March in Hang Shi was a city of unpredictable weather — one day cycling through all four seasons at once.

Ruan Yu chose a sunny day to return to her hometown.

Word had reached her recently that the old family house was slated for demolition. People with a sentimental streak could never bear to hear such news, and since she had nothing better to do, she figured she might as well go back for one last look.

The Ruan family’s old house stood on the outskirts of Su Shi, in that in-between stretch where city bled into countryside. The surrounding area was filled with similar privately-built homes — thin mint-green walls, three stories tall, each topped with a triangular attic.

Ruan Yu had moved away the summer she graduated high school. By her count, it had been nearly eight years since she’d last set foot here.

The empty house had been swept not long ago, so there wasn’t much dust — only a faint smell of staleness that clung to everything. She unlocked the door, made a brief circuit through the rooms, and then climbed up to the attic.

That was where she’d left behind relics of her student days.

The wooden stairs groaned and creaked beneath her weight with every step. When she pulled back the curtains, golden light spilled in generously, stirring up tiny motes of dust that drifted through the air.

After a quick tidy-up, Ruan Yu dragged out an old wooden chest and settled cross-legged on the floor. She had barely lifted the lid when her phone rang.

She plugged in her earphones and answered, not stopping her rummaging.

A woman’s voice came through the earpiece: “Miss Ruan, the fact that you’re receiving this call means that as of one o’clock this afternoon on March nineteenth, you have still not submitted a new story outline to your former editor. Today marks exactly eleven months since your last book wrapped up.”

Ruan Yu laughed despite herself. “You’re my former editor — why are you still coming after me like a debt collector?”

“I’ll ask the debtor to adjust her attitude.”

She sighed up at the ceiling. “Miss Shen, Miss Ruan remembers telling you — by the end of March, guaranteed.”

“And may I ask whether she has selected a subject yet?”

Ruan Yu deflated, sniffling as she answered, “No.”

The person on the other end of the line grew exasperated. “Eleven months, Ruan Yu — you could have gestated a child and finished the postpartum recovery by now! You’re a full-time writer. Do you actually want to fade into complete irrelevance?”

She idly flipped open a diary from the chest, glancing at it without really reading, and gave a halfhearted reply: “When the inspiration’s just not there, writing a book might genuinely be harder than having a baby.”

“You sit at home in your little bubble every day and expect inspiration to come knocking—”

Shen Mingying was still rattling on, but on Ruan Yu’s end, silence had fallen. Her gaze had dropped to the page of the diary, and she went completely still, as though frozen in place.

The aged paper was faintly yellowed in the sunlight, and on it was written the following:

“May eleventh, sunny. I ran into Xu Huaisong three times today.

“First time: I was carrying my English test papers to the office and came across him standing in the corridor getting a scolding along with a few guys from his class. The head of discipline is really terrifying…

“Second time: I walked past the school’s arts building and spotted him crouching in the bushes nearby, feeding a stray cat from a tin. So he likes cats too. That’s nice.

“Third time: I was heading to PE class and saw him running laps alone on the track. He looks really good without his glasses — no wonder girls are always bringing him water. I bought some water too, but I didn’t dare bring it over. If my dad found out I had a crush on one of his students, Xu Huaisong might be in serious trouble! Though… he might not even want to be with me in the first place…”

Ruan Yu had gone quiet for so long that Shen Mingying began to worry something was wrong, and asked where she was.

“At my old home,” Ruan Yu replied — and as she spoke, the look in her eyes as she stared at the diary slowly brightened. “Mingying. I’ve got it.”

“Got what — you’ve thought of something to write about?”

“Yes. School setting, secret crush as the theme — what do you think?”

A beat of dead silence on the other end, then: “Ruan Yu, wake up! That whole angsty, lovelorn, youth-in-pain literary genre died out eight hundred years ago. There’s no money in it whatsoever!”

Ruan Yu glanced down at the diary. “But… do you still remember Xu Huaisong?”

Shen Mingying brushed past the odd detour and asked, “Who?”

“From our high school. Class Ten.”

“Oh… tall, thin, quiet, the one you had a crush on back then? Don’t tell me you ran into him in Su Shi?”

Xu Huaisong was indeed from Su Shi, and his grandmother’s house was somewhere in the area, but as far as Ruan Yu knew, he had left even earlier than she had — none of their mutual friends had heard from him in years.

She smiled and closed the diary. “As if. What do you think this is, a novel?” She thought for a moment, then added, “Alright, let’s drop it for now. I’ll send you an outline in a few days. Talk later.”

Back in Hang Shi, Ruan Yu sat down that very night to work on the new story. Within three days she had a complete outline. It was the first time in eleven months of creative drought that the words had come pouring out of her.

After sending the outline to Shen Mingying’s inbox, she received a WeChat message from her: Isn’t this basically just you and Xu Huaisong?

More or less.

You’re planning to write a tragedy where the female lead is hopelessly in love with the male lead, who doesn’t feel the same?

