“The Big Bad Wolf stood at the doorstep of the third little pig’s brick house. He huffed and he puffed and he slammed against it, but the house remained unshakeable. Furious, he simply climbed up onto the roof, intending to slip down through the chimney. The third pig, seeing this, quickly lit a fire. The Big Bad Wolf tumbled right into the furnace, scorching his entire tail. He fled in humiliation and never dared to bully the three little pigs again.”

Twenty-year-old Lu Yicheng’s voice was clear and melodious. As he reached the end of the story, his tone gradually softened and deepened, coaxing his listener toward sleep.

Unfortunately, a five-year-old’s energy was an unstoppable force.

The storybook contained twenty stories, the last of which was *The Three Little Pigs*. By this point, Lu Yicheng was parched and drowsy.

And yet the child lying beside him had bright, alert eyes, without the slightest trace of sleepiness.

Lu Yicheng: “……”

He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was nearly eleven o’clock. This child’s energy was truly something to marvel at.

“When do you normally go to sleep?” Lu Yicheng closed the book and asked, pinching the bridge of his nose.

The child held up his chubby little hand — the back of it adorned with five perfectly round, utterly adorable little dimples — and held up eight fingers. “Eight-thirty.”

Lu Yicheng hadn’t experienced anything resembling anxiety or irritation in a very long time.

“Then why aren’t you asleep yet?” Lu Yicheng asked.

The child pouted. “Because I didn’t have my milk, and because it’s not Mama telling me the story!”

Lu Yicheng felt his scalp go numb.

How on earth had things come to this? Even his usually sharp and clear mind was now beginning to fog over.

Every winter and summer break, he planned his schedule down to the last minute.

This summer break — after the end of his sophomore year — was no exception. Thanks to the connections of a respected mentor, he was currently tutoring two students: one in middle school and one in high school. One hour of tutoring per day. Over the course of a full summer, he could save a decent amount of money.

One week ago, he had found a child outside the Binjiang Garden residential complex.

The child had called him “Daddy” in a bright, clear voice the moment he laid eyes on him.

Lu Yicheng had assumed it was some kind of prank — until the child produced a pocket watch.

The pocket watch had belonged to Lu Yicheng’s late grandmother. He clearly remembered placing it deep inside a box, but after bringing the child home and turning the entire apartment upside down, he couldn’t find his grandmother’s watch anywhere. From that moment on, Lu Yicheng began to sense that something was very wrong.

The pocket watch in the child’s hands was, without any doubt, his grandmother’s keepsake.

But unlike what he remembered, this pocket watch had a photograph tucked inside it.

A photograph of a family of three.

The man had refined, elegant features, wore slim-rimmed glasses, and radiated a mature, composed air.

The woman had hair in soft waves, her beauty vivid and dazzling — like a red rose in full bloom, captivating and alluring. Her eyes curved with warmth, her lips tilted in the faintest smile. She was breathtaking.

The child in the middle appeared to be around three years old, with chubby little cheeks, dressed in a miniature tailored suit complete with a bow tie, his eyes bright and clear — handsome and utterly adorable.

It looked like a wonderfully happy family of three.

But here was the problem.

The man in the photograph was very familiar to him — identical to himself in every way, only without his own youth and rawness.

The woman in the photograph was not entirely unfamiliar to him either.

This five-year-old child was no ordinary child. Lu Yicheng had managed to extract quite a bit of information from him. The child had recited his father and mother’s names, phone numbers, workplaces, and even their full ID numbers with perfect clarity.

When asked how he had gotten here?

The child replied with an aggrieved expression: “If even Daddy doesn’t know, how would I know? All I did was play hide-and-seek with A’Min, and I secretly hid in my own wardrobe. A’Min never found me. When I came out of the wardrobe, there you were, Daddy!”

“But Daddy without his glasses~”

“Daddy, why haven’t we gone home yet?”

“Did Mama kick you out again?”

Lu Yicheng had begun to piece together the truth.

He just needed one final confirmation.

Even he didn’t quite understand himself — he actually believed what this little chubby boy told him, and in a moment of inexplicable impulse, withdrew some money and arranged a paternity test.

The results of the paternity test showed that he and the child were, in fact, father and son.

Could someone please tell him — how, at twenty years old, did he end up with a five-year-old son?

Back in high school, his English teacher had brought the class to the multimedia room to watch a film called *The Butterfly Effect*. The girls at the surrounding desks were also always discussing popular romance novels — stories of time travel, reincarnation, and the currently trending genre of transmigration into books. Lu Yicheng made a rough deduction: this five-year-old son must have triggered some kind of mechanism and traveled back in time from the future. Why this had happened, Lu Yicheng couldn’t figure out.

But it had happened. Over the past week, every time he thought it might be some science-fiction-tinged dream, he would open his eyes and find the child lying right there beside him.

It was nearly eleven o’clock.

After a day of running wild, the child finally let out a lazy yawn, growing sleepy at last. Before drifting off, he repeated the question he asked every hour: “When is Mama coming to pick us up? I want Mama.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t drag me into your fights. You got kicked out — I didn’t~”

Lu Yicheng had a splitting headache.

Once the child finally fell asleep, he studied that sleeping face.

