Ten minutes earlier.
In her apartment, Zhong Xueran sat in front of her laptop in a red dress, tapping halfheartedly at the keyboard.
She was thirty-four that year, and single.
It was not that she could not find someone. With her looks and abilities, the line of people pursuing her could stretch all the way to neighboring Moon City.
But for some reason, Zhong Xueran could not muster the slightest interest in any man, as though a piece of her heart had been hollowed out.
Thunder rumbled outside, and she still had nothing for the news article due tomorrow.
She really did not want to write about trivial matters just to grab attention, but the editor-in-chief did not care about that. The old man only looked at performance figures.
Whoosh-
Beyond the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows, the downpour finally began.
Occasional flashes of lightning lit her mature, coolly beautiful face. At her age, dressed in red, she was like a rose in full bloom, radiating astonishing allure.
Zhong Xueran picked up her wineglass, walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows, and stared blankly at her own face reflected in the glass.
She looked at her reflection in the window in bewilderment. She seemed to have... forgotten something very important.
And forgotten a very important... person.
Although her memories of the past remained clear, and she had lived an uneventful, smooth life all these years, that strange sense of unease had always lingered faintly in her heart.
Especially... on stormy nights like this.
Whenever she tried hard to remember, her head felt as though it would split open.
Often, Zhong Xueran could sense what seemed to be a pane of glass in the part of her brain that held her memories.
On stormy nights like this, that feeling became even clearer.
She could