That’s a gut punch.

Ruan Yu called her on voice. “Do you really think I’d be stupid enough to dig my own grave? This isn’t a documentary segment — if the male lead doesn’t like the female lead back, you can hardly call it a romance novel.”

Xu Huaisong might not have liked her, but art was drawn from life and then transcended it. What was stopping her from adapting a one-sided, miserable crush into a story of mutual, unspoken longing?

On the other end, Shen Mingying laughed. “I see, I see — so this is essentially a self-indulgent fantasy written by the author herself.”

Ruan Yu was briefly struck speechless. Well. That wasn’t entirely wrong.

“Fine, but I’m warning you — the cold, aloof type like Xu Huaisong isn’t quite as popular anymore, and with slow-burn elements like school settings and secret crushes piled on top, I’d estimate the numbers on this one won’t look too great.”

Ruan Yu seemed to have already made peace with that. She laughed. “Let’s give it a shot. If it flops, I’ll treat it as something I wrote for my own amusement — you did just say it was a self-indulgent fantasy, after all.”

She hung up, grabbed a cup of bubble tea, and moved to her desk. She opened the diary and began picking through it, looking for moments worth trying to write. She hadn’t put pen to paper in so long — she needed to warm herself back up first.

She turned a few pages and paused at one that was covered in far more writing than usual.

Dense characters filled the page in a wild, sweeping hand — every stroke felt charged with barely contained emotion. The date was New Year’s Day of her third and final year of high school.

Ruan Yu sat with it for a moment, and the memory surfaced.

That day had been the single closest she and Xu Huaisong had ever been — in that whole one-sided production she’d put on over the course of their high school years.

At midnight, as the New Year’s fireworks lit up the sky, the school’s main track had been packed with people. She had feigned casualness and quietly positioned herself to his right. She hadn’t expected that in the very instant the bursts of fire and light exploded overhead, he would suddenly take hold of her hand.

Startled, she turned to look at him — and in the flickering light and shadow, she saw the apologetic expression on his face.

He let go, pushed the slim-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose, and said, awkwardly: “Sorry. Wrong person.”

Ruan Yu typed that passage into her document.

But she was fairly sure that any reader reaching that line would think exactly what she’d thought at the time: if the male lead had grabbed the wrong hand, there must have been a right one somewhere. And clearly, that person wasn’t the female lead.

Boring! I’m out!

She propped her chin in her hand and thought for a moment, then typed another line, adding a passage immediately after:

The moment those words left his mouth, his heart was hammering against his ribs, the pounding in his chest louder and more violent than the fireworks exploding above his head.

— A hint that “wrong person” was nothing but the male lead’s excuse.

When she was done, Ruan Yu took a small sip of her bubble tea.

Huh. This really did have the flavor of something she was writing purely for her own enjoyment.

At that same moment, over a hundred kilometers away in a soon-to-be-demolished neighborhood in Su Shi, a girl in a school uniform came bounding down the stairs of a private home’s attic, lugging a box. “Mom, is any of this old junk still useful?”

Tao Rong glanced at what she was carrying. “Those are things from when your brother was in high school. Pack them up properly.”

Xu Huaishi gave a noncommittal “mm,” set down the dust-coated box, and absently picked up an old mobile phone from inside. “Brother used such a clunky old thing in high school? Really takes you back.”

“We bought him that kind specifically so it wouldn’t distract him from studying.” Tao Rong gave her a sideways glance and added, “Don’t go messing with your brother’s things.”

“It’s just an old phone — it doesn’t even have power, it can’t even turn on—” She was still muttering while randomly pressing the power button when the screen suddenly flickered to life, giving her a fright.

Still functional after all these years? Was this a phone or a piece of military hardware?

Xu Huaishi blinked. Noticing that Tao Rong was watching her, she quickly hid the phone behind her back, crouched down, made a show of sorting through the box — then turned away and began quietly investigating.

It was an old feature phone. No passcode after powering on. She held down the asterisk key, tapped “Confirm,” and it unlocked. A few more button presses and she was on the home screen, two more brought her to the “Contacts” menu.

Not a single contact saved.

She navigated back to “Messages.” Not one text, sent or received.

Right. Very on-brand for Xu Huaisong.

Nothing at all. She was about to turn it off when, just as she was backing out, she noticed a number beside one entry at the bottom of the screen — “Drafts”: 327.

Three hundred and twenty-seven drafts? Had her brother been doing math problems on this thing?

Xu Huaishi wrestled with herself for a moment, then tapped into it and opened one at random.

The recipient field was blank. Date and time of composition: January 1st, 2010, 0:10 AM. Contents: Just kidding. I didn’t grab the wrong hand. Happy New Year.

Xu Huaishi’s hand gave a little jolt. Even through a screen, she could smell the unmistakable scent of a teenage crush.

A crush? Her brother?

The way she was cradling the phone suddenly became reverent.

Because this might not be just an ordinary old phone. This might be… an undiscovered new world, waiting to be explored.