"Hey, were you looking for this?" Gao Ming held up the Student ID in his hand and exchanged a glance with the utterly ordinary student.
The photograph on the ID gradually became clear. Memories slipped into his heart like raindrops sliding down a window.
"Huh?" The student seemed to have just woken up. He was slow to react, taking a long while before reaching out. "Thanks."
The Student ID held fragments of memories scattered throughout the campus. Gao Ming did not really want to hand it over. If he could, he wanted to swallow it whole and lock all those memories in his heart.
"What's your name?" Gao Ming kept his hand suspended in midair. "I want to check whether this is your Student ID."
"My name is Gao Yun," the boy answered without hesitation.
"Gao Yun? As in the word for fate?" Gao Ming tightened his fingers around the Student ID. He felt as though all the blood in his body had come to a boil. His heart pounded, and even he did not know why.
"No, Yun as in cloud," the boy explained again. "The family who adopted me hoped I could be as free as a cloud, never bound by anything, born in the sky and turning into rain after I died."
"The family who adopted you? Your adoptive parents gave you that name?"
"My adoptive father, to be precise." Gao Yun thought back for a moment. "My father is a very strange person. He never smiles, and there are always chains wrapped around him beneath his clothes, like a sinner. He has no friends or family. He said he'd died many times. He also said he adopted me so I could become the next him."
There was a great deal of information buried in Gao Yun's