Clear Dawn Porridge

In an unequal relationship, women can lose their heads when they fall in love with men. But what about men? What could make a man end a marriage he had spent years building because he fell in love with another woman? Even as his life came to an end, Yan Huijie never found the answer to this relationship. His mistake was falling for a married woman when they first met. He had thought that standing firm in his choice was what it meant for love to be mutual. Instead, he was met by Zhang Yuling's sudden return. From the moment their Valentine's Day gift, a half-silver, half-cord bracelet, broke, Yan Huijie and Zhang Yuling became entangled in a daily life neither could leave behind. This longing for a love that could never be attained or fulfilled, and the thoughts of her that haunted him through the night, pushed Yan Huijie into an abyss of suffering. By chance, Yan Huijie got the opportunity to "exchange souls" with a friend and began trying to "have it both ways," only to push his life into even deeper misery. Even as he climbed Zheduo Mountain, he could not forget Zhang Yuling or the past and present lives he had remembered.

What seemed like nothing more than an ordinary rainy-day breakdown, followed by an ordinary night of drunken adult pleasure, began to reveal clues of past and present lives as they shared rice porridge at dawn, when their affair had run its course. Yan Huijie's love life was like a series of sieges: one city was hard to defend, another proved impossible to conquer, and by the time he looked back, an old city had already changed hands. The siege had become a chain around him. Their journey was like the four crabs Yan Huijie and Zhang Yuling caught at the foot of Liangyu Mountain, two large and two small. Two days after they took them home, the big ones were still alive, while the little ones had dissolved into the water. In the end, the children they each had became the deciding factor that brought their story to a close and sent them their separate ways.