The auntie gave him a mildly reproachful look as she said this.

“Luxiao — and I don’t mean to scold you — but is there anything you can’t just talk about calmly? That young woman traveled all this way to find you, and look at you, you’ve gone and driven her off again. What are you going to do with yourself?”

Lin Luxiao curved his lips in a faint, sardonic smile, turning an unlit cigarette between his fingers. “What did she say to you?”

The auntie waved her hand. What could she have said, really?

Most of the unit was made up of young soldiers barely in their twenties — full of spirit but mostly single. The family quarters rarely had anyone staying in them for more than a few days out of the year, so Nan Chu’s arrival had actually pleased her. At least there was someone to keep her company.

The girl didn’t talk much, but she didn’t leave you feeling cold either. If you took the initiative to chat, she’d sit with you for a while. If you were quiet, she’d quietly sit off to the side reading her Buddhist scriptures.

That reminded the auntie. “Oh, right — she believes in Buddhism, doesn’t she? A young girl like her, and yet she has such a peaceful spirit. Nothing like Zhao Guo’s girlfriend — every time that one comes through, she shuts the door and blasts music so loud it shakes the walls. I’m an old woman with a bad heart. I’ve told her several times and she still won’t listen.”

Lin Luxiao had his head bowed, turning the cigarette back and forth in his hands, lost in thought.

What the auntie had chatted with Nan Chu about most was her own son — the boy up north attending university. The moment she mentioned her son, the auntie’s eyes lit up with a particular brightness, though she complained about him for being lazy and gluttonous whenever he was around. The truth was, once he was gone, she missed him terribly.

And then the auntie glanced over at Lin Luxiao. “She talked about you the most.”

“What?”

His voice came out hoarse. It took him a long moment to register what she’d said.

“She asked me whether you were doing well here, whether you’d ever been sick, whether you’d seen a doctor when you needed to, whether the food and climate agreed with you. I couldn’t really answer any of it.”

The truth was, since their reunion, both of them had been so busy squaring off against each other that neither had thought to ask: How was this past year for you?

Perhaps it wasn’t forgetting.

Perhaps they both already knew the answer was not well — and simply needed to hear it confirmed by someone else.

In the second week after he’d first arrived here.

Lin Luxiao had come down with a high fever. It was winter then too, with a heavy snowfall imminent. He lay in the sick bay in a haze, and all he could see behind his closed eyes was Nan Chu’s face — a face that could shift from coy to sulky to joyful in a breath.

Her curled up on the sofa, teasing him with a coy “Commander.”

Her frowning with genuine seriousness and calling him “Commander” when she was angry.

Her breathless and flushed, calling him “Commander” in bed.

And then that morning, still half-asleep, turning into a small lion roaring “Commander” with impatient irritation when he tried to wake her.

It was always Commander, Commander, Commander.

Even at the very end.

Even then, she had said: “Commander, let’s break up.”

His fever-clouded mind had been a blur to begin with, and her voice echoed through it like something that had taken root and refused to leave — every repetition another layer of torment, as if he were about to come apart. It was the kind of pain that could kill.

Like thousands of tiny insects gnawing through his insides, bit by bit, grinding him down.

He hadn’t gotten close enough to the others in the unit yet at that point. Only Zhao Guo had come to the sick bay to check on him.

And found this man of almost six feet sitting up on the sick bay cot, tears running down his face.

Zhao Guo, standing outside the door, watched Lin Luxiao cry.

He was genuinely startled. His first assumption was simply that Lin Luxiao had never endured this kind of hardship and high-intensity training, that the fever had pushed his body to its limit and brought his spirit crashing down with it. Zhao Guo was a gossip by nature, but not a loose-lipped one — he wouldn’t go blabbering everything he saw. Lin Luxiao was so composed in front of others; if the man broke down in private like this, spreading it around would be a terrible humiliation. Besides, the team’s dynamics were still strained at that point, and any careless comment risked tipping into mockery, which would make things worse.

After that, for a long stretch, Zhao Guo found himself feeling genuinely sorry for Lin Luxiao, and quietly took it upon himself to look after him. He’d serve him extra food at mealtimes, hoping he’d eat more and take better care of his body. He’d pour his water for him, hoping he’d drink more and flush out whatever was ailing him inside.

