Zhu Yun felt as though she had dreamed a very long dream — a dream that wound backward through time.

From the moment he told her “I love you,” back to the night they decided together what they were going to build, then further to the lakeside in summer, the swaying willow branches, the sticky heat of perspiration, the New Year’s Eve fireworks.

And the classes they had attended together, the cigarettes they had shared, the roads they had walked…

The tone of his voice when he invited her in. The cold smile he gave when he looked down at her.

Then that sweltering afternoon, the teacher calling roll at the gymnasium entrance in a hoarse, unrelenting shout —

“Class One, Number One — is Li Xun here?”

A voice answered from behind her —

“Here.”

The dream stopped there. She had no memory of anything before that moment, and felt no need for any — it was as though her life had simply begun with that single word.

Li Lan was found by chance, by a group of competition students passing through late at night.

Their team’s submission had run into a small technical problem and kept them working until well past midnight. On their way back to the hotel, they tried to take a shortcut through a side path — and the person at the front nearly tripped over something.

In the near-darkness, they made out a figure collapsed on the ground and were so frightened they could barely breathe.

They rushed Li Lan to the hospital. Her vital signs were extremely faint. She was suffering from severe hypothermia and had fallen into a deep, unresponsive coma.

The doctors couldn’t find any identification on her. They searched her belongings and found a phone. Once it was charged, the call history showed nothing but a single name: Li Xun.

By that point, Li Xun had been searching for Li Lan for over ten hours. He had gone to every place he could think of, and at the end had even appealed to the police — who declined on the grounds that she hadn’t been missing for twenty-four hours yet, and advised him to keep checking likely locations.

His emotions had been stretched to a breaking point. When he received the call and arrived at the hospital to find Li Lan barely clinging to life, he came completely undone.

He grabbed one of the students and demanded to know how Li Lan had ended up in that place, his expression so terrifying it looked as though he might tear someone apart. The student — first frightened, then furious — said: are you serious right now? We’re the ones who brought her here. We have a competition tomorrow and we’re still here at this hour. What is wrong with you? How on earth would we know how she got there?

They covered the ambulance costs themselves and left. Li Xun asked the doctor what Li Lan’s condition was. The doctor was noncommittal — said that generally speaking there shouldn’t be any danger to her life, but given that the patient was already seriously ill, her body was in an extremely weakened state, and they could not rule out sudden complications.

Li Xun left the hospital and went to look at the spot outside the venue where Li Lan had collapsed. It was already past seven, but in winter the sun rose late, and the past few days had been overcast; the world outside was still dim and grey.

To the front left of the administrative building stood a vending machine — shut down for the holiday, no one using it. Li Xun walked over, looked up, and noticed a small, unobtrusive security camera mounted above it.

The security guard on duty at the campus watchroom had just gotten out of bed and was scowling at the grim weather. The competition had pushed his rest schedule back, and he was in a foul mood about it.

He was about to wash up when a knock at the door startled him. He opened it to find a tall young man outside — face ashen, eyes threaded with red.

The guard was about to ask who he was, when the young man’s low voice said: I need yesterday’s security footage.

The guard bristled — where do you think you’re from, barging in like this, who do you think you are, where’s your teacher, let me call your —

He didn’t finish the sentence. A sudden pain exploded in his abdomen and he dropped to his knees.

I need yesterday’s security footage. Li Xun withdrew his foot and said it again.

The guard couldn’t stand. Li Xun simply sat down at the computer himself, and within moments had pulled up the previous day’s footage from outside the venue.

The monitor was washed out and grey, like a rag that had never been properly cleaned.

The guard was furious and felt he ought to do something about what had just happened — but he didn’t move, because some instinct told him this silent young man had already slipped somewhat beyond the reach of reason.

Inside, the competition was in progress.

