Daylight Returns

“If you could live your life over again, what would you do?”

Lu Chi opened his eyes and returned to the summer of the new millennium, to the moment he was born.

At the same time, another newborn girl's cries came from the delivery room across the hall. Her name was Shen Chao.

He hadn't become a business tycoon or saved the world. He couldn't even remember the numbers for more than a few lottery tickets.

The only thing he remembered clearly was the birthday letter Shen Chao sent him every year, which he had never bothered to open properly.

And the tin box his mother had tremblingly handed back to him at Shen Chao's funeral, filled with every unspoken expression of love from a girl between the ages of five and twenty-three.

This time around, Lu Chi wanted only three things:

First, to protect the little girl across the hall who was always clinging to him.

Second, to make sure she grew up safe and sound.

Third, when she turned twenty-three, to be the first to say the words “I love you” that had come a lifetime too late.

But the river of time carries more than one story.

Beneath the summer parasols in a village in southern Anhui, he met a girl named Lin Wan, with porcelain-pale skin and eyes as tranquil as a deep pool. She gave him a pair of stones that fit together perfectly and softly said, “That way, you won't forget this summer.”

And so, from then on, Lu Chi's life held two colors etched into his soul:

One was the blazing, bright sun, Shen Chao. The other was the cool, luminous moon, Lin Wan.

One was the salvation he wanted to hold on to after being reborn. The other was a love that took him by surprise.

This is a story about protection and choice.

In an age before Bitcoin was born, he quietly planted the seeds of the future.

In the years when Nokia ringtones rang out, he stayed by the side of someone important, slowly