When Chen Manyi was fourteen, Chu Mingyuan saved her once. From then on, he became the guiding light of her life.
Her sense of justice is overflowing. On her first day reporting for work, she used her suitcase to knock down a creep taking secret photos. She can't help meddling, so she helped her best friend catch a food-delivery thief, helped a laid-off older man demand his wages, and wrote suggestions to the principal. She's impossibly determined: she got into the high school he attended and filled her sketchbook with the same person's back view. When he disappeared again, she began living in her memories.
In everyone else's eyes, Chu Mingyuan is the light of Yunzhou No. 1 High School: an excellent student with a polite, distant smile that never fades. But Chen Manyi thinks he's like the moon, giving off a gentle glow of kindness while hiding all its craters.
Later, she meets him again at Yunzhou University of Science and Technology. They're in the same school, and their dorms face each other. She pursues him, but he politely keeps his distance. She asks why he vanished without a trace. He says there are things in his past he wants to cut off completely.
After all this time apart, she still can't bring herself to ask the question: "Did you ever like me?"
She says, "Some people are incapable of love, just as I can't squeeze blood from his soul."
At last, she understands that longing is a kind of illness.
"At seventeen, you were the secret in a young girl's heart. At twenty-one, you were a poem I couldn't bring myself to write in my dreams."
"I only feel alive when I love him."
