Chapter 2: Seven Days of Summer

“Yo, Qiu. Long time no see.”

Early summer sunlight cast parallel bars of light down the first-year hallway of Shanhai High.

A boy, just over 1.8 meters tall, smiled and held out his hand to her.

Jiang Ciqiu was absolutely certain: her childhood friend was dead.

He had died thirteen years before, in a calamity beast accident.

Back then, she had been floating in the air above the hospital, watching with her own eyes as the inpatient building collapsed with a roar.

All the windows on the five floors shattered into powder in the same instant, hit by the immense pressure from within. Flames scorched the night sky above into orange-red.

In that kind of furnace heat, no human life could survive. Even the load-bearing steel bars had been baked black and twisted out of shape.

But if that was really the case, then who was this person standing in front of her, looking exactly like Lin Xia?

“You have to be kidding…”

Jiang Ciqiu’s crimson pupils shrank to pinholes. Her body stiffened by instinct.

‘Is this transformation magic? A shapeshifting monster? Or some new trick from the Administration Bureau to test whether the memory wipe on me worked?’

Maybe he could tell what was flashing in her eyes. The boy slapped a hand to his chest, then, as if he remembered something, wore a look of lingering fear.

“I was lucky, really. I checked out of the hospital yesterday at noon. I thought I’d give you a surprise today, so I didn’t let you know. Then I saw the news last night: that place was bombed by calamity beasts… I really got away with my life.”

Looking at the way he let out a long sigh of relief, Jiang Ciqiu’s brain, a little rusty from overtime, took two turns.

Then it all made sense.

‘So this is a hallucination before death!’

‘Of course. I’m nothing but a thirty-year-old corporate drone who has been working fourteen days straight. How could I really be back in high school, seeing a childhood friend who came back from the dead?’

She remembered watching a medical drama once, in which a person’s brain would weave the illusion they most wanted to see as a final comfort just before dying.

‘The sunlight, the hallway, even living, breathing Lin Xia… these must all be images my brain is rendering to soothe my body.’

“Hey, Qiu, why are you looking at me like I’m a dead man? I’m not dead, and I’m not your hallucination!”

The boy felt uneasy under Jiang Ciqiu’s dull, hollow stare. He sighed helplessly, reached out, and pinched the girl’s cheeks, pulling them out to the sides.

“Does it hurt? You can feel this, right?”

Jiang Ciqiu said nothing. She just let him pull at her soft cheeks.

Lin Xia’s heart tightened.

The skin under his fingertips was warm and soft, and felt very good… wait. This was not the time to be thinking about that!

In the past, Qiu hated this kind of teasing, being treated as a girl. She had always worn the boys’ uniform, and the two of them called each other brothers.

If he had dared to pinch her face like this before, nine times out of ten she would have smacked his hand away. Even when he was lying in that hospital ward, she would have only held back a little.

For Jiang Ciqiu, though, the slight stinging from the tug on her cheeks cut straight through her chaotic thoughts.

‘This really doesn’t seem to be a dream. At least, I’ve never heard of a dream that can simulate pain.’

“Qiu, are you okay? Don’t scare me.” Seeing that she still didn’t respond, Lin Xia quickly let go, panic flickering in his eyes.

“She’s just too excited.”

Ilya, who had not spoken all this time, broke the awkward silence.

The blonde girl looked at Jiang Ciqiu, then looked at Lin Xia, with an expression of having understood everything.

“After we learned your condition had taken a turn for the worse last time, I haven’t seen her smile at all. Now that you suddenly appear, jumping and alive, it’s only natural that her brain short-circuits.”

Ilya tossed out those words, turned, and walked toward the classroom.

“Class is about to start. I’m going back first. Welcome back, Lin Xia.”

Lin Xia nodded at the departing figure of the foreign young lady, then turned his worried gaze back to Jiang Ciqiu’s face.

Feeling the faint heat and pain lingering on her cheeks, Jiang Ciqiu finally came back to her senses.

The scene in front of her would not pop like a bubble of summer soap.

She had really returned to thirteen years ago, and this was a new world line, one where Lin Xia had been discharged early and had lived through the calamity beast attack.

“…I’m fine.”

Jiang Ciqiu took a deep breath and pushed away the hand that was still trying to reach her forehead.

