Extra 1
Xu Li and Tan Yuze's wedding was like a dream kissed by the Milky Way.
That day, the entire city seemed to hold its breath. The Bund's clock struck half an hour early, as if to make way for their vow. The lights on the opposite bank of the river lit up inch by inch, spelling out her name—"Xu Li".
He stood on the opposite bank, impeccably dressed in a suit, like a male protagonist straight out of a shoujo manga, clutching a crumpled little note she had given him in high school, which read, "You have to marry me someday."
The red carpet stretched from the stone steps of the old house all the way to the riverbank, a hundred meters long, embroidered with city maps they had walked together: candied hawthorns in Beijing's hutongs, fallen leaves in New York's Central Park, wind chimes by the Kamo River in Kyoto... Every step was a footnote to their ten-year love story.
The guests didn't walk; they arrived in a vintage tram with photos of their annual trips pasted on the windows, like a moving documentary.
As Tan Yuze recited his vows, a sudden sun shower began. He looked up and laughed, saying, "Look, even the heavens are jealous of me."
Xu Li threw her bouquet at him while crying—hidden in the bouquet was a button from his cuff that she had secretly taken off when they first rode the subway together. She had kept it for nine years and now it was sewn into the lining of her wedding dress, close to the spot where her heart beat.
The dinner was held on a century-old cruise ship on the Huangpu River. The deck had been transformed into a glass greenhouse, filled with her favorite white hyacinths. The band members were senior students she had a crush on during her school days.
Now a renowned cellist, the first piece she played was a cheesy love song she wrote for Tan Yuze when she was 18—which he recorded on his phone and played on repeat more than three thousand times.
As guests raised their glasses, a drone spelled out the Latin phrase: "Amorvincitomnia." Love conquers all.
Before the last light went out, Tan Yuze suddenly picked her up and ran to the bow of the ship, like in "Titanic," but not for romance—he told her to close her eyes.
The next second, all the lights along the river lit up at the same time, from upstream to downstream, forming the image of what she had said in anger during their first argument: "Unless you make all of Shanghai light up for me."
At that moment, she opened her eyes, and through her tears, she saw the reflection of thousands of lights, like a meteor shower flowing backwards.
Seven seconds after the sea of lights came on, Xu Li suddenly tiptoed and kissed Tan Yuze—not the kind of kiss that guests cheered for during the ceremony, but a kiss that smelled of candied hawthorn, the fallen leaves of Central Park, and the sound of wind chimes in Kyoto.
It was as if they were chewing up ten years of time and swallowing it into each other's bodies. Just then, the cruise ship's whistle sounded, the sound waves vibrating the glass greenhouse, and white hyacinths fluttered down like a reverse snowfall.
Tan Yuze tasted the salty tears on her lips, then suddenly bent down, picked her up, and carried her straight through the stunned guests.
The cello music stopped abruptly, and the senior student trembled his bow, playing a variation of the Wedding March—stolen the solemn 4/4 time signature into a 3/4 waltz, and the entire deck began to spin.
Xu Li's wedding dress skirt swept over the hyacinths, and the petals stuck to the dark patterns on the petticoat, turning into a walking relief.
They barged into the galley on the lower deck of the cruise ship. The chef was pouring the last layer of caramel onto a crepe cake. Tan Yuze reached out and scraped off the frosting from the edge, smearing it on Xu Li's earlobe—where he had accompanied her to get her ear pierced on the day she turned 18.
What was once feared as pain has now become the perfect place for sugar frosting. "Is it sweet?" he asked. Xu Li opened her mouth and bit his wrist bone, leaving a row of fine teeth marks: "Not as sweet as the iced cola you handed me with this hand after playing ball when you were seventeen."
Suddenly, exclamations came from outside. It turned out that the drone swarm hadn't disbanded; instead, it had swooped down onto the river and projected a red laser image onto the water—a scene from the 2013 Interstellar movie they had skipped class to see: the hands of the watch on Murphy's bookshelf were trembling.
At that moment, Xu Li said, "If love has a shape, it is probably a Möbius strip in five-dimensional space." The water curtain on the river was typing this sentence in Morse code. The sensor lights embedded in the cruise ship railing received the signal and immediately translated the whole sentence into light, which was projected onto Xu Li's collarbone.
She happened to have a cinnabar mole there, like a comma added by fate.
Tan Yuze suddenly knelt down on one knee and took out a rusty pull tab from the inside pocket of his suit.
It was something Xu Li casually tossed to him during his senior year of high school. He later smoothed out the gap with super glue and crookedly carved "Marryme" on the inside. He realized he had carved it backwards after finishing it, and it looked more like an abbreviation of "mirror".
He slipped the ring onto her ring finger, and it fit perfectly, holding the million-dollar diamond ring. “It’s legal now,” he said with a smile. “Now I can hide you in my five-dimensional bookshelf.”
Xu Li suddenly grabbed his collar and dragged him toward the lifeboat deck. There hung a Polaroid photo of him dozing off during their first subway ride together—the photo showed him with potato chip crumbs on his lips, and on the back was the word "future husband" she had written at the time.
