See You at the Next Stop

Lin Wan always thought this was just how life would be. Go to work, work overtime, rush for the subway, wait for the weekend while fielding one “urgent revision” after another, then wait for the next weekend as soon as the last one ends. Until one day, she casually snapped her fingers. The next second, the office disappeared. She was standing on a black-sand beach in Iceland, the sea surging before her and a world she had never seen behind her. That was also where she met Zhou Chen. He had quit his job and traveled from place to place with a backpack, never knowing where he would go next. Later, Lin Wan discovered that if she truly wanted to go somewhere, she could cross cities, borders, and oceans and arrive in an instant. So she began visiting the sights that had once existed only on her screen. The northern lights at midnight, the scorching streets of North Africa, whales in the Atlantic, long highways, snow-capped mountains, forests, and the first light shining in an unfamiliar city. And strangely enough… No matter how vast the world was, she always seemed to run into Zhou Chen. They made no plans, followed no fixed routes, and never knew where they would meet next. Yet time and again, they still found their way to each other. Lin Wan once thought that being able to reach anywhere in the world in an instant was the greatest miracle fate had given her. Only later did she understand. What mattered most was never how far she could go. It was that amid the crowds, the passage of time, and countless diverging roads, there was someone who had truly traveled alongside her. They always said: See you at the next stop. But back then, neither of them knew that some “next stops” would not wait there forever.