Lin Luxiao never knew any of this. He was simply grateful, in retrospect, that he hadn’t been in Northern Xun at the time — because if Big Liu and Shen Mu had found out, it would have become their favorite story to trot out over drinks for the rest of time.

In almost thirty years of living.

He had only ever cried once — and it was over a woman.

From childhood onward, nothing had ever managed to wring tears out of him. When his mother died, he hadn’t cried either — his eyes had reddened twice, and both times he forced it back down. Some grief and some pain could be endured.

But when a person reaches the absolute depth of despair, they always manage to find, buried in some corner of memory, the precise details that will make things hurt just a little more.

Like — maybe that girl hadn’t loved him as much as he’d believed.

Like — maybe she had been infatuated with him, or perhaps more accurately, infatuated with his body.

That kind of realization was a particularly bleak one.

Everything that had come before was negated in a stroke.

He had been so certain of himself at the time — that no matter what happened, he wouldn’t have broken up with her. He had never been the sort of person who worried about rumors.

The night before, Big Liu had said: “Don’t be too sure of yourself. That girl is young and she spooks easily. When things get hard, she tends to run.”

He had given Big Liu a contemptuous sidelong look. “If she runs, I’ll wash your socks for a year.”

Big Liu had had athlete’s foot since childhood — the kind that could clear a room when he took his shoes off. Back when the group used to come over to Lin Luxiao’s place to play games, the moment Big Liu’s shoes came off, Lin Luxiao would physically pick them up and throw them outside. The smell had nearly wilted the flowers in the entryway.

Shen Mu, standing nearby, had tried to be reasonable: “Luxiao, don’t make the stakes so high.”

Now, looking back, he found his past self ridiculous.

The day Shen Mu called to tell him she’d come looking for him, and then the emergency call came in — he had honestly been ready to strangle her.

When he found out it wasn’t her car that had gone over, something inside him eased slightly — but there was also a trace of disappointment mixed in.

Thinking about it calmly: she was always such a cautious person. How would she ever agree to hire a private car with the mountain pass sealed by snow?

And yet the moment he saw that streak of vivid red at the entrance to the fire station.

He was furious — incensed — and in that instant, any trace of relief was buried completely. He asked her what she’d come for, and she said, completely unbothered, that she’d come to court him.

That had truly made him see red.

As if everything was on her terms — she came when she wanted, left when she wanted?

And the moment they met.

She’d rushed straight at him, trying to use desire to paper over a year’s worth of distance.

He had been repelled by it at the time, and he’d said so harshly.

And then last night, she had said she’d never come looking for him again, and that he should find some other woman.

At that, he truly panicked inside.

Fine — desire, whatever — at least let there still be a thread connecting them.

And yet even in bed she was colder than before. He tried to draw her out, and she didn’t respond. He indulged her every preference, again and again, and still the effect was minimal. When it was over, she calmly leaned against the headboard and smoked, detached as a woman who’d just hired someone for the evening.

The only thing she hadn’t done was throw money at him in contempt.

Lin Luxiao had turned to go when the auntie called after him. “When she left just now, I told her to come back at a better time — the roads are dangerous in the snow. She said she probably wouldn’t be coming back. I thought about it and figured I should tell you, so there aren’t any misunderstandings between you two.”

She was gone.

Outside, the cold wind stood solid against the door. The tree branches thrashed. Great flakes of snow came spiraling down.

The auntie went to close the door and muttered, “Snowing again.”

In the bleak, still scene.

A man moved through the snow, his steps steady, his back tall — and somehow diminished.

In our next lives, let’s neither of us fall in love. It hurts too much.

Back in Northern Xun, an esports project launched. The script was based on a novel by an author named Nan Xuan — I Once Heard You in the Flow of Time.

Nan Chu’s audition went smoothly.

She was the first actor confirmed for the entire production — purely because the original author had been very taken with her.

She later learned the author’s name was Su Zhan.

The two of them took to each other at once. On set whenever there was a break, they’d sit together and talk, and if there was nothing to talk about, they could sit perfectly comfortably in silence — one reading her book, the other spacing out — like old friends who had known each other for years.