She stuffed the photo into the sealed container in the lifeboat, then tore off her veil and stuffed it in with it. "If the world sinks tomorrow," she gasped, "at least that bastard on the subway will have to drift with me."
Tan Yuze paused for half a second, then suddenly burst into laughter. The laughter startled the night herons perched on the mast, and as the flock swept past the drones, the laser screen shattered into countless stardust fragments—as if someone had pulled the fuse on the Milky Way.
Before the last drone crashed, it dropped a QR code. Scanning it led to a cloud drive link containing only 1 GB of audio, titled "Argument Compilation 2015-2023"—ranging from "Tan Yuze, you threw your socks at my makeup bag again" to "Xu Li, I was away on a business trip for three days and you deleted my game save file."
All in high definition and without loss. Xu Li laughed and cried at the same time, her nails digging into his back: "Are you a pervert?" "Yeah," he kissed the crown of her head, "After ten years of saving up, tonight I can finally update to the 'post-marriage chapter'."
The distant Bund clock struck midnight again. A new day officially began, and their marriage certificate was automatically stamped in the Civil Affairs Bureau system—Tan Yuze had hacked in beforehand and changed the stamping time to 23:59:59, as if he had stolen a second from the universe.
Xu Li suddenly reached out and pressed the release button on the lifeboat. The small boat splashed into the river, and the water splashed up and wet the button that had been hidden inside her wedding dress for nine years.
The subway map on the button developed a visible image when it was wet, revealing the station they hadn't yet visited—"No. 13 Yinhe Road".
"Next stop?" She looked up.
“No. 13 Yinhe Road,” Tan Yuze pressed his forehead against hers, “I heard there’s an entrance to the fifth dimension there, and it requires a pair of madmen who have spent ten years living each other’s lives like a Möbius strip as the key.”
The lifeboat drifted with the undercurrent toward the mouth of Wusong, and the cruise ship's lights gradually became a breathing star. Xu Li reached for an oar and suddenly threw it into the river: "Wrong direction."
Tan Yuze smiled and lay down, pressing her hand to his heart—where a heartbeat resonated with hers: "That's right," he said, "everything has been heading towards you ever since you knocked over my iced cola when I was seventeen."
A thin mist rose from the river, as if blurring the world. From the depths of the mist came the subway announcement from 2013: "Next stop, No. 13 Yinhe Road—" It was actually recorded by Tan Yuze with his old phone, now playing through the Bluetooth speaker of the drone that had fallen into the water, its sound husky and distorted by electricity.
Xu Li took one last look at the cruise ship as it gradually disappeared into the distance: her senior was conducting the band, turning the Wedding March into "No Time for Caution" from Interstellar, and the guests were stomping their feet to the rhythm, shaking the hyacinths on the deck into a white powdery snow.
She turned and stepped into Tan Yuze's arms, the back of her wedding dress soaked with river water, like a silver river bleached by moonlight.
The lifeboat spun and spun in the fog, eventually becoming a point of light on a Möbius strip—while on the other side of the strip, seventeen-year-old Xu Li was handing an iced cola to seventeen-year-old Tan Yuze. The can clicked open, and bubbles surged up, drowning out all the unfulfilled futures.
The fog grew thicker, as if someone had boiled the entire Huangpu River into milk. The outline of the lifeboat was diluted to just a halo. Xu Li looked down and saw that the hyacinth petals on her wedding dress were floating upstream—they were breaking free of the fabric and drifting back towards the cruise ship, like a snowfall played in reverse.
Tan Yuze reached out to scoop it up, but his fingertips passed through the petals, producing a crackling sound of tiny electric currents: those were laser particles left behind after the drone crashed, now imprinting their fingerprints on the water mist, forming a barcode that only a Möbius strip could read.
“We’re going to miss it,” Xu Li suddenly said.
What did he miss? Tan Yuze didn't ask. He was staring at the Morse code formed by the light spots in the hollow of her collarbone—it began to wriggle, like an earthworm awakened by water, and finally pieced together a string of GPS coordinates: 31.14°N, 121.29°E, altitude -7 meters.
That was the spot where they fell into the subway ventilation shaft under construction sixteen years ago. At the time, the two of them were hanging on the safety net, sharing a bag of crushed Cheetos. Xu Li drew a crooked ∞ on the back of his T-shirt with her finger, which was covered in cheese powder.
A click-clack came from the bottom of the lifeboat. A silver-white track emerged from the fog—an old, decommissioned carriage from Metro Line 2, which had sunk in its entirety during the 2010 flood and was now transformed into an underwater cable car by the undercurrent.
The carriage doors and windows were covered with barnacles, resembling whale bones covered in teeth. Tan Yuze picked Xu Li up horizontally and stepped onto the tracks. The moment they did, the abandoned LED station sign suddenly lit up, displaying "No. 13 Yinhe Road → Basement 7".
The carriage door hissed open, releasing a stream of air carrying the smell of Cheetos: crumbs from that bag of snacks from sixteen years ago were still perfectly suspended in the air, like amber that had been paused.
As soon as they stepped inside, the carriage began to move backward—not in a physical sense, but as if time itself was going backward.
