Chapter 38: “Snowy Wilderness” Part 1

Fu Tingli removed the felt hat that had been covering her face. Kong Liyuan already had her back turned, strolling leisurely ahead along the cleared road.

Winter sunlight spilled down. On either side of the road, layers of snow had piled up in the daylight, pure and fervent, like a pristine velvet blanket ablaze with wild fire.

The light fell on the hazy figure ahead, casting a tall, slender shadow. A gentle wind blew through, stretching that shadow ever longer across the vast snowy expanse.

It was like a scene from a road movie bleeding into reality.

Where was Kong Liyuan headed?

Fu Tingli stood there stunned for a moment, weighing the felt hat in her hand. Its fluffy material felt warm against her palm, incredibly comfortable.

She realized then: Kong Liyuan hadn’t simply been adjusting it. She had warmed the hat first before handing it over.

To her again? Just like that swimsuit, the one treated as a birthday gift?

But what was this supposed to be? It wasn’t her birthday in the middle of winter.

Fu Tingli watched the figure receding into the distance, on the verge of chasing after her, when her phone vibrated faintly in her pocket.

She followed in Kong Liyuan’s footsteps while pulling out her phone to check.

It was a message from the Guide—a string of them, in fact—but the vibrations had been so subtle that, buried in her thick clothing, she hadn’t noticed until now:

【Little sister, the village power lines froze yesterday. Power’s out now. I asked around; they say they need to clear the outer roads before anyone can come fix it. Where are you and the Superstar?】

【You at home? Phone dead already? Why no reply?】

【Reply soon or my phone’s gonna die too, heh. If I can’t reach you later, come find me at the Log Cabin Hotel.】

A power outage?

Fu Tingli blinked in surprise and checked her battery. Her phone was down to just ten percent.

She quickly messaged Qiao Lipan and Li Weili—who had sent a concerned WeChat early that morning—explaining the outage, that she might not be able to charge her phone and could lose contact. She looped in Rong Wu as well.

Then she replied to the Guide at the Log Cabin Hotel.

But there was no immediate response from the Guide after her WeChat. Her phone was probably dead by now.

“Kong Liyuan!”

Fu Tingli finished sending her messages and called out to the figure ahead.

By now their distance had narrowed considerably. The long road stretched empty around them—no one else in sight to overhear.

“Hm?”

Kong Liyuan paused amid the ice and snow, turning to glance back. Her face was slightly obscured beneath her hood.

A dozen paces still separated them.

Fu Tingli jogged over, clutching the felt hat. Perhaps it was all the layers she wore, but she arrived panting a little.

“I’ve got something to tell you.”

“What is it?” Kong Liyuan fixed her with a steady gaze, apparently oblivious to the anxiety flickering across Fu Tingli’s face.

“Power’s out.” Fu Tingli caught her breath, watching Kong Liyuan’s expression closely. As expected, there was no trace of worry.

So she pressed on. “And they can’t fix it until the roads outside are cleared.”

“My phone’s almost dead too. Meaning… we might not have any way to pay for things until then.”

She laid it out as clearly and concisely as she could, hoping Kong Liyuan would grasp the gravity of their situation.

But Kong Liyuan merely gazed at her through the hazy, diffused sunlight, as if she hadn’t registered a word.

Then she reached out.

She took the hat from Fu Tingli’s hand and, with deliberate care, placed it on her head.

The cold wind howled around her ears, but Kong Liyuan’s fingers—warm with her body heat—brushed lightly through Fu Tingli’s hair, adjusting it with gentle precision.

One knuckle grazed Fu Tingli’s chilled earlobe in the barest, faintest touch.

Fu Tingli dipped her head slightly. She lifted her eyes.

The vast snowfield stretched around them, an immense, suspended blankness—like a slow-motion close-up from this obscure road movie.

They stood a mere handspan apart, eyes locked. The wind whipped the stray hairs peeking from beneath their hat brims into disarray, their breaths nearly mingling in the frigid air.

Until the felt hat wrapped her head snugly and warmly.

Fu Tingli gazed up, transfixed.

She took in Kong Liyuan standing before her—the clear arch of her brows, the subtle upward curve of her eyes.

Kong Liyuan watched her in return, her fur-trimmed hood rustling in the gusts. At the edges of her pupils glimmered a distant light like white flame—as if she were smiling, or as if, amid the bone-chilling wind, she held only Fu Tingli in her gaze.

It was a meticulous, appraising look.

When Kong Liyuan finally withdrew her hands, she was still staring. Then came a soft, measured chuckle.

With that, she did as she always did—patted the back of Fu Tingli’s head lightly and said,

“Hm, the hat suits you pretty well.”

And with those words.

She shoved her hands back into her pockets and resumed walking along the snow-dusted road.

Sunlight poured over the snowbound world. Fu Tingli stood rooted, unsure which direction Kong Liyuan intended.

Seconds passed before she gathered herself. The hat’s lingering warmth had banished the wind from her scalp, but it had also trapped the essence of the other woman’s body heat tightly against her ears.

Fu Tingli let out a sigh and glanced at Kong Liyuan’s retreating back before following after her, warmth seeping through her.

She knew Kong Liyuan had heard her perfectly well. She wasn’t ignoring it on purpose.

No, this woman was always like this. Whatever unknown path lay ahead, she carried an air of making the best of it.

In the steady hum of everyday life, Kong Liyuan seemed like a wisp of gray smoke, liable to dissipate on the breeze. But when trapped at the end of some dead-end road, that hidden restlessness of hers simply vanished without a trace.

