The Alley Was Always This Long – Chapter 84

by Little Panda

Restart

“You… know me?”

[If I ever like you again, Tao Tianran,

I want to be a happy fool who knows nothing.]

In the familiar, disorienting white space, Tao Tianran stood alone once more.

But this time, it was not silent. There was an extremely low-frequency, piercing alarm—almost imperceptible to the human ear, as if it were drilling straight into her brain.

That cold, mechanical voice, impossible to locate, surrounded her from all directions: 【Warning. Loop collapse. Warning again. Loop collapse.】

Her brain buzzing, Tao Tianran drew a sharp breath and quickly sorted through what had just happened:

First, Yu Yusheng had still used those sleeping pills. No matter how tightly Qiao Zhiji had guarded her, she had been determined to go, and she had found a gap.

How? Yu Yusheng had clearly reconciled with Qiao Zhiji. Her emotional knot should have been untied. And Qiao Zhiji was a meticulous person—she had taken Yu Yusheng for three psychological evaluations, all of which showed she was stable.

Then there was only one possibility—

Yu Yusheng had never gotten better. She had fooled everyone. She had fooled Tao Tianran, Qiao Zhiji, and even herself, which was why she could pass the evaluations.

She was like an apple that looked perfect on the outside. No one knew that its core was rotting deeper and deeper, and perhaps even she herself didn’t know.

Yu Yusheng had been rushed to the hospital for emergency treatment, her life hanging in the balance. At the same time, that truck with “xxybzd” written on its front had still rushed toward Cheng Xiang like fate itself. The moment Tao Tianran pulled Cheng Xiang away, her own life was also hanging in the balance.

It had become a “Schrödinger’s cat” situation.

Tao Tianran slowly lowered her head. A patch of blood was still slowly seeping from her chest. She lifted her head again with difficulty. In the pure white space, the system from the last time did not appear to speak with her.

There was only that mechanical, cold voice, constantly surrounding her from all directions: 【Warning. Loop collapse. Warning again. Loop collapse.】

Tao Tianran took a slow breath. The broken ribs made it hurt. But the pain cleared her mind, which had been growing hazy from blood loss:

What did “loop collapse” mean?

The last wormhole had been constructed because of the same truck, the same rain and snow evaporating between heaven and earth, the same Cheng Xiang. But this time? This time, Tao Tianran, who had been on guard, had pulled Cheng Xiang away.

That meant the wormhole constructed between Cheng Xiang’s two deaths had already collapsed. This should be the reason for the so-called “loop collapse.”

Tao Tianran thought of Cheng Xiang’s first car accident. That afternoon, she had gone with a colleague to visit a pottery artist in the alley. As she drove away, she had passed the market where Cheng Xiang often shopped, and had even had a conversation with her colleague about the alley.

Since there were infinite parallel timelines.

Tao Tianran thought, there must be one possibility. She and her colleague would return to the company. She would feel like she couldn’t sit still, because this was the first time since the breakup that someone had talked to her about Cheng Xiang.

At that time, she had called Cheng Xiang’s name like this: “Xiao Xiang.” The syllables were both unfamiliar and familiar. Because it had been so long since she had let those syllables slip out, they stirred a slight tremor in her heart, and the tip of her tongue had to press hard against the back of her teeth to suppress that subtle feeling.

She would sit in her cold, empty office. At her huge desk, her long-used Montblanc fountain pen would be at hand.

The blinds on the glass curtain wall would be tightly shut. No one would know she was sitting here, her shoulders slightly raised, trying once more to let those two syllables escape from the tip of her tongue: “Xiao Xiang.”

She would suddenly stand up, grab her bag, and walk out of the office.

Her assistant, whom she happened to meet in the hallway, would ask her: “What’s wrong, Teacher Tao? You just got back and you’re going out again?”

“Mm.” She would reply: “Something came up, I need to leave early. If the Big Boss is looking for me, call me.”

She would drive out of the company in a hurry.

Actually, she had nothing to do. She would just park her car in the parking lot near the market, then walk toward the market in her high heels. Her open-front, structured coat would make her figure look even taller, and the uncles and aunties carrying groceries out of the market would glance at her strangely.

