Echoes in the No-Man's-Land: He Called It Love

My name is Xie Chenqing... No... My name is Lin Zhixia...

[Changes faces faster than turning a page × So cold he could freeze someone eight miles away]

Everyone thought that my first meeting with Xu Shuyan was our actual first meeting, and I believed them too.

When we were children

In the height of summer, at Nanshan Park, I helped a pampered young master to his feet, and the gears of fate began to turn.

We saw two boys holding hands on a bench, taking wedding photos, and asked innocently,

"Can two boys get married too?"

When we were parting, he turned back halfway.

"Then can I like you?"

Half asleep, I neither agreed nor refused.

I gave him the hair tie my mother had let me play with. It had a little yellow star on it, and he gave me a jade safety pendant.

"You're a boy, so why do you have your mother's hair tie?"

"We'll use these to recognize each other. Someday, we'll take photos just like them."

But in the days that followed, the gears of fate mercilessly crushed everything.

My father's violence and alcoholism brought our family to ruin.

On a rainy night, Mom took me and fled to Ningzhou. I changed my name and became Lin Zhixia.

Mom stayed by my side through elementary school and my first two years of middle school.

On my fifteenth birthday, Mom left me forever...

Clutching half of a crystal pendant, I gritted my teeth and made it into high school, enduring the neighbors' help, bullying at school, and beatings from my father.

I thought I'd never find him in this lifetime, until the first day of school, when I saw the most familiar stranger in my new class.

"Get lost. I want to be alone."

"Why?"

"I have my own personal space, okay?"

"What a coincidence. I like your personal space too. What kind of illegal building is this? I'll tear it down!"

He seemed like a stranger who had never known me...

I didn't dare tell him.

"You only need to take one step forward. I'll take the remaining ninety-nine for you."

We were young and reckless, after all.

In the name of love, all he gave me was the empty joy of entrusting his life to me.

He began in the name of love. I wagered half my life, and in the end, it was an echo that no one answered.

It began in summer, paused in summer, and ended in summer.

At the end of the story, we were finally together "forever."

Theme: Embracing in the darkness and staying by each other's side in desperate times, fulfilling a youthful promise of eternity at the cost of one's life.