The Life Book of a Fleeting Moment

[Ensemble cast | Similar to The Scholars | Gender-swap plot | Infinite flow | If you don't like it, don't read; all feedback is welcome]

The Song of the Dawn Fungus

Born in rotten earth, the dawn fungus blooms, then dies before a month has passed.

Spring’s splendor gathers in the dew one night; in a thousand-year-old empty mountain, its fragrance lingers.

The cicada cries in summer’s heat, knowing nothing of the long years of spring and autumn.

It spreads its wings with dreams of the highest skies, only to become dust drifting on the wind.

The great Chun lives eight thousand years as spring, watching mayflies’ joys and sorrows with a smile.

The dawn fungus is born in rotten earth. It gathers a night of spring’s splendor between dawn and dusk, then leaves behind a fragrance that lingers in a thousand-year-old empty mountain. The cicada sings in midsummer, its wings beating with ambitions that reach for the highest skies, yet in the end it is no more than a handful of sighing dust. The characters in this book are like dawn fungi and cicadas, exhausting their joys and sorrows in their own times and places. Some are ground to mud by love and hate, some shatter into fireflies amid schemes for power, and some use a fleeting blaze of passion to warm a frozen river, yet none can escape the lengths of day and night carved out by fate.

You and I are all spectators like the great Chun, living eight thousand years as spring and eight thousand as autumn. So sit on the branches of time and watch them turn love and hate into amber in stories brief as dew, dance life and death like drifting frost, and let all their tumultuous farewells and reunions become moonlight, fragrant with ink, rustling down between the pages. This story has all the burning grudges and passions of web fiction, along with the fleeting eternity distilled into poetry. Open the book and see how the dawn fungus leaves behind a legend, etched between morning and evening, that can rival the ages.