Yi Yue first met Shen Jindu on an evening in late autumn.
Smoke curled from the mountain village kitchens. Dressed in the rising moonlight, she dragged her heavy luggage across countless mountains and rivers, arriving somewhere no one knew her.
The dolly wheels rattled over the thick stone slabs. She sank into the damp mud and happened to look up.
A ginkgo tree on the second floor stretched into the corridor, reaching toward the far end of the glass windows.
He was talking with the village chief. Beneath his black coat, his sharply defined profile was like a sketched branch scraping across the galaxy. The stray hair at his temple caught the light as smoke curled around his fingertips.
The moment he turned, their eyes met, and she lost her way in the moonlit passage.
"What are you looking at?"
Across the divide of time and space, Yi Yue heard him say, "I think I saw a little wooden girl who'd lost her way."
Everyone thought he called Yi Yue "Wooden Girl" because she'd worn a russet coat that day. Only Yi Yue knew he'd seen right through her gentle exterior to the dullness and monotony beneath, and through her soul to its numbness and pallor.
A dull soul can't have an interesting life. Some people chase mountains and seas, some revel in indulgence, and some wander through the wilderness. But others remain trapped in a lifeless shell, sinking deeper into the mud the harder they struggle.
Yi Yue had thought this escape would be nothing more than a journey of self-exile, a fragment of a lonely life.
But when she saw white snow falling in layer upon layer across the boundless mountains, like powdered sugar; when she lay among the fields beneath the shade of trees in the rainy season, waiting for the peanuts to ripen; when she stood on the attic rooftop beneath the summer night sky and saw the river of stars and that person's eyes; as the seasons turned...
She seemed to see herself.
The self inside her slowly, quietly emerged in the unnoticed depths of the night, stealing a glance at the world, and then never wanting to leave...
A gentle girl with depression × a down-to-earth, healing boy
Theme: Please remember to find your way back to who you were
