Winter Time Rendering

Chapter 139: Chapter 57: "My Condolences

Forget it.

There was no point in dwelling on it anymore.

It was better than nothing being resolved.

’Fate really is fair,’ he thought. He’d saved someone, and his reward turned out to be more than just two bags of snacks. He’d also gotten a complimentary four-day pass to his childhood. But now the pass had expired, and since it wasn’t something money could buy, he had to return to his original path in life.

A person has to learn to make peace with reality, and he was already used to that, anyway.

...Yeah, he was used to it.

’But what choice do I have?’ He felt that dwelling on these things was just torturing himself. He shut his eyes and forced himself to stop thinking. The bus rocked and swayed along its route. He didn’t know how much time had passed until a woman’s prim voice announced over the speaker:

"Next stop, the funeral home. Passengers getting off here, please prepare to disembark and take all your personal belongings with you..."

Zhang Shutong wearily opened his eyes and stood up.

It was time to get off.

He didn’t need to prepare, nor did he have any personal belongings. He remembered leaving home in a hurry, forgetting to put on an extra layer for warmth. He’d been freezing his ass off standing outside, and Du Kang had even teased him for trying to look cool.

Zhang Shutong held onto the handrail. The moment the rear doors of the bus opened, he stepped one foot out.

Then, he froze.

’Wait, why the funeral home?’

Or, to ask a more direct question—

Why exactly was his eight-years-older self back on the island?

...

Only then did Zhang Shutong belatedly realize something:

If, in the original timeline, he hadn’t returned to the island for eight years until he received news of Lu Qinglian’s death and came back for her funeral, then why was he here today?

He immediately checked the date. It was December 12, 2020. That couldn’t be wrong; his past self had also come to the island on this day.

"Are you getting off or not?"

The bus driver turned and shouted at him. Zhang Shutong leaped off the bus, with no time for further thoughts. He pulled out his phone, opened his call history, and started scrolling, looking for that missed call from Lu Qinglian.

His memory had always been good. He remembered it had happened after 11 p.m. on December 10th. He’d had his phone on silent at the time, which was why he missed her call... But what about now?

Zhang Shutong’s call history wasn’t very long, so he quickly found his answer. It wasn’t there.

Nothing.

He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. ’It shouldn’t be there. This means history really has changed.’ If the exact same missed call were still on his phone, that would be the strange thing. It would probably mean that the past four days in his junior high years had been just a dream.

’Then why did I come here today?’

He scrolled to his most recent call. He recalled that the last call he’d made was for work, to an editor at a publishing house. He’d been working from home as a translator for the past few years. He had exchanged a few brief words with them because attending the funeral would cause a delay of several days. And now, he saw that the call was indeed to that same editor.

This discovery didn’t reassure him. Instead, the more he thought about it, the more unsettling it became.

’Why am I still working from home as a translator?’

’Wait, wait, wait.’ He’d been getting something wrong this whole time. After returning, he had subconsciously assumed he was back in that same life, trapped by the rewinds with no end in sight. But it only now occurred to him that if history had changed, his life should have changed too.

’But it seems like not much has changed?’

’Does the rewind ability still exist?’

Zhang Shutong had once naively believed that as long as he didn’t run up that mountain, he would completely change his life. But now he had been sent back, which meant the ability was still there.

But the mechanism of "returning to a critical juncture whenever something bad happens nearby" was definitely gone.

Take the time Gu Qiuyan’s building blocks were knocked over. Based on past experience, he should have returned to the moment before Li Yipeng did it, not run off to play detective after the fact.

’If it’s gone, then why am I still working from home as a translator and avoiding contact with strangers?’

He decided to open his food delivery app and check his order history. One look was enough to make him want to scream. ’Why am I still ordering takeout every day?’

This was giving him a headache.

If someone wanted to confirm their own past, what was the best way to do it?

Zhang Shutong rarely took photos and didn’t keep a diary. He looked at his call history again and saw that he had called an unfamiliar name last night.

"Su Yunzhi."

’Who’s that?’

The name seemed vaguely familiar. He thought hard, and the memory gradually overlapped with that of a senior from high school.

But he should have lost contact with her long ago. This time, however... He checked the time of the call. It was last night, and they had talked for a full ten minutes.

He kept scrolling, wanting to look for Qingyi, Du Kang, and Ruoping. He remembered that in the original timeline, although they all had each other’s contact information in junior high, they had all later changed their numbers and phones, so he didn’t have any of their numbers.

