The Great Worm Lich

When Sheila hooked a finger in front of Zhang Lisheng as a seductive gesture, the young man inadvertently saw a vaguely familiar young white man wearing wide black-rimmed glasses, black beach pants, and a black T-shirt from the corner of his eye. With a happy expression, that person walked across the distance that a group of companions accompanied.

The instant Zhang Lisheng saw that young black-shirted man, that kind of palpitating intuition that rarely appeared ever since his strength got stronger, suddenly appeared in his heart. His entire body froze, causing him to clench his fists tight as he turned his head abruptly to look. However, the young black-shirted man had already long disappeared among the crowds of people.

When Sheila saw that something was not right with Zhang Lisheng’s appearance, she immediately stopped her joke obediently while Trish, who was standing by her side, whispered, “What’s wrong, Lisheng?”

“It’s nothing. I seem to have seen an ‘old friend’ but I can’t remember who it is.” Unable to explain his ‘intuition’, Zhang Lisheng secretly became vigilant but his face resumed his usual calm look instead. “Speaking of relaxing, I’ve already relaxed for a long time in New York already…”

“But this is Boston! Let’s go, baby, the first thing I’ll do is to bring you back to college to change your clothes,” Tina interrupted her boyfriend’s words and pulled his hand to walk out of the airport.

“Change my clothes? I just changed these clothes in the morning though…” Puzzled, Zhang Lisheng followed his girlfriend, Sheila, and Trish, out of the Boston Logan International Airport.

The outdoor sun was bright with no clouds in sight. The weather made it feel as though it was as hot as summer. Hurrying but yet possessing a graceful and attractive demeanor that turned heads, the three girls headed down the stairs and took the young man to a red long Cadillac SUV at the parking lot.

Tina opened the door of the driver’s seat directly with her fingerprints. Zhang Lisheng followed and entered the passenger seat before plodding away and asking, “Tina, you haven’t told me why I need to change clothes even though I’ve just arrived in Boston.”

“Two reasons. First, I’ve bought a set of couple shirts with Harvard’s mascot designs for you and walking it around the university campus under the sun has always been my long-cherished wish; second, after I’ve slept with you in the university dorm, I’ve fallen in love with this feeling, and I want to relive this old dream again today. Are you satisfied with my explanation, baby?” Tina placed her hand on the young man’s thigh and gently caressed it slowly moving her hand upward all the way to the end as she answered softly.

“Oh, girl! Please don’t deliberately make such erotic actions in front of your love rivals. Hurry and drive! Trish and I still have dates in the afternoon, and you’ll have plenty of time to make love later!” When Sheila saw her friend doing such steamy actions from the back seat of the car, she shoved the front seat and shouted loudly.

“Alright, dear Sheila! Put on your seat belt!” Tina turned and pulled a funny face at Sheila. Without warning, she started the car and made a sharp turn, causing her friend to be almost tossed around as she drove up towards the spacious streets of Boston.

The SUV drove in the middle of the crowds. When it was speeding on a riverside road, Tina pressed a button on the center console, which immediately retracted the car roof, turning the SUV into a large hardtop convertible car.

Three beautiful seductive girls of different demeanor plus an eye-catching remodeled luxury car soon attracted a series of whistling sounds from the pedestrians and the cars next to them.

“Dear Tina, play the song Cowboy Girl, and I’ll drop the felony charge of how you almost threw me out of the window just now! Otherwise, I’ll report to the police during your ‘most important moment’!” Sheila shouted as she excitedly took four well-prepared straw hats of different colors from the rear storage box and put it on the heads of her two best friends and Zhang Lisheng.

“Sheila, this is honestly the most powerful threat you have ever said. Tina will definitely give in!” Upon hearing this, Trish could not help but chuckle. Before the girl could even finish her sentence, a beautiful guitar melody had already resonated from the car.

Accompanied by music, the cheers were even more constant when the car slowly drove past the Charles River amidst the cooling and comfortable water vapor.

“Do you find it to be noisy, baby?” Dancing unconsciously along with the music on the road, Tina asked Zhang Lisheng.

“No, I just feel like I’m a character in a movie. This time, it’s not a fantasy horror movie, but a teen flick instead.” Even though Zhang Lisheng was not used to this kind of limelight, he also knew that it was best not to be a bummer now, so he answered with a smile.

“Is that so?” Tina suddenly slowed down and turned to her side to kiss the young man on the lips before saying affectionately, “I’m glad you like it. I love you, baby.”

“Me too, Tina, but we’re in the bustling section of downtown Boston now! There should be a lot of police patrolling here. I really don’t wish to kill them just because you’re charged with reckless driving.” Zhang Lisheng felt a sudden sweetness in his mouth. Stunned, he remarked.

“Did you hear that, Tina? It may be just a little joke if some other people uttered this sentence, but your boyfriend can really do it. For the sake of not turning Boston into a second Tokyo, you better focus on your driving!” The instant the young man’s words left his mouth, Sheila chimed in, not before throwing a seductive look at a handsome, strong, young white fellow by the roadside.

