Back Then, I Adored You

After two rounds, she finally saw “Zero” come online at three in the morning for the first time that day. He hadn’t been online that afternoon, either, when she had logged in.

Xu Wennuan was just about to start a game but immediately exited and started a chat with him. She messaged, “Are you done with your day?

……

Lu Bancheng was laying on the couch in the living room. He stared at Xu Wennuan’s message, and then his fingers started tapping his screen without hesitation. He wrote, “Yes…”

The act of typing triggered the pain in his elbows. He sucked in a mouthful of cold air and paused momentarily before continuing the rest of the message. “I just returned to the hotel.”

Xu Wennuan replied to him the moment his message went through. She wrote, “Have you had dinner?”

“Yeah, what about you?”

“Me, too.”

He was about to ask her if she was still in Shanghai before recalling that earlier that afternoon she had messaged that she was in Lijiang. Lu Bancheng then typed, “How’s Lijiang?”

“It’s pretty fun, but I had some symptoms of altitude sickness just now.”

“Did you see a doctor?”

“It’s not serious. I just inhaled some oxygen. It was probably because I took a long hot shower.”

“Oh.” After Lu Bancheng typed that, he stared quietly at the words “altitude sickness.” He eventually lifted his head and gazed at his reflection in the mirror in front of him. There were several bandages on his face, and the corner of his lips was bruised.

Wu Hao is ruthless… I didn’t expect him to hit me with a chair!

He internally cursed at Wu Hao and hesitated for a moment before exiting the game and opening his web browser. After checking flights to Lijiang, Lu Bancheng booked one for the following morning.

……

Xu Wennuan had one week of vacation, and she went somewhere different everyday—Yulong Snow Mountain, Tea Horse Road, Shuhe Ancient Town, Lugu Lake… She enjoyed good scenery and delicious food throughout her trip, and she felt happy and content every day. Everything was so perfect, that her carelessness started acting up again.

She took a bus from Lijiang to Shuhe Ancient Town early in the morning and had lunch in a small restaurant. After that, she obliviously walked away without her bag. She only realized it was gone when she went shopping and saw some beautiful ethnic objects that she wanted to buy. An hour had already passed since lunch, and by the time she rushed back to the restaurant to look for her bag, it was no longer where she had been sitting earlier.

Xu Wennuan checked with the restaurant’s servers, but none of them had seen her bag. She then borrowed one of the server’s phone and dialed her own phone number. It had been turned off, indicating that the person who took her bag had no intention of returning it to her.

All the good feelings she had accumulated over the past few days evaporated at this moment. She forced herself to smile at the server and thanked her before leaving the restaurant.

Xu Wennuan had planned to return to Lijiang that night and fly back to Beijing the following morning, so her luggage was in the hotel there—She had not booked a room in Shuhe Ancient Town.

She was presently exhausted and penniless and unable to even afford a bus ticket back to Lijiang. Moreover, Lijiang was three hours away from Shuhe Ancient Town.