Time Travel

On the night of February 2, 2011, my daughter was lured to a park under the guise of a part-time job.

There, she was raped and her body was discarded. At least three people were involved in the assault, but the killers were never found.

On New Year’s Eve, 2026, I prepared a table full of poisoned food and looked at my daughter’s photograph. “It’s been fifteen years, and I still haven’t found the people who destroyed you.

I don’t want to spend another New Year without you. I’m coming down to join you now.”

As the poison began to take effect, I set down my chopsticks and leaned over the table, retching. Just then, my phone rang.

When I answered, a familiar voice came from the other end: “Dad, I’m at the park. Wait for me, I’ll be home soon.”

After my husband’s favored concubine shoved me into a deep well, I miscarried. As crimson blood spread through the water, I heard a strange melody rise from the depths.

“Third Set of National Middle School Students’ Radio Gymnastics, Dancing Youth, begins now.”

At exactly midnight, there was a sudden knock on the dormitory door.

I thought it was just the dorm warden doing rounds, but then a cold, mechanical voice rang out in my ear- [Ding-The Zombie invasion has begun. Your first WeChat meme sticker is now your life-saving artifact.]

My three roommates were: an Avatar, Briar, and an Armor Hero.

Trembling, I tapped on my phone… My first meme sticker was my ex-boyfriend’s grinning face.

Marquis Dingbei, Lu Chenzhou, had three wishes in life. First, a smooth career in court. Second, a prosperous household. Third, to marry the woman he loved. The first two were within easy reach. Only the third remained beyond him-unattainable, forbidden, inescapable. They said another man’s wife was not to be taken. But what if that woman was the wife he had divorced in his previous life?

By sheer chance, I stumbled across a diary from a hundred years ago.

Its owner seemed to have been the young master of some wealthy household. Inside were little records of his daily life: “May 7, Year 14 of the Republic of China. Clear skies. I skipped class to play cards with my classmates, and my teacher chased me all the way home and scolded me. So annoying!”

I found it amusing, so I added a line beneath it: “May 2024. Been working for too long. Exhausted.”

The very next second, a sentence surfaced on the diary page: “Who are you?”

When Nan Mu was very young, he met someone who told him: never, under any circumstances, become friends with Wen Miao.

As the years passed and he was on the verge of forgetting that warning, he met a girl. Her name was Wen Miao.

Even more shocking than the genius girl Wen Miao winning the nation’s highest award in physics was the fact that she was murdered in the Biology Research Lab like a common lab rat-with her very skull sliced open.

The boy I loved died in the prime of his life.

So, I traveled back twenty years, giving everything I had to bring him even a single glimmer of hope.

Gu Zhixian, you probably won’t believe me, but I’m your future wife…

Gu Zhixian, the future you is a wonderful, kind-hearted person.

Gu Zhixian, we’re going to have a precious child in the future. They’ll have your eyes and my eyebrows.

So, please don’t give up on yourself, okay?

The boy I loved believed me.

As the clock prepares to strike midnight, it’s time for me to go.

I’m sorry. I lied to you. I am not your wife.

And in our future, we will never meet again.

After an argument with Zhou Mingyu, I jumped from the thirtieth floor with my five-month-old daughter in my arms.

When I opened my eyes again, time had actually returned to yesterday.

On this day, because the baby wouldn’t stop crying, Zhou Mingyu snapped at me for the first time: “Chen Ran, you don’t have a mother yourself, so it’s no wonder you don’t even know how to take care of a child!”

Our relationship had always been good, so I thought he hadn’t meant it; I blamed it on my own volatile temper and for taking things too hard.

But time continued to flow backward, and I discovered that this wasn’t the first time Zhou Mingyu had said such things: During my postpartum recovery month, he joked, “If your mother were still alive, my mother wouldn’t be so exhausted.”

On the day I was hospitalized to give birth, in response to the nurse’s questions, he said with a smile, “Her mother passed away, so who else could be her caregiver but me?”

At our wedding, he held my hand and vowed, “Chen Ran, I will definitely take good care of you in your mother’s stead!”

… It turned out he had always cared about the fact that I didn’t have a mother.

But the strange thing was, why didn’t I have any memory of my mother at all?

Had she ever truly existed?

If time continued to flow backward, would I eventually see her?

Every night, I travel ten years into the future along with my classmate, the school’s most popular guy.

I never would have imagined that ten years from now, we’d be married with a baby of our own!

So, the moment I saw him lying there on my pillow, I didn’t hesitate for a second-I pounced right on him.

It has been ten years since I died.

After a decade, I have finally seen the first person to come and pay their respects at my grave.

It is a man, limping as he walks toward me.

It is my father.