Amidst the countless @ mentions, some urging him to update, some admiring his looks, and others showering him with exaggerated praise, the account named Seasonal Little Xingxing wasn’t particularly easy to notice.
But after enough time had passed, it was equally hard not to notice it.
The bathroom of an old luxury resort hotel beside the ski slopes was still filled with lingering steam.
Barefoot, Chi Tong walked into the bedroom. Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at the antique clock on the wall, its hands pointing to a particular hour.
Logging into his D App account, Chi Tong sifted through the mountain of @ mentions and comments in his notifications. Following the pattern of timing he had noticed before, he quickly found the very first @ mention from Seasonal Little Xingxing, posted at around 2:30 in the afternoon.
There was no meaningful comment attached.
It simply tagged him, followed by a string of “hhhhhhhhh.”
After watching the video, Chi Tong found that it revolved around a clever homophonic pun. It really was the kind of joke that made people laugh.
The first time Chi Tong noticed the Little Xingxing account happened to be the first time he had logged back in after many days away.
His mother’s death had stripped the account of its reason for existing. There was no longer anything in his life that felt worth recording or sharing.
But before deleting the account, he had happened to notice a newly arrived notification.
“@ing the cutest bestie in the whole wide world to come see this fluffy little sheep! @Banchi 【Kiss】”
Chi Tong had to admit that when he first saw the message, it stirred something in him ever so slightly.
The popularity of the Chi Tong account had never been something Chi Tong deliberately cultivated. Nevertheless, for various reasons, it had attracted a great deal of attention. Over the past year or so, Chi Tong had grown almost accustomed to receiving all kinds of chaotic messages every day.
Admiration and affection, skepticism and nitpicking, he never paid any of them much mind.
The content used to tag his account varied, and most of it wasn’t enough to make Chi Tong spare it a second glance. This wasn’t the first time he had received persistent users tagging him every day, most of those messages were meant to grab his attention or carried some other intent. But “Seasonal Little Xingxing” was a little different.
It communicated with him in an extremely ordinary, almost friend-like tone, sharing bits of daily life, expressing joy and affection. Each message carried laughter, reflection, or surprise, regardless of the content, the emotions behind them consistently delivered small, fragmented pieces of happiness to Chi Tong.
Even when some messages included private or slightly sensitive topics, the way every word was written felt open and sincere. It was like softness extending from the sensation of touching a lamb’s fleece into a broader tenderness toward life itself. This, in turn, gave “Little Xingxing” a more three-dimensional image in Chi Tong’s mind: someone genuinely warm, bright, and enthusiastic about life.
It had nothing to do with romance or affection. Rather, it simply made Chi Tong feel that the connections formed through the internet were strangely miraculous, that someone as withdrawn and gloomy as himself could actually intersect with someone so sunny and full of life, and thereby glimpse a world he rarely touched.
The user Little Xingxing seemed to be trying to @ someone else entirely, and this wasn’t hard to notice. Aside from terms like “baobei” or “bestie,” sometimes he would directly call someone “Jiajia.” Chi Tong inferred that this “Jiajia” person was likely the true recipient of those emotions.
It was like a small lamp lighting up in the dark, sparking a desire to explore further. Because of this, Chi Tong had, for a while, not deleted his account.
It wasn’t until after returning to the country, when several days passed without any notifications from Seasonal Little Xingxing in the mornings, afternoons, or evenings, that Chi Tong began to feel something was strange.
He searched for the ID and clicked into Seasonal Little Xingxing’s profile, only to discover that the other party had quietly unfollowed him at some point, silently, without a word.
Chi Tong paused slightly. He guessed the other person had finally realized they had been tagging the wrong account all along. A faint sense of dullness and disappointment rose in him.
He swiped back to the app’s homepage and saw another recommended video, a cute animal clip. A tiny kitten on a sofa clumsily rolled onto the floor, lying there on its back, innocent and helpless.
Chi Tong pressed pause. In the past, algorithms would never have pushed this kind of content to him, but after a month of Seasonal Little Xingxing’s diligent tagging, his homepage had been completely reshaped.
Scrolling further, he saw more videos, cute animals, food clips, gaming content. To be honest, not all of them were interesting, which only made him more aware of how much effort Little Xingxing must have put in. Everything shown to him had clearly been carefully selected, shining fragments of someone’s life.
Seasonal Little Xingxing: “This one’s bad, this one’s bad, this one’s bad… ah, this one’s really good, I’ll give it to you. 【otter holding hands offering.jpg】”
Chi Tong didn’t react to the video itself, but the image he imagined made the corner of his lips curl slightly.
There probably wouldn’t be someone like that tagging him in the future anymore.
He glanced lightly at the comment section. Just as he was about to close the app, his hand paused.
There was nothing unusual in the comments, many people were tagging their friends.
But the top comment was from an ID that had recently become very familiar to Chi Tong.
Seasonal Little Xingxing: @Jiajia Eats Watermelon, baobei, love you love you.
The video caption read: “Tag your best friend and confess your love!” The clip was edited with various friendship scenes from well-known film and TV dramas, paired with sentimental music.
