1.
On Qingming Festival, drizzle fell without end, and birdsong echoed through a secluded valley.
Cui Siyi sat outside the temple atop Qinglu Mountain, holding daisies in his hand. All he could think about was the girl who had almost become his first love: Where was Jiang Fanfan now, after her soul had departed?
The drizzle stopped. The temple doors swung wide, and a Taoist nun in a dark blue robe caught sight of the man outside the gate. She turned and hurried away in a panic.
On the steps, Cui Siyi let out a cold laugh. His voice was neither loud nor soft, just enough for the nun to hear:
"Jiang Fanfan, you've lied to me for all these years. If you don't come back now, I'll really think you're dead."
Separated by a door, the nun was silent for a long while before making up her mind. "Fine. Just consider me dead. Thanks for coming all this way to see me. You can keep your chrysanthemums."
"My chrysanthemums?" Cui Siyi stood up, his smile wild and unrestrained. "You wish."
"..."
The bunch of chrysanthemums in your hand!
2.
Cui Siyi, the "stage-play male lead doomed to a bad ending," is said to have been born for the theater. His performances are perfectly controlled, and he belongs onstage by nature.
Rumor has it that he lost his first love when he was young and never spoke of love again, becoming aloof and carefree, proud and solitary, and devoting himself only to the stage.
Until one day, his first love returned.
A new star suddenly emerged in the theater world.
The young woman was slender and graceful, and her performance was breathtakingly beautiful.
Audiences called her the "crested ibis" of the stage: rare in this world, elegant and noble, and on the verge of extinction.
But the man who had watched her perform time and again from the audience knew that she was no crested ibis.
She should be a Qingluan: one who once gathered fragrant wood and burned herself, then rose anew from the ashes of death.
3.
Later, the audience finally learned why the boy who ruled the stage would kiss the base of his thumb, fingers pointed upward, with his right hand at every curtain call. It was his way of kissing the palm of the girl who had passed away.
Theme: On the stage
