The ordinary story I wrote with my own hands became my second life.
At twenty-eight, I pulled an all-nighter to meet a deadline, and my heart stopped. When I opened my eyes again, I had become Lin Xiao, a high school senior with the same name as the heroine of my debut novel.
The original plot was etched clearly in my mind:
My father would die in an accident before the college entrance exams. I would grow up, marry, and eventually have all the tenderness drained out of me by four years of childlessness.
With the “script” in my hands, I smiled. This time, I would rewrite every regret:
Save my father, get into a good university, and avoid the seemingly gentle upperclassman who was my “official match” but would cheat on me.
Everything went according to plan, until
My father escaped the condemned building, only to nearly get into a car accident at another intersection;
I found a diary in his study, written by “myself.” The handwriting was familiar, but I had never seen its contents before;
And Lu Huaizhou, an upperclassman who had only one line in the original story, kept appearing whenever I needed him, his quiet gaze as though he saw through everything.
“Lin Xiao,” he asked softly in the library’s evening glow, his fingertip tracing a book’s spine, “it seems like you’ve been preparing for something all along.”
“Can you relax now?”
I thought I had been reborn, transmigrated into a book, and given the script to crush everyone with my foreknowledge.
Only later did I understand
That the “paper character” I had never bothered to describe properly was gently making me whole, even as he filled in the gaps in the world.
