The scheduled time for the table read had already arrived, yet no one had come to the little cabin.
Ying Yin pushed open the fogged-up window a crack and looked back along the snow-covered road under the clear morning sun.
It was ten o’clock in the morning – eight by the local time. Everywhere she looked was an endless expanse of white. But if she listened carefully, the silence was alive with sound: horses snorting softly, cows lowing as they were milked, milk simmering in pots with a bubbling boil, the rhythmic thuds of Kazakh women slapping naan dough against the oven walls, contented sighs over cups of milk tea. Every sound was tucked away behind the fences of their own courtyards, muffled by the snow.
“No one’s here yet.”
She stepped away from the window and pulled it shut.
The latch was a slender strip of metal, stiff with the cold. She fumbled with it for a moment before finally guiding it into place. When she turned around, she didn’t return to the warmth of the stove. Instead, she leaned against the windowsill where she stood, keeping a careful, almost imperceptible distance from Jiang Te.
There weren’t many people attending today’s table read. Each department’s supervisors first had to account for their own personnel and equipment, so only the three principal cast members, the director, two assistant directors, and the screenwriter had been asked to come.
Jiang Te glanced at her. “You could call and ask.”
Ying Yin actually did.
She called Li Shan directly and was told they’d gone the wrong way. They were turning back now, and she was asked to wait just a little longer.
The air beside the window was bitterly cold. The pale sunlight filtering through the glass carried no warmth at all.
“Are you shy around people?”
“I’m not.”
“Then perhaps you’re afraid of warmth.”
Left with little choice, Ying Yin walked back over and sat on the sofa beside the stove.
A long coffee table stood in front of it. Beneath the glass top lay a floral cloth, and on top sat a fruit platter filled with dried fruit and nuts, alongside a plate of rock-hard naan.
She had arrived in too much of a rush to eat breakfast.
Picking up a piece of naan, she tried to tear it apart.
It wouldn’t budge.
A quiet laugh reached her ears.
She looked up, puzzled, at the film’s male lead.
“You’ll need a knife for that. It was baked two months ago.”
“You seem to know this way of life well.” The words were out before Ying Yin realized how they sounded. She gave a faint, distancing smile. “I forgot you’re Kazakh.”
“My mother’s Han Chinese,” he said. “So I’m mixed.”
Only then did Ying Yin study him properly for the first time, her gaze lingering for several seconds.
His features were strikingly deep-set. His eyes carried an effortless tenderness, even more natural than Shen Ji’s. The mixed heritage was unmistakable.
“Then how did you become an actor?” she asked.
“I haven’t become one yet.” Jiang Te lifted the teapot in his hand.
“I’ll only be an actor after I’ve shared scenes with you.” He tipped the pot slightly. “Tea?”
He moved with easy familiarity, picking up Ying Yin’s thermos without waiting for permission. Unscrewing the lid, he poured in the vigorously boiling water. “I’ve seen every one of your films.”
“Even the bad ones?”
“You’ve been in bad films,” he said. “But you’ve never given a bad performance.”
“A good performance only makes a bad film harder to endure.”
Jiang Te smiled. “Then what do you think this one will be? A bad film – or a good one?”
Ying Yin paused, caught off guard. “Director Li has never made a bad film.”
“He’s that good?”
Her surprise deepened.
“You don’t know who he is?”
“I don’t.”
He extended a hand toward her, palm open and steady between them. “Shake my hand.”
“What?”
“Go on.” He gave a slight nod, his eyes lowered as they rested on her from above, waiting.
Ying Yin assumed he was simply making up for the social niceties they’d skipped when they first met, so she reached out and gave his hand a brief shake.
His hand was broad and solid, the palm rough with calluses.
“Your hands are like silk,” he said. “Mine would scratch them.”
His eyes were amber washed with gray, like those of a golden eagle.
“These are the hands of a herdsman. They hold reins, shoe horses, cut hay. I don’t understand the world you come from.”
After hearing him say that, Ying Yin found herself looking at him all over again – not merely observing him this time, but studying him.
His Mandarin was fluent, yet there was a faint accent. It wasn’t the imprecision of someone speaking standard Mandarin from a dialect region; it carried a certain stiffness, as though the language had been learned rather than inherited. Even the way he spoke was disarmingly direct. It was always you and I, plain statements laid out without qualification, compromise, or polite detours. There was something almost invasive in its lack of ceremony.
“Is this your village?”
“No. My home is another pastureland, in Altay. The Director Li you mentioned came to visit us. His original guide fell ill, so I took him instead. He asked me whether I wanted to try a different kind of life.”
“And you said…”
“No.”
Ying Yin imagined that Director Li’s expression at the time must have been every bit as conflicted as hers was now.
