On the day Shen Yanzhi disappeared, it was raining lightly in Hangzhou.
Lin Xingran waited for four years for a document announcing his death. She didn't believe it. Until she found the broken piece of jade that made him disappear in the Luoyang Museum, with half a poem engraved on it: "This feeling can only be remembered."
She touched the jade.
When he woke up, he was lying under the city wall of Bianjing in the Northern Song Dynasty. A young man with a toothy smile squatted in front of her: "Where are you from? What are you wearing?"
His name is Pei Yan, a student of the Imperial College, and he is as enthusiastic as a ray of sunshine. He took her to eat Hu cakes, visit Bianjing, and told her: "That Dr. Shen you are talking about? His name is Shen Yanzhi, and his courtesy name is Sigui. He lives in the alley behind the Imperial College."
She opened the door and saw the person she had been waiting for four years.
But he stood inside the door, his eyes as calm as looking at a stranger: "Girl, who are you looking for?"
Twenty years.
It took four years on her side, and a full twenty years on his side.
He was no longer the Shen Yanzhi who would send her messages at two o'clock in the morning. He was a doctor of Guozijian in the Northern Song Dynasty. He was as gentle as jade, self-denial and etiquette, and his every move was full of character. He rinsed his mouth with green salt, wrote beautiful Su style, bowed to superior officials, and greeted his colleagues - he was domesticated by time and became a real ancient person.
The only thing that hasn't changed is that he goes outside the city every month, standing alone on the hillside, looking east.
To the east is the direction home.
East is the direction she is in.
He thought he would never see her again.
But here she is.
She asked him using the secret code she used by the West Lake twenty years ago: "I want to return home, but why don't I return?"
His eyes were red.
Twenty years, seven thousand three hundred days and nights, he waited for her.
But at this moment, he realized that what was more terrifying than "not being able to wait" was "not being able to go back."
Here she comes.
But he can't go back.
And Pei Yan, the young man with a tiger-toothed smile, was falling bit by bit into a love that was destined to be fruitless.
Concept: Time is the gentlest tamer and the cruelest executioner.
If one day the person you love most disappears for twenty years and comes back as a different person - would you still recognize him? Do you still love him? Do you love the person in your memory or the stranger standing in front of you?
As for you, if you were forced to live in a completely unfamiliar world for twenty years, would you still be able to maintain your original aspirations? Or will you also be tamed by time and become a person you don't even recognize?
We all think that love can transcend everything.
But time cannot be crossed.