Chapter 5

Chapter 5

On the seventh loop, Lu Chen was the one who spoke first.

It was winter during our sophomore year of high school. I was waiting for him at the library entrance, holding the stomach medicine I’d bought for him in advance. Lu Chen came down the stairs and stood before me. He didn’t take the medicine for a long while, only asking in a low voice, “Cheng Zhi, have we met like this many times before?”

My heart skipped a beat.

“What?”

“I’ve been dreaming a lot lately.” He frowned slightly. “In the dreams, you’re always running. Sometimes it’s at the school gate, sometimes by the bridge, and once… you were crying outside an emergency room.”

The box of medicine in my hand hit the ground with a sharp thud.

Lu Chen bent down to pick it up for me. When his fingertips brushed mine, they were terrifyingly cold.

“Are you really okay?” He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a panic in his eyes that I could understand. “Cheng Zhi, why does it always feel like you’re racing against time?”

I opened my mouth, but my throat felt blocked.

What could I say?

That I was racing against your death? That I’d already watched you die six times? That every single time, I thought I could keep you here, only to end up sending you away in a different manner?

It was too absurd.

But what was even more absurd was that Lu Chen actually seemed to believe it.

That evening, we walked out of the school gates together for the first time. The wind was cold, and the setting sun cast long shadows of the camphor trees along the road. I was walking distractedly when Lu Chen suddenly unwound his scarf and wrapped it around my neck.

“Don’t keep staring at me,” he said. “I’m not going to just vanish.”

My nose stung, and I nearly burst into tears right there on the street.

Lu Chen didn’t know that his attempt at comfort cut deeper than a knife.

Because I knew that he would.

And not just once.

What truly made me understand the cost was the Seventh Blue Notebook.

That time, Lu Chen died in a multi-car pileup on the highway that I couldn’t have prevented no matter how hard I tried. I was waiting for the rescue teams in the rain when a sudden, sharp pain flared in my chest, and I blacked out. When I woke up, I was back on the first day of freshman year.

Driven by pure instinct, I flipped open my backpack, wanting to transcribe everything I had recorded before.

But inside the bag, along with my textbooks, was a piece of paper that didn’t belong to this point in time.

It was a sheet torn from an essay notebook, covered in my own handwriting.

“If you are seeing this, it means you have reached the seventh time.”

My hands began to shake.

“Lu Chen’s death is not an accident; it is the result of repeated corrections. Every time you change things, he will die in a different way. You think you are saving him, but you are actually just delaying the settlement.”

“The price will fall on you.”

“Every time you bring him back, you lose a bit of your own time. In the end, fate will demand that you personally complete the path he was supposed to finish.”

At the very bottom of the page, there was only one sentence left, blurred by tears:

“Cheng Zhi, stop saving him. You will die.”

I sat in the classroom, a chill creeping up my spine.

So it wasn’t that my health was failing, and it wasn’t that I was getting sick from staying up late.

It was that every time I reached out to snatch Lu Chen back from the Grim Reaper, the thing I offered in exchange was my own life.

No wonder I always dreamed of an endless road. Lu Chen stood at the far end of it, but the ground beneath his feet was covered entirely by my shadows.

Yet, as I crumpled that paper in my palm, the first thing I thought of was still Lu Chen.

If I stopped saving him, what would happen to him?

If I really let go this time like the paper said, would he die quietly before my eyes, just like those previous times?

I couldn’t stand it.

Even if the price was myself, I still couldn’t stand it.