The valley was deep. The sobbing wind and cold mist wrapped heavily around his body. He had given everything he had — and still been utterly defeated.

Wei Qingyue gradually lost his human form, becoming a rotting leaf carried up by the wind. He was free now, dragging his shattered body along as the wind carried him back to that hospital in Shanghai. He saw Wei Qingyue there, small again, the shape of a child, curled asleep against the window. He smiled. How could one disturb a child’s dream?

And so he passed by quietly, without a word.

The wind wrapped around him and carried him onward. He was a leaf — there was nowhere he could not go. Lighter than the wind itself. Sky and earth, vast and boundless.

He flew over mountains. He flew over the sea.

The entire world seemed to have become something outside of him.

He did not know how long he followed the wind.

Until a bothersome plastic bag struck him, and the leaf fell to rest before the gates of his old school.

Mei Middle School.

He recognized it. And the leaf, at last, remembered certain seasons of its own green vitality — the sunlight just right, fine specks of dust drifting through the air. As a leaf, he had once possessed the color of youth.

So then — having flown long enough, the body growing more and more ragged — let it stop here.

The leaf wanted to see, clearly, all the old familiar things. He too was one of Mei Middle School’s old things. A lash fell, tearing his already tattered form into pieces. Through the pain he said: let me have just one look.

Let me have just one look.

The lash came down more ruthlessly still. He refused to be destroyed — every fragment threw itself unhesitatingly into the path of the whip. That single glance had not yet been seen. He would never be resigned to losing it.

He would never submit to time.

But he had forgotten that he was only a leaf.

The leaf turned to ash and was swept up by the wind — gathered for a moment, then scattered again, like the black flecks of wild geese vanishing into the distance, until at last they disappeared into the vast and empty wilderness. He had lost even the form of a leaf.

The world had truly become something outside of him.

“Wei Qingyue, let me put you back together.” A Tweety Bird hopped clumsily over, gathering the ashes in her beak.

He was broken so badly. No one had known a leaf could shatter to such a degree.

Tweety Bird truly did piece the ash back together, working away with cheerful diligence, tireless.

She had a large head, a slender body, and long, spindly feet.

Oh — she actually knew his name.

He became a leaf again, though covered in wounds.

Tweety Bird said: you can’t stay like this. You need to go back to the tree. Go back — only on the tree can you recover your color, a beautiful green, the color of spring.

He thought: I have been away from the tree so long — how can I go back?

“I’ve been gone too long. I have no intention of returning,” he said, in earnest.

Tweety Bird shook her head. She had already taken him up in her beak, working just as hard as she had piecing him together, carrying him back toward the tree.

He refused — struggling — and said: I haven’t had my one look yet.

And so, as a leaf, he fell into an argument with a Tweety Bird.

“I feel no attachment to the tree,” he said, coldly.

Tweety Bird tilted her head. She smiled. “You really are foolish. A leaf only thrives when it is on the tree.”

“I have no wish to thrive.”

“What kind of leaf doesn’t want to thrive?”

“I don’t.”

He stubbornly insisted on leaving the tree. Tweety Bird threw herself in his way with all her might. She grew sorrowful — so distressed, so sad — and tears ran from her eyes: “Wei Qingyue, I worked so hard to put you back together. Not so that you could shatter again.”

“Then stay with me,” the leaf said quickly. “If you stay with me, I’ll stay on the tree.”

Tweety Bird agreed.

At last a kind of pact had been made. The wind came again — and Tweety Bird suddenly fell from the tree, without time to say goodbye.

She had lost the ability to spread her wings and fly. In piecing him together, she had used up every last bit of her strength.

The sky grew light. The automated curtains drew back on schedule, slowly and precisely.

Sunlight fell across Wei Qingyue’s eyelashes as they stirred. He opened his eyes.

The Tweety Bird charm had pressed a deep, deep mark into his palm.

Today’s world was no different from yesterday’s — the same sunlight, the same tall buildings, the same city skyline.

Only he was out of step with the correct sequence of time.

Wei Qingyue suddenly leapt out of bed and pulled open the bedside drawer. Inside — nothing. No tissue. Certainly no tissue wrapped around nail clippings — those pink, crescent-shaped, small and dear nail clippings.

He refused to believe it. He pulled the entire drawer out and held it up to the light.

Still nothing.

He dropped the drawer and ran to the entryway, to the shoe cabinet. There sat a pair of women’s slippers — the tag still attached, never worn, a soft, goose-yellow color.

On the coffee table in the sitting room, his watch lay still — ticking forward, steady, indifferent to everything around it.

He picked it up without a word and looked at the time.

Then, as if gripped by a sudden frenzy, he ran back to the bedroom and flung open every cabinet door.

In the crash that followed, all his clothing came into view.

The clothes were not sorted by season. His coat had never been ironed. His socks had not been rolled into pairs.

Wei Qingyue’s eyes grew slowly, slowly, desperate.

If the warmth of those lips, the softness of that long hair, the velvet of that body — if none of it had been real, he did not know what could be.

He approached the wardrobe. Inside hung an old piece of clothing.

A denim jacket from his high school days — not faded from washing, but carrying that particular color of age from the very beginning.

His fingers moved over the old fabric. Tears slid down without warning. He buried his face in it, and stood there alone for a long, long time.

The dream had burned through the entire night. He had corrected the mistakes of the first two times, sliding forward onto the right path, borne on the wings of the dream.

Everything had been perfect.

