[Two female leads + bittersweet romance + childhood friends-to-lovers + rekindled romance]
Two names, and a reunion brought into alignment by time.
Chen Yingxue restores ancient books, and mends people’s hearts, too. Her world is a climate-controlled vault, and all her life she has used the finest brushstrokes to mend the cracks in history. Until the wild child who climbed over the wall splashed the first improper stroke of ink across the neat draft of her life.
Shang Shixu believes in action before words. Her life is a wilderness, a campaign of conquest, a brief kingdom built with fists and marbles. Chen Yingxue is the only fortress she wants to hold, the undisturbed snowy plain within her tempestuous nature.
Between them lay the eighty-seven meters of school corridor, fifty-two steps, the diagonal distance of four years at university, and two thousand silent days and nights. There was the warmth of a body on Shichahai’s back, delirious words spoken through a fever of 39.2 degrees, the moonlight outside an operating room, and the verdict delivered beside Houhai’s rusted railing: “We’re not that kind of relationship.”
Love is a long exercise in archaeology.
One person spends twenty years carefully excavating the fault lines of memory, piecing together the shards of a heartbeat.
Another spends twenty years staking everything on building amid the ruins of reality, erecting a monument to her faith.
When the Golden Roof of the Forbidden City sinks into dusk, when frost at Gubei Water Town whitens their brows, and when their fathers’ teacups develop an irreparable crack, they finally admit that some heartbeats have been written into the same calendar since their very first glance.
Some snow is destined to fall in the spring called “Shixu.”
