Seeing Spring: Prologue

Loving you is like awaiting the arrival of spring.

Prologue

The summer after the high school entrance exams, there was very little rain. The sky was a silent white heat, burning without flames.

That summer, Jiang Du ended up in a police station. At that time, she was still a month away from her fifteenth birthday.

The cause of the incident was simple. She was taking a shortcut home on her bike when she saw a group of boys fighting in a small alley. To be precise, it was one tall boy being attacked by several others.

Jiang Du immediately thought of a scene she had witnessed as a child at her grandfather's old house, where a pack of stray dogs had torn apart a lone one.

The tall boy kicked out fiercely. Someone tried to ambush him from behind, but he struck back hard with his elbow, sending them to the ground.

But as things go, the group gradually gained the upper hand. Jiang Du watched, her face pale, as one of them lifted half a brick and swung it at the tall boy's head. He tilted his head to the side, and the brick scraped his temple, drawing blood. Jiang Du, mustering some unknown courage, shouted, "The police are here!"

If a story must have a beginning, it wasn't the blooming cloud in the sky, nor the whirring of an electric fan in someone's house, nor the cars with their various destinations on the street. The beginning of everything was simply this shouted lie: "The police are here!"

The trouble was, this lie only made the fighting boys pause momentarily. Jiang Du didn’t know how they figured out she was lying, but this trivial matter ended up involving her. Her hair band was knocked off and the basket on her bike was dented. She was so scared that her cries sounded different from usual.

Eventually, the police really did come, and everyone was taken away.

In the police station, the boys were making statements, with the occasional stern scolding from the police. The boy who had been beaten, his face still bloody, sat with his head up, his voice floating in the summer heat, devoid of any emotion.

"You're just a little girl. Even if you want to act bravely, you need to know your limits, right?" The police uncle, seeing Jiang Du's gentle and delicate appearance, spoke with a tone of helplessness.

She was too embarrassed to cry any further, biting her lip with tears in her eyes. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a pair of eyes that showed no gratitude.

The boys who had fought were vocational school students, suspected of extortion.

Later, they needed to call the parents.

When asked about her parents, Jiang Du shyly and softly pleaded with the police uncle, asking if she could go home by herself and begging him not to call her grandparents.

Outside the window, a kind uncle was already helping to repair her damaged bike.

By the water basin in the courtyard, the boy was washing the wound on his temple with tap water. His body bent over in a graceful arc.

Jiang Du watched him through the glass, as if looking into another clear world. When the boy looked up, he saw her. The two neither spoke. Jiang Du immediately averted her gaze. Her palms, burning. Actually, her own scraped skin hurt quite a bit.

She pulled a pack of tissues from the pocket of her skirt.

The paper was slightly damp from being held. As Jiang Du walked over, the boy straightened up. He was very tall, with water droplets clinging to his hair. Looking down, his face revealed well-defined features.

Caught off guard by his gaze, the summer heat burned intensely.

"Here, for you." She handed him the tissue, her voice light, like a handful of tender grass in spring.

The boy didn’t take it, instead lifting the hem of his shirt to roughly wipe his face. His gaze went straight past her to the figure approaching the door.

Water gleamed at his throat, glistening in the sunlight. The boy’s expression was restrained as he stood motionless, black eyebrows still adorned with unwiped water droplets.

Jiang Du pressed her lips tightly together, her ears burning as she put the tissue back and moved aside. She watched as a tall man and the boy walked into the police station together, then slowly raised her head to take a few more glances.

What happened next was completely beyond Jiang Du's expectations.

Outside the police station, she squatted down, slowly rotating the bike pedals. She felt that the chain wasn’t quite right.

In this brief pause, she saw the man who had come to pick up the boy. He turned and his expression changed, losing the politeness he had shown to the police. With a slap, the boy staggered, and Jiang Du was stunned.

This beating didn’t stop at one slap. The man’s violence came down like a storm. In the end, the boy with mouth full of blood, clutching his abdomen, was shoved into a black car. It looked far more severe than the earlier group fight.