It happened to be Fang Zhijing’s group presenting their demonstration. Down at the judges’ panel, Professor Lin sat in the center; he had formed a favorable impression of Fang Zhijing and was quietly praising him to the teacher beside him.

When Li Xun walked into the venue, no one noticed — no one except Fang Zhijing, who spotted him instantly. His speech cut off mid-sentence. He watched Li Xun drawing steadily closer and instinctively stepped back half a pace.

The same suffocating pressure Li Xun had brought with him two years ago had returned.

In that moment, Fang Zhijing forgot entirely that he was in the middle of a competition. His mind raced — had something been exposed? Had the woman told him?

Even so, it wouldn’t matter. There had been no third party present, no witnesses, nothing that could be proven. And in a hall full of people — what could Li Xun possibly do to him here?

With that thought, Fang Zhijing steadied himself and even turned to gesture to the support staff to prepare for the next segment.

In the few seconds that pause lasted, Li Xun had already stepped onto the stage. Fang Zhijing turned back around — and was met with darkness, as his left eye flooded, something gave way inside it, and a thick, viscous warmth began to run.

Then came the pain — a searing, bone-deep agony — and his legs buckled beneath him, and his trousers went wet.

He understood that something had gone very wrong, though not yet how wrong. He lay on the floor, still faintly conscious, his eye a field of red, the whole world shaking along with him, blood and sensation all tangled together. He wanted to scream, but fear had sealed his throat shut — the feeling of being left with no way out, no escape, was absolute.

After that, he knew nothing more.

The entire hall stood frozen in shock — until Professor Lin shot to his feet at the judges’ table and roared at the staff beside him: “What are you waiting for?! Restrain him — now!”

Zhu Yun didn’t learn what had happened until three days later.

Her mother sat in the armchair and narrated the events to her in an unhurried tone, sipping tea as she spoke. Because her mother’s manner was so light, Zhu Yun told herself inwardly that this wasn’t anything too serious.

Just a fight. He’d get a disciplinary mark. That would be the end of it.

If it came to it, he could even withdraw from school. It wasn’t the end of the world.

“A disciplinary mark?” Her mother heard this and gave a short, quiet laugh. Then she said, slowly: “Fang Zhijing’s left eye was removed.”

The cold swept through Zhu Yun from head to feet.

Her mother continued: “He certainly doesn’t pull his punches — a few blows and he had the man barely breathing.”

Zhu Yun couldn’t speak. She only shook her head, over and over, telling herself in the silence of her own mind — it will be all right. There must be a reason. He wouldn’t just, without warning, he wouldn’t—

Her mother made a small sound. “He was arrested on the spot. And I heard his sister died in the hospital yesterday. Well. What goes around comes around.”

A ringing filled Zhu Yun’s ears. “What did you say?”

“I said, what goes around comes around.”

Zhu Yun couldn’t tell anymore whether she was awake or dreaming. She turned and went upstairs. Her mother called after her: “Where are you going?” Zhu Yun didn’t answer, kept moving, went to her room to find her phone. She searched and searched and couldn’t find it. Her eyes went hot, her hands started shaking without her permission, and she rushed back downstairs and looked at her mother and said: “Where is my phone?”

Her mother sat holding her teacup, perfectly composed, watching her.

Zhu Yun saw that expression — and something broke open. “I’m asking you where my phone is!”

Her mother had never heard Zhu Yun speak to her in that voice before. She startled, and a few drops of tea spilled and scalded her hand. Her eyes went sharp.

“Zhu Yun, say that to me again — I dare you.”

That outburst had cracked something loose. Every feeling Zhu Yun had been holding came flooding out at once. She stared at her mother and said: “You told me to prepare materials for the company. You wanted to stall me, didn’t you.”

Her mother said coolly: “Zhu Yun, don’t look at me like that. I didn’t send him out to hurt anyone. This has nothing to do with you or me. He did this himself.”

Zhu Yun went to the front door.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

She pulled her coat off the hook and threw it over her shoulders.

