“Don’t say, these settings you came up with in middle school are actually pretty interesting.”
Qin Feng flipped through the script.
“What exactly does ‘Genius Playground’ refer to?”
After filming wrapped, the film club hurried back to edit the footage, while Jiang Ran and Qin Feng headed for the cafeteria.
“I don’t remember anymore.”
Jiang Ran kicked a pebble aside.
“They were all just baseless adolescent fantasies. After all these years, how could I still remember?”
“I only vaguely remember a few fragments, so I used them to write a script for the film club.”
“What a shame.”
Qin Feng closed the script booklet.
“I’m actually pretty interested in this story.”
Jiang Ran chuckled softly.
“Then when summer break comes, I’ll go look in my basement back home. If I’m lucky, maybe I can still find the draft notebook where I wrote the settings back then.”
Qin Feng was Jiang Ran’s best friend.
The two had met in high school and were as close as brothers.
“Jiang Ran! Oh no!”
Before them.
A short-haired girl came running over anxiously, fine sweat on her forehead, her expression panicked.
She grabbed Jiang Ran’s arm.
“This is bad, this is bad! I lost my phone! I’ve been looking for ages and couldn’t find it!”
Jiang Ran blinked.
This girl was his childhood friend, Cheng Mengxue. They had grown up together.
Together with Qin Feng, the three of them had been classmates in high school and the closest trio of friends. That friendship had continued until now.
Though they were in different majors at university, they always gathered together after class.
“Where did you lose it?” Jiang Ran asked.
“I don’t know!”
Cheng Mengxue was very anxious.
“You guys were filming just now, weren’t you? So I wandered around the graduates’ market by myself. By the time I realized it… my phone was gone.”
“Actually, losing the phone itself isn’t that bad. I’m mainly worried about that Rhein Cat charm! That’s the limited-edition astronaut Rhein Cat! It’s a collaboration with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, only 4,200 were released, and it’s super precious!”
Rhein Cat was currently the most popular plush toy, selling all over the world.
Speaking of which, when the thing was first created, it was merely the mascot of a cosmetics brand. Who would have thought it would turn out so cute and so explosively popular that it had now become an independent IP on the level of Doraemon and Hello Kitty?
And Cheng Mengxue was an extreme Rhein Cat fanatic.
“Generally, no one at school steals phones. I’ll call yours for you.”
Jiang Ran picked up his phone and dialed Cheng Mengxue’s number. A prompt sounded:
The number you have dialed is powered off. Sorry…
“It’s probably out of battery.”
Jiang Ran thought for a moment.
“How about this? I’ll send your phone a text.”
“You didn’t set your phone to privacy mode, so when the person who finds your phone charges it, even if they don’t know the unlock password, they’ll still be able to see the text and contact me.”
“That’s a good idea.” Qin Feng nodded.
Jiang Ran began editing the text—
【Hello, if you have found this phone, please contact XXXXXXX. Thank you very much!】
“Sigh.”
Cheng Mengxue sighed.
“I hope they’ll return the Rhein Cat to me…”
Jiang Ran smiled.
“What ordinary person would recognize a limited edition? If you hadn’t said it, even I wouldn’t have known that charm was so expensive. Otherwise, I would’ve sold it to Zhuanzhuan secondhand recycling long ago.”
“You dare!”
“I’m kidding.”
Jiang Ran checked that the contact information wasn’t wrong.
“Don’t worry. We’ll find it soon.”
With that, he pressed send—
Buzz!
Buzz!
Buzz!
The instant the message was sent, the world spun, and his vision blurred!
A heavy ringing in his ears made Jiang Ran lose his balance, and he nearly fell.
He closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, and pressed his temples…
Two seconds later, the discomfort vanished.
“What’s wrong?”
Qin Feng looked at him.
“Not feeling well?”
“I don’t know. I suddenly felt a little dizzy.”
Jiang Ran let out a long breath, opened his eyes, and straightened up.
Huh?
He looked left, then right.
“Where’s Xiaoxue?”
“What Xiaoxue?” Qin Feng asked in confusion.
“Cheng Mengxue. What other Xiaoxue would there be?”
Jiang Ran turned around in a circle, but still didn’t see Cheng Mengxue anywhere.
Strange.
She had clearly been standing beside them just now. How had she vanished in the blink of an eye?
“Hey.”
Qin Feng patted his shoulder.
