and adopted a guarded stance he hadn’t known he possessed.
He was no longer just a salaried worker who fled trouble—his body prepped before thought.

But his few scraps of combat experience felt pale against several drunken adults.
Just as the thin man sneered and lunged with the bottle—

“Woooo—!”
A siren cut through the night like a blade.
A police cruiser, blue and white, screeched in with strobing lights and came to a precise drift stop in front of the stall.

The car door slammed.
A young cop jumped out, all righteous energy.
He frowned, scanned the chaotic scene with hawk-like eyes, then drew his duty pistol and bellowed:
“Police! Don’t move! Put down what you’re holding!”

His voice was steady and authoritative, a pillar that froze the crowd.
The drunks, suddenly faced with the state’s uniform, sobered three notches.
Their snarls died; stools and bottles slackened in their hands.

Lin Yu sank to the ground, his taut nerves finally snapping cleanly at the sight of the uniform.
He stared at the young officer’s upright face, which somehow looked disturbingly familiar.
A hesitant voice escaped him:
“…Is… is that Luo Shaotian?”

The cop froze mid-radio call.
He turned toward the voice, head cocking in surprise.
On the ground sat a pale, hollow-eyed youth who looked like he’d been pummeled by life.
Something in the shape of that face tugged Luo Shaotian’s memory back years.

“He—Ah Yu?”
Luo Shaotian tried the old nickname, disbelief thick in his tone.
The man before him was older, rougher around the edges, but the stubborn glint in his eyes matched the kid Luo had shielded in the university library.
“You’re—holy shit, it’s you?!”

Luo Shaotian strode forward to help him up, a mix of shocked delight and confusion on his face.
“How are you here? How did you end up like this?!”

Lin Yu opened his mouth but no words came.

At that moment Brother Zhang mumbled and began swearing himself awake.
Luo Shaotian’s expression hardened instantly; the old-classmate softness vanished beneath the badge.
He turned, no longer focusing on Lin Yu, and swept his flashlight across the drunkards, voice clipped and icy:
“Enough. Nobody shout. You’re all coming with me—public brawl, creating a disturbance. We’re taking you to the station; we’ll sober you up and have you write a full statement.”

He had quelled the arrogant drunks in no time, then leaned in, lowering his voice with protective matter-of-factness toward Lin Yu:
“Ah Yu, you’re done here. You and your friend go now—leave this place. I’ll handle the rest; you won’t need to give a statement.”

He used his authority to pull Lin Yu clean out of the mess.
Wang Wei felt pardoned and clutched the stupefied Lin Yu, and the two fled the scene like fugitives allowed to vanish.

As they turned to go, Lin Yu glanced back.
Luo Shaotian efficiently shepherded the still-cursing drunks into the arriving squad car.
Streetlight gleamed off the rank on his crisp uniform.
For a brief second Lin Yu felt a thick, invisible wall separating the uniformed friend from his own battered life.

On the walk home, Wang Wei babbled like a broken record—“holy shit… badass… your college buddy’s such a movie cop!”—half awed, half terrified.
Lin Yu said nothing.
He had no explanation.

That night, in his ten-square-meter “safehouse,” he didn’t collapse straightaway.
He stood before the cheap full-length mirror and studied the exhausted, jittery man reflected back.
Adrenaline still trembled in his limbs, and his mind kept replaying Luo Shaotian’s straight-backed silhouette shielding him.

…Saved by him again.
The thought prickled like a cold needle.
He felt like a pathetic clown.
Years of failure looped like a vicious carousel, and Luo Shaotian was always the hand that hauled him out of the mud.

Memory gates burst open.
He thought back to the university library—another world in its silence.
Back then he was shyer, more withdrawn—like a cave-dweller nesting in the stacks, building a world of thick books.
Luo Shaotian had been the campus sun: basketball starter, social butterfly, always cheerful and tireless.
They’d been parallel lines destined never to meet.

Everything changed because of one collision.
It was an ordinary afternoon. Lin Yu was threading a narrow aisle with a stack of books.
A girl suddenly rounded the corner; he stepped back instinctively and bumped the trendily dressed girl reading by the shelf.
Books tumbled.

“Sorry—sorry!” he blurted, hurrying to pick them up.
But the girl didn’t accept the apology.
She snapped her fashion magazine shut and shrieked like she’d been grievously affronted:
“What are you doing?! Watch where you walk! You did that on purpose, didn’t you?!”

Her scream struck like thunder in the hushed library; faces turned.
“I—I didn’t mean to—” he stammered.
“Not intentional? Give me a break.”
She peered down her nose and accused him in a low, humiliating voice:
“I’ve seen creeps like you lurking in corners—always thinking pretty girls are fair game to hit on or grope!”

Her friends chimed in, piling on:
“You’re harassing her! We see scumbags like you all the time!”

It was a surreal lynch mob.
He couldn’t talk his way out of it; his face burned, words evaporated, and he stood there like an accused criminal.

Just as he hit the nadir of social death, Luo Shaotian pushed through the crowd.
He didn’t theatrically throw punches; he simply planted his tall frame behind Lin Yu and said calmly to the accuser:
“Calm down. This is the library, not your runway.”

Then he pointed to a faint red indicator dome in the aisle and said, measured and firm:
“If you claim he harassed you, fine. The library has 360-degree cameras along the aisles. We’ll get a librarian, pull the footage. If the video shows he harassed you, I’ll take him to the security office right now and make him apologize in person.”

He paused, and then his sunny eyes sharpened into a blade:
“But if the footage proves this was an accident and you’re here to stir up trouble and slander him… then you’ll be the ones writing reports to the security office and issuing a public apology on the bulletin board.”

Shame flickered across the accusers’ faces and they disbanded.
Afterward Luo patted Lin Yu’s shaking shoulder, helped pick up the books, and said a line Lin Yu remembered forever:
“Man, how do you let people bully you like this and not even open your mouth? Hey, we’re in the same department, right? If you need anything, come to me—my name’s Luo Shaotian…”

The tide of memory ebbed away.
“Luo Shaotian…” Lin Yu spoke the name softly, full of wistful regret.

They had become decent friends in college, but after graduation their lives diverged.
Luo had passed the exams and realized his dream—wearing the uniform, slogging at the city’s grassroots as a police officer with purpose and honor.
Lin Yu sank into unemployment after graduation, unable to find relevant work and unwilling to humble himself for steady low-end labor, drifting between gigs and food delivery, scraping by.

The gap between their lives and the self-loathing it bred made him sever contact with the “successful” friend.
He didn’t want the sun who once lit his days to see him floundering in mud.

Yet the world is unpredictable; years later they met again.
Luo Shaotian remained sunny; Lin Yu… didn’t.

Standing before his mirror, he forced a bitter smile at his unchanged lack of progress—still the guy who needed rescuing.
He clenched his fist.

Tonight we were lucky: he was drunk and slipped on a bottle. Next time—what then? If it’s pollution, if it’s a real monster—
The senior was right…
…I’m still far from ready.