At two in the afternoon, inside a café, Rong Qian rested her chin in her hand, gazing listlessly out the window in a daze. She stirred her long-since-cold coffee with a spoon, and she even felt like yawning.

The man sitting across from her had been talking the entire time, attempting to capture her attention, but every topic worth discussing had already been covered, and the woman across from him still showed no reaction whatsoever.

The man smiled helplessly and shook his head, then asked her directly: “Miss Rong, don’t you want to have a conversation with me?”

Hearing this, Rong Qian finally turned to look at him and said plainly: “Mr. Xu, when you asked me out, I already made it clear that I have no plans to get married right now, and I have no interest in blind dates. It was only because you said you didn’t mind that I reluctantly came.”

A bitter curve appeared at the corner of Xu Yang’s mouth. He had originally assumed she was just being polite; he hadn’t expected her to truly be so unwilling to accept him.

“Miss Rong, it seems I really did misjudge the situation. I have very good feelings toward you, and I assumed the impression I’d made on you wouldn’t be bad either.” Xu Yang was, after all, an elite who had returned from overseas — eloquent in speech, and gentlemanly in every action and manner.

By all conventional logic, with his looks and his status, no woman would easily turn him down.

And that went doubly for someone like Rong Qian, who spent every day working alongside a group of rough-and-tumble men — she should have had even less resistance to him.

Yet Rong Qian simply had no interest in him whatsoever, rejecting him cleanly and decisively, leaving him not even the faintest sliver of ambiguity to hold onto.

Xu Yang gave up, but he was somewhat curious, so he asked her: “Miss Rong, is it that you already have someone you like?”

“No, where did you get that idea?” Rong Qian scooped up a large spoonful of strawberry mousse and stuffed it into her mouth, completely unconcerned with appearances — eating with evident relish.

Xu Yang gazed at her for a long moment before saying: “You look like you have something weighing on your mind, especially when you’re spacing out. It’s as if you’re thinking about someone.”

“Really?” Rong Qian furrowed her brows. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard something like this.

Every time she sat quietly in a daze, someone would always come over and ask if she’d had her heart broken. Every single time, Rong Qian wanted to roll her eyes.

She had been single since birth, had never so much as had a crush on anyone — where would heartbreak even come from?

At most, she just sometimes felt a hollow emptiness in her heart…

Xu Yang still wanted to chat with her a little longer, but unfortunately, Rong Qian received a phone call saying there was a case at the bureau, and just like that, she hurried away.

Xu Yang watched her retreating figure and could only sigh in regret.

After Rong Qian arrived at the police station, she learned that this was a very unusual case. Apparently, a certain real estate company had developed a plot of land and was planning to build a villa complex.

But when the construction site began excavation work, they discovered a car buried underground — and inside the car, there appeared to be a skeletal remains.

The construction site reported it to the police immediately, and only with police assistance did they dare to use an excavator to carefully dig the vehicle out.

After verification, it turned out to be an old-fashioned sedan from over thirty years ago — a Shanghai-brand automobile. In other words, the car’s owner had been buried underground for more than thirty years.

Initially, there was speculation about whether it was linked to murder, but geological experts investigating the land and its history determined that this was most likely nothing more than an accident.

More than thirty years ago, that particular plot of land lay at the foot of a mountain. Due to the loose soil composition, whenever a severe rainstorm warning was issued, it would trigger mudslides.

If a vehicle happened to be passing through at the time, there was indeed a genuine possibility of it being engulfed and buried.

As for that line of speculation, Rong Qian left it to the experts to investigate. She herself focused her attention on the skeletal remains found inside the car — buried for so many years, they had long since become nothing but a bare skeleton.

Judging from the skeletal structure, the deceased was male. After more thorough examination, it was confirmed: male, approximately 30 years of age, with no trauma found anywhere on the bones, making foul play a preliminary exclusion.

Also excavated from the car were a few of the deceased’s personal belongings — not many at all, and not even an identity document to establish who he was.

There was only a rotted wallet, a string of rusted keys, a pop star album disc that had been fashionable at the time, and a few photographs — but having been buried in the earth for so long, they had already decayed beyond any possibility of restoration.

Subsequently, once all aspects of the investigation were concluded and it was determined that the deceased had died in a mudslide accident more than thirty years prior, the media was notified and the story was reported to the public.

The primary hope was that any family members with knowledge of the case would come forward to claim the remains. On the day the news came out, Rong Qian opened her phone to take a look and couldn’t help but frown.

When those journalists were taking photographs, they actually captured her in the shot?