“He’s been detained — where do you think you’ll find him? This has gotten very serious now. Fang Zhijing’s family is not without influence. Their child has lost an eye — do you think they’ll let this go?!”

Zhu Yun heard none of it. There was only one thought in her mind — she had to see him.

The moment she pushed the door open, Zhu Guangyi came in from outside. Without a word, he pushed her back inside and shut the door behind him.

“Let me out!”

“You’re not going anywhere.” Zhu Guangyi’s voice was firm and low. “Until this matter is resolved, you stay home. That is final.”

Zhu Yun made for the door again. Zhu Guangyi’s hand swung out and struck her across the face.

“Haven’t you caused enough trouble already?!”

It was the first time Zhu Guangyi had ever hit Zhu Yun.

They were an educated family. No matter how heated the arguments had become, neither parent had ever raised a hand against her. Her mother, watching from the side, came forward involuntarily and pulled Zhu Yun away from him. “You can say what you need to say,” she snapped at Zhu Guangyi. “Don’t hit her.”

Zhu Guangyi’s expression was hard and unyielding. He turned on Zhu Yun. “You’re not a child anymore. Can you not tell the weight of what you’re dealing with? Do you think this is nothing?! That young man has lost an eye. His future is destroyed. And you’re here defending the one who did it?!”

Zhu Yun shouted: “Whether Fang Zhijing is blind or dead has nothing to do with me!”

Zhu Guangyi hit her again. Her mother didn’t move fast enough. Zhu Yun took it fully. Her skin was fair and sensitive; both strikes had left half her face swollen. Her eyes showed the strain of held-back blood — but she held herself upright and refused to let the tears come.

“And what about his future?” She raised her eyes, their redness fierce and direct. “He is still a student too. Why has no one — not one person — thought about what happens to him?”

Zhu Guangyi’s voice cracked into a shout: “After what he’s done, what future does he deserve?!”

Zhu Yun shook her head. “You’re wrong.” Her voice dropped, very quiet. “Everyone in this room has a future worth less than his. Including me.”

Zhu Guangyi was incensed by her gaze alone. “What is that supposed to mean?!”

Her mother joined in from the side. “Zhu Yun, how can you be so disobedient. Your father and I sacrificed everything to raise you, and this is how you repay us — you can’t even tell right from wrong.”

Zhu Yun turned to her. “I’ve done plenty of disobedient things. I smoke, for instance. Did you know that?”

Her mother’s expression went cold. “What did you say?”

Zhu Yun’s eyes didn’t waver. She had nothing left to protect.

“Do you want to know when I started? The same day you and Fang Zhijing drove Liu Xiaoyan away.”

Her mother went rigid.

She hadn’t been prepared for this. Something buried that far back — and Zhu Yun had been carrying it all this time.

Zhu Yun’s voice shook with the force of someone throwing everything down at once. Through clenched teeth, she said: “So even if Li Xun had killed Fang Zhijing, I would only applaud.”

Her mother was struck speechless for the first time — truly, completely, without an answer.

Zhu Guangyi had heard enough. He didn’t bother arguing further. He seized her by the arm and hauled her toward the stairs. Zhu Yun struggled with everything she had, but she was no match for him. He shoved her into her room. “You stay in there and think about what you’ve done!” Her mother followed quickly. “Don’t lock the door — I’ll stay in with her.”

Zhu Yun was confined for four days.

Her mother stayed with her every one of those four days — genuinely, without leaving.

Zhu Yun ate nothing. She tried every method she could think of to get out, but except at mealtimes, Zhu Guangyi would not open the door.

At the very end, Zhu Yun even moved toward the window with the intention of jumping. Her mother didn’t stop her. She sat in the chair and watched.

After everything they had endured together in that room, her mother’s eyes carried a deep, bone-weary exhaustion.

