Winter came a little early to the Northern Hemisphere that year.
The winter solstice had yet to arrive, but a bone-chilling cold already lingered in Jinling's winds.
Looking at his wife standing before him and the infant in her arms, Sun Lieyang felt a pang of reluctance. Still, he drew a deep breath of icy air and spoke with resolve.
"I have to go."
The woman gazed into his eyes. Her lake-clear eyes seemed to hold so much she wanted to say, but in the end, only one sentence passed her lips.
"...Remember to think of me."
"Don't be so sad."
Gently brushing aside the bangs the wind had tousled across her forehead, Sun Lieyang gazed at his wife as though trying to engrave her face in his memory. A smile spread across his lips as he tried to make his voice sound as lighthearted as possible.
"It's not like I'm never coming back. Besides, I reckon that in ten years at most, going to the moon will be as easy as taking a high-speed train back home. Then you can come up to see me, or I can come down to see you. It'll make no difference."
Looking at the infant in her arms, Sun Lieyang held out his index finger to play with him and gave him a warm smile.
Perhaps that warm smile was contagious. The baby stopped crying and reached out with a giggle, trying to grab his father's finger.
"Be good, sweetheart. Wait for me to come home."
Gently holding his child's hand, he continued in a voice tinged with anticipation.
"By then, your dad will have a story to tell you that'll make all your classmates green with envy."
Biting her lip, the woman looked at him with a faint trace of reproach.
"Honestly...