The rain in Bruges came out of nowhere.
Chen Yu stood in a narrow cobblestone alley, watching the sky shift from gray-white to iron blue. He figured he was probably the unluckiest backpacker in all of Europe.
Three days ago, his wallet had been stolen in Barcelona. Two days ago, he had stepped into a puddle of unknown origin in Paris and twisted his ankle. Yesterday, he had eaten a serving of mussels in Brussels advertised as having “traditional flavor,” only to sit on the toilet until his legs went numb.
Now he was standing in some alley in Bruges, Belgium, with exactly enough money left to buy either a budget-airline ticket home or three days’ worth of food.
One or the other.
Chen Yu chose three days of food.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go home. It was just that nothing was waiting for him there anyway. No job was waiting for him, no one was waiting for him, and even his rent wasn’t due until the end of the month. He was twenty-five, with no parents, not many friends, and plenty of savings—or, more precisely, just enough to let him drift around like this for several years without quite dying.
He thought that was pretty good.
The rain fell harder and harder. Chen Yu pulled his jacket zipper up to his chin and walked deeper into the alley. In a place like Bruges, tourists scattered as soon as it rained, leaving only locals and fearless Asian backpackers on the streets. He clearly belonged to the latter group.
At the end of the alley was an open-air flea market. Most of the vendors had already started packing up, leaving only a few stubborn old men guarding their junk. Chen Yu’s gaze passed over a pile of rusted silverware, several yellowed French books, and a headless-nosed statue of the Virgin Mary before finally stopping at a stall in the corner.
The vendor was a bald old man with more beard than hair. He was using a piece of oilcloth to cover his goods.
Through a gap in the oilcloth, Chen Yu saw a lamp.
A brass oil lamp.
It wasn’t large, about the length of a hand. Its design vaguely resembled a Western medieval pressure lantern, but not quite. Engraved on the body was a totem: a cloaked humanoid figure holding a mass of flames, surrounded by several angels with outspread wings. The carving was crude, and the copper surface had oxidized green. It looked like something that had lain forgotten in an attic for decades.
But Chen Yu’s eyes lit up.
Not because he thought the thing was worth anything. Quite the opposite—the thing was obviously worthless. It was badly oxidized, poorly made, and decorated with a bizarre mishmash of imagery. But precisely because it was worthless, there was room to haggle. And in Chen Yu’s eyes, anything with room to haggle was a good thing.
He squatted down and spoke in a deliberately casual tone.
“How much for this?”
The bald old man glanced at him and held up five fingers.
“Fifty euros?” Chen Yu pulled a face that said, You’ve got to be kidding me.
The old man shook his head and held up five fingers again.
“Five hundred?”
The old man nodded.
Chen Yu stood up and turned to leave.
After three steps, he heard a sigh behind him. He took two more steps, and the sigh turned into a cough. On his seventh step, the old man shouted in heavily accented English, “Two hundred.”
Chen Yu stopped, but didn’t turn around.
“Fifty.”
“One fifty.”
“Fifty.”
“One hundred! Lowest I’ll go!”
Chen Yu turned around, wearing an expression of sincere regret. “I’ve only got fifty on me.”
That was a lie. He had eighty-three euros on him. But when it came to being a person, you had to save something for food.
The old man glared at him, as if trying to decide whether this Asian youngster was genuinely poor or merely pretending. At last, he muttered something, flipped up the oilcloth, and handed over the brass lamp.
“Fifty. Take it.”
Chen Yu took the lamp, pulled out fifty euros, and did the math in his head—thirty-three euros left, enough for two and a half days of food. Worth it.
He turned the brass lamp over and examined its bottom. There were no markings at all. He scraped at the oxidized layer with a fingernail, revealing the dull copper color underneath. The cloaked figure engraved on the lamp’s body looked especially clear beneath the washing rain. The flame had been carved deepest, as if whoever made it had applied particular force to that part.
Chen Yu stuffed the lamp into the side pocket of his backpack and zipped it shut.
The rain was still falling.
He stood at the mouth of the alley, watching pedestrians hurry past on the opposite street, and suddenly felt that this trip wasn’t all that interesting after all.
It wasn’t that the scenery was bad. Bruges was beautiful, with its canals, bell tower, and medieval houses—everything a postcard ought to have. But once you’d seen it, you’d seen it. Once you’d taken the pictures, you’d taken the pictures. And then what?
Then he would return to that empty rented apartment and continue living those not-too-bad, not-too-good days.
Chen Yu thought about it and decided that “not too bad, not too good” was probably the summary of his life. Things weren’t miserable enough to give him the drive to turn his life around; they weren’t good enough for him to have anything worth protecting, either. He simply lived in that neither-here-nor-there state, like a cup of warm water left sitting too long—not hot enough to burn your mouth, not refreshing enough to quench your thirst.
He sighed and walked toward the bus stop.
The bus stop stood beside a canal, its sign blurred by the rain. Chen Yu stared at it for a long while and more or less figured out that the next bus would arrive in ten minutes. He set his backpack by his feet, leaned against the sign, and pulled the brass lamp from his pocket.
Rainwater ran down the patterns on the lamp’s body, over the outline of the cloaked figure and the angels’ wings, then dripped from the bottom.
Chen Yu stared at the flame carved into the copper surface and suddenly chuckled.
“If only you were Aladdin’s lamp,” he muttered to himself. “I’d make a wish to make my life a little more interesting.”
He put the lamp back in his backpack.
Ten minutes later, the bus arrived.
More precisely, it came barreling in.
When Chen Yu looked back on this moment later, his memory was fractured. He remembered standing up. He remembered the backpack strap hanging over his shoulder. He remembered the bus’s headlights shining with a piercing glare through the curtain of rain. Then he heard the tires scream against the slick pavement and saw the bus lurch crookedly onto the sidewalk like a rampaging beast gone out of control.
He even had time for one thought.
Huh. Guess my life really did just get interesting.
Then the world went black.