Though it wasn’t obvious, you could still make out that it was her holding her phone to her ear. But since it had already been published, Rong Qian had no recourse — she simply pretended she hadn’t noticed.

A few days later, just before the end of her shift one evening, the evidence room called her and said they’d discovered something rather interesting, asking her to come take a look.

When Rong Qian arrived, an officer held out an old photograph and handed it to her, saying: “This photo was found inside the album disc case — tucked inside it. We didn’t notice it before. Take a look and see if there’s anything odd about this photograph.”

Rong Qian took it. The photograph had been placed inside a transparent evidence bag; the old photo had yellowed with age, but its contents were still discernible.

The background was indoors, with a European aesthetic from the last century. A man in a white button-down shirt sat on an antique sofa, one leg crossed over the other, holding a white cat in his arms.

He wore a pair of gold-framed glasses. His gaze was very gentle, his features exquisitely drawn — aristocratic and refined.

And standing behind him was a woman.

She wore a capable-looking trench coat — rather like a bodyguard — with both arms crossed, a smug and playful smile at the corner of her mouth, her eyes bright and shining with light.

Rong Qian blinked. She didn’t know if it was just her imagination, but she had the distinct feeling that she was very familiar with this woman — as though she’d seen her somewhere before.

Seeing that she still hadn’t caught on, the male officer smiled and said: “Officer Rong, don’t you think this woman looks a great deal like you?”

“Hm? Oh my goodness — she really does!” Rong Qian took a closer look and was instantly startled. They were absolutely identical!

The male officer said to her: “Officer Rong, why don’t you take this photo and investigate? It might just lead you to the identity of the deceased.”

Rong Qian stared at the photograph for a long time, her brow furrowing tighter and tighter.

Of course she wasn’t naive enough to think that the person in the photograph was herself — she was simply baffled as to how someone could look so exactly like her.

If this woman were still alive, she’d be an old woman by now, wouldn’t she?

After thanking the officer, Rong Qian took the photograph, got in her car, and drove home from the station.

Rong Qian was currently living with her parents. The thing the couple worried about most every single day was her marriage — they constantly asked when she planned to wed. Rong Qian had been driven no small amount of frustration by this.

It was true that she was already 27 this year, and had never been in a relationship — but she had all her limbs, looked perfectly fine, and was she really going to end up unable to find a husband?

Every time she said something like that, the couple would nod and say they understood — and then immediately follow it up with: “So when do you think you’ll be ready? So we can start making arrangements?”

Rong Qian: “…”

She surrendered willingly. Could she not just not talk about this?

That evening, after washing up, she lay in bed and stared at the photograph for a long while. The longer she looked, the more she felt the woman in the photograph was herself — the expression, the posture, was completely identical to hers!

She even had similar clothes. Just as that thought crossed her mind, Rong Qian immediately rolled out of bed and rummaged through her wardrobe, pulling out a trench coat and jeans that matched exactly what the woman in the photograph was wearing.

She held them up for comparison and found that, aside from the photograph being too faded and yellowed to see fine details clearly, everything else was remarkably similar.

Because it was all so unsettlingly strange, Rong Qian just kept staring at the photograph until she fell asleep looking at it.

It was the middle of the night when the sound of a television playing woke her. Rong Qian sat up groggily.

She got out of her room and went downstairs to find the living room television on — and no one there.

It was already past two in the morning. Who would have the television on at this hour?

Bewildered, Rong Qian walked over, thinking her father must have left it on after falling asleep watching it. She was about to turn it off and go back to bed, but then she saw what was playing on screen and paused, slowly backing up to sit down on the sofa.

It was a very old modern-era war film — not even in color, still in black and white, with a date stamp at the bottom: a 1975 production.

The filmmaking technology of that era was nothing like today’s — the camera work was a bit shaky, but the sense of authenticity was powerful, and every shot felt like a real, lived moment.

Rong Qian watched for a while and, though there were no subtitles, the actors all spoke in very standard Mandarin, enunciating each character with precision.

Perhaps because she’d never seen it before, Rong Qian found herself watching with genuine interest, poured herself a glass of water, and settled back into the sofa to keep watching.

But then, as she was drinking, she caught something out of the corner of her eye — and with a “pffft,” she spat the water out.

“Cough, cough!”

Not bothering to grab a tissue, Rong Qian covered her mouth and coughed a few times, then rushed up close to the television.

On screen, there appeared a man in military uniform — the kind with a cape — exuding an imposing air. But that wasn’t the point. The point was: this man in the film looked exactly identical to the man in the old photograph she had just been looking at!