She glanced at the empty store, pulled a tablet from her bag, and opened a livestream room that hadn’t officially started yet—no video feed, just chat.
People were already flooding the comments.
Fu Tingli leaned over and saw the chat scrolling by fast. She got it right away—this stream had to be about Kong Liyuan.
“Today marks Kong Liyuan’s first-ever birthday event since debuting,” the Dimple Colleague explained, as if reading her mind.
“First one?” Fu Tingli asked. “Hasn’t she been in the industry for five years? How’s it still the first?”
“Yeah, five years, but she’s never done a birthday event before. She doesn’t post birthday Weibo updates like other stars, and she hates fans sending her birthday gifts or fan projects. Anything mailed to the company gets sent back, so everyone’s gotten used to not sending. Compared to her occasional business posts, she basically vanishes around her birthday—no Weibo, no events. Now that I think about it, she’s never celebrated her birthday at any public event.”
The Dimple Colleague pursed her lips. “This year’s event is free, though. Folks at the venue say everyone’s getting a new phone she endorses, a full skincare set, and a CD player.”
“Why the change this year?”
“No idea. Maybe the patterns we thought we knew aren’t set in stone. She’s never outright said she doesn’t celebrate birthdays.”
“I see.” Fu Tingli nodded, her gaze drifting back to the screen unbidden.
The next second, the livestream lit up. An enlarged face filled the view—it was Kong Liyuan.
Fu Tingli instinctively tilted her head aside.
The Dimple Colleague let out a squeal, her face flushing with excitement in an instant.
Fu Tingli watched from the side for a good while.
She didn’t dare stare at the somewhat blurry screen under the overhead lights like her colleague did.
She only stole a few hazy glances from the corner of her eye and caught a few words.
Then she slowly shuffled her feet toward the packed shelves, wiping bottle after bottle of soda on the rack one by one.
Kong Liyuan’s voice came through the tablet, the compressed audio slightly distorted.
It didn’t sound like her. Not at all.
That was Fu Tingli’s first thought. Kong Liyuan’s voice should have been clearer, her enunciation balanced—not too light, not too heavy. Most of the time, it carried a soft, weary tone.
Especially whispered close to the ear, it always held an ambiguous sincerity that was hard to pin down as real or feigned.
Then she thought, Kong Liyuan was so busy.
Wrap party during the day, birthday livestream at night.
This woman always lived among crowds, yet somehow always seemed so lonely.
Unbidden, Fu Tingli recalled that night before leaving the Northern Border—the Kong Liyuan she’d seen by the deserted lake.
What if she hadn’t been sleepless that night? What if she hadn’t wandered groggily to the lakeside…?
Would Kong Liyuan have stood there alone all night?
She probably would have. Even by herself, Kong Liyuan always carried that loneliness.
Lost in these swirling thoughts, Fu Tingli felt a sour, swelling ache in her chest.
The voices filtering through grew fuzzy, brushing past her ears like a soft hiss.
The hissing lasted until the end of the night shift, when someone came to take over.
She snapped back to herself. The birthday stream had long ended, and the Dimple Colleague was dozing at the counter.
Before her gleamed a row of sparkling cans, each emblazoned with Kong Liyuan’s half-body portrait.
So she sighed, set down the rag, shrugged off the green vest, handed over to her colleague, and stepped out of the store. Outside, night had fallen to the horizon.
It must have rained again. The old road gave off the scent of dust soaked by water, and the night breeze carried a chill.
Fu Tingli strolled leisurely down the puddle-reflecting street. It wasn’t even midnight yet; lights blazed along both sides, the city’s nightlife just kicking off.
But a little farther toward her place, in those rundown apartments, the glow came only from the flickering old yellow streetlamps lining the roads—tinged even green.
Like a world abandoned by the times.
Everyone and everything living there seemed stuck in the early 2000s.
She didn’t rush home. Instead, she wandered the street aimlessly. Her life was improving, after all—those new job offers weren’t bad.
It was just that, from the perspective of those jobs, art was measured first and foremost by commercial value, far outweighing its artistic merit.
Today’s interview had gone smoothly too. Perhaps before long, she could move out of this place.
What was there not to like about that?
So why did she still feel like a part of her was hollow inside?
It was as if a chunk of bone had been carved right out of her.
She felt light on her feet as she walked the streets, each step failing to find solid ground.
After wandering two full circles, she finally found a dessert shop that hadn’t closed yet.
But there weren’t many cake options left for her to choose from.
She picked a pure white cream cake topped with a fondant birthday hat. It cost her over three hundred yuan.
That was Shanghai for you—every inch of land worth its weight in gold.
If she were any poorer, she probably couldn’t even afford a birthday cake. On the flip side, at least she could still manage one now.
