Setting the empty blue-and-white porcelain bowl carefully down on the folding bamboo stool, the twenty-five-year-old Gu Nian wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve.
As he stood up, his body was already beginning to shimmer.
Without the black ink of the Chief Author’s resentment holding his phantom vessel together, his form was turning into a warm, translucent silhouette woven from millions of tiny, drifting motes of golden starlight. Yet for the first time in three thousand pages of existence, there was no pain in his posture, no hunch in his shoulders, and no frost clinging to his eyelashes.
With the bright red paper flower and gold star sticker still shining proudly in the center of his forehead. The twenty-five-year-old youth stepped forward and wrapped both arms tightly around Gu Changsheng and Luo Qingxue at the same time.
He was half a head taller than his mother now and broad-shouldered enough to match his father. When he buried his face against Gu Changsheng’s shoulder, he held on with the simple, unguarded relief of a child who could finally go to sleep without watching the door.
“Thank you for refusing to die on Page Three, Dad,” the twenty-five-year-old Gu Nian murmured, his voice warm and clear as a temple bell in the morning sun.