Xu Li saw a series of reversed images flashing across the river outside the car window: their wedding photo, which they had broken during an argument, being pieced back together in the frame.
The tears he shed while hiding in the stairwell that day flew back into his eyes; the heart he made to her when he rang the Nasdaq bell retracted from his fingertips in mid-air… Each frame was accompanied by a “click,” as if someone was cutting pages with an old-fashioned slide projector.
Finally, the car stopped in a ventilation shaft in 2015. The young Tan Yuze was writing "∞" on the palm of the young Xu Li with Cheetos shavings. When he finished the last stroke, the young man suddenly looked up—through sixteen years of time, and looked at the thirty-three-year-old Xu Li through the car window.
The boy smiled and pressed the infinity symbol on his palm against the car window. In that instant, cheese powder began to seep from the cuffs of adult Tan Yuze's suit, like rice paper being dyed in reverse.
Xu Li grabbed his wrist and discovered that a subway map appeared where their skin met: Line 2, then Line 13, then a non-existent "Yinhe Road Branch Line", with the terminus marked "Mobius Depot".
The train's announcement came on, but it was Tan Yuze's voice from 2035—hoarse and nicotine-scented: "Passengers who need to pay for their tickets, please proceed to the customer service center on the -7 level before time reverses."
The customer service center is located in the last carriage of the train, transformed into a 1990s newsstand. An elderly woman wearing a red armband sits at the window, waving their marriage certificate in her hand—the red certificate is soaked in water, but the photo seems to move.
They are smiling in their school uniforms in their ID photos.
The back of the photo reads, "Return ticket, valid indefinitely."
“You need to make up the difference.” The old lady spoke, but her voice was that of Xu Li, the boy from the ventilation shaft in 2013, clear and crisp, “with your most painful memories.”
Xu Li held his trembling hand and pulled the button she had kept hidden for nine years from the lining of her wedding dress—the back of the button was engraved with "Last subway train 23:59".
At that moment, the numbers began to flip wildly, finally stopping at "00:00:01". She inserted the button into the notch of the stored-value card, fitting it perfectly, like inserting her last tooth into her gums.
The train emitted a long "toot" and began to slow down. The water mist outside the train window suddenly froze into ice crystals, forming an upside-down city: all the buildings had roots, like trees growing in reverse.
The bus stop sign for No. 13 Yinhe Road appeared overhead, but it was written upside down, with the number "13" resembling two doors that could not be closed.
When the car door opened, what rushed in wasn't water, but the crumbs from that bag of Cheetos from 2013—they reassembled into a complete spiral, suspended between the two of them, like a DNA strand written with cheese powder.
Tan Yuze reached out and touched it, and the spiral immediately shattered into light spots, which then coalesced into images of them as teenagers: Xu Li, wearing a school uniform, was putting the pull tab of a soda can onto the ring finger of young Tan Yuze—the "Marryme2025.9.23" on the inside of the pull tab was engraved in reverse, but now it was facing the right way.
The boy and girl ran hand in hand towards the end of the carriage, where an inspection door appeared, behind which was a blinding white light—like someone had turned up the exposure of the Milky Way to its maximum.
The adult Xu Li suddenly understood: the so-called No. 13 Yinhe Road was nothing more than the "unread messages" they marked each other in their memos after each argument. Those "cancelled" voice messages, "retracted" text messages, and "deleted" photos.
She turned and hugged Tan Yuze, and the back of her wedding dress began to burn—but the fire was cold, like fireworks made of liquid nitrogen.
"Are you ready?" she asked.
Tan Yuze didn't answer, but lowered his head to kiss her—a kiss that carried the scents of Cheetos, iced cola, deathly Barbie pink, nursing home nail polish, and sandalwood from an urn... All timelines collapsed into a single candy at that moment.
They fell together into the white light behind the maintenance door, and heard the teenagers from 2013 calling out behind them:
"Hey! Did you drop this ∞, or this ∞, or this—?"
The sound was sucked away by the train. At the end of the white light, a 2010 subway ticket vending machine appeared, its screen flashing green.
Tan Yuze reached out, but Xu Li stopped him just as he was about to press the button. She slipped the return ticket into his hand and pressed "3" herself. The ticket machine clicked out two one-way tickets—but the tickets were blank, like two unfinished pages of a diary.
“Never stopping means,” she tiptoed close to his earlobe, “that we have to fall in love with each other all over again in every train car.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, the ticket machine began to melt, transforming into that Cheetos packaging bag from 2013. A line of small print was printed on the back of the bag:
Shelf life: 16 light-years.
How to consume: Share with another person in case of drowning.
Side effect: Time will lose its linear flow, and all arguments will turn into preparatory kisses.
They picked up the packaging bag, exchanged a glance, and, just like they had shared snacks sixteen years ago, each tore it open from one end—
"Click".
The galaxy collapsed into a candy. On the inside of the candy wrapper, written in cheese powder, were the last words:
"Welcome aboard No. 13 Yinhe Road. This train's final destination is: —"
The ellipsis is followed by a blank space, as if it's left for them to fill in the rest of their lives.
Only then did their love truly begin.
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