The next day, Sunday evening.
Rinna stood in front of her house, looking up at the four-story building. The exterior was finished in light beige real stone paint.
The property covered about four hundred square meters, with the house taking up roughly one hundred and twenty of those.
The remaining area around the house had been completely turned into a garden by Mama. Nine perfectly trimmed osmanthus trees lined the wall in a neat row.
The first floor was the garage. The rolling door was closed, and inside sat her father’s old Toyota—the same one he’d been driving for years without replacing it.
A semicircular staircase, paved with dark gray granite, connected to the side of the garage. The steps were gentle and wide, leading up to the main entrance on the second floor.
Rinna stood at the main entrance, key in hand.
She turned it twice in the lock. When she pushed the door open, the motion sensor light in the genkan turned on automatically, casting warm yellow light across the light wood floor. The entire entryway felt cozy and quiet.
Hisaki followed her inside, carrying Rinna’s canvas bag and a small bundle of clothes she’d brought back from the Kurose household. She lined up her shoes neatly next to Rinna’s.
Her parents hadn’t come back yet.
Rinna’s phone buzzed in her pocket. It was a message from Mama, saying the plane was expected to land around eight and that they’d probably be home by nine or so. She replied, “Okay, Xiao and I will be waiting for you at home.”
Then she put her phone back in her pocket and turned toward the stairs.
The housekeeper had taken time off after Rinna left for the Kurose household and her parents went abroad. She probably wouldn’t be back until Monday.
For now, only she and Hisaki were in the whole building. It was so quiet that she could hear the ticking of the old pendulum clock’s second hand from the second-floor living room.
Her room was on the third floor.
The hallway was short. One end led to her room, and the other led to a secondary bedroom that had been converted into a study.
Rinna pushed open the door to her room and turned on the light. It was about twenty square meters. The east wall was a full floor-to-ceiling window.
The glass was double-layered, and a thin white gauze curtain hung outside it, half drawn. The bed was a double, slightly larger than the one in Hisaki’s room. Next to the wardrobe was a white desk. The overall decor was a warm, yellowish tone.
***
Outside the French window, in the garden, hydrangeas were blooming quietly in the dusk. The sky in the distance had already shifted from orange-red to deep blue.
“Rinna, I’m going downstairs to light the water heater and see if there’s anything in the fridge I can heat up. Your parents should have something to eat when they get back.”
Hisaki’s voice came from behind her, still in that calm, flat Hisaki tone, but the tail end curved upward just a little—probably secretly happy that she got to stay over at Rinna’s place again.
“Mm, okay.”
Rinna answered.
Hisaki’s footsteps traveled down the stairs, growing fainter, then disappeared in the direction of the second-floor hallway. The room fell quiet again, except for the occasional call of birds returning late, muffled by the double-glazed window.
Rinna stood in the middle of the room and suddenly felt a little empty.
She was home…
But standing here, she felt an indescribable strangeness. It was like living in a place for a long time and suddenly noticing a detail in some corner that she’d never paid attention to before.
Her eyes slowly swept across the room, then stopped on the wardrobe that covered the entire wall. She walked over and opened the leftmost door.
This compartment was specially set aside for Rinna’s personal belongings. Not clothes, not shoes—things she’d kept since childhood, things she couldn’t bring herself to throw away or give away.
The graduation album from elementary school, the sticker photos she and Hisaki took in middle school, the souvenir from their first trip to the amusement park together, and a few neatly stacked notebooks.
She crouched down and found the diary at the very bottom layer.
The cover was light blue with a white rabbit printed on it. One of the rabbit’s ears stood up, the other drooped down, making it look both silly and cute.
The edges of the cover were worn, the white paper peeling at the corners to reveal a small patch of gray cardboard inside.
This was the diary “Rinna” had started writing in elementary school.
From the childish pencil script to later ballpoint pen writing, from crooked kana to neat Chinese characters, from “Today I ate strawberry cake with Xiao” to later longer, more fragmented records of her feelings… Nineteen years of time, all compressed into that notebook less than two centimeters thick.
She had never read this diary.
When she transmigrated, she only knew the diary existed. The memories left by the original Rinna were, to a certain extent, gradually fading away.
Only certain specific scenes would suddenly trigger fragmented images. But the diary was different. It wasn’t memory fragments. It was a continuous, complete emotional record that had lasted over a decade.
If she flipped it open, she would be able to see every feeling the original Rinna had ever had for Hisaki, every hesitation, every little secret hidden in the diary that was never spoken aloud.
But she didn’t dare to look.
Or rather, she had been avoiding it.
Because there was one question that had been buried deep in her consciousness ever since the day she transmigrated, like an unexploded bomb lying quietly there, never disappearing.
Every time she saw Xiao being good to her… feeding her, helping her change her sanitary pad, shielding her with her body on the train, breaking through a line of over a hundred people with a steel pipe on the second floor of Sunshine Town… she would feel that bomb’s presence at the same time as she was moved. It didn’t explode, but it had weight.
It reminded her of one thing.
All the emotional foundation Hisaki had for her was built on the ten-plus years that the past Rinna had spent with Xiao.
Those days of growing up together, those afternoons sharing strawberry cake, those evenings waiting outside the dojo secretly for Hisaki to finish practice, and those lines written over and over in the diary but never said out loud—“Xiao is so cool,” “so gentle”…
All of that was done by “her,” accumulated bit by bit over more than a decade.
And then she—Shirase Rinna, the soul that had transmigrated from another world—took over this body and, in passing, took over the fruit of those feelings.
‘Is this cheating?’
‘Am I stealing from “her” what shouldn’t belong to “me”?’