It was a rainy evening, the cold wind whipping up fallen leaves and wreaking havoc across the city. I stood at the entrance of the municipal maternity hospital with Leyao, sharing an umbrella. In the surging crowds, her face looked a little pale as she gazed at me.

"Zhaoyang, I'm pregnant."

I was stunned for a moment, then glared at her and said, "Go find whoever got you pregnant! Why did you call me out here?"

"I've only slept with one man this past year, who else could I look for but you?"

"If I said I've only slept with one woman this past year, would you believe me?"

"Zhaoyang, can you call yourself a man?"

"We're all just out to have fun. Don't try to pin this on me if you've gotten yourself into trouble. If you want me to take responsibility, show me some proof. Don't just make baseless accusations. Who'd be happy to randomly become a father?"

Leyao was silent for a while before saying to me, "I've already gotten rid of the child, so where's the proof?"

I grew angry: "Do you think I'm a sucker? You got rid of the child, and then..." I raised my hand, then sighed in frustration. "Then you tell me the child is mine, Zhaoyang's. Are you naively honest or am I really stupid? ...Leyao, we're adults. Can we handle this with some decency?"

Leyao bit her lip and looked at me. After a long pause, she said, "So you're unwilling to take responsibility? Fine, tomorrow I'll go to your company..."

"Damn it!" I snapped angrily.

Leyao clenched her lips tightly as she watched me. I felt she was just putting on an act. We had met at a bar, had a one night stand, and now this woman who frequented bars was claiming I was the only man she'd slept with all year. As if I would believe that! I was no fool.

I didn't want to continue tangling with her. I took out my wallet and handed her all the 100 yuan notes inside. "You just want money, right? Here, take it. Don't bother me again!"

Without a word or further hassling me, Leyao simply nodded, turned around, and walked back towards the hospital under her umbrella, as if she still had some unpaid fees to take care of...

Watching her lonely back disappear into the rain, I suddenly felt an indescribable emotion. Although I didn't believe the child was mine, and I was extremely annoyed by her, I also felt her life must be difficult right now. Otherwise, she wouldn't be trying to deceive me like this.

I stood silently for a long while before finally calling out to stop her, "Wait..."

Leyao turned back to look at me.

I took out a bank card from my wallet and handed it to her. "You can overdraw some money from this card. You just had surgery, buy yourself some supplements and take care of your health."

But Leyao didn't take it. "No need...Seeing that you're willing to take responsibility is my purpose in finding you. I didn't want to be carelessly slept with and then carelessly get pregnant!"

...

At the bar, I drank alone while waiting for Fangyuan, my only true friend and colleague in this city.

From the first day I came to this bar, I had seen far too many lonely women and empty men here, drinking all kinds of alcohol, either silent or with eyes full of lust, searching for something called "a life of dissipation."

In fact, when we shed our physical selves in the day and let our souls lose themselves in this dazzling scene, we were already leading dissipated lives.

I couldn't remember when it started, but I began treating this place as where I belonged. I liked the women gyrating their hips, the swaying lights, the colorful liquors, the mixture of perfumes and tobacco, the dissipated lives here. Amidst it all, I etched my messy past onto a tombstone.

Lighting a cigarette, I peeled off the foil wrap and held it up before my eyes. Watching the flickering lights through it, my body swayed along, the refracted lights making me feel as if I was glimpsing a kind of decadent decay! I couldn't help but become engrossed!

...

Fangyuan snatched away the foil wrap in my hand, abruptly returning my world back into clear focus.

"What's the big emergency that you called me out for?" Fangyuan put down his briefcase and took a cigarette from my pack to light up for himself.

"Lend me some money, I got f*cked over!"

"Knocked up another girl?" Fangyuan said, unsurprised.

"F*ck you! This time I really got cheated..."

"Why do you need to know so many damn details?"

"Every time I lend you thousands, shouldn't I at least know who the hell swindled my money?"