Jiang Du was speechless, her face was swept by an indescribable surprise and fear.

But before the boy got into the car, he distinctly glanced in her direction, just one look, and it was impossible to tell whether it was unintentional or something else.

In that fleeting moment of eye contact, the boy's eyes were indifferent yet clear. He was in a sorry state, but he seemed unfazed, as if being beaten was as natural as breathing—inevitable, unquestioned, and without resistance or pain.

Later that summer, she often thought of those eyes.

Her best friend, Wang Jingjing, would come over to sleep at Jiang Du's house whenever her parents were away on business trips. Wang Jingjing breathed warm air into Jiang Du's ear, saying, "Did you know? My mom bought me a bra. I don't wear little vests anymore—it's the kind adults wear. Do you have a bra?"

Jiang Du's face heated up in the dark. Wang Jingjing grabbed her hand, gently and cautiously, placing it on a soft spot, making Jiang Du's heart pound.

Wang Jingjing said again, "My mom said that when girls develop to a certain point, they should start wearing bras. Feel it, right? I'm not like you, flat-chested Jiang Du."

Wang Jingjing covered her mouth, stifling a giggle and a snicker, making Jiang Du's face turn even redder.

"Can I feel yours, too?" Wang Jingjing proposed and then she immediately sneaked a touch, exclaiming, "Oh my gosh!" with wide eyes, "When did you start developing?"

Jiang Du, pulling the silk quilt made by her grandmother in the countryside over her mouth, her voice buzzing, "I don't know."

Wang Jingjing just kept laughing, her stifled laughter sounding like a small chicken struggling to breathe, trying not to alert the adults next door. Wang Jingjing was very fierce and daring. Every day, she bossed around the boys in their class until they didn’t dare say a word. Especially her deskmate, a boy named Tan Kai—she’d grab his ear to make him lend her his math homework. She was always domineering and unreasonable, jumping up and down the ranks for three years. Even so, Wang Jingjing somehow managed to do exceptionally well in the high school entrance examination, getting into the prestigious Mei High School with Jiang Du.

Tan Kai didn't do as well as her. It was really strange. She copied other people’s homework every day but she still scored higher than them?

The world can be quite unreasonable.

For instance, Wang Jingjing had started using sanitary pads in seventh grade. While Jiang Du, whose birthday was a few days before Wang Jingjing’s, and was about to start high school had never used such a thing as sanitary napkins.

However, thankfully, after a few nights of Wang Jingjing sleeping over and whispering with her, Jiang Du woke up one morning just before school started to find a red stain on her bedsheet.

Wang Jingjing immediately educated her, took her to choose sanitary pads, and taught her how to use them, advising her not to catch a cold or eat ice cream… She was really fussy, nagging like an old mother.

The bathroom had the faint scent of a first period and the unnamed sorrow that floods a young girl's heart. It was a bit embarrassing, like the delicate texture of jade being gently turned over in one's palm.

At this time, it started raining in the city and didn't stop. Her grandmother noticed the wastebasket and asked Jiang Du if she had started her period. Jiang Du felt inexplicably ashamed. The raindrops fell on the branches outside the window. The days seemed like a copper mirror covered in green rust, and the dampness was in stark contrast to the scorching sun of early summer.

Jiang Du diligently scrubbed the bloodstains that had accidentally gotten on her underwear. She was easily embarrassed, and the faint marks on her white cotton panties that could not be washed clean symbolized her shyness at that moment.

At the end of this summer, the young girl Jiang Du truly began her long and chaotic journey of adolescence.

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☆: here's another story! :D i've actually already finished translating all chapters of seeing spring but editing them is an another hellish matter T_T i was originally thinking of posting [only] the prologue of this novel just so i can list this gut wrenching underrated story on novelupdates since i know updating this here would take me nth years to finish (pls forgive my adhd brain) but let's see if i can commit on this one since this novel is one of my favorites and i highly recommend it! enjoy reading!

p.s. i'm still trying to find any motivation to update hera's modern life after the ending left me quite a bit underwhelmed :/

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