The Cicada Knows Nothing of Next Year

A Sad Ending Throughout | No Reconciliation After the Breakup | Mutual Healing | A Realistic Story That Leaves You Heartbroken]

⚠️ A realistic, healing yet heartbreaking story. Both leads grow, but do not get back together. Everyone finds peace. If sad endings aren't for you, read with caution.

The cicadas screeched through the height of summer when they were seventeen.

Chen Zhixia came home late and knocked Lu Feng's recorder to the ground. The crisp sound of her footsteps suddenly entered the wind sounds he had collected all summer.

She was a reserved girl raised by her deaf and mute grandmother. She was used to silence, longed for stability, and feared sudden farewells most of all.

He was a sunny boy raised wandering with a theater troupe. He was good at saying goodbye, carefree and free-spirited, and never dared promise forever.

Their paths should have crossed only briefly, but that summer, they saved each other.

He taught her to speak, filling her silent world with sound.

She taught him to put down roots and stay, giving his wandering heart a place to call home.

They filled tapes with the cicadas' song year after year and promised to meet again every summer, believing summer would never end and that they would always see each other again.

But life does not bend to the passions of youth.

Her grandmother passed away, distance separated them, their dreams took different paths, and the mountains and seas between them proved too vast.

He traveled far through wind and snow, recording every sound in the world. She stayed in their small town, gently protecting the little lights of everyday life.

There were no melodramatic misunderstandings, no love and hate entanglements. They simply, little by little, lost each other over the years.

Later, the old trees still rang with cicada song, and both of them had become better versions of themselves.

But that summer, and the people they had been then, could never come back.

It turns out that meeting at all was the greatest blessing.

But cicadas don't understand next year, and the young don't understand what it means for things to come full circle.