She said: Zhu Yun, I didn’t know you still held on to what happened back then. But everything your mother has done has been for your sake. If you truly believe that seeing that young man is worth making your father and me suffer for the rest of our lives — then jump.

Her mother said it with tears on her face.

Zhu Yun finally broke. She sank to the floor and wept.

It seemed as though the whole world had someone fighting for it — everyone except him.

Zhu Yun felt as though she had dreamed a very long dream — a dream that wound backward through time.

By the end of it, she thought the dream was too beautiful to have been hers at all.

The aftermath of what Li Xun had done spread far and wide.

When Fang Zhijing learned of Li Lan’s death, he grasped the full gravity of the situation. Regarding the security footage, he insisted that Li Lan had only approached him to ask about the venue’s preparations — that he had kindly told her what she needed to know, and that she herself had chosen not to go inside, out of concern for her brother. He held to this account without deviation.

Fang Zhijing’s parents both held positions in government institutions. During the period before formal charges were filed, they mobilized every resource available to them to shape public opinion. A reporter obtained information from some unnamed source and published an account of a series of incidents involving Li Xun throughout his time at the university.

Contemptuous of authority. Bullying classmates. Cultivating relationships with the professor’s daughter for personal gain…

Even his remark about preferring guileless women made the list.

The media constructed the image of him with ease — an opportunist, eaten through with envy, using those around him to climb. Public opinion surged in one direction and one direction only.

Time itself seemed to distort.

For a long stretch of days, Zhu Yun was afraid to fall asleep. When sleep finally came, she was afraid to open her eyes when she woke.

As though opening her eyes would mean looking straight into hell.

Li Xun’s sentence came down quickly. Intentional assault causing grievous bodily harm and permanent disability. The evidence was unambiguous. And he showed not a single trace of remorse — when the judge asked why he had struck with such force, he said only: “Because he deserved it.”

First instance verdict: eight years’ imprisonment.

Li Xun did not appeal.

Zhu Yun’s health deteriorated. Her parents were not, at first, deeply alarmed — they knew Zhu Yun had always been physically resilient, and believed she would recover once enough time had passed.

Then the semester resumed, more than a month later, and Zhu Yun still couldn’t get out of bed.

Her mother grew genuinely frightened. She took her to a Western medicine doctor, but nothing helped; the doctor said the root cause was psychological. She took her to a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, who took her pulse, studied her face carefully, and gestured to a point just above Zhu Yun’s brow. He said to her mother: “The girl’s vital energy has withdrawn to here.” He moved his hand up half an inch. “At this level, it becomes clinical depression.” Another half inch. “At this level, nine out of ten patients will attempt to take their own life.”

Her mother arranged for her to take a leave of absence from school, and did not leave her side.

Within one month, Zhu Yun lost over ten pounds. She lay in bed like a creature that had been startled past recovery — the faintest sound made her break into a cold sweat.

Her mother sat at the edge of the bed and watched this person her daughter had become, and said quietly: “Zhu Yun, every great illness strips away one bad habit. You must take this as a lesson.”

Zhu Yun lay with her face buried against the pillow.

“I…”

Her mother leaned in. “What?”

Zhu Yun said, in a voice barely loud enough to exist: “I knew he had a bad temper… that he was easy to provoke.”

Every sentence cost her something to say.

“He made mistakes. He liked to be forceful about things. He never softened his words…”

Zhu Yun lifted her head from the pillow, her eyes raw and red.

“But was it this much?” She looked at her mother, and seemed to be asking through her something larger — asking everyone. “Do you really believe what he did warranted this? That this is what had to happen to him?”

Her mother held her gaze for a long moment, then answered: “That question belongs to the people who hated him.”

Zhu Yun could not accept it.

“Every choice was his,” her mother said. “He made his own decisions. I told you from the beginning — I know how to read people. That one was always going to reach a breaking point. You’ve been this way your whole life — too easily drawn to people who live dangerously outside the lines, and in the end it’s always you who gets hurt.”