Maybe they would wonder what a person like her, who seemed so detached from the mundane world, was doing coming to the market.

She wouldn’t even go in to buy a bowl of cold-skin noodles. That wasn’t a flavor she was familiar with or liked.

She would just stand there, looking up at the four large characters, “Yimin Market,” whose once-gold lettering had rusted and faded with time. There were a few scattered stalls in front of the market entrance, as if the market couldn’t swallow them up and had spat them out. People coming out of the market would be carrying full bags of groceries, chatting about whose eggplants were cheaper and whose green onions were fresher.

And there was a row of shops in front of the market. One of them sold phones for the elderly, with a demo model hanging in front, blasting at full volume: “I really want to live another five hundred years!”

Tao Tianran just stood there, for a long time, silent.

Thinking about the meaning Cheng Xiang had brought to her life.

Back then, she hadn’t understood anything. She couldn’t even say she truly understood feelings. She only knew that since she and Cheng Xiang had separated, the aura of worldly life around her had grown weaker and weaker, like feathers that couldn’t hold on, falling off piece by piece—from her eyelashes, from her shoulders, from her fingertips, from her skin, which time had carved with lines.

She looked down at the ground, thinking she had lost a part of herself. But the ground was clearly empty. There was nothing.

How could this be?

Tao Tianran was a person overly familiar with parting. She didn’t even understand the meaning of goodbye. In her heart, gathering was temporary, and parting was permanent. She had left places one after another, never looking back.

She probably didn’t even know why she was standing here, letting a mountain of busy work wait, standing under a pigeon-gray, overcast sky that was about to snow, just looking up, silently staring at the four characters, “Yimin Market.” She didn’t know how long she would stand here either.

When Cheng Xiang walked toward the market, she wouldn’t notice her. Because in Cheng Xiang’s mind, how could she be here? That would be too strange. She was clearly a person who had disappeared from Cheng Xiang’s world for 400 days, a person who would never appear again.

But she would turn around, as if by telepathy.

She couldn’t say why. It had been this way since high school. Before Cheng Xiang could cheerfully call out that “Hey, Tao Tianran,” or before the people around her could call out “Xiangzi, Xiangzi,” or even before Cheng Xiang’s rapid footsteps could be heard.

She would always instinctively lift her head, already sensing Cheng Xiang’s approach.

Probably because the aura around Cheng Xiang was too warm, too vivid. Long before the sun rose, the ice field had already sensed the thermal effect of the sun’s diffusion. She noticed it earlier than others, because she herself was a cold, thin place.

So she was more sensitive to the sun’s warmth.

She would notice the truck rushing toward Cheng Xiang earlier than Cheng Xiang herself. She would rush toward that truck before the exclamations of the people around her even started.

There would always be one time when the truck stopped in time. The people around would continue with their lives. The phone shop for the elderly would still be hoarsely singing, “I really want to live another five hundred years!” And Cheng Xiang wouldn’t even notice what had happened, continuing to walk into the market without a care, to buy a bowl of cold-skin noodles.

Standing in that pure white space, Tao Tianran thought, there must be such a timeline.

Even though she still hadn’t figured out what Cheng Xiang meant to her, she would instinctively, without hesitation, rush toward Cheng Xiang.

The sun set in disappointment, thinking the ice field would never melt.

But in the ice field’s eyes, the sun rose and set so freely, while the ice field could never leave. It longed for the sun to rise again, so the world wouldn’t fall into eternal night.

Tao Tianran was losing blood continuously, but with her last bit of strength, she thought: The same truck had hit her twice. So she could also construct a new wormhole between her two collisions.

The ultra-low-frequency alarm kept buzzing, stimulating her brain. Tao Tianran felt like she was going to vomit. Every limb and bone ached. She dragged her broken body to the wall—though in this space without dimensions, she wasn’t even sure if she had reached a wall.

She raised her hand and slammed it down hard. The dried blood on the edge of her palm vaguely stained the wall of unknown material: “The loop collapsed this time. What about the next?”

