Time To Stop Smoking

At three o'clock in the morning, Ling Ran cranked the engine of his second-hand Volkswagen Jetta—still relatively new— and drove from Lower Groove Clinic to Yun Hua Hospital.

Ling Ran drove with the focus of a race car driver. On the road with a speed limit of fifteen miles per hour, Ling Ran made sure his speedometer was constantly, infinitesimally close to fifteen miles per hour.

He drove to the hospital at a moderate speed. By then, it was a quarter after three.

Ling Ran finally breathed a sigh of relief. After sending away Meng Xue and the others the day before, he worked on his research paper again. Because of it, he could only sleep at ten. He only managed to crawl out of his bed at three. If it was not because the roads being barely populated at dawn, allowing Ling Ran to speed, he would have been late.