I Promise to Walk With You for Half of my Life’s Journey - Chapter 1

April 6, 2018, Morning. Cheng Sutong was seventeen, a sophomore in high school.

She always sat quietly in the corner painting, out of place among the girls who were obsessed with discussing celebrities and variety shows. Perhaps it was her composure, unnatural for her age, and the hollow gaze she often directed out the window that made her a target for those who labeled her as “antisocial” or “pretentiously aloof.”

Malicious nicknames, stationery “accidentally” knocked over, and being “forgotten” when it was time for cleaning duty notifications.

Cheng Sutong mostly met this with silence. She would wipe her defaced textbooks clean, pick up her scattered pens, and finish the cleaning duties alone. She wasn’t cowardly; she was simply bored. To her, it was a farce; their provocations couldn’t stir a real ripple in her heart. However, her silence was mistaken for weakness, and the pranks escalated.

After class that day, Cheng Sutong avoided the crowds as usual, sitting under the old locust tree in the corner of the playground to sketch. A few boys, led by a student from the neighboring class, sauntered over. They had just finished playing ball, exuding excess hormones and mindless malice.

The leader was named Zhao Feng. His family had some influence, and he was habitually arrogant.

“Yo, little artist is creating again?” Zhao Feng kicked Cheng Sutong’s art bag. Charcoal pencils and erasers rolled across the ground as his companions burst into laughter.

Cheng Sutong gripped her pencil tight. She looked up, her face cold. “Pick it up.”

Zhao Feng froze for a moment, clearly not expecting this reaction. Feeling his pride wounded, he snapped in anger: “What did you say? Who are you telling to pick it up?”

“You kicked it over. You pick it up,” Cheng Sutong said, word by word, her voice clear. She stood up. Though half a head shorter than Zhao Feng, her back was ramrod straight, and her eyes, like frozen glass, stared directly at him.

The surroundings went silent. Other students watched from a distance, not daring to approach. Zhao Feng felt a chill from her gaze, but he couldn’t back down in front of everyone. He stepped forward and shoved her shoulder. “Giving you an inch and you take a mile, huh?”

Cheng Sutong reacted swiftly, stepping aside, but Zhao Feng’s hand still grazed her arm. Just as he went to strike again, Cheng Sutong lunged forward and drove the sharpened HB pencil in her hand hard into Zhao Feng’s arm!

“Agh!” Zhao Feng shrieked, clutching his arm and recoiling.

The pencil tip snapped off against his school jacket, leaving a hole and a faint bloodstain. The wound wasn’t deep, but it was enough to humiliate him. His companions swarmed in, and Cheng Sutong was shoved back against the locust tree, her spine throbbing with pain.

She didn’t cry. She didn’t even make a sound.

“What are you doing? Everyone, stop!” a sharp shout rang out.

It was An Chuxin. She was there to substitute for the Class 7 physics teacher and had happened upon the scene while leaving the school. Dressed in a simple white shirt and trousers, she was tall and carried an air of natural authority. The boys surrounding Cheng Sutong instinctively scattered.

An Chuxin immediately saw the defiant Cheng Sutong and Zhao Feng, quickly assessing the situation. “Who can tell me what happened?”

Zhao Feng spoke first, pointing at Cheng Sutong. “Teacher! She stabbed me with a pencil! Look, I’m bleeding!”

An Chuxin looked at Cheng Sutong. The girl’s lips were pressed thin, and there was a slight scratch on her cheek. She didn’t defend herself; she simply lowered her eyelashes. The fierce defiance she had shown against the world seemed to vanish in an instant, leaving only a lonely exhaustion.

“The rest of you disperse. Back to whatever you were doing.”

She walked over to Cheng Sutong, her tone softening slightly. “Can you walk?”

Cheng Sutong nodded and silently bent down to gather her scattered art supplies. An Chuxin knelt down to help. When their fingertips accidentally brushed, Cheng Sutong flinched, pulling her hand back as if burned.

An Chuxin paused, then gently placed the charcoal pencil back into Sutong’s hand.

After checking Zhao Feng’s wound and seeing it was shallow, despite his incessant complaining, An Chuxin turned to the silent girl. “Student, do you have anything to say?”

“He kicked over my supplies first and shoved me. I told him to pick them up and he refused, then tried to hit me again. I; I just didn’t want to get beaten anymore.”

“You’re lying! I only touched you lightly!” Zhao Feng yelled.