“What are you looking for? Xiaoxue hasn’t been with us all afternoon. We were filming, and she went off to have fun by herself.”
“No…”
Jiang Ran was completely bewildered. He gestured with both hands.
“Xiaoxue was standing right here just now. She was here a few seconds ago!”
“Heh, how is that possible?”
Qin Feng laughed speechlessly.
“What are you doing, having some kind of fit? Are you messing with me?”
In an instant.
A chill ran down Jiang Ran’s spine.
What on earth was going on?
【Why did Cheng Mengxue disappear after I got dizzy for a moment?】
【And Qin Feng is acting as if he never saw Xiaoxue at all, even though the three of us were clearly chatting just a few seconds ago!】
“Who’s messing with who! I just sent her a te…”
Opening the text messages on his phone, Jiang Ran fell silent.
Nothing.
It was nowhere to be found.
He was certain that in the instant before he felt dizzy, the message had indeed been sent successfully.
But now, whether in the outbox or the trash, there was no trace of that text at all!
Where had it gone?
Why had that text disappeared together with Xiaoxue?
He hurriedly dialed Cheng Mengxue’s number.
“Hello? Jiang Ran, are you guys done filming?”
Cheng Mengxue’s side was noisy with voices.
“Where are you?” Jiang Ran asked directly.
“I’m at the graduates’ market… What’s wrong with you? Your tone sounds weird. Did something happen?”
Jiang Ran’s brows drew tightly together, and he didn’t know how to explain.
This feeling…
It was like sleepwalking in broad daylight.
Cheng Mengxue’s phone hadn’t been lost,
she hadn’t run over anxiously to find him,
he hadn’t sent any text either.
Could everything that had just happened have been nothing but an unreal hallucination?
“Jiang Ran?” A questioning voice came from the other end of the phone.
Qin Feng also leaned closer in concern, looking at him.
“What’s wrong? If something happened, say it. Don’t go mute.”
Jiang Ran calmed down.
“I don’t know how to explain it, but in my memory just now, Xiaoxue lost her phone. Then she came to find us, and I even sent a text to her phone, saying—”
“Pfft!” “Hahaha, so that’s what this is about.”
Jiang Ran was nervous, but the other two broke into smiles, not taking it seriously at all.
“You finally admit it,” Qin Feng snorted.
“Admit what?” Jiang Ran looked at him.
“【Three days ago, you sent Xiaoxue’s phone a completely inexplicable text.】”
Qin Feng chuckled.
“You said that whoever found this phone should contact you at your number. It was totally random.”
“Xiaoxue took a screenshot and asked you about it at the time, but you played dumb and said you didn’t send it. I saw it too back then. The sender was clearly you, but you insisted it wasn’t, refusing to admit it no matter what.”
“If you insist on denying it to the death, what can we do? So we just ignored you after that.”
…
Jiang Ran’s arms dropped to his sides.
He stood upright.
The setting sun stretched his shadow long, like the hands of a clock moving backward.
Three days ago?
That text was clearly something he had just sent, only a minute ago. How could it have been sent three days ago?
He opened WeChat, tapped into his chat history with Cheng Mengxue, and scrolled upward.
Sure enough.
Three days ago, on March 14th, Cheng Mengxue had sent him a screenshot of a text message and asked what was going on.
He enlarged it.
The sender was indeed himself.
The content of the text was exactly the same, irrefutable proof.
“See?”
Qin Feng pointed at today’s date in the upper left corner of his phone: March 17th.
“It was obviously a text you sent Xiaoxue three days ago. It wasn’t even a big deal to begin with. Did you really have to be so stubborn about it?”
“No, I wasn’t being stubborn.”
Jiang Ran shook his head.
“The me from three days ago wasn’t lying.”
The red sun sank completely below the ground, and on the opposite side of the sky, a pale moon rose.
He was beginning to understand a little.
Three days ago, on March 14th, he had indeed not sent Xiaoxue any text.
Because…
The person who had sent that text was the him of March 17th.
The him of right now.
What he utterly couldn’t understand was:
If the text had clearly been sent today, why had it been received three days ago? And why did neither Qin Feng nor Cheng Mengxue remember this incident at all?
“【Could it be that this is… a text message that traveled through time and space?】” he murmured to himself.
Although he didn’t know the principle behind it, nor how it had been accomplished.
As far as the result was concerned,
that text from just now had truly, undeniably traveled through time and space, returning to the past—
and been sent to three days ago!