At this time, the SUV just so happened to pass by the famous giant performance stage surrounded by lawns and zonal riverside parks in Boston.

Several hot school bands were standing by the sides of the stage as they showed their musical talent to their hearts’ content to the audience cheering for them below.

After teasing her best friend, Sheila swept her gaze across the bands and saw an open thick hardcover book that had a rugby ball placed on it surrounded by a mid-long hair middle-aged man wearing a round hat and a huge bulldog on the background cloth on the stage. Without warning, she sighed, “Our mascot looks just as bad as this rugby school team. Lisheng, if Professor Steven hadn’t kidnapped you to Stanford in the first place, you’d have definitely come to Harvard because of Tina, and if that was the case, the kids in Yale would have a great lesson already.”

“What does my studying at Harvard have anything to do with Yale?” Zhang Lisheng asked casually. Inadvertently, he also shifted his gaze onto the huge background cloth on the stage, and he could feel a sudden jolt in his heart. At this time, Sheila’s explanation began to resound. “Harvard students hate Yale students who always like to assume airs the most. If you had entered Harvard, other than polo, football, and basketball, Yale students would have only tears left in all the sports that strong physical fitness can win like rowing, track and field, boxing, rugby, and so on…”

“What do you mean by ‘all the sports that strong physical fitness can win’? Sheila, I’m a Ph.D. graduate in biology at Stanford. The way you described me felt as though I was some sort of a simple-minded, muscle-bounded fellow.” The car sped across, but Zhang Lisheng still had his eyes locked onto the background cloth of the stage as he replied casually. “Besides, I don’t have the time to take part in those boring competitive sports.”

“What are you looking at, Lisheng?” When Trish saw how the young man was staring at her direction while bantering with Sheila, colors began to creep on her face as she ran her fingers through her hair awkwardly and asked after a moment of hesitation.

“I’m looking at the background of the riverside stage. The man wearing a cap, the bulldog, and the thick book don’t seem like a random drawing to me. There must be some underlying meaning in it,” the young man answered in a lower voice as he looked beyond the girl at the drawing of a book and a rugby ball.

“Of course it’s not a random drawing. The cap-wearing man is John Harvard, the unpleasant Puritan mascot of Harvard University. The bulldog, on the other hand, is the Yale University’s mascot, which is also the only thing that the Yales can flaunt in front of Harvard; as for the hardbound book, it’s an association called the ‘Truth Society’ that has suddenly become popular in a well-known US school on the east coast in the past year or two. It’s like fraternities and sororities in universities, but it allows both men and women to join. Tomorrow, the rescheduled NCAA Honey Bowl quarter-final will take place at Harvard Stadium, and our opponent is Yale University. Just imagine, a football game in September with a temperature above 30 degrees, and our opponent is our eternal enemy. That kind of heat is really crazy! For this reason, I guess that the performance on the riverside stage just now may be a concert jointly organized by the two universities with the purpose of easing the atmosphere. You know, baby, everyone here is a civilized person, so we can’t just show too much blatant hatred.”

“Hatred…” Zhang Lisheng looked at the girl’s slightly excited expression with a dumbstruck expression. “Sheila, it’s just picking a university to study; you may enter Harvard and you may enter Yale too. Do you really have to bring ‘hatred’ into this?”

“Oi, Stanford student!” Sheila raised a finger and pointed at the young man and said with a curled mouth, “When you guys entered the ‘Honey Bowl’ as a guest last time and played a game of ‘Stanford that is equal to Harvard plus MIT’, you guys didn’t have such a magnanimous air as you have right now!”

Tina, who was driving the car by the side, chimed in and told her best friend, “Sheila dear, can you please stop being crazy?”

She reached out a free hand and patted her boyfriend’s thigh. “Baby, this is the US’ traditional university culture. It has always been like this for the past hundred years.”

“Is that so?” Zhang Lisheng turned his head and shrugged. “But in my opinion, students from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are all Earthlings, so it’s time for us to abandon tradition and unite!”

The three girls in the car burst out laughing right away. In this relaxed atmosphere, the car continued to speed forward, passed through a few blocks, and finally arrived in front of a classical building that was still decorated by sculptures.

“Baby, we’ve reached Harvard,” Tina got down from the car and announced with a tinge of pride in her voice as though waiting for her boyfriend to gasp in admiration.

However, Zhang Lisheng stared at the crowds outside the car and said instead, “Oh, this is quite a nice campus and house. I can say that it is perfect other than the large volume of people that hugely resembles a flea market.”

“It’s the day before the Honey Bowl’s final battle between Harvard and Yale today, so many students from other universities and Boston citizens will come here to join in the fun. There will be even more people tonight,” Tina laughed and explained. “We won’t be able to get in by driving, so we can only walk now, baby.”