The child had long, curled lashes and thick eyebrows. His cheeks were soft and round, his arms pale and plump — like segments of a lotus root.

No matter how bizarre this situation was, it had truly happened. There was no option but to face it.

Lu Yicheng let out a sigh and reached for his phone on the nightstand.

Even now, Lu Yicheng still found it difficult to believe that in the future, he would actually marry Jiang Ruoqiao — and that they would even have a child together.

Who was Jiang Ruoqiao?

During the second semester of sophomore year, her name was the one most frequently mentioned in their dormitory.

The undergraduate dormitory at A’Da was a standard four-person room. From the freshman military training all the way to now, the atmosphere in their dorm had been warm and harmonious. All four of them got along well. Jiang Yan, in particular, was exceptionally loyal — whenever anyone needed help, he never hesitated. So when Jiang Yan said he had fallen for a girl, the other roommates threw themselves into helping him brainstorm ideas with even more enthusiasm than they would have had if they were the ones in love.

Jiang Ruoqiao was the girl Jiang Yan liked.

Lu Yicheng still remembered the night Jiang Yan got her response — he had gone absolutely wild, smuggling a case of beer past the dormitory supervisor right under her nose.

It was precisely because he knew how much Jiang Yan cared for Jiang Ruoqiao that, upon seeing the photograph inside the pocket watch, Lu Yicheng had even entertained the thought — perhaps Jiang Ruoqiao had a twin sister?

If not for the child’s astonishing memory — rattling off Jiang Ruoqiao’s ID number without a moment’s hesitation — Lu Yicheng would never have believed that his future self had somehow lost his mind badly enough to fall for Jiang Ruoqiao.

Jiang Ruoqiao was Jiang Yan’s girlfriend.

From the very first day of enrollment, Lu Yicheng had stood out among the new students, arriving with the halo of being his province’s top-scoring science student on the college entrance examination. He had the lean, clean-cut look unique to young men of that age — back then, he wore a faded, pale grey T-shirt, the collar having lost its elasticity, and when he leaned forward, one could glimpse his slender collarbone. At one hundred and eighty-three centimeters tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, he was like a white poplar tree. Over the two years since then, the nickname “herbivore” that a few senior girls had given him back then had stuck all the way to now.

He was reserved and modest by nature, gentle and approachable in the way of a herbivore — almost entirely without aggression.

And so, Lu Yicheng genuinely could not understand it.

Could it be that the attributes hidden deep within his heart were actually quite terrible?

In Lu Yicheng’s phone contacts, there were only four women: his academic advisor, two parents of the students he tutored, and his aunt who had married far away.

Ordinarily, reaching Jiang Ruoqiao would have been somewhat troublesome. But the child could recite her phone number by heart — the only question was whether she still used that number.

Lu Yicheng’s fingers were long and distinct at the knuckles. They hovered over the phone screen for a long moment before he composed a message with careful deliberation:

【Hello, is this Jiang Ruoqiao? I’m Lu Yicheng. I need to speak with you about something.】

At that very same moment, Xi Shi was visited by rain, dispersing the stifling summer heat.

Jiang Ruoqiao, having nothing better to do, idly flipped through a novel her younger cousin had bought. Novels worked better on her than melatonin — two or three pages in and she was already drowsy. The small bedside lamp was still on, and the ancient air conditioning unit rumbled along with its perpetual hum. Jiang Ruoqiao sank into a deep sleep.

Back in her hometown, sleeping in this little bed, she always rested soundly.

But tonight — for the first time in what felt like forever — she had a dream.

And it wasn’t a pleasant one.

She was at a cocktail party, gazing from a distance at a man and a woman nearby. The man was dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, radiating an air of cold, untouchable authority. Surrounded by a crowd of flatterers, a flicker of irritation passed across his severe features — yet the moment his gaze fell on the woman on his arm, that cold expression melted into warmth and tender indulgence. Anyone who saw it would say he was devoted to her. The woman beside him was petite and delicate, clinging to his arm with adoration. Then, for some reason, she rose up on her tiptoes and murmured something in his ear. The man pressed a soothing kiss to her forehead.

In the dream, Jiang Ruoqiao simply stood and watched.

The man’s sharp gaze swept over and landed on her.

The scene shifted. Outside, rain fell in a light, pattering drizzle. Jiang Ruoqiao walked along a narrow path looking disheveled, arms wrapped around herself, her skirt hem dirtied, her hair damp.

She was trembling with cold, hunched and struggling forward as though walking on blades.

Then, a black Bentley rolled to a slow stop beside her.

The window glided down. The man fixed her with an icy stare, and sneered: “Beg me. Beg me, and I’ll let you off.”

……

Jiang Ruoqiao was woken by noise.

Her maternal grandparents were getting on in years, and their hearing wasn’t what it used to be. They had been deliberately trying to keep their voices down, but the old house had poor soundproofing. She woke up, stretched, and out of habit reached for the phone on her nightstand. She pressed the screen to life and looked.

Apart from notifications from Weibo and various advertisements from websites, there was one text message and a few WeChat messages.

The text was from an unknown number.

The WeChat messages were from her boyfriend.

Jiang Ruoqiao made a small sound and tapped open the text message.

She furrowed her brow. Lu Yicheng?

And he said he had something to find her about?

Were they even close?

—