When Tao Tianran opened her eyes again, she found herself lying on a soft bed.

She sat up immediately, grabbing her phone, which was charging on the nightstand.

She glanced at the time on the screen: December 18, 2023, 6:53 AM.

She ran a hand through her long, straight black hair. As she lowered her wrist, the lamp-black gray, sexually apathetic-style duvet cover rustled softly.

She got out of bed. Her pale, jade-like ankles slid into her slippers. As she moved, the obsidian-colored, long-sleeved silk pajamas slipped a little off her thin shoulders, revealing a section of jade-like collarbone.

She realized she was trembling.

When she walked into the kitchen to make herself a glass of lemon water. When she changed into a stiff white shirt and an ink-gray coat. When she picked up her Bolide bag and walked through the section of the neighborhood where the streetlights looked like an old moon.

Tao Tianran drove out of the underground garage. With one hand, she put on her Bluetooth headset and dialed her assistant.

“Hello, Teacher Tao.”

“Hello.” Tao Tianran stopped at a red light and adjusted her Bluetooth headset with one hand. “I’ll be an hour late to the company today. Call me if there’s anything urgent.”

“Then our quarterly design meeting is scheduled for ten o’clock. Should I keep it as planned?”

“That’s fine.”

“Oh, right, Teacher Tao. Shianne will be at the company today too.”

“Wasn’t she going to Europe for further study?”

“It seems like it was canceled. She just told the Big Boss. We don’t know the reason either.”

“Okay. Got it.”

Tao Tianran hung up. A minute later, the phone rang.

Yi Yu’s volume made the phone’s audio crackle. Tao Tianran frowned slightly as she listened to Yi Yu shout on the phone: “Teacher Tao! My dear Teacher Tao!”

Tao Tianran thought to herself: Exactly the same.

It was almost identical to every scene from the last time she had looped back through the wormhole constructed between Cheng Xiang’s two car accidents.

She drove toward Hundred Flowers Alley.

She passed an old man walking a myna bird, a woman holding chopsticks and going to the alley entrance to buy fried dough cakes, and bicycles and tricycles parked haphazardly on the roadside. An old man, startled by her driving, shouted: “Be careful with such an expensive car! Don’t scratch it!”

Tao Tianran parked at the entrance of the alley. She got out of the car, pressed her lips together, and then walked in.

A long, narrow path in her memory, with two low walls on either side, covered in the dust of time. Such paths were called hutong in the north and xiao xiang in the south. And it had taken Tao Tianran so long, and cost her so much, to realize that the endless alley in her memory was as beautiful as a regret.

Standing at the door of Cheng Xiang’s house, Tao Tianran felt a sense of timidity upon nearing home¹.

The last time she had looped, she had stood here, watching a vibrant Cheng Xiang fly out of the door with her canvas bag, glance at her, and then walk past her without looking back.

She didn’t recognize her anymore.

And… this time?

Tao Tianran curled her fingers. There was no movement from inside the wooden door for a long time. She finally mustered the courage to step forward and knock gently.

Maybe she hadn’t mustered the courage at all. Her throat was dry and rough. As the two soft knocks sounded, she couldn’t help but swallow.

The wooden door creaked open.

Tao Tianran was stunned.

The person who answered the door was not Cheng Xiang, nor Director Ma or Deputy Director Cheng.

It was a young man she had never seen before, wearing black-rimmed glasses. He looked at Tao Tianran, and she asked, “Excuse me, is Cheng Xiang here?”

“What Cheng Xiang? You’ve got the wrong place. There’s no one by that name here.” The young man waved his hand impatiently and slammed the door shut again.

The blood in Tao Tianran’s body ran cold all the way down her spine.

What variable had this loop produced? Could it be that Cheng Xiang’s family no longer lived here?

Or even… did Cheng Xiang still exist in this timeline at all?

At first, Tao Tianran could still pretend to be calm, as if afraid of disturbing something, maintaining her pace as she walked into Hundred Flowers Alley. But now, her blood was completely frozen. When she lowered her head to rummage through her bag for her phone, her fingertips were trembling violently. As she pulled the phone out of her Bolide, she almost dropped it, unable to hold it.