“Does a ‘light touch’ send someone crashing into a tree?” An Chuxin countered calmly, her gaze lingering on Cheng Sutong’s messy hair and the red mark on her cheek. “Zhao Feng, how did this start? Why did you touch Student Cheng Sutong’s art supplies?”

Zhao Feng was speechless and began to stammer.

An Chuxin understood perfectly. She followed protocol, recorded the event, and took them to the school clinic for disinfection. She notified the head teacher and Zhao Feng’s parents. Once the dust settled, only she and Cheng Sutong remained in the clinic.

An Chuxin stepped toward her. “Does it still hurt?”

Cheng Sutong shook her head, then nodded, unsure of what she wanted to express. Tears suddenly surged without warning. She tried desperately to hold them back, but they fell in large drops.

An Chuxin sighed softly. She didn’t say things like “don’t cry.” Instead, she took a clean medical kit from a drawer. “Sit down,” she said, pulling over a chair. “There’s a scratch on your face. We need to treat it so it doesn’t get infected.”

Cheng Sutong sat obediently. An Chuxin dipped a cotton swab in iodine and very gently dabbed the thin scratch on her cheek. As they leaned closer, Cheng Sutong could smell a faint scent of white tea on her.

The girl’s tears fell harder, but she gritted her teeth to remain silent.

“Tell me if it hurts.”

Cheng Sutong shook her head, her vision blurred. Through the haze of tears, she looked at An Chuxin’s profile: her lowered lashes, her careful movements. Her heart began to thud: thump, thump. This was the first time she had been so close to a woman.

After treating the face, An Chuxin checked her arms and back to ensure there were no serious contusions. “In the future, tell a teacher immediately or find a way to escape and ask for help. Protecting yourself is most important, but not by using ways that harm yourself. Pencils are dangerous; what if you had stabbed somewhere else?”

“They won’t stop. I tried ignoring them, I tried avoiding them; it didn’t work. They think you’re an easy target, so they keep doing it. I just didn’t want them to think I was an easy target anymore.” She raised her wet eyes to An Chuxin. “Teacher An, was I wrong?”

An Chuxin was momentarily stunned by those tearful eyes.

“There is nothing wrong with protecting yourself,” An Chuxin said, choosing her words carefully as she handed her a tissue. “But there are smarter ways. Your courage is precious, but don’t let it hurt you.” She watched the girl slowly dry her eyes and asked softly, “Do you like drawing?”

Cheng Sutong looked at her dirtied art bag and nodded.

“That pencil can be considered to have ‘died a hero’s death,'” An Chuxin joked lightly to ease the tension. “I have extra drawing pencils. I’ll bring some for you tomorrow. They aren’t fancy, but they should work.”

Sutong remained silent.

“The school will handle today’s incident according to the rules. I will speak with Zhao Feng’s head teacher and parents. It’s late; I’ll walk you to the gate. Can you get home by yourself?”

“Yes,” Cheng Sutong stood up, whispering, “Thank you, Teacher.”

As they left the office, An Chuxin walked slightly ahead, with Cheng Sutong half a step behind. At the stairs, An Chuxin suddenly stopped and turned. “Cheng Sutong.”

“Yes?”

“If anyone gives you trouble again, you can come directly to me. My office is in the Physics Department on the third floor. If I don’t have class, I’m usually there.”

“Okay.”

In that moment, Cheng Sutong felt as if she had seen a beam of light, pointing toward a direction where she could temporarily take shelter from the storm.

On July 3, 2024, amidst a cardiac arrest, Cheng Sutong purchased a one-way ticket back to 2018.

The price: she had to forget how she died and only remember why she lived.

Cheng Sutong sat in the third row by the window. She looked down at the title page of her open physics textbook, where she had unconsciously scribbled “2024.07.03” in ballpoint pen.

Everything seemed right, yet everything was wrong. The classroom layout, the old locust tree outside, the familiar light brown mole on her deskmate’s face; everything aligned perfectly with her memory of that spring when she was seventeen.

Except the woman on the podium: An Chuxin.

She was absolutely certain that in her original three years of high school, this woman had never been her class teacher.

“Starting today, I am your class teacher and physics teacher,” An Chuxin said, her gaze sweeping the room. “My name is An Chuxin. An as in ‘quiet’; Chu as in ‘clear’; Xin as in the character formed by ‘sound’ and ‘lack’.”