Did he have any idea what kind of opportunity he’d been turning down?
“But you still ended up here.”
A faint smile touched Jiang Te’s lips. “I read the script. All I had to do was live my own life over again inside the story. That wasn’t difficult.”
“So you didn’t watch my films of your own accord either.”
“He locked me in a room,” Jiang Te replied matter-of-factly. “The television kept playing your movies. I had no choice but to watch.”
The black television screen lit up over and over with every smile, every frown, every subtle shift of her expression.
At first, he’d been impatient.
But the more he watched, the deeper he settled into the sofa, eventually tucking one leg beneath himself, completely absorbed.
Those keen eyes, sharpened by the boundless grasslands and towering mountains, never once left the screen.
“You’re not photogenic,” he said bluntly.
“Every sentence you speak is a judgment. You always arrive at a conclusion.”
“What I mean is…” Jiang Te corrected himself. “You’re very beautiful.”
Ying Yin tightened both hands around the hot-water bottle.
She was going to need time to get used to the way he spoke.
“This story shouldn’t exist. A woman as beautiful as you would never appear in my life.”
“Not me,” Ying Yin corrected gently. “Ha Ying.”
Ha Ying was only twenty-four or twenty-five, but she was already divorced.
Among the herders, people married young, often having children in their early twenties. So although Ha Ying was only in her mid-twenties, the girlishness had long since left her.
The first time Yin Xueqing met her, he had assumed she was already over thirty.
The misunderstanding came not from her appearance but from the quiet composure she carried – her steadiness, her ease with herself. She was beautiful, just as Jiang Te was handsome.
“So,” Ying Yin asked, “you don’t believe this story?”
Over the course of five months, Yin Xueqing and Ha Ying met, grew close, fell in love, parted, found each other again, and finally faced death’s irrevocable separation.
By the time death claimed them, their love had already carved itself into their bones.
After that final farewell, one of them was destined to spend the rest of life with a heart pierced by ten thousand arrows.
“A love that lasts five months…” he asked in return. “Do you believe in that?”
Had he said something so absurd?
Why was the woman before him smiling?
It wasn’t the polite, reserved smile she’d worn earlier.
This one was luminous, gentle… and quietly accepting.
It was the smile of someone looking at something impossibly distant – something that had once been real, but had long since slipped beyond reach. Because it could never be reclaimed, all she could do was smile at it from afar, afraid to touch it, as though admiring flowers through mist, or gazing into a dream.
“I do.”
Jiang Te pressed his lips into a thin line, unable to understand.
Tilting his head slightly, he narrowed his long, deep-set eyes beneath their heavy lids and studied her in silence.
Another fifteen minutes passed, and Director Li and the others still hadn’t arrived.
Left with no choice, Ying Yin called again. “Director Li?”
There was no echo on the other end this time. He didn’t sound as though he was outdoors. His tone was perfectly calm.
“I’m at the set with Tennessee and the others. The art department ran into a bit of trouble.” He continued as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Have Jiang Te show you around the village.”
Only then did Ying Yin realize what was going on.
“Director Li…” she called again, her voice filled with helpless resignation.
Li Shan chuckled, entirely pleased with himself. “Let him play host. The two of you can talk about the story… talk about films.”
When the call ended, she looked at Jiang Te. “He wants you to show me around the village.”
Seeing no surprise whatsoever on his face, she let out a quiet sigh.
“You knew all along.”
“I couldn’t have wished for anything better.”
She chose not to comment on his rather creative use of the idiom. “Can we just stay here instead?”
“It’s too cold outside.”
“This is an order.” Jiang Te bent forward slightly, extending one hand toward her in invitation.
“I’m not only taking you around the village.” His amber-gray eyes rested steadily on hers. “I’m taking you to my house as well.”
The moment they stepped out of the cabin, they finally saw signs of life in the vast, open valley.
The main road leading into the village had been churned into muddy slush by countless footsteps and horses’ hooves. Beside it, a narrow stream ran clear and lively over pale stones, which, wrapped in thick blankets of snow, looked almost delicately charming.
Jiang Te turned to her.
“Would you rather walk through the snow…” he asked, “or take the road?”
Ying Yin stepped into the snow, sinking one foot deep and the other shallow with every step.
The snow was soft and powdery, crunching beneath her boots. She wore tall snow boots, and the light camel-colored leather quickly darkened as it absorbed the dampness.
“You’re only wearing this much. Aren’t you cold?” she asked Jiang Te, searching for something to say.
“I’m not cold. This is a warm winter here.”
Ying Yin glanced at him. “Your understanding of warmth is wrong.”