"Leyao." I said angrily, lighting up a cigarette.

"That lingerie model?"

"That's the bitch. Our circle is too messy. She said I was the only man she slept with all year. Do you believe that? If it happened to you, would you believe it?" I slammed the table in agitation, making it rattle noisily.

"This kind of thing would never happen to me. Besides, she wouldn't scam you out of just a few thousand, right? Last month, our department store's promotional posters were full of her photos, she made over 10,000 just from the modeling fee..."

I snorted contemptuously, interrupting Fangyuan. "Do you see how she spends usually? 10,000 yuan wouldn't even last her a month. Now she's gotten into trouble playing around and has no money left to clean up the mess, so she thought of me, her cheap f*ck buddy...I'm so pathetic, I shouldn't have been kindhearted and introduced her to our company. I didn't pay her less, now she's trying to scam me instead. Does she still have any professional conscience left!"

But Fangyuan ignored my anger and asked in a low voice, "Did you use protection when you slept with her?"

I thought back hard, only remembering I had been nearly blackout drunk, and couldn't recall if I wore a condom or not. After a long pause, I said, "I did...otherwise why would I say I got scammed!"

Fangyuan looked at me suspiciously for a while before sighing, "Zhaoyang, we've been friends for almost ten years. Sometimes I really want to advise you - I know your breakup with Jianwei hit you hard, but it's been two years. You don't need to torment yourself like this...Youth waits for no one. Find a nice girlfriend and settle down properly, okay?"

When Jianwei's name was brought up again, I unconsciously froze for a bit before saying, "Don't mess with my business, I'm doing great!"

"But not without troubles, right?"

...

Fangyuan lectured me for a long time as I impatiently listened for just as long. In the end, he left with a "You can't turn a broken man around" but forgot about my borrowing money from him.

Luckily, after two years of being a bar regular and often bringing friends here to spend money, I was fairly familiar with the owner. So my bar tab was put on my account for now.

Stepping out of the bar, I walked along the rain-drenched streets holding an umbrella, truly experiencing what it meant to be all alone in the world. After struggling in this city for two years, what I had harvested was endless emptiness and loneliness. To escape from this poisonous emptiness and loneliness, I had to put on a face mask of shame and live on behind it. With this mask, I could calmly live a life of self-indulgence.

But no matter how I struggled on the edge of agony, she would never come back!

...

After wandering aimlessly for several bus stops drowned in melancholy, I finally made it back to the small district where I lived. It was an old district, so old it didn't even have a property management office. When I had first moved here, the aunties in the district told me it was built in the early 1990s. After enduring the erosion of time, every building looked so dilapidated, yet they crowded against each other tightly, as if afraid of loneliness. So it seemed each building had come alive, and I imagined they would exchange whispers in the dead of night to console each other's decades of solitude.

With an unlit cigarette in my mouth, I took out my keys and walked towards the building I lived in. It was the only one in the district that had ivy climbing up, so every summer the south facing wall would become very green. If these buildings had genders, then this one was undoubtedly a woman - a cold, aloof woman, who often made people feel sad for her!

...

To my surprise, parked below this shabby building was a red Audi Q7. As far as I knew, in the two years I'd lived here, cars above 500,000 yuan had never once appeared in this district before.

Without thinking too much about it, I whistled as I walked up to my unit. But when I reached the top floor, I was shocked to find my door slightly ajar. I clearly remembered locking it when I went out. Instinctively thinking a burglar had broken in, I paused to steady my mind, then remembered I hadn't paid the landlord Lao Li rent for two months. Most likely it was Lao Li coming to dun rent.

Pushing the door open, I saw Lao Li and an unfamiliar woman sitting on the sofa, with a set of Audi Q7 car keys on the coffee table - undoubtedly belonging to the Q7 parked downstairs.

A question immediately flashed through my mind: What magic did this worldly landlord use to bring such a noble, untouchable white lotus of a woman to this simple room? This really left me quite puzzled!...