Later, Nan Chu noticed that Su Zhan seemed to have some kind of entanglement with the devastatingly handsome gaming company chairman in the production.

This came from almost a year’s worth of professional training.

The time she’d spent studying in America had genuinely sharpened her. Something in her seemed to have opened up — her understanding of emotional control and character portrayal had deepened considerably, and she’d developed a particular talent for catching the small, telling details in people’s behavior.

Neither the handsome gaming chairman’s nor Su Zhan’s micro-expressions had escaped her notice.

Su Zhan was candid with her about it — the two of them had been involved at some point.

Nan Chu wasn’t particularly surprised. She only found that whenever she saw Xu Jiayan, she thought of Lin Luxiao. The two men looked nothing alike, and their personalities were worlds apart — Xu Jiayan leaned toward a kind of languid ease, whereas Lin Luxiao had more of a roguish edge, and in his uniform he was almost dangerously restrained.

But she’d still think of her commander.

The commander who had turned on her so fiercely when she left.

The other female cast members spent most of their time swooning over the gaming chairman — they’d line up just to bring him neck patches — but she still liked the commander’s type best: steady, commanding, and safe.

Su Zhan said she envied her — found her way of living so free and easy.

She smiled and shook her head. All of that ease was performed, she thought. Performed right up until the moment she was in front of that person again.

The production was doing a night shoot.

The two of them lay in the grass looking at the stars, and the conversation turned to professional bias. Su Zhan gazed upward and sighed. “The world’s judgment — we can’t stop it. I always thought firefighters were wonderful. That kind of bias should have died out long ago. Even the master had family who didn’t understand him — even though he was an idol to so many young esports players, his father thought he was wasting his life.”

That’s right. There are so many voices in this world that try to unsettle us. When we’re struggling, they show no mercy — they mock, they sneer, they try to hold us under and watch us drown. They want you to fall into the abyss and never climb out.

The new year was approaching. Snow fell on Northern Xun without pause, one storm after another.

The world was sealed in ice. The snow had piled so deep that the tree branches bent under its weight.

Two days before New Year’s Eve, Nan Chu and Su Zhan made a trip to Qing Chan Temple to seek a blessing.

The Buddhist temple grounds were packed at the year’s end. The Jiumang Mountain was covered top to bottom with worshippers coming to make their new year’s prayers.

The two girls dressed simply and plainly, slipping past the hurrying crowds.

“Do you come here often?” Su Zhan asked.

Nan Chu shook her head. “I used to come all the time. Now with filming, it’s more like once a month — I come up to sit in on the Zen talks.”

“What good does the Zen teaching do?”

Nan Chu smiled. “It calms the mind. When people were coming after me, I couldn’t find any inner quiet — all I wanted was somewhere to vent. If you let that kind of thing fester in your chest, it’s genuinely bad for your health.”

Su Zhan stared pointedly at a certain prominent part of Nan Chu’s anatomy.

“Are you mocking me right now?”

Nan Chu laughed more openly. “Not at all — I’m being entirely serious. You can’t punish yourself for other people’s wrongdoing. And the Zen talks really have helped me settle down. The monk who gives the teachings explains things beautifully — if you ever have something weighing on you, you could talk to him. I’ll introduce you in a bit.”

They talked and laughed their way up, and before long they had reached the top of Jiumang Mountain.

The temple was busy with people lighting incense.

Nan Chu brought Su Zhan to light their own sticks, then turned to go find the abbot.

As it happened, in the rear courtyard of the temple, they ran into Shen Mu.

His suit was immaculate, his features refined.

Nan Chu glanced down and moved to slip past, but Shen Mu called after her.

He recognized her instantly, even with her mask on.

“Wait a moment.”

Nan Chu stopped. “Brother Mu.”

Few people were permitted in the rear courtyard. The environment was serene and quiet, a bronze incense burner smoldering at the center, a wisp of pale smoke curling up. There was no one ahead or behind them, just the dense green of trees standing at their backs.

Shen Mu slid his hands into his jacket pockets and looked at her. “Luxiao is back.”

“Oh.”

Nan Chu moved past him, and said to Su Zhan behind her: “Come on, Zhan.”