On the last page of his notebook, he wrote a sentence he had written last year by Qinghai Lake: "The best scenery is never in the lens, but around us."

Zhong Hua leaned over to look, but said nothing; he simply reached out and pressed down the pages that had been blown about by the wind. Looking back now, he probably did see it.

The phone screen lit up again; it was a new photo from Zhong Hua. In the pitch-black night, faint glimmers of light could be seen, like a few stars that had fallen from the sky.

"The kids say these are fireflies," the message came in along with the photo. "Didn't you always want to take pictures? I tried a few, but they probably didn't turn out well."

Ah Yu looked at the blurry dots of light and suddenly felt his eyes getting hot. He remembered Zhong Hua in high school, when he always remembered something Zhong Hua casually said. Back then, he said he wanted to see shooting stars, so Zhong Hua dragged him to squat on the playground all night, eventually catching a cold, but still smiling and saying, "I saw at least three."

He picked up his phone and took a picture of the night sky outside the window. The city lights were too bright; he couldn't capture the stars, only a blurry, dark blue expanse. He sent the photo to Zhong Hua, captioning it: "Waiting for you to come back, so we can take pictures of the real starry sky together."

This time, it took a long time for them to reply, and the reply was just one word: "Okay."

Ah Yu held his phone to his chest, listening to his own heartbeat mingling with the sound of the wind outside the window, like a gentle song. He knew that the mountain wind was carrying Zhong Hua's thoughts, blowing little by little towards him, not far away.

Lin Wanqing tidied up the cookie crumbs on the table, looking at the smile that Ah Yu couldn't hide on her lips, and sighed softly, her eyes full of tenderness. Some feelings are like film in an old camera, invisible and intangible most of the time, but slowly developing over time, eventually becoming the most precious images.

And that crooked camera drawn on the loess land is probably the warmest scene at this moment.