[BL] Daily Disposable Persona

43: The King of Clouds 12

Zong Yan was lying on the rooftop looking up at the sky.

It was an ordinary, everyday rooftop covered with cement. You could even see occasional rough patches where the cement hadn't been smoothed out.

It was evening and the hot summer temperature had cooled a bit. The air naturally flowed from high pressure to low, forming a cool breeze.

A lot of elderly people grew vegetables on the roof of the tube-shaped apartment building. They scavenged wooden boards to build growing beds on the roof, filled them with soil, and picked up a load of mud from the banks of the Huangpu River each month as fertilizer. Almost every old person had their own small plot, and their vegetable crops flourished with the added nutrients.

Many elderly people did this, but it wasn't just the old. The entire Chinese nation was filled with wild farming maniacs. No matter where people went, they grew small vegetable gardens. Many of the elders in the tube-shaped building had previously lived in the countryside. Later, after they lost their land, they planted a few vegetables to scratch the itch.

Of course, Zong Yan wasn't lying on the ground amid the fragrance of the soil. To reach the small platform on the roof he'd nimbly climbed a bamboo pole like a scampering monkey.

On top of this small platform was installed the building's only solar water heater. Zong Yan avoided the water heater and lay down flat with his legs crossed. There was a dog's-tail straw stuck in his mouth.

The sky began to darken.

The view above him didn't exist. It hadn't existed since Zong Yan had begun high school.

He remembered very clearly that the parcel of land behind the tube-shaped building was acquired by a real estate company in his third year of junior high. For a month, machines rumbled all over doing demolition. By summer vacation before his first year of senior high, the structure was already taller than the three tube-shaped apartment buildings. When Zong Yan lay on the platform and looked up, his view was slightly blocked by the new building.

But right now, the only thing above Zong Yan was sky. The view was endless.

Then there were his clothes. He wasn't dressed in the school uniform of Qingyang High School, but a simple, ragged sack.

And his hair, which was suddenly incredibly long, was now a different shade, having changed to brown from black.

Zong Yan faintly remembered that he'd looked like this after using the Azathoth persona card.

But he didn't panic. He could tell that he was dreaming.

In your dreams you can be anything you want. Forget Azathoth, he could even be a Super Saiyan.

But maybe Zong Yan was sleepy. Right now he felt so lazy and empty-headed that he wasn't thinking about much of anything. It was one of the intriguing aftereffects of using the Azathoth card.

He wasn't sure how much time had passed. The setting sun disappeared from the horizon, the last glimmer of daylight was annihilated by the darkness, and the stars began to twinkle in the night sky.

Well, there weren't enough stars. There could be a few more.

In Zong Yan's dream world he was the absolute master. So, at the very moment this thought occurred to him, the sky was suddenly populated with stars blinking off and on.

"What are you thinking about?" A man's calm, low voice came from above him.

Zong Yan lifted his head, and long gray tendrils of hair drifted down like moonlight, blowing coolly against his face.