Prologue

The night was already dark and the clock hand moved passed midnight. Besides an occasional car hurtling past, tranquillity was restored to the heaven and earth after a clamorous day. The majority of windows were no longer bright and only a few were still alight for the people who were to return at night. As the doors opened and closed intermittently and the lights went out one by one, only a single light always stayed on to wait for someone's unknown return like a stubborn watchman.

The living room was decorated in a simple style. The black ceiling was an original approach and the rays from the chandelier glimmered on the polished wooden floor enough to be a mirror.

The owner of this room clearly preferred cool tones and the wall behind the television had adopted a combination of black and white. The solid geometry shapes gave an oppressive feel that it was hard to imagine the man sitting opposite on the white sofa was in the mood to participate in the upcoming entertainment programme.

He was a handsome man with an unsightly band-aid on the corner of his mouth yet his image was undamaged and it even added a little bit of charm. He stared at the display on the television which read "reading disc". His thin lips were closed very tightly and a line appear on his chin which made him appear rather serious. His seriousness was not like that of an old white-haired scholastic but rather as if he was facing the choice of life or death. Which was enough to make anyone curious about the content of the disc that the DVD machine was currently reading.

The moment the film started, a full moon hung on the pitch-black screen and the sounds of birds surrounded the stereo sound. Along with sounds, three French words he did not know slowly appeared.

*TL-note: Winged Migration – A 2001 documentary presenting an epic portrait of winter bird migration. Filmed on all seven continents over four years, the footage is brought together into one portrait of a journey that's uniformly arduous for all kinds of different birds.

He hands reached out to the coffee table in front of the sofa and picked up a random copy from the neatly stacked diaries. He glanced at the rustic pink cover and at the cute Winnie the Pooh from a collection of stationary items that arrived in China many years ago including this diary which clearly was a part of the last century.

The diary was locked as if to imply the countless secrets hidden within waiting for him to unlock. On the coffee table, there were a bunch of bright gold keys and he patiently tried each one until the fifteenth key opened the diary.

The date written on the first page was January 1st 1994 with a single sentence.

"This year I will no longer like that idiot Pei Shangxuan!"

His fingers moved over his name then stopped at the word "idiot". She was completely right, he truly was an idiot in every respect!

The DVD player paid no attention to the audience's mind and continued to read the disc as intended. Accompanied by birdsong, a man spoke in a deep and low baritone* voice, "For them, it is a promise, the promise for return."

*TL-note: A baritone is a type of classical male singing voice whose vocal range lies between the bass and the tenor voice types.

Yet beside his ear was the voice of another, a glass shattering rejection. "I no longer have the energy to fly back."

These were the last words that Li Li left for Pei Shangxuan.