On her way home from school one day, Shen Wan came across a boy at the mouth of a gloomy alley. He was covered in bruises, with a black eye, and lay in despair beside a puddle of dirty water.
She stopped and tilted most of her umbrella toward him, but the boy reacted like a startled bird. He struggled to his feet, glared at her, and ran away.
Later, Shen Wan learned that he was the son of the neighbors upstairs, and that his alcoholic father had beaten and verbally abused him for years. Everyone around him avoided him.
But Shen Wan suddenly remembered the look in the boy's eyes that night at the alley's entrance: the look of a prisoner driven to the end of the road.
She didn't know that if she hadn't tilted her umbrella toward him, he would have died in that rainy night.
Mud and moonlight. Lin Zhihan had never imagined that these two utterly different things could have anything to do with Shen Wan.
He struggled and fell apart in the depths of his hellish life. At one point, a cruel thought even crossed his mind: to drag down someone so far beyond his reach.
Someone so good. If only she could come down and rot alongside me.
He was selfish, despicable, and dark. When cruelty met purity, even love came tinged with hatred.
And Shen Wan simply opened the door one night, when he was planning to die with that man, and reached out to him.
At last, he grasped the moon with ease, but he regretted it.
"The moon belongs high in the sky, and he must make his own way toward it."
A girl saves a boy who has given up on life. The story should have ended there, happily, like a fairy tale.
But somehow, everything... wasn't quite as she had imagined.
Lin Zhihan had said more than once that she saved him.
But Shen Wan didn't remember it. A voice in her mind kept crying out in denial, and when she lowered her head, the moon-shaped birthmark on her wrist was as crimson as a catastrophe.
Fate intertwined, the story went awry, and the moon hung high on a certain night.
The red mark on her wrist disappeared.
Reader's guide: School life / redemption / twists / 1v1 / both leads are each other's first / imaginative premise / he has a secret crush on her
Setting: Modern alternate universe
Author's Weibo: Zhi Jiujiu
Theme: Breaking free from obsession and love
