At eighteen, Lin Xingchen clutched her full-scholarship admission letter and left her county town for the most expensive private school in the city. On the first day of school, wearing a 39.9-yuan white shirt among students dressed in ARMANI uniforms, she felt like a speck of dust that had strayed into the Milky Way.
All she wanted was to get into Tsinghua and give her mother, who ran a small restaurant, a better life.
But somehow, she caught Gu Sichen’s attention. The school chairman’s son, the top student in their year, he was as cool and distant as an iceberg that would never melt. Yet he kept showing up in front of her: walking her home, helping her out of a jam, and telling her, when she was at her most wretched, “You don’t have to carry it all alone.”
Just as Lin Xingchen began to think this was nothing more than a schoolyard crush that crossed class lines, her father, missing for twelve years, suddenly returned and brought to light a sealed case from thirteen years ago. The case led straight to Gu Sichen’s family.
She was the daughter of the whistleblower. He was the son of those who benefited from the case.
They stood on opposite sides of a gulf, holding each other’s hands, yet separated by the prejudice of an entire world. All they could do was fight to grow up, to become strong enough to protect the people they wanted to protect, and to stand in the sunlight and love each other without fear.
This is the story of a star rising from the dust. This is the story of a young man who spends his entire youth answering, “I’m here.”
