Chapter 1: Twenty-Seven

On the subway.

Cen Mingchan scrolled through Zhihu to pass the time. Amid the flood of stories, a question caught her eye—”Do you like your eighteen-year-old self?”

Without a second thought, she swiped the page down and scrolled right past it.

The answer was obvious. No, she didn’t.

She didn’t like her eighteen-year-old self, and she liked her twenty-seven-year-old self even less.

Back home, she tossed her bag aside and collapsed straight onto the couch.

The exhaustion from work was so total that she couldn’t even be bothered to open a food-delivery app and make a choice. All she wanted was to lie there for a while—scroll Bilibili, or play a round of something.

Choices like that only cost her time, and time was cheap to her. Nine hours a day. Ten. Even eleven hours of work amounted to barely a hundred yuan.

She chose to open Prosperous Era, a mobile MOBA. It had launched her freshman year and was still going strong nine years later, its popularity showing no sign of cooling.

Back in college she’d been obsessed with it—so obsessed that, thanks to the anti-addiction system, she’d made two accounts just so that when the game banned her for half an hour and forced her to rest, she could log into the other and keep playing with friends.

Life back then had been carefree. No worrying about layoffs or pay cuts, no dragging herself to work each day like a prisoner headed for execution, no wishing she could dig up her boss’s ancestors and spit on their graves.

Her only worry had been that the game kept rolling out new skins faster than she could afford them.

At eighteen she’d once ranked in the National Server Top 10, and a few clubs had even reached out with tryout invitations—though most of them, upon hearing she was a girl, had politely hinted that she might not be a good fit.

Now, at twenty-seven, her stamina and reflexes were starting to lag.

Cen Mingchan knew she was aging, one step at a time.

Maybe she really was getting old. These days she couldn’t even pop her Stasis in time.

She laughed at herself and queued up for a ranked match. Teammates were found almost instantly.

The moment the ban-pick screen loaded, she heard a girl’s voice—clear, sweet, and lovely, like a freshly picked apple, crisp and dripping with juice.

The girl was chattering away to herself. “Oh, of course I’m in my dorm—all my roommates went out to play.”

“Your daddy here is not going out. I’m a total homebody. Getting me to walk two extra steps is harder than climbing to heaven.”

Cen Mingchan couldn’t help a soft laugh at that—then noticed the girl’s player ID: Zangchun Goes Solo.

[T/N: Zangchun (藏春) literally means “Hiding/Sheltering Spring.” In Chinese literature, it evokes the idea of locking away or preserving the fleeting warmth, passion, and beauty of youth so it never fades. It was a popular style of poetic, slightly “edgy” internet pseudonym in the 2010s.]

It looked familiar.

She’d used it herself once.

Back then she’d been a cringey, lone-wolf, edgelord kind of kid, and she’d gone through plenty of IDs like it.

Don’t Mess with Zangchun. Protect Our Zangchun. And—Zangchun Goes Solo.

“Zangchun” was a handle, a circle name that stood in for her real one when she made friends online.

The girl was still talking. “That fifth pick’s obviously a mid-support player. I’ll take the Marksman role, then.”

“Just sit back and relax—Daddy’ll carry you through this in ten minutes.”

The fifth pick she was talking about was Cen Mingchan.

The girl was a bit of a talker—a bit noisy, honestly.

But maybe because of the shared ID, Cen Mingchan felt a strange sense of fate in it. She didn’t mute the girl. She even typed that she could play support, and asked what support the girl wanted.

“She’s asking what support I want? Honestly, anything works—just keep me alive.”

Then the girl typed, “Whatever’s fine.”

It dawned on Cen Mingchan that the girl was probably queuing with a friend and had mistaken her team voice chat for the all-team channel.

In the end, Cen Mingchan got mid lane, stuck with a short-legged, squishy champion—and the enemy jungler was an assassin, the exact counter to her pick.

The game wore on. Sure enough, good news kept pouring in from the girl down in bot lane, while Cen Mingchan got camped so hard by the enemy jungler that she couldn’t even leave her tower.

She couldn’t even walk past the river without getting ambushed.