Wasn’t it strange? Of course it was.

Yet Fu Tingli knew she wasn’t much better off herself. She fell into step beside Kong Liyuan, embracing that same easy acceptance in the moment.

“Where are we going?” It felt like aimless wandering to her.

“No idea,” Kong Liyuan replied, her words muffled by the wind. “Just walking.”

She glanced sideways at Fu Tingli. “You really worried about the power outage?”

“I was,” Fu Tingli admitted. She kicked at a drift of snow by the roadside and surveyed the bright, open wilderness. “But not anymore.”

In some ways, she couldn’t deny it—she rather liked the feeling.

Everything here was so vast, so open. It made her heart expand to match, reminding her of her twenty-year-old self: exhilarated by a view like this for no reason at all.

“Don’t worry.” Kong Liyuan let out a free, easy laugh just then and murmured softly, “I won’t let you go hungry.”

“You’re not going to barter something else away, are you?” Fu Tingli eyed her suspiciously but smiled all the same, relaxing into it. “Who knows how much you’ve even got left to trade.”

“Is bartering such a bad habit in your book?” Kong Liyuan asked.

“Not really.” Fu Tingli wrinkled her nose; the ear muffs on her felt hat swayed with the motion. “It just doesn’t sit right.”

“Why not?”

Fu Tingli had known the question was coming. She gave a faint sigh.

“Honestly, I don’t like how it feels.”

“You don’t like it? How what feels?”

“Like…” Fu Tingli hesitated, but pushed on. “Like you don’t care about any of the things you have. Or about yourself, for that matter.”

The sensation wasn’t new, and being this close to Kong Liyuan only intensified it.

She knew that to Kong Liyuan—and probably plenty of others—she must seem young and naive.

Friends had put it bluntly: she had practically been steeped in love from childhood.

Fu Tingli had a clear sense of it herself. She had always known how to love herself, and in a world brimming with abundance, that self-love was what allowed her to live most freely while spreading kindness around.

Kong Liyuan possessed the exact opposite quality.

And yet, it was that very quality that had drawn Fu Tingli in—made her slam on the brakes that day, made her carry the memory of this woman through the bustle of the world for so long.

She often sensed it: at her core, this woman was indifferent, tinged with melancholy, all wrapped in a veneer of gentle warmth.

Except when it came to herself.

Then her casual indifference, her profound lack of self-regard, became a thorn as natural as breathing—no mercy turned inward. What she didn’t realize was how keenly that inward barb could wound others.

Fu Tingli understood that the world was full of all sorts of people, each with their own traits. No one needed to be shoehorned into rigid molds, nor did everyone have to live the way she once had.

But this sense of opposition, of contradiction—it always reared up in moments like these, bringing with it that familiar, crumpled ache in her chest, over and over.

She wasn’t the type to preach or scold. But this time, the words slipped out unbidden.

“Kong Liyuan, next time… could you please not do this?”

“Don’t treat yourself so carelessly. Don’t love yourself so little.”

After saying that, she fell silent and said no more.

Kong Liyuan offered her only a long stretch of quiet in response. Fu Tingli heard the steady crunch of her boots in the snow, as if she were lost in thought—or perhaps thinking nothing at all.

By now, they had walked far enough that the snow wasn’t as cleared away nearby, and the layer of it had grown much thicker.

The tread of her sneakers alternated with the high boots.

One step after another crunched through the snow, leaving two lonely trails of footprints behind.

Fu Tingli walked silently at Kong Liyuan’s side. She both hoped for a clear answer from her and wondered if she was overstepping, or just speaking from a place of armchair wisdom. Maybe Kong Liyuan didn’t even see anything wrong with it?

So she decided to backtrack a little. “Actually, what I meant was—”

“Fu Tingli.”

Right then, Kong Liyuan called her name. Her voice drifted like the wind across the snowy wilderness, yet it felt as close as a whisper.

The wind whipped past her ears, and Fu Tingli turned her head to look.

Kong Liyuan gazed at her steadily, the wind-tugged hood casting a sharp shadow across her face. Then she smiled.

“Take a photo for me.”

Fu Tingli met her eyes and knew Kong Liyuan hadn’t ignored her words.

She also knew this ran far deeper than she’d assumed. In that moment, she thought: Maybe I can’t change this woman after all.

But it didn’t frustrate her. She simply smiled back. “Sure.”

She didn’t hesitate, pulling out her phone and checking the battery. “Only six percent left.”

“Where do you want me to take it?”

She glanced around. The snow was deep all around them now, the houses scattered and distant, with no other people in sight on the road.

“Right here.”

Kong Liyuan trudged into the thick snow, her high boots sinking in all the way to her knees.

With some effort, she made her way beneath a solitary tree, her voice scattering on the wind.

“Don’t come over. The snow’s too deep here.”

The words reached Fu Tingli in fits and starts, half-swallowed by the gusts.

Her felt hat covered her ears, but she just made out the meaning.

She raised her precious phone and aimed it at Kong Liyuan beneath the barren tree.

“Got it!” she had to nearly shout to carry her voice across.

She peered into the tiny viewfinder. The endless snow formed a vast, empty world, soft sunlight spilling over the lone, desolate tree.

Beneath it stood a woman in a bulky down jacket, with pale white clouds hanging low overhead, as if she were poised in a rift amid layered cloudbanks.

She herself resembled a drifting wisp of cloud.

“You ready?” Fu Tingli shouted, her voice piercing and high in the empty expanse.

She glanced again at the battery on the screen. Down to four percent.