Chapter 355: Bird and Fish

The face is gone, I know not where, but the peach blossoms still smile in the spring breeze.

Looking at the photo in his hand, Jiang Ran understood everything.

His earlier suspicions had been correct.

The roll of film should have held eight photos, yet it was full after he had only taken seven.

The implication was obvious: someone had used the camera to take a photo behind his back.

Nan Xiuxiu.

It was all just another one of that quirky, unconventional girl’s clever little tricks.

After buying the camera, she hadn’t rushed to give it to him. Instead, she had secretly learned how to use it and taken the first photo herself, preparing a little surprise.

According to Nan Xiuxiu’s plan, he was supposed to find this surprise when he developed the photos and then be so moved that “tears welled up in his eyes,” right?

What a pity.

Things rarely go according to plan.

Before the girl’s little trick could be revealed, the two had already parted ways, becoming strangers on different paths.

For a moment, Jiang Ran was overcome with a mix of emotions.

He examined the photo closely and noticed more details.

Above the handwritten birthday card, the edge of an Apple laptop was visible. In the left corner of the photo lay the scraps of a few discarded cards—likely failed attempts with mistakes. To the right sat an unopened spool of ribbon, ready for wrapping.

The picture was now clear.

Jiang Ran closed his eyes, and he could already imagine the scene when Nan Xiuxiu had taken the photo—

To plan his birthday party and prepare his gift, Nan Xiuxiu must have done a lot of research and put in a great deal of thought.

She hadn’t simply bought him a camera; she’d prepared a little surprise for him as well…

So, when the camera arrived, Nan Xiuxiu first opened her laptop and looked up a bunch of tutorials. She sat in her chair, studying the screen intently, learning how to focus, how to load the film, how to frame a shot, and how to operate the shutter.

It turned out Nan Xiuxiu had learned to use the camera before he had.

He recalled how at the birthday party, Nan Xiuxiu had pretended to know nothing about film cameras, patiently holding a pose for ages while he fumbled to figure out how to focus…

‘Nan Xiuxiu knew all along that I couldn’t use a film camera. She realized I was lying the whole time.’

‘But not only did she not expose the truth, she even defended me from Wang Hao’s doubts.’

Jiang Ran took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

Nan Xiuxiu.

‘Just how deep were her feelings for me?’

The desk where the card was placed in the photo was clearly her dorm room desk.

Nan Xiuxiu had written the words on the card with painstaking care, stroke by stroke. She rarely wrote by hand, so she must have struggled, forgetting characters or finding her handwriting messy and unsatisfactory.

The discarded card scraps nearby must have been her unsatisfactory attempts… She had rewritten those few lines again and again, all to present him with the most perfect, beautiful blessing.

She must have been so pleased with herself at that moment, right?

She must have imagined that one day, when Jiang Ran developed the photos and found her secret picture, he would be in for a huge surprise. She had learned to use a film camera to cater to his interests—a classic case of “love me, love my dog.”

Just as she had written on the card—

*”You see? As long as it’s something you like, I’ll slowly come to like it, too!”*

This sudden, overwhelming love, fierce as a flash flood, seemed to pour out of the photograph and engulf the entire room.

He thought back to his conversation with Fang Ze.

According to Fang Ze’s theory, Nan Xiuxiu was completely “love-brained.” Ninety-nine percent of her brain power was spent on how to be in a relationship with him and how to create the perfect, sweet romance for him.

Even if some of her efforts seemed superfluous from a guy’s perspective, that’s just how a love-brained girl was… Nan Xiuxiu’s happiness depended on Jiang Ran’s happiness; Nan Xiuxiu’s life depended on Jiang Ran’s choices.

Therefore,

when she learned Jiang Ran liked film cameras, she gladly researched them;

when she learned Jiang Ran was going to East Sea University, she naively proclaimed she would test in and follow him;

when she learned Jiang Ran liked a certain flavor of milk tea, she bought it repeatedly, trying to make herself like the taste as well;

And so on and so forth. There were things Jiang Ran knew, and things he didn’t.

But no matter what, this unconventional, stubborn, and headstrong girl who never pandered to convention or cared for criticism… had always placed her favorite person, Jiang Ran, first in her world.

Jiang Ran opened his eyes.

He scanned the photograph one more time, from left to right, his gaze finally resting on the unopened spool of ribbon on the right.

So that was it. Every part of his birthday gift, inside and out—from the first photo on the film roll to the ribbon tied around the gift box—had all been prepared by Nan Xiuxiu’s own hands.

People often say that time dilutes a person’s story, but memory always covers it with a hazy filter, making the past grow thick and viscous in the gloom.

In truth, at this point, Jiang Ran didn’t hate Nan Xiuxiu as much as he once had.

He admitted they had met at the strangest, most awful time in his life. So, clouded by fear and prejudice, he had indeed gone through a period where he found Nan Xiuxiu incredibly annoying and irrational.

But as they spent more time together, Jiang Ran gradually came to understand the girl… She didn’t have a single bad intention; on the contrary, she was frighteningly naive.

But…

They were like a bird and a fish—one in the sky, the other in the sea. One was on World Line 0, the other on World Line 1. They were parallel lines, destined never to intersect.

Faced with the chasm of time and space, what could a mere, insignificant human do?

That was a history destined to be erased in the Worldline Jump. The moment he brought Cheng Mengxue back to life… the story between him and Nan Xiuxiu would, like the photograph in his hand, dissipate into dust and smoke, ceasing to exist.