Her complaint came so naturally that the corners of Jiang Te’s lips lifted slightly. “In my hometown, we would already be preparing to move pastures in October. During the migration, we wore thick military coats. The wind and snow would freeze them stiff, like sheets of iron, so rigid you couldn’t even bend at the waist. That is what you call cold.”
He looked out across the snowy landscape. “We faced that kind of cold and moved from one side of the mountain to the other, all just to find a place where the wind had calmed and the snow had stopped. We call that kind of place a ‘winter shelter.’ Aqiap is one such winter shelter.”
He turned back to her. “So now you understand? Here, winter only drops to minus four degrees Celsius, but there is no wind. To me, that’s warmth.”
In return, Ying Yin shared something about her own hometown. “The place where I live stays above twenty-five degrees all year round. Only in January and February do we occasionally have a few weeks below twenty degrees.”
“So you and I are different kinds of people.” Jiang Te looked ahead as they walked through the snow. “That Miss Yin… is she also from your hometown?”
Miss Yin – Yin Xueqing – also came from a city where all four seasons were warm, though not Ning City itself, but its neighboring city.
There, smokestacks rose everywhere. Pedestrian overpasses stretched in every direction. Steel towers pierced the sky. It was known as the “world’s factory,” taking on outsourced manufacturing orders from every corner of the globe.
Countless migrant workers headed south, drifting like duckweed between one factory building and another, moving from one bunk-bed dormitory to the next, standing before one assembly line after another.
The moon there, as Yin Xueqing once described it, looked as though it were made of iron – its silver-white glow resembling the metal lunch boxes held in workers’ hands.
Yin Xueqing came from that city.
And that city had many people like Yin Xueqing.
Once, they were notorious throughout the country, becoming symbols of a city’s darker underbelly. Later, they disappeared into business KTVs, sheltered beneath the protective umbrellas of those above them. Some vanished into overcrowded rental apartments, receiving guests day after day. And of course, those who had grown older and lost their youthful beauty disappeared into the small, dim boxes where the light could never reach – pressing their hands against mold-stained black walls, bending their waists with practiced ease, earning fifty yuan a transaction.
Yin Xueqing was as beautiful as Ying Yin, and because of that, she always had a way upward.
They all shared the same dream: save enough money, leave the business behind, return to their hometowns, build a house, marry, and have children.
It was the unchanging dream passed down through generations in their line of work for thousands of years.
Whether their hometowns whispered rumors behind their backs did not matter. What mattered was that, in the mountain village, their parents would be the first to build a grand, impressive house, and they could walk down the road with their backs straight and their heads held high.
A status bought with the spring breeze naturally had to be enjoyed with a face full of spring sunshine.
At thirty years old, Yin Xueqing finally saved one million yuan of her own private money.
She had regular health checkups, but each time she only tested a few specific items. When she decided to stop working, she spent two thousand yuan on a comprehensive medical examination.
That report diagnosed her with a terminal illness.
It had been discovered too late. There was little time left.
“I can’t really imagine how you’re going to play her,” Jiang Te said honestly.
His tone was casual, but his words were blunt and cutting. “She’s very seductive. You dress far too conservatively.”
“You think I don’t resemble her.”
“You resemble the later version of her.” Jiang Te looked at her. “The earliest Yin Xueqing had a kind of polished seductiveness. Her body was beautiful, her skin was beautiful. But the later her… was a kind of shattered purity.”
“Shattered from something once so perfect.” Ying Yin repeated his words.
She looked at Jiang Te seriously – deeply, for a long while – then slowly shook her head.
It wasn’t a rejection.
It was disbelief.
Where had Director Li found someone like him?
No wonder that when they were deciding on the female lead, countless investors had brought enormous sums of money hoping to buy their way into the project and force their own male lead choice. But Li Shan’s answer had always been the same: no one could possibly be more divinely suited for the role than the person he had chosen.
They walked for more than twenty minutes, following the stream all the way downstream. Only after reaching the very edge of the village did they arrive at the house where Jiang Te lived.
Li Shan wanted him to become familiar with this place until it was as natural as breathing and eating – completely effortless, completely at ease. So Jiang Te had moved here long ago.
Life here was no different from his ordinary routine: feeding horses, herding sheep, lounging on the kang bed doing nothing but playing cards, and drinking after night fell.
The male lead and female lead walking side by side so openly naturally drew the attention of the entire crew and the villagers.
In truth, everyone was busy. Their hands were occupied with work, boxes balanced on their shoulders, but whenever they saw the two of them, they would always turn their gaze sideways.
It was an unconscious kind of staring, watching, and prying.
Exactly the same as what Yin Xueqing and Ha Ying had experienced in the village.
The sun had climbed high into the sky. The heavens were clear without a single cloud, and the sunlight fell directly onto their bodies.
