Rift in Time: The Customers Who Can't Leave the Convenience Store

At three in the morning, dark red ice crystals seep from the convenience store's refrigerated case, and Lin Xiaoman's phone date jumps frantically between 2013 and 2023. The expired chips on the shelves bear the smiling face of an actress who left the entertainment industry long ago. On the security footage, a woman in a wine-red dress walks barefoot across the tiles, water dripping from her hair and freezing into web-like patterns. Yet when the alarm sounds, every anomaly vanishes along with the static.

The rainy night her father disappeared ten years ago has haunted Lin Xiaoman ever since. At the cold room's drain, she finds a ginkgo-leaf earring engraved with the initials LY, her father's initials. Every day at four in the morning, the ice wall reflects her wearing her middle school uniform. Stranger still, a limited-edition chocolate from 2013 on the discount rack has a packaging date that exactly matches the day her father disappeared. Lu Ji, who claims to be a keeper of time, appears without warning. This pale, gaunt man can predict the cycle of blood seeping from the refrigerated case, but he becomes evasive whenever she mentions the crescent-shaped birthmark on her left shoulder.

When a yellowed police report is found beneath the shelves, the truth begins to peel away its hideous shell: a witness claimed to have seen Lin Guodong, covered in blood, carrying an unconscious girl into the cold room...

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.