I said I was taking a day off because it was my birthday, but in truth, I had been thinking over the later plot developments. Before I knew it, I had thought too much and written too many drafts, until I even forgot the update time, so I used my birthday as an excuse to take a day off.
The time had come for Lanke to reach its ending. In the end, I had to give both myself and everyone an account. Some plotlines were not suitable to appear in full within the ending and would be completed in the form of Side Stories—for example, Bai Ruo and her husband meeting again in their next lives.
Endings were always tangled and painful; there were simply too many things to consider. The recent updates were the same.
Many times, I would think about the ending, think about the feelings I wanted to express, and lose sleep.
But then again, all these years, it seemed I had never really celebrated a birthday. On the Seventh Day of the First Lunar Month, visiting relatives and friends always diluted it.
When I was little, aside from longing most for New Year's Eve, I also hoped for a real birthday cake—the kind I could eat to my heart's content by myself. Sadly, it seemed that wish was never fulfilled until after I had already stopped liking the taste of cake. ╮(╯▽╰)╭