The screen had cracked like a spiderweb.

As Tao Tianran crouched down to pick up her phone, she suddenly lifted her head.

Two seconds later, a slender figure walked out from the corner.

Cheng Xiang walked along, talking to Director Ma as she went: “Our old siheyuan is pretty unique, isn’t it? I mean, sure, it leaks in the summer and drafts in the winter, but it’s old! It looks the part as soon as the camera starts rolling, right? A film crew even came to borrow our place for a shoot. That’s pretty impressive, huh!”

Director Ma was chattering away: “That’s why I told you to keep your room tidy. Don’t just leave your worn clothes and socks lying around. Look, the film crew wanted to borrow our place, and you still had to spend ages cleaning up before you could leave.”

“Mom, Mom, stop. The film crew is borrowing our place and even putting us up in a hotel. Isn’t that great? The hotel’s buffet breakfast this morning was pretty good too, right? Burp. I’m so full. Okay, I’m off.”

“Alright, take your time and be careful on the road. I’m going to see how the filming is going.” Director Ma said, walking back inside.

Cheng Xiang walked alone toward Tao Tianran.

Tao Tianran stood up, clutching her cracked phone tightly in her hand. She didn’t know if tiny shards of glass were digging into the lines of her palm.

The sky after the first snow was still a pigeon-gray haze, as if more cold was building up in the clouds, waiting to fall. The northern winter air was always so biting it felt like it would cut your nose. Cheng Xiang walked past Tao Tianran without even glancing at her, her canvas bag slung over her shoulder as she walked forward.

The little bear pendant on her bag strap swayed with her steps.

Tao Tianran should have been calmer.

After the previous loops, she should have known she needed to be patient and take it slow. But patience—Tao Tianran didn’t have any now. She was trembling all over, unable to tell if it was from the cold around her. She followed behind Cheng Xiang with her bag, unable to say what she wanted to do.

If she asked her true feelings, she just wanted to pull Cheng Xiang into her arms.

Without a word. With all her strength. To use Cheng Xiang’s soft warmth to ward off the cold trembling of her own body.

But she couldn’t.

She could only follow behind Cheng Xiang in silence.

Cheng Xiang must have heard the footsteps behind her. She turned around and looked at her.

Tao Tianran’s lips parted, but no words came out.

She should have come up with a reason. If this was another “first meeting” with Cheng Xiang, at least she shouldn’t let Cheng Xiang think she was some kind of weirdo. But the words came out faster than her thoughts: “You… know me?”

Cheng Xiang: “How could I possibly know you.”

With that, she lowered her head and walked on. Before Tao Tianran could react, she suddenly started running, still keeping her head down, the little bear bouncing against her canvas bag.

Tao Tianran’s heart jolted.

She hurried after her: “Xiao Xiang!”

Cheng Xiang kept running, her head down, not stopping.

Tao Tianran caught up to her from behind. Because Cheng Xiang was looking down, she didn’t notice an old man on a bicycle coming toward her. Tao Tianran pulled her aside, but Cheng Xiang struggled, and the phone in her hand flew out.

It landed at Tao Tianran’s feet.

Tao Tianran looked down. On Cheng Xiang’s screen, a small memo module was set up, reading:

【Xiao Xiang’s Phone Memo: 401st day since breaking up with TTR.】

After the old man on the bicycle had ridden away, Cheng Xiang rushed over, snatched up the phone at Tao Tianran’s feet, and turned to leave.

“Xiao Xiang!”

Cheng Xiang suddenly stopped. She kept her head down, her soft, medium-length hair falling to cover her face. “Hey, Tao Tianran. Don’t do this, okay?”

Cheng Xiang was rarely like this.

Back in their sophomore year of high school, Tao Tianran had sat behind Cheng Xiang and watched her back every day. Cheng Xiang was such a lively girl that even her back was full of life. Between classes, she would go chat with Qin Ziqiao, laughing loudly. Even in her most hated math class, she would hold a compass and draw aimlessly on the paper with one hand, while resting her chin on the other, looking out the window at the drifting clouds.