Yet surrounded by those coming and going glances, Ying Yin suddenly shivered.
Li Shan’s arrangements and training had been carried out quietly, without anyone noticing.
By the time they realized it, all of them had already fallen into his trap.
Jiang Te’s room was very clean – cleaner even than the one Ying Yin had moved into the previous night.
But it was obvious that only a single man lived here. There were none of the gold-threaded red floral carpets favored by Kazakh women, nor any of those brightly colored embroidered quilts. The furnishings were simple: a dark red tapestry hung on the wall, a sturdy low wooden table sat on the kang, and a silver thermos rested against the wall.
“I’ll make you milk tea.”
Jiang Te invited her to sit down. He opened a wooden box, pinched out a small amount of crushed tea leaves, and placed them into a delicate, fine-meshed strainer.
Ying Yin watched his movements.
He poured steaming horse milk over the tea leaves, then pulled out the cork stopper of the thermos and added boiling water. Finally, he sprinkled in sugar.
Throughout the entire process, he was practiced and silent.
“Kazakh milk tea is supposed to be salty,” Ying Yin pointed out.
“You wouldn’t be used to it. If you poured it away, that would be wasteful; if you forced yourself to drink it, you’d suffer. Better to just add sugar from the start.”
Jiang Te’s explanation was brief and straightforward.
“Here.”
The milk tea he made was rich and fragrant. Ying Yin held the cup between her palms, and the heat seeped through, warming her all the way to her core.
“Miss Ying.”
Jiang Te called her.
Ying Yin had already grown tired of those words.
The moment she heard them, the tea in her cup spilled out – spilling from a moment of distraction, surprise, and startled confusion all at once.
“Don’t call me that. Call me Sister Yin, or Ying Yin.”
Jiang Te simply stopped using any form of address. “Li Shan asked me to add you on WeChat.”
Everything Li Shan arranged naturally carried some intention related to the film.
Ying Yin had no choice but to take out her phone and open her work WeChat account.
Jiang Te looked at it and refused to scan the QR code. “It’s another account, not this one.”
“They’re the same.”
Jiang Te looked at her with a meaningful expression, the corners of his lips naturally pressed together.
After three seconds of this, Ying Yin looked away, lowered her eyes, and switched to her personal account.
“Scan it.”
Jiang Te sent her a friend request.
Her WeChat name was rather amusing – long, too:
[Yinyin is at work today but free]
“Who are you waiting to hear from?” He asked the question with uncanny sharpness.
“No one.” Ying Yin answered, “Partners, clients, any opportunities that can make money.”
Jiang Te smiled. He didn’t ask further, nor did he expose what she was really saying.
Later, once filming began, they were thrown into complete chaos. They were so busy they barely had time to eat or drink, but she never changed her WeChat name.
Yinyin is at work today but free.
Yinyin is at work today but free.
Yinyin is at work today but free…
How I wish you would come looking for me.
You said we could be friends.
But she knew they could never become friends.
Why would he look for her?
Just as, if she were ever in trouble, she would never go looking for him.
Would ten years really be enough for everything to become the past?
From today onward, she would count down ten years.
And wait until the day he could face her with peace and acceptance.
Then they would meet again.
Jiang Te stayed alone with her in the house for a long time.
The doors and windows were naturally shut. Sometimes they talked; more often, they sat in silence.
She tried to understand him, and he tried to understand her, but her gaze always avoided his. She could never hold his eyes for more than three seconds before looking away.
“Do you not have a girlfriend? Or a fiancée?” Ying Yin asked, afraid of repeating the mistake she’d made with Shen Ji’s wife.
“I don’t have someone I love, and I don’t have someone bound to me by a promise.”
Jiang Te answered in two separate parts.
“What does the gaze of someone who loves another person look like? Is it like the way Li Meijian looks at Xu Situ?”
He was very fond of the film The Bitter Beauty. The life depicted in it was completely different from anything he knew: dazzling lights, extravagant pleasures, a world of luxury and intoxication.
He was a man accustomed to fierce winds and towering mountains. He was not yet accustomed to neon lights or wine glasses.
Instinctively, he felt that among all of Ying Yin’s films, only Li Meijian’s love in that one was the deepest.
He could not tell the difference between acting and reality. As an outsider, he was unable to distinguish what was performance and what was genuine. Later, standing before the camera himself, he finally saw Ying Yin look at him with that same kind of gaze.
He thought that was love.
Until a man arrived uninvited.
That man was dressed impeccably, his black coat exquisitely tailored. Yet he carried a deep weariness, as though he had traveled thousands of miles to this place for the sole purpose of changing his fate.
Only when Jiang Te saw the way Ying Yin looked at him did he finally understand – what she had truly given was love.
