My name is Jiang Feng. In the autumn of 2023, I lugged a worn-out suitcase and squeezed myself into a mundane, unremarkable science and engineering university within the province.
If life could be described by color, my eighteen years would definitely be a stagnant, dead grey. At 175cm, thin and sickly pale, with black-rimmed glasses practically welded to my face, I was the definition of ordinary. Before college, excluding the lady who sold breakfast at the school gate, I hadn't exchanged more than ten sentences with any girl. I rarely even spoke to my mom, to the point where my parents had grown indifferent to my reclusiveness. Yet, as I left, they asked with a glimmer of desperate hope: "Xiao Feng, in college... could you find a normal girl and fall in love?"
I had dreamed of that too.
My best friend, Liu Zhenyu (Big Fat), is 185cm with a toned, muscular build. He and his girlfriend, Chen Meng, had been dating since freshman year of high school. As soon as the college entrance exam was over, he started relentlessly dumping his "normie" romance on me. Watching Chen Meng act like a little clingy pendant, pouting and laughing vivaciously, I imagined countless times in the dark corners—if only I had a girl like that, lovely and clingy, to illuminate my fading life.
But I was wrong. What truly drags people into the abyss is never the darkness; it is the light that burns too bright.
In the first class of college, the door of the lecture hall pushed open. She walked in.
Her name is Yu Ge.
Our names combined evoke the poem: "Maple leaves by the river, fishing fire, facing the sorrow of a sleepless night." I don't know if that signaled the fate that was to be ours.












