Bright sunlight streamed in through the glass windows, illuminating everything in the room. The crisp chirp of a bird outside pulled Li Yu’s thoughts back to the present. He gently wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead and gave a slight shiver as he looked at his somewhat calloused hands.
Without realizing it, he had reached the final page of the book in his hands. The story lingered in his mind, refusing to dissipate; everything felt like a dream, yet now, he seemed to have returned to reality.
The birdsong faded away, and the room grew quiet once more. The only sound left was the scritch-scratch of a ballpoint pen moving across paper, held by the blue-haired girl sitting in the center of the bookshelves. She wrote busily for a moment, then relaxed her hand. The pen dissolved into tiny specks of light, vanishing into the secular world.
“All of this... just what...” Li Yu felt a throbbing headache. The events from the story seemed to be slowly transforming into his own memories.
“You’ve finished?” The blue-haired girl walked silently to Li Yu’s side. “The ending... what did you think of it?”
“Parted by death... I think it was okay,” Li Yu replied, enduring the headache. Immediately, his ankle was met with a light kick from the blue-haired librarian. Her expression was somewhat dark.
“It was terrible. There couldn't possibly be a worse ending,” she said with a hint of resentment. Then, she changed the subject. “How is this job? Is it better than any of the ones you found before?”
“It is... and the salary is very good too.” Li Yu swallowed hard. His mind instinctively flashed to currencies like gold and silver coins before he shook his head, remembering that the money in this world was now all paper and digital.
“What is your name?”
“Clo,” the blue-haired girl said softly. “Clo, Clo Chronos.”
Li Yu froze, then turned his head. He saw the blue-haired girl’s shimmering blue eyes and felt stunned. The memories of those thousands of years from the book began to batter his mind; by comparison, the twenty years of life he had experienced now felt like nothing more than the fleeting existence of a mayfly.
“I spent tens of millions of years, watched the world be destroyed thousands of times, but I finally waited long enough for you,” she said softly. “She told me once that after a person passes away, their soul turns into countless fragments. Later, those fragments recombine with others to form a new soul.”
Li Yu was dazed. He looked at his hands; in a trance, he could even feel something in the far-off heavens calling to him from the darkness.
All of it... was real... Everything I suffered for, everything I grieved for, everything I loved, everything I missed... it was all real...
“So... during those countless, incredibly dull years when I could not die, I kept trying to aggregate those tens of millions of fragments,” Clo said slowly. “As long as I ensured they were born at the right time and died when they were supposed to, they could keep gathering and gathering...”
“And so... finally, today... I found you.” Clo turned her back to him, speaking as if it were a common occurrence. Her gaze was peaceful, as if she had long anticipated this day. The radiance of divinity slowly dissipated from her; she had waited for far, far too long.
“Then... what was the price?” Li Yu asked subconsciously. He looked at his palm, feeling the blood flowing through his veins—everything was so clear now. Following his memories, he casually snapped his fingers. His flesh was reshaped in an instant. Clo’s eyes widened slightly as she looked at the figure who had accompanied her countless times in her past memories.
Pale hair, blood-red eyes—everything was exactly as it had been in the old days, completely unchanged.
“Everything is me... and everything is not me...” she murmured softly. She looked at the world around her. The dead memories felt like they had happened just a moment ago. This was reality, a reality where time flowed normally.
“I made a deal with Fate. The price was that the Authority of Fate would shatter and return to this world,” Clo said casually, handing the book back into Li Yue’s hands.
“What I got in return was... that idiot who abandoned me all on his own tens of millions of years ago.”
“But, welcome back. Welcome back to this reality where I exist.”
Li Yue opened the book. The conversation they had just shared was already recorded within. She looked at the final chapter; the title of the article was “Only Because of You.”
“Let’s go... I still have tens of millions of years of stories to tell you. Those... my stories.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go home.” Clo gave a gentle smile. Li Yue walked behind her, seemingly still deep in thought. With another soft snap of her fingers, Li Yue transformed back into the appearance of that young man. He tried clenching his hand, finding the experience quite novel.
“There is still this life to live. I want to see it through to the end,” Li Yue said slowly. “It’s only a mere sixty years at most.”
“You want to live... the life of a normal person?”
“I suppose... yes...”
“No,” Clo answered bluntly.
“Why?” Li Yue blinked, looking at the somewhat sulky Clo.
“I went through so much trouble to save you. I don’t want to watch you marry someone else and have children...” Clo pouted her lips slightly. “Unless... that person is me. This time... it’s my turn to be the wife.”
“Alright.” Li Yue smiled and gently took Clo’s hand. He pushed open the library doors. Outside, the weather was beautiful, the sun was bright, and the wind was gentle.
That wandering star had finally found her home. There was no throne there, no abyss; it was merely a piece of the secular world, nothing more. And that was enough.
Just like that, they stepped into the secular world once again. Sixty years later, Li Yue, his hair having returned to white, began a new journey across the sea of stars with Clo.
Your eternal summer shall never fade, growing with time in these brilliant verses. So long as humans live to read, this poetry shall endure, and give life to you.
To—Li Yue
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