Beneath the Qilian Mountains

"We can't escape the universe anyway. Everywhere is a prison, really. The Qilian Mountains are the center of the world."

[Li Shuoye x Ji Xunchuan]

-

A long time has passed since Ji Xunchuan's childhood, when people called him a child prodigy. A long time has passed since the bleak years when he had blood-red scars on his hands, too.

And just as much time has passed since he and Li Shuoye parted ways for good.

So much time, in fact, that when he wakes in the dead of night and sees the remnant moon in the deep-blue sky, he wonders if their love was only an illusory dream reflected into reality by the moon.

-

At eighteen, with the fading echoes of the college entrance exam bell behind him, Ji Xunchuan traveled by high-speed train to the foot of the Qilian Mountains, battling altitude sickness. One night, as a green dragonfly landed on the windowsill, he met a boy who spoke softly and had a beauty mark above the rim of his ear.

His gaze fled toward the distant snow-capped mountains, betraying his true feelings. His heart raced. It took every ounce of courage he had to ask, "What's your name?"

The boy said his name was Li Shuoye.

Shuo, as in the north wind, and Ye, as in the wilderness.

As he spoke, it seemed the grasses and clouds were rising with him. The foot of the Qilian Mountains was breathtakingly beautiful.

Ji Xunchuan thought that might be why, years later, he could never forget this boy with such striking features.

Their meeting had been so romantic and dazzling that Li Shuoye's words before they parted, "No one can stay with anyone for a lifetime," seemed a little less heartless.

-

They broke up in October, the golden month. The grassland was dying, the sunlight blood-red. His former lover's voice was now hard as ice, so perfectly suited to the scene that Ji Xunchuan couldn't help laughing. Li Shuoye said, "You have to live well from now on, too."

Ji Xunchuan, who had never been good at crying, shed a tear for the first time in his life.

He couldn't say how he felt afterward. It only seemed to leave him even more helpless.

Before leaving for the United States, Ji Xunchuan looked back at the airport, shrouded in darkness beneath a sky thick with clouds. He wondered, who could be my moon from now on?

-

No matter how much he still missed him, Ji Xunchuan always believed there could be no future for him and Li Shuoye. That was until, six years later, he returned to the foot of the Qilian Mountains.

After six years apart, one was a commercial horse ranch owner who moved among the drinking tables, while the other was a university professor who followed the usual routine of working on projects. Their lives were ordinary, with nothing new worth reporting.

The lofty ideals and ambitions they had once whispered about, the hazy dreams of old, champagne and beer, exams and dissertations, all seemed to have turned into shards of transparent glass scattered across the floor. The boys they used to be were dead.

Neither wanted to face the other, just as neither wanted to face the self that life had hammered flat.

But dying grasslands always bloom again the following year.

They still found themselves on the same stretch of grassland, at the border between dream and reality, silently facing each other.

"Do you hate the ways I've changed?"

With just a centimeter between their lips, he answered:

"I hate the Li Shuoye who asks me questions like that."

1. He/him. Pure love, each other's first and only love, reunited after a breakup.

2. No character is favored. OVO. They all have their own pain and growth, as well as their own mistakes and flaws.

3. Real place names have been adapted.

Theme: Make it through winter and embrace you beneath the snow-capped mountains