In the Platinum tier of Starpath Canyon, 23-year-old Ye Ning meets 18-year-old Song Zhixing. He's a top jungler with razor-sharp mechanics who takes damage for her in team fights and quietly tells her, "Stay farther back." She's a support player who hides behind her match history, listening to him talk about the grueling lab reports at university and sharing how she'd spilled half her bubble tea on the way home from working overtime.
Five years apart, they go from chatting through the game interface late into the night to video calls, from watching New Year's fireworks on their screens to taking in the view of the Bund from Shanghai's waterfront. He switches his major to finance for her, gives everything he has to get into graduate school in Shanghai, and spends countless nights at internships until dawn, steadily closing the gap between their lives over two years. She fears the age gap, fears a boy's feelings might be a passing impulse, and fears that life's hardships will wear away his love. As she hesitates, she watches him slowly grow from an inexperienced boy into someone she can rely on.
Only when he tells her, "I got in. I can stay in Shanghai," and, after his graduation defense, kneels on one knee on a candlelit sports field with a magnolia-engraved bookmark in his hand and says, "Now I can give you a stable life," does Ye Ning finally dare to admit it: some kinds of love can go from fighting side by side in a game to signing the marriage register at the Civil Affairs Bureau, then on to all the ordinary nights they'll spend watching fireworks and playing games together for the rest of their lives.
This is an age-gap romance that begins in the canyon and ends in a lifetime together, filled with a young man's steadfast pursuit and an adult's courage to meet him halfway. It turns out the best kind of love is when he's willing to grow up, and she's willing to wait.