At that moment, An Chuxin’s gaze cut across the classroom and locked onto Cheng Sutong’s face. As their eyes met, they both thought the same thing: “It’s her?!”

The look in An Chuxin’s eyes made it seem as though she was standing there, opening the register and saying her name, just to wait for this moment: waiting for Cheng Sutong to look up and meet her gaze.

A sharp sting pierced Cheng Sutong’s heart. It wasn’t the agonizing failure of her heart in 2024, but something far more complex: a mixture of fear and stability, of strangeness and destiny.

If fate really gave me a chance to start over, then is the person before me the “corrected answer” you sent?

Or is it my own broken soul from the future that, at the end of despair, personally called this only echoing response out of the void to catch me?

“From Friday to Saturday, the grade will organize a two-day research study trip,” An Chuxin announced. “The location is the Qingwu Mountain Ecological Reserve. It will involve an overnight stay.”

The classroom erupted in excitement.

But Cheng Sutong’s heart tightened inexplicably. Qingwu Mountain? In her original memory, there had never been such a trip in all three years of high school; a sense of discord crept up her spine.

“I’m pulling you out of the sea of practice problems to catch some air, so you don’t wither away in the classroom.”

“The details will be sent to the parents’ group.”

Friday morning, 7:00 AM. Three large buses were parked on the main campus road.

Cheng Sutong stood at the end of the line with a sky-blue backpack. Inside, besides a change of clothes, were two blister packs of Alprazolam from the future and a bottle of Suxiao Jiuxin Wan (emergency heart relief pills).

“Board the bus according to your student ID number!” An Chuxin’s voice cut through the morning mist.

Cheng Sutong’s ID was 12. She boarded the third bus and found a window seat. An Chuxin’s designated teacher’s seat was diagonally in front of her, across the aisle.

As the bus started, Cheng Sutong put on her headphones and turned to the window. The city scenery receded in the morning light: familiar street corners, old shops that hadn’t been demolished yet, and the white steam rising from breakfast stalls. Everything was tinted with the vibrant colors of the pre-pandemic world of 2018.

Yet her eyes couldn’t help but drift toward the reflection in the window, watching the figure diagonally in front of her.

An Chuxin sat straight, a thick folder spread across her lap, writing something. From Cheng Sutong’s angle, she could only see the hair pinned at the back of her head and the occasional movement of her shoulders as the bus jolted. Those shoulders looked slender, yet held a powerful uprightness.

Halfway through the trip, the bus entered the winding mountain roads. As the altitude rose, the air became thin and cool. Cheng Sutong began to feel a slight dizziness; it was a familiar early signal of insufficient blood supply to the heart. This seventeen-year-old body was, after all, carrying the ailments of the future.

She quietly took a pill and swallowed it with a sip of water.

Just then, the bus made a sharp turn. The water bottle on Cheng Sutong’s lap rolled into the aisle, stopping exactly at An Chuxin’s feet.

Before she could react, An Chuxin had already leaned down to pick it up. She turned around, reaching over the gap between seats to hand the bottle back.

As their fingers touched during the exchange, Cheng Sutong pulled back as if struck by static electricity, nearly letting the bottle slip again. But An Chuxin’s fingers steadily supported the bottom of the bottle, tucking it into Cheng Sutong’s slightly trembling hand.

“Hold it steady,” An Chuxin said.

But Cheng Sutong clearly saw that in that half-second of contact, there was a brief, momentary stillness in An Chuxin’s eyes.

She took the bottle, the faint, cool sensation of the other woman’s skin lingering on her fingertips. The temperature was different from the burning heat she expected of a strict teacher; it was a cool touch that carried a sense of distance.

Cheng Sutong turned back to the window, her heart racing chaotically in her chest.

The white walls of the Qingwu Mountain Reserve Visitor Center were covered in various biological specimens and diagrams.

“This afternoon, you will form your own teams to conduct ecological observations along the East Line trail,” An Chuxin stood before the group with a megaphone, her voice echoing in the hall. “Everyone must return to the gathering point by 6:00 PM. Anyone late will be treated as having committed a disciplinary violation.”

As she spoke, her gaze swept the room. Every time it passed over Cheng Sutong, it paused for a subtle fraction of a second.

Cheng Sutong lowered her head to avoid the gaze. She knew An Chuxin was watching her: a professional vigilance, like a nurse watching a critical patient or a police officer watching a potential suspect.

She hated the feeling of being “marked.”

Support I Promise to Walk With You for Half of my Life’s Journey