Her mother stood. At the door, she added: “Zhu Yun, you know the position your father is in. Your association with that young man has already created difficulties for him. Don’t only think about yourself. And don’t torture yourself over this — everyone does reckless things when they’re young. Once it’s behind you, you turn the page and keep going.”

Turn the page.

And then what.

Who do you leave behind in the book.

She had a knot in her heart that wouldn’t loosen.

“She has to go abroad this year,” Zhu Guangyi told his wife. “She can’t stay here. She needs a different environment.”

Zhu Yun drifted through the weeks that followed in a daze. Her mother gave her time — more than enough of it — without pressure, without persuasion.

Whatever she chose to accept or not accept, the outcome had already been decided.

Zhu Yun’s body continued to decline. It began with her sleep, and slowly spread to affect her internal organs, her skin. A widespread rash broke out across her body that no medication could touch.

Ren Di and Fu Yizhuo both called. Whatever they said, she couldn’t hold onto it by the next day.

The damage that had been done to her ran too deep.

There were stretches of time when Zhu Yun genuinely believed she might not be able to hold on.

In the end, what rescued her was a dream.

In it, she stood outside an iron railing, and far across the distance she could see a figure — hair dyed in a shock of messy gold, both hands in his pockets, standing in the middle of a sports field, smiling faintly, completely still.

Then, after a long time, a violent gust swept through the world — the grass across the football pitch thrashed and reeled like something possessed.

He still didn’t move.

The sky looked like the end of everything.

She woke at that moment.

It was the borderline between night and dawn. The silence around her was absolute.

That dream gave her access to something she could only call an everlasting love — or, to put it another way, an everlasting freedom.

From that point on, she gradually stopped being afraid.

Four months later, the day before she left the country, Zhu Yun went back to campus one final time.

The campus was peaceful. Everything was as it had always been.

She saw only Gao Jianhong. He had kept the company running — but he had abandoned the project Li Xun had built, pivoted to e-commerce, and brought in a new round of investors through the consultant they had met before.

“You can’t blame me,” Gao Jianhong said to her.

Zhu Yun said nothing. She turned to leave. Gao Jianhong suddenly reached out and caught her arm, and his voice broke into something heated.

“Zhu Yun, you cannot blame me. I gave up everything. Guaranteed postgraduate placement, studying abroad, every recommendation the school offered me — all of it, gone, for this company! And what did he do? What did he actually do? Zhu Yun — three years. When did he ever make a decision with anyone else in mind?!”

Zhu Yun looked at him. She said quietly: “Li Xun’s remark about preferring guileless women — he only ever said it in front of the practice lab members. How did the media find out about it?”

Gao Jianhong’s expression paused for just a beat. Then he said, evenly: “Do you have any idea how many people he had turned against him over the years?”

Zhu Yun nodded once. She turned and walked away.

“Zhu Yun!” Gao Jianhong called after her. “You cannot hold every person to the same standard you hold yourself to when it comes to him!”

She didn’t stop, not for a single step.

There was something she had once heard, or read, or known.

All things are closest to what they truly are at the very beginning. The further along they go, the more they drift from it.

The plane gathered speed in a brief rush and climbed into the sky.

“Ma’am — would you like a tissue?” A flight attendant noticed Zhu Yun’s tears and asked softly.

Zhu Yun shook her head.

She sat quietly and looked out the small window at the sky stretched endlessly above, the layers of cloud packed dense below.

In the memories she carried, the pain and the joy were both beyond counting.

Some moments, revisited too many times, had begun to lose their solidity — blurring at the edges like reflections in water, easily dispersed by any passing wind.

But one had stayed firm through everything. His parting words — I love you — had survived every ordeal, every collision with the world, and remained clear. Enough to stand witness to all that had been, enough to offer some comfort to everything she had given up without looking back.

— End of Part One: The Wasteland Garden —