Lin Yi'an has been stuck on a painting for three years, and there has always been a blank space on the canvas: the place where Xie Zhiheng should be.
Then one day, during a torrential rainstorm, his fingertips brushed the rainy alley in an old painting. When he opened his eyes again, he was standing on the bluestone road from when he was nineteen, with the half-eaten osmanthus cake Xie Zhiheng had bought him years ago in his pocket.
Other people transmigrate into a book, but he transmigrates into a painting. Each time, he finds another clue: the fingerprint on the hand warmer's switch belongs to Xie Zhiheng; the rosewood pen barrel is engraved with "Zhiheng, Yi'an's"; even the bank card password is his birthday.
Only belatedly does he realize that Xie Zhiheng's claim that he "wouldn't lower himself to work with him" as he knocked over the palette was a lie. Secretly paying his mother's surgery bills was true. So was mixing "memory powder" into his paints, allowing him to follow the painted worlds and uncover the truth.
The final painted world is in the snowy mountains. Lin Yi'an looks at the studio before him, identical in every detail to the one in the painting. When he opens the door, Xie Zhiheng is carving a crane, its eyes shaped exactly like his.
"Found enough clues?" Xie Zhiheng turns around, stone dust still on his fingertips. "I've watched you work on that painting for three years, from the edge of the painted world."
So all those blank spaces in the paintings were places you left for me to fill when we met again.
(Oil-painter bottom x sculptor top, getting back together after a breakup, transmigrating into his own paintings to uncover the truth, happy ending, sweet and angsty throughout, with an excessive amount of snowy-mountain cuddling later on)
Theme: Study hard and make progress every day.