It wasn’t strange for Seasonal Little Xingxing to leave a comment here, he was indeed someone who liked to express affection openly and directly.
Looking at the full context, this “Jiajia Eats Watermelon” was clearly the person Little Xingxing had intended to @ from the very beginning.
“Baobei, love you love you.” Comments and @ mentions like this weren’t uncommon on Chi Tong’s account either.
Seasonal Little Xingxing had tagged the correct account and was expressing affection just like many others in the comment section. The behavior was ordinary enough, but Chi Tong still felt a faint sting from it.
For a month, Chi Tong had temporarily been “Jiajia,” experiencing a stranger’s version of friendship. But since it was never truly his, everything now simply returned to its original place.
Under an inexplicable impulse, Chi Tong left a comment:
“Don’t you love me anymore?”
He himself couldn’t even explain why he wrote it. Because of this comment, the section took on a strangely surreal atmosphere.
Seasonal Little Xingxing: @Jiajia Eats Watermelon, baobei, love you love you!
Chi Tong replies to Seasonal Little Xingxing: Don’t you love me anymore?
Whether it was meant as a joke or a serious question no longer mattered, because within minutes, Chi Tong’s comment triggered several replies from bystanders.
Given Chi Tong’s massive follower base, any comment he replied to would appear effectively pinned in the eyes of fans, making it impossible to ignore.
“?? Am I seeing things? Is that really Chi Tong?”
“Holy shit, what is going on? This feels like an information overload.”
“@Jiang Mango, come watch your bias’s drama.”
The bystanders didn’t know the relationship between Chi Tong and Seasonal Little Xingxing. All they could see were these suggestive back-and-forth replies, and it would have been strange not to imagine something more.
At this point, even deleting the comment was too late. Chi Tong pressed a hand to his forehead, realizing he might have caused trouble for a complete stranger.
Meanwhile, Lin Xing still had no idea that a piece of gossip involving him was already racing through D App like a runaway horse.
The next day was the start of the school term, and Lin Xing was packing the things he would need for classes.
A few days earlier, Xi Jiajia had brought him a pile of things as an “apology,” including food and daily necessities, all of which Lin Xing had temporarily stuffed into cardboard shipping boxes. Most of the items he needed for school had already been packed into boxes as well, minimizing what he would have to carry by hand.
During this process, Lin Xing’s phone, which he had left on the living room sofa, started buzzing every few seconds. At first, he couldn’t even recognize which app the notification sound was from, and thought his new phone had gone crazy.
But since he was only halfway through sealing a box, he decided to ignore it for now.
It was his mother who couldn’t stand it anymore.
“You’re so lazy you won’t even pick up your phone?” she said, walking over to take it and hand it to him. “Hurry up and check it yourself. Why does it keep buzzing like that?”
Lin Xing pushed the box aside and sat cross-legged on the floor, speaking casually. “I don’t know why it’s buzzing. Let me see…”
It had only been a week, but he had already pushed all his earlier anxiety about social embarrassment to the back of his mind. With each passing minute, a growing sense of safety had settled over him.
However, that sense of safety lasted only until the moment he turned on his phone screen.
The instant the display lit up and he saw a flood of D App notifications, his heart gave a hard jolt.
His mother stood nearby, watching him with concern. “Xingxing, what’s wrong? What messages are buzzing so much?”
In those few seconds, the phone had already chimed several more times.
Facing his mother’s question, Lin Xing quickly covered up. “It’s nothing, nothing. Just classmates from school asking me to play games. I’ll go back to my room and handle it.”
He got up and rushed into his room, stumbling in haste as he shut the door behind him.
“Be careful, why are you in such a hurry?” his mother’s voice was cut off outside the door.
Leaning against the door, panting slightly, Lin Xing saw that the D App notifications had stopped, not because no one was looking for him, but because there were simply too many messages, all bundled into a “99+” notification that the system couldn’t display individually anymore.
With trembling hands, he opened the app. Before he even gathered the courage to check what was going on, a very explosive video appeared on the homepage.
Accompanied by a robotic voice from a clickbait account, he saw an image featuring his own account ID.
“Recently, Chi Tong, who hasn’t updated in a long time, was spotted posting in a comment section. Take a look at this comment, doesn’t it have the feel of a love triangle drama? Has Chi Tong really been absent all this time because he’s been dating? What exactly is going on now? The person he’s replying to is a man, could it be that Chi Tong is gay? Has he been cheated on?”
Lin Xing’s eyes were locked on the screen, unable to move.
All he could see were those few words from Chi Tong’s comment:
“Don’t you love me anymore?”
Don’t you love me anymore? Don’t you love me anymore? Don’t you love me anymore…
It felt like a devil’s whisper, a mental shockwave. Lin Xing had never once imagined he would become material for a gossip account one day. The world itself felt unreal in that moment.
In the comments, people were flooding in with question marks and shock.
“Chi Tong’s boyfriend??? Who is this person???”
Lin Xing: …a passerby who is about to ascend peacefully.