“I drank too many cold drinks last night, so my stomach feels bad. I’ll go to the restroom. You go back to class first.”

She did not dare look at Lin Xia again. Muttering a clumsy excuse, she turned and hurried away.

Lin Xia stood in place, not chasing after her.

The girl’s back swayed as she walked, like a wind-up doll nearing the end of its spring.

He quietly watched that thin silhouette wrapped in the boys’ uniform. The clear light in his eyes gradually sank, and an intense, dark grief flashed beneath the joy of reunion.

To see this silhouette again, he had paid a very heavy price.

****

In the boys’ restroom at the end of the second floor, the girl stopped in front of the sink.

Five meters away stood a water dispenser, and then the girls’ restroom. What kind of medicine had the school leaders taken to put a water fountain between two toilets? Even after living for thirty years, Jiang Ciqiu could not wrap her head around it.

She turned on the faucet and splashed big handfuls of water onto her face.

“…Calm down, Jiang Ciqiu. You’re an adult. A corporate drone who grew up a long time ago.”

With both hands on the edge of the sink, she looked at the young girl in the mirror, at the water droplets rolling down her chin.

‘This body… it can’t really be from thirteen years ago, can it?’

She pinched her right cheek. It still hurt.

So, as a retired magical girl, as a weary thirty-year-old corporate drone, she had been on the train home from work when she heard a mysterious voice.

“Do you want to go back to the happiest time in your life?”

She had said yes without giving it much thought. And then she really was sent back to a point thirteen years ago.

What was more, as if fate wanted to compensate her for all the suffering of those years, she had been handed a bonus IF line. In it, her best friend Lin Xia had not died in the calamity beast attack.

Everything was too wonderful. Wonderful in the way she used to sneer at the wish-fulfillment stories she later, after becoming a corporate drone, devoured with pleasure.

Ah, so all along, it wasn’t that those stories were fake. It was that she had never been the main character.

“Time travel, huh… What rank of magical girl can manipulate time? This is way too amazing.”

Water droplets fell down her cheeks and splashed onto the terrazzo counter. Jiang Ciqiu watched the little whirlpool in the sink and murmured to herself.

A lazy but sly female voice sounded beside her ear without any warning.

“What’s so amazing about that? There are even boys who get permanently TS’d to become magical girls, meow.”

“Who’s there!?”

Jiang Ciqiu raised her head, her gaze sharpening at once.

She would not misrecognize it. This was clearly the voice that had asked her that question on the train!

She looked warily at the mirror in front of her, and the next second, she froze.

In the mirror, besides herself, there was a black cat squatting at the corner of the sink at some unknown moment.

Jiang Ciqiu wiped her eyes and turned to look. That spot was empty in reality.

The black cat in the mirror flicked its tail, the corner of its mouth lifting into a humanlike smile. Its ruby eyes glittered with an unreadable light.

“Nice to meet you. I am Sephirah.”

The cat’s mouth moved slightly, and the voice sounded directly inside Jiang Ciqiu’s head.

“To make it easier for your single-threaded human brain to understand, you can think of me as the administrator of this world, the one who knows everything. The kind that grants wishes, meow.”

“Was it you who brought me back?”

“Don’t rush to thank me yet. Everything has a price. Even coming back to such a beautiful, illusory summer has its price, meow~”

Jiang Ciqiu’s heart skipped a beat. “A price?”

“Yes. The price is that you have seven days to stay here. And if you want to continue staying, you have to finish the task I ask of you.”

The black cat stretched out a furry paw and waved it.

Jiang Ciqiu stared at the dark creature in the mirror. “What task?”

“Hehe, that’s a secret, meow~. You’ll be told when the time comes.”

In a blink, the body of the black cat dispersed in the mirror, carried away by its sly laughter.

“Enjoy your found-again youth first, retired magical girl.”

Another blink passed. Inside the mirror and outside, the sink was empty, with only a patch of undried water remaining, as if the black cat had never been there.

She froze for a few seconds, then wiped her face forcefully again and let out a long sigh, blowing water drops from between her fingers onto the countertop.

“What is all this…”

Ring, ring, ring, ring.

The bell came over the loudspeaker again. Jiang Ciqiu, who had left campus too long ago, could not tell for a second whether it was the bell ending morning reading or the bell for the start of first period.

But either way, she should go back.

Back to that classroom, the one with Lin Xia in it.

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