Maybe because they were closing soon, the shop assistant generously gave her a set of upscale birthday candles—the kind where the flames came in colors when lit.
But they couldn’t provide all nine digits, so before packaging them, the assistant asked which two numbers she wanted.
Without thinking, she blurted out, “Twenty-nine.”
Even she herself froze at the words.
The shop assistant just chuckled cheerfully as she placed the two candles on top and handed it over. “Turns out you’re not the little sister after all—you’re the big sister.”
She stood there stunned for a moment, then gave a soft smile.
She neither argued nor corrected her. She simply picked up the two cakes and hurried back.
One was a six-inch birthday hat cake holding candles for the numbers two and nine; the other was a slice of chocolate cake that the Dimple Colleague had bought for her.
By the time she stepped out of the shop, the longest day had finally drawn to a close.
The city’s nightscape unfolded before her, the misty drizzle turning the air into a muted, desaturated haze.
A car sped past, splashing up a sheet of water that mirrored her hurried, disheveled steps.
This time, she didn’t linger on the roadside. Clutching the two cakes, she raced back to her place.
When she reached the entrance of her building, the motion-sensor light under the short overhang above was still shining brightly.
Even brighter than before, in fact.
She stood beneath the overhang for quite a while, the damp breeze teasing the stray hairs at her neck again and again.
It took a long moment before she snapped out of it and trudged up the stairs with her head down.
It was nearly dawn, and the stairwell in this rundown apartment block was deathly quiet. No one else came home as late as she did; she could hear only her own footsteps.
Pitch black, save for the faint glow of streetlights filtering through the rain-fogged windows outside.
And the motion-sensor lights on each landing, which flickered on slowly under the weight of her heavy steps. They trailed the rainwater she’d brought in, leaving damp footprints on the stairs.
The first-floor light blinked on—she wiped the rain from her face in a bedraggled swipe, feeling the chill at her neck. She reached down and discovered a wet patch darkening her collar.
The second-floor light blinked on—she heard a child’s cry from the apartment next to the stairwell and became aware of the cicadas humming.
The third-floor light blinked on—she glanced down at her footprints on the concrete, now faded to mere damp stains.
The fourth-floor light blinked on—her phone buzzed in her pocket. Both hands full, she couldn’t check it right away, but her heart quickened. Was it the interview results?
The fifth-floor light blinked on—she paused at the landing between four and five, deciding it was unlikely they’d send results this late. More likely, someone had finished work and sent her birthday wishes.
The sixth-floor light blinked on—at the turn between five and six, she caught her foot on something and stumbled. Heart pounding, she grabbed the railing, then frantically hoisted the large cake in her hand. Peering through the plastic wrap, she checked if the expensive thing had toppled over.
The cream cake pressed intact against the film, showing no signs of damage.
She let out a breath of relief, though her heart still raced.
Gingerly, she lowered the cake, moving with exaggerated slowness. As the box descended, the view it had blocked came into focus bit by bit.
Like a slow-motion camera pan.
Revealing a hazy silhouette slumped against the door of her rental.
Before her eyes could fully adjust, the stairwell’s motion-sensor light went dark in that instant.
For a moment, the only sounds were Fu Tingli’s own ragged heartbeat.
And a breath that wasn’t hers, carrying the faint scent of alcohol drifting on it.
It lingered at her nose, refusing to fade.
The woman leaning against her rental door hadn’t made a sound. She simply stared at her through the blackness of night.
For an instant, Fu Tingli even wondered if they could stand there all night without a word.
Like two animals who couldn’t understand each other’s language, chancing upon one another in the human world.
Until a gust of wind rattled open the stairwell window.
The breeze brushed Fu Tingli’s neck, scattering her hair. She shivered involuntarily and snapped back to reality, instinctively taking a step down the stairs toward the figure.
The hallway light blazed to life in that moment.
Warm yellow light spilled forth, washing over the woman slumped by the door, across the brim of her baseball cap, and down to the pale fingers clutching her own arms.
Finally, it poured crystal clear into Fu Tingli’s ears—one drop after another, falling away.
For some inexplicable reason, Fu Tingli mistook the sound of her own step for the crunch of gravel.
And there sat Kong Liyuan on the floor, a neat little cake box by her side—pristine and undamaged by the rain, clearly well protected.
In the dim, murky glow, those deep-set eyes, damp with rain, lifted slightly from beneath the cap’s brim.
The look on her face felt like it spanned billions of light-years between them.
At last, Kong Liyuan’s gaze settled on the cake box in Fu Tingli’s hand. She said softly, simply,
“You’ve lost weight.”
Thus, the hourglass flipped, the final grain of sand inevitably becoming the first.