The more perfect, the more broken.

In the world he had built for himself, he met her again.

And possessed her completely.

His phone rang. The voice on the line reminded him that Huang Yingshi’s interview was scheduled for nine o’clock, and the production crew’s car for the Cipher program was already on its way to collect him. The venue was on the fifteenth floor of the Park Hyatt.

The program had been suspended for a period of time due to the pandemic.

Now the whole country had returned to work.

Wei Qingyue, out of habit, asked the caller: what was today’s date?

The voice on the other end of the line sounded entirely accustomed to the question. It said: “President Wei, today is March 20th, 2020. The vernal equinox.”

The vernal equinox meant that spring had already passed its midpoint.

He hadn’t known that spring had come. He hadn’t known it was already half over. But when those two words — vernal equinox — reached him, something in his chest clenched with a crushing, acute pain.

He said: understood.

Huang Yingshi hadn’t interviewed him yet, Wei Qingyue thought.

Over the years, he had rarely even dreamed of her — she had been kept deliberately sealed away in the deepest corner of his mind.

The first time he dreamed of her was in 2009. He made an error in the dream.

The second time was in 2015, when he returned to China. He made an error in the dream again.

Then a pandemic came. Many people died. The order of the world was altered. He was still trapped inside time.

He had met her in the year before the pandemic erupted.

September 1st — the day students returned to school. The autumn term of 2007. He was no longer at Mei Middle School.

The first day of school meant you could see classmates again after a long absence. Somewhere in that school, there was someone he had wanted to see.

The mirror on the bedroom dresser was clear as water — the housekeeper always gave it particular attention when she cleaned. He could see his own face in it with perfect clarity.

He washed briefly, changed clothes, sat on the edge of the bed, and in the silence lit a cigarette while he waited for the production crew.

Ash fell onto the wooden floor without a sound.

He smoked like a corpse. The nicotine entered his lungs. The lights that had once been kindled in his life had been extinguished — only in the dream would they blaze again. Wei Qingyue stared with hollow, numb eyes as the smoke rose, coiling, entangling itself, then slowly dissolving.

When the car arrived, he pressed the lit end of the cigarette directly against the back of his hand, ground it out with a slow twist. The immense physical pain sent a surge of sensation through his mind, and Wei Qingyue felt a profound satisfaction. He walked out the door.

He reappeared beneath the sun. Found his shadow.

The real world was no longer quite so precarious.

When dusk came, he returned home — didn’t wash, didn’t undress — only lay down on the bed with urgency, waiting for the dream to descend again.

At the window, the gentle light of dusk fell on him. Its warmth touched his eyes. Wei Qingyue drew his body into a curl and waited to meet her again. She had left him unsettled for the entire day.

Perhaps it was real?

It must be real.

In this moment, only a strip of slanted evening light kept him company.

Wei Qingyue needed no one. Dark waves rose. Rain beat against hidden reefs. All he needed was for the night to show him its favor again — to let him return once more to that other world.

Sleep would not come for a long time. He walked barefoot off the bed again. Past midnight, the city too had grown gradually still. He hadn’t turned on the lights. He moved back and forth through the apartment, knocking into things several times.

Until he pressed himself against the white wall, breathing in great, heaving lungfuls — wanting to inhale the taste of dust, wanting to inhale wind and snow, wanting to inhale all the endless darkness, to draw it all into his chest.

At some point he changed his posture. He spread both arms wide, wanting to embrace the wall — as though Jiang Du had become the wall before him. He wanted so badly to hold on to something — anything at all.

After a long time, Wei Qingyue slowly straightened. He spoke to the wall with a smile: “I learned to dance in America. I’ve never danced for you. Would you like to watch?”

He went to find his earphones and put them on.

The music began. He became once more a solitary whale in the deep sea, swimming alone, body unfolding, limbs moving soundlessly and without restraint to the rhythm.

No — he wasn’t even a whale. He was nothing anymore. He simply moved, without meaning, in the darkened room. The dust from the Friday dusk classroom, which had never fully settled, began to keep him company, moving with him. The dust grew soft. Enclosed within the dust, he found a new kind of comfort.

He felt fortunate to have inhaled the scent of dust.

Until his body was utterly exhausted. Until the music in the earphones went silent.

Wei Qingyue cried anyway. He hated her — why had she left him?

He had told her everything. He had given her every last piece of his vulnerability. He was the kind of person who could be discarded at any moment — Wei Zhendong had said get out of the car and clear off, and so he’d had to get out, no matter how the wind and rain raged outside.

Now, it was the same. He had been abandoned again. Why had she deceived him?

Wei Qingyue, Wei Qingyue… He repeated his own name inside his mind. But who would come to take him home?

Across the way, the lights went out one by one. He knew they would come back on again tomorrow night. Ten thousand lights, a thousand and ten thousand of them — and still no one was waiting for him at home. He knew that now. No one would ever wait for him again.

Wei Qingyue fell asleep on the cold floor. Tears wound their way across his face, soaking into his hair.

Even the dream was stingy — it didn’t come a second time.

But his mind plunged once more into a fresh round of endurance:

Jiang Du is still alive. She is still hiding from him somewhere. The moment Wei Qingyue woke, the thought returned. He still had to find her. This matter could not be abandoned halfway.

As long as he believed it, it was real.

With that thought, he couldn’t help but lift the corners of his mouth. To all appearances, he still looked as he always had — intelligent, open, like the young man he had been at the very beginning.