Lin Zhao's knees always made a crisp sound like broken glass.
She was crouching in the garbage dump rummaging through the Tsinghua Physics Department's flyer. The cuffs of her school uniform oozed pus and blood from the muscle patch, but she heard the sound of leather boots crushing the moonlight from behind her——
"Lin Zhao? Your father owes two hundred thousand."
The cold light from Cheng Ye's earrings flashed across her purple fingertips, and the stick was pressed against her ulcerated knees, but she suddenly let go when she saw the oath on the title page of her textbook to "take the Physics Department of Tsinghua University."
This is a summer where fate is measured by pain.
A mute female painter was made pornographic, boxing punching bags were turned into bargaining chips, and "late stages of ALS" and "sepsis" on the medical certificate were intertwined. He shreds her organ-pawn agreement, but she discovers that the new scar on his collarbone overlaps with the signature on his mother's medical records.
"Look at the finale question she solved for me."
It rained heavily on the day of the college entrance examination. Before he was charged and imprisoned, he tore up all the wrong question papers annotated with red pen, leaving only the Latin embroidered words floating in the wind: Dum spiro, servo (I breathe, therefore I protect).
Many years later, in front of the Tsinghua University motto monument, with her wheelchair running over dead leaves, she finally understood—the last piece of draft paper written with the word "Zhao" read: "May you become the light."
Purpose: Redemption