She Comes to the Human World

When Li Ruochu was twenty-four years old, she traveled through time and space to meet a poet whom she had studied for fifteen years. She was supposed to just take a look and return in a few days. But the experiment went awry. She became a half-conscious, half-corporeal being—one who could become invisible or choose to be seen by someone occasionally. The person she chose was named Ji Qianfan. She didn't know that this companionship would last for sixty years. In the past sixty years, she used punishment and warning again and again in exchange for the moments of being seen in his life. Every time he saw it, he was getting closer to the edge of being cleared by time and space. She knows. She chose. Sixty years later, before he died, he asked: "Was it worth it?" She said: "It's worth it." Then she disappeared into the space-time tunnel. Many years later, someone asked her: Is it worth spending a lifetime to change someone else? She thought for a while and said: "I read his poem for the first time when I was nine years old. There was no wind that afternoon, but I always felt that something had passed." "Later I realized that it was me who was in the past." "From the moment I read that line, I was already on the road." "Sixty years is just a walk from him back to myself." She is there, but you can't see her.