Jade of Another World

2025 Spring Night Overpass

Lin Ning's Tesla crawled along in the evening rush hour traffic when the car's air freshener suddenly released a peach blossom scent—it seemed exactly like the smell on the warm jade kang in the main hall of the Jade Pavilion a hundred years ago. Her heart skipped a beat, and she gripped the steering wheel tightly. In the rearview mirror, she saw the safety buckle below her collarbone; the jade pendant was burning hot, just like the warmth of Nangong Jin's touch before his death.

A Maybach in the oncoming lane suddenly honked. The sound made her look up, and the two cars passed each other at the flashing yellow light at the intersection. The man had one hand on the steering wheel, a dragon-patterned pinky ring on his ring finger, and a sandalwood bracelet with half a dried peach blossom wrapped around his wrist—it looked very familiar.

"Ning'er, where are you?"

His lip reading was torn apart by the sound of the horn.

Lin Ning's brake lights suddenly flashed on, and amidst the honking of the car behind her, she vaguely saw the man's pupils contract sharply, exactly the same look she had when she said, "I want to go home, I want to leave here!" on that snowy night in the fifteenth year of the Yuanhe era.

The Maybach's window slowly rolled down three fingers. Lin Ning saw a sachet hanging in the rearview mirror, its faded apricot satin surface patched with crooked stitches—it seemed to be a medicine pouch she had sewn for Nangong Jin, who was in Nanzheng, when she was eighteen.

"Miss, the light's green, you can go!" The delivery rider's shout startled her. Lin Ning slammed on the gas, and as the Tesla sped off, she saw in her rearview mirror that the Maybach suddenly stopped, then reversed, domineeringly blocking the road, eliciting a screech of brakes. As the man got out, the hem of his suit billowed up, revealing a tattoo on his lower back—a peach blossom design from the Great Yu Imperial Palace, with the tiny character "Ning" etched among the petals. But by then, Lin Ning had already driven away, and she hadn't seen anything clearly.

Lin Ning's tears fell onto the safety buckle. She took out an old handkerchief from the box. On the yellowed Xuan paper, the embroidered words "May the moonlight flow to illuminate you" were bleeding blood—the stitches were exactly the same as the one in the crystal coffin a hundred years ago.

The neon lights of the overpass swept across the man's face. Lin Ning suddenly remembered the white hair at his temples when the Gate of Rebirth opened. He clearly looked thirty years old at this moment, but in the instant their eyes met, a sense of vicissitudes spanning a century surged in his eyes.

"Ding—"

My phone suddenly vibrated. An unknown number sent a photo: deep in a peach orchard in Longquanyi, in front of a newly erected, wordless monument, a string of candied hawthorns was laid out. The accompanying message read: "When you were eight, you said that if you buried the candied hawthorn pits in the ground, they would blossom and bear the fruit we wanted."

Lin Ning turned around abruptly, but the Maybach had already disappeared into the traffic. Trembling, she touched her neck, where the red thread of her safety buckle had been replaced by a dragon-patterned silk tassel, with a black iron whistle tied to the end—the very token she had secretly slipped into the medicine pouch she had given to Nangong Jin during his southern expedition in her previous life.

The evening breeze carried the scent of peach blossoms through the car, mingling with the aroma of a hot pot restaurant in the distance. Lin Ning suddenly laughed, tears streaming down her face as she blurred the route home on the navigation screen. It turns out that some encounters, their paths to reunion etched in the peach blossoms of a hundred years ago, are like glimpses of something unseen.

(In the rearview mirror, the man in the Maybach was caressing the peach blossoms on his bracelet when the car radio suddenly switched to "Qing Ping Diao." His fingertips paused, and he murmured softly, "Ning'er, this time it's my turn to come find you.")

Bonus scene: Three days later, Lin Ning's Tesla was "accidentally" rear-ended by a Maybach. The man got out of the car carrying a bouquet of white peach blossoms, the petals glistening with morning dew from the Forbidden City, the stems wrapped in a blood-stained old handkerchief, the corner embroidered with the second half of a sentence she had never seen before: "Ning'er, for the rest of my life, would you like to participate again?"

(end)