And then, suddenly, she would burst out laughing.

It was the first time Tao Tianran had seen a girl who would laugh just by looking at the shapes of the clouds.

She lightly tapped Cheng Xiang on the back.

Cheng Xiang turned around: “Hm?”

“What are you laughing at?”

“Huh?”

“You were looking at the clouds just now, and you laughed.”

Cheng Xiang blinked. “I’m not telling you.”

Tao Tianran’s attention wandered for a second, and she also looked at the clouds in the sky. But what was there to those clouds? They were just abstract, strange shapes.

But now, the sky above Cheng Xiang’s head was a gray haze. Her back was slumped as she said, “Hey, Tao Tianran. Don’t do this, okay?”

“Why do you get to leave whenever you want, and come back whenever you want?”

“I set myself a lot of timelines. Even though we broke up, we didn’t even have a big fight. You’d come back to me eventually, right? I waited until the 100th day. If you still didn’t come, I would forget you.”

“When the 100th day passed, I told myself again, wait until the 200th day. If you still didn’t come, then I’d forget you.”

“Then even the 300th day passed. Chinese people say ‘three strikes and you’re out.’ But I told myself, you’re Tao Tianran. You’re my favorite, my most favorite Tao Tianran. So I still had to wait. I would wait until the 400th day.”

She suddenly turned around and showed Tao Tianran her phone screen: “You saw it just now, didn’t you? The memo on my phone. Today is the 401st day since we broke up.”

“You know, yesterday I went to the market to buy cold-skin noodles for my dad. When I got to the market entrance, I was still thinking about you.” Cheng Xiang laughed as she said this, but her round eyes reflected the gray of the sky.

Since breaking up with Tao Tianran, she hadn’t shed a single tear. She had just, yesterday, in the weather of the first winter snow, while crossing the crosswalk, suddenly looked up and felt that the sky looked like a girl’s face that had just been crying.

Like her own face.

“I took you off my blacklist. I wanted to see if you had contacted me, even once. But no. Nothing.”

Cheng Xiang’s eyes reddened as she spoke.

Tao Tianran took a step forward: “Xiao Xiang…”

Cheng Xiang immediately raised her hand and stepped back, signaling her not to come closer. She forced back the tears that were welling up in her eyes. She didn’t cry. There was only a faint tremor in her soft voice: “If you want to see how pathetic I am, I can tell you.”

“I dream about you.”

“Ever since we broke up, I’ve dreamed about you countless times.”

“I even dreamed that I died, and my soul went into another girl who was talented and beautiful. I became your colleague. I watched you be amazed by me, praise me, unable to help but approach me, and finally fall in love with me. Ha, Tao Tianran, I’m really dark. I wanted to seduce you like that and then dump you, to get my revenge. But then, Tao Tianran, I still went soft on you. I dreamed that you only fell in love with me after you discovered that the soul inside that person was me.”

“And then I turned back into myself. But I didn’t remember you anymore. Ha, but you had already realized you loved me, right? So you chased after me like crazy. You were so devoted. We had a really sweet, really sweet time together.”

Cheng Xiang laughed as she said this, raising the back of her hand to rub the tip of her nose. Her eyes were still red. “See? I’m just that pathetic. Don’t they say that dreams reflect the deepest desires of a person’s heart?”

“I just wanted to be on equal footing with you. Or rather, I didn’t want to get hurt anymore. So I fantasized about not remembering anything, and you chasing after me with all your heart.”

Tao Tianran’s lips parted slightly, but she said nothing.

“Would you do that?”

Tao Tianran paused, then nodded. “I would.”

Cheng Xiang curled her lip. “You’ve changed, Tao Tianran. You can even comfort people now.”

“But I… don’t want this anymore.”

She turned and walked away.

Tao Tianran chased after her: “When I said I would, I meant I really would.”

“Like in my dream?”

“Yes. Just like in your dream.”

Cheng Xiang laughed again. “But I don’t want to anymore, Tao Tianran.”