Morris: "If you're going to take the husband's role in our relationship, you should understand what your wife needs. But you don't, so we're doomed to fail."
Yang Zheng: "...I'm leaving first thing tomorrow morning. Go to sleep."
[GB] An Eastern-style building in an ancient, quiet forest in Europe bears witness to a meeting across the centuries: To dear Mr. Morris.
Yang Zheng: A follower of freedom
Morris: A conservative
[2024 timeline]: After photographer Yang Zheng starts thinking about traveling to Switzerland, she begins having frequent hallucinations. That familiar yet foreign land seems to sense that she is on her way. What she doesn't know is that more than beautiful scenery is waiting for her. Deep in the forests of the Alps, a gentleman has been waiting for her for a hundred years amid white walls and black tiles.
After arriving, Yang Zheng happens upon the Chinese-style building hidden in the mountains and meets Morris, its handsome owner. During a walk with him, a fragment of a memory from a hundred years ago suddenly comes back to her. It makes Yang Zheng realize that the two of them had already crossed paths back then, and had been lovers.
Yang Zheng is both curious and at a loss over their past. Faced with her former lover, now a ghost, she is torn over whether to run away and abandon the past, making the most of her new life in the present. But the inexplicably strong feelings she has for Morris make it impossible to resist being close to him.
Mr. Bern Morris is always impossible to read. Yang Zheng doesn't understand what he feels for her. When she looks into his gray-blue eyes, she senses that there's much more to his feelings than meets the eye. She grows more and more curious about their story from back then...
[1917 timeline]: In the spring of 1917, a 21-year-old student studying abroad meets her 25-year-old teacher and neighbor. Unfortunate circumstances draw them both into a case, and as they spend time together, they develop feelings for each other.
As they get to know each other, they discover and accommodate one another, allowing time to reveal their beloved in their entirety and touch each other's souls.
Perhaps there are regrets, but they don't sigh in the wilderness. Instead, they run to pick up every leaf, press them between the pages of their notebooks, and preserve them as memories belonging only to them through the long seasons.
The year 2024 becomes a promise they couldn't tell each other back then.
[All foreign-language dialogue in the full story is rendered in Chinese.]
Theme: Memories and the future
"This is fate, this is the most beautiful meeting of fate..." Tan Yunxi fits this article so well, I feel like crying just reading it.
Teacher, will you update this again?