Her score soon hit 0–5.

The girl’s voice took on a note of irritation. “Their jungler’s gotten so fed. He’s slaughtering our mid laner like a pig.”

“This mid is so bad—just keeps feeding.”

Cen Mingchan opened the economy panel and saw her gold barely edged out the support’s. She couldn’t help feeling a little dejected.

She unmuted her mic and said quietly, “Sorry. I really am playing badly this game.”

“Huh?” The girl sounded startled. She went silent for a long moment—then shrieked. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god—was my mic on all-team? Holy shit, I’m done for!”

“Ahhhhhh—then she heard all of that?!”

Then another stretch of silence.

The girl was the first to speak again, her attitude doing a complete 180. She apologized frantically over the mic. “I’m so sorry, sister—I didn’t mean to flame you, I just have a big mouth, I like trash-talking my teammates, I didn’t know I was on all-team, I really wasn’t trying to insult you, it’s not your fault their jungler keeps ganking you, I’ll go kill him for you!”

Then, timidly: “Sister, can we add each other after this? I’ll carry you up the ranks, I swear I won’t call you bad again, I’m really so sorry!”

There were plenty of toxic players in games—bad attitudes, foul mouths. Cen Mingchan had seen her share. In her hot-headed youth she’d been a flamer herself; when someone kept ranting over the mic, she’d unmute and trade insults right back.

Most of the time, the moment a flamer heard her voice and realized she was a girl, their fire would die down.

That was why a friend once said, “Good voices are a dime a dozen, but our Mingchan’s is unmatched under heaven.”

If Cen Mingchan had to name one good thing about herself, it was probably her voice.

“Sweet girl” was the compliment she heard most. From the day she’d first unmuted at eighteen, people had been praising it—right up to now.

Her voice was distinctive. During her Mandarin proficiency exam, a machine malfunction meant the final spoken essay had to be played on speaker for everyone, each person getting maybe a sentence or two to make sure the equipment had recorded them properly.

It was like opening a blind box—everyone couldn’t help listening to those slightly distorted recordings, murmuring guesses about whose voice it was.

When it came to Cen Mingchan’s turn, half the class recognized it at once. “That’s Mingchan!” “Mingchan’s voice is so pretty!”

But when Cen Mingchan heard her own voice, she felt nothing—she even thought it sounded a little ugly.

A bit affected. A bit put-on.

Her mind wandered.

Seeing she hadn’t replied, the girl kept apologizing meekly. “I’m sorry, sister. Don’t be mad. Let’s add each other after this, okay?”

Cen Mingchan’s mind drifted again.

She thought of that afternoon.

She’d been a homebody, never one for going out—she just wanted to curl up in her dorm and game.

She’d sat on her dorm bed in a duo queue with a friend she’d met online. Since she was on an alt account, her teammates were terrible, so she trash-talked them out of habit while hard-carrying the game.

She’d assumed she was on team voice chat, that only her duo partner could hear her—and her partner was long used to her running mouth, would even join in with the snark, so she’d spoken without a shred of self-consciousness.

The other teammates were so bad—what was wrong with a little trash talk? She was only doing it behind their backs. To their faces she was still cheering them on.

But she’d accidentally unmuted the all-team channel, and all four of her other teammates could hear her.

And the one she’d flamed was a sweet mid-lane girl.

The girl was gentle, with a lovely voice too. She unmuted and apologized of her own accord—and only then did it hit Cen Mingchan that she’d had the wrong channel on. She offered to add the girl and carry her up the ranks, but the girl never accepted her friend request.

The Cen Mingchan of back then had more pride. When the other didn’t add her, she didn’t go chasing after it, just kept duo-queuing with her friend.

The whole thing had been mortifying—getting caught red-handed by her own teammates—which was why, years later, she still remembered it.

And now the roles were reversed.

Cen Mingchan stared at her phone, dazed again.

The bullet fired at eighteen, when she’d accidentally unmuted—it was as if it had crossed through time and struck her square between the eyes today.

She unmuted and replied, “Sure. I’ll add you after this game.”