Among the three of them, he had completely lost touch with Ruoping. However, he still had Qingyi and Du Kang on WeChat. His interactions with Qingyi were infrequent, limited to just liking his posts on Moments, but that connection had lasted the longest.

As for Du Kang, they chatted occasionally. He was the one who had informed him of Lu Qinglian’s death, and he was the first old classmate Zhang Shutong saw after returning to the island, his enthusiasm as strong as ever.

So, what about this time?

He searched by the first letter of their names. This time, they were all there: Feng Ruoping, Meng Qingyi, Du Kang... He even found Gu Qiuyan and Lu Qinglian. He then checked the call history for each of them but found that only Ruoping’s number showed a recent call, from just a few days ago.

’What on earth happened in between?’

The WeChat chat history with Du Kang notifying him of the death was also gone.

He was now standing by the bus stop sign, and when he came back to his senses, he realized it was freezing cold. Zhang Shutong tightened his trench coat and noticed something else. ’How come I’m still wearing the same clothes as before?’

Zhang Shutong wasn’t one to overthink things. After a moment’s thought, he decided to call Ruoping back first. He waited patiently for a moment, but the line was busy.

He subconsciously stuck his hand in his pocket and felt a hard cardboard box. He pulled it out and saw that it was a pack of cigarettes. He had smoked for a while after graduating from college but had later quit. Logically, he shouldn’t be carrying a pack of cigarettes. He made a simple test, sniffing his fingers, and realized his current self hadn’t quit.

It was all genuinely bewildering. When he had returned to eight years in the past, even though many memories were hazy, it was just a matter of re-experiencing his past. There was a trail to follow. But now, in a sense, he had traveled to the future, and a future that had been altered. It was both familiar and strange.

It all came back to the original question: what was he doing back here?

’A class reunion?’

He now regretted getting off the bus. Maybe he could have found a clue by riding it for a full loop around the island. Even just having a place to think would have been better than standing here in the cold wind.

But the buses on the island ran infrequently. He stopped waiting around foolishly and decided to find a place to get out of the wind. ’It’d be great if there were a convenience store, I could buy a hot drink.’ He was also a bit sleepy; the rewind had been triggered in his sleep late Saturday night, and unexpectedly, the mental exhaustion had followed him back. But this area was desolate, not like the city. Where would he find a convenience store?

The nearest place... Zhang Shutong thought about it. It was the funeral home. It must still be there, or its name wouldn’t have been announced on the bus. He started walking from memory, his hands stiff with cold, but he couldn’t resist continuing to scroll through his phone’s records.

He opened QQ, the app he had used most frequently eight years ago. But after starting college, everyone around him had switched to WeChat. He didn’t have high hopes, and reality confirmed them. There were no chat histories with anyone. The latest notifications were just junk like "Friend Birthday Reminders" and "Channel Messages." He had to dig through his list of group chats to find the small group of four, and just like before, it was completely empty.

Zhang Shutong breathed into his cupped hands. He found a user named AutumnRain Mianmian. Just as he’d thought, she really liked sheep. After all these years, her profile picture was still that image that looked like both a sheep and a cloud.

At this thought, Zhang Shutong couldn’t help but look up. He could already see the silhouette of the funeral home in the distance, but the large smokestack was gone. On Saturday morning, when he and Gu Qiuyan had been riding in their head teacher’s car to the mall, his gaze had followed the smoke from that chimney for a long time.

What surprised Zhang Shutong next was that he actually saw people standing in front of the funeral home.

There were never people at a place like this. If there were, it could only mean someone had passed away. Theoretically, it was nothing to be concerned about. The island’s population was over eight thousand, and the number of people he had any connection with was less than ten... But he couldn’t help but quicken his pace. He could hear the sound of funeral music from beyond the main gate.

Zhang Shutong’s heart sank for some reason. He pushed open the funeral home’s main doors, passed between the wreaths on either side, and rushed into the mourning hall in a few strides. His eyes instantly locked onto the subject of this funeral:

It was a black-and-white memorial photograph.

In the photo was a beautiful woman with long hair. Her brows were slightly furrowed, but her eyes were as still as an ancient well, without a single ripple.

Just then, someone suddenly patted Zhang Shutong’s shoulder and said:

"My condolences."

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