“Comrade! That female comrade in the dress, please wait!”
Lin Wanwan turned around.
“You can’t just park your car here like this. This road isn’t wide to begin with, and with you parked here, how are other vehicles supposed to pass? You’re disrupting traffic order. Move the car away quickly and find a proper parking spot.”
A traffic police officer in olive-green uniform stopped her, instructing Lin Wanwan to move the car away—it couldn’t stay parked there.
“But… but I don’t know how to drive, and this isn’t my car either.” Lin Wanwan hadn’t expected that stepping out of the car to wait for Jian Ming would lead to such an interruption. This wasn’t like the dream at all, but in the prophetic dream, she hadn’t gotten out of the car, so she hadn’t been stopped by the police to move it.
“Who drove the car here?”
“He left.”
“Then you can’t leave. I saw you get out of it. You need to call the person to come move the car.”
The officer scratched the back of his head, clearly encountering this situation for the first time. The main issue was that although he was a traffic police officer, he didn’t know how to drive either. Driving was a valuable skill, and he hadn’t had the chance to learn it in the team. Otherwise, he could have helped the female comrade move the car.
Could it be that no matter what changes she made, today’s outcome still had to align with the dream? Was she not allowed to leave early?
Lin Wanwan wanted to try a different approach. “Officer, could you help check which unit this license plate belongs to?”
She really didn’t want to wait foolishly for Jian Ming to return as she had in the prophetic dream today. So, Lin Wanwan actively sought a solution to the problem at hand because she wanted to know: if she didn’t act as she had in the dream, would something different happen? Would she continue to have similar dreams?
At this time, there were few cars, and private vehicles were almost nonexistent. They were all public vehicles belonging to units, so license plates generally followed the format “Jing XX-XXXXX.” The numbers at the front represented the category of the unit the vehicle belonged to or the purpose of the vehicle, while the long string of digits at the back was the vehicle’s serial number, used to distinguish different vehicles within the same unit category or purpose.
For a traffic police officer, checking which unit the car belonged to was still possible.
“Alright, come with me to the guard post over there to check the registry.”
Lin Wanwan followed the officer to the nearby traffic police guard post. Sure enough, there was a dedicated registry that clearly recorded which unit the vehicle with the black characters on a white background license plate belonged to.
The officer pressed his finger against the paper of the registry and read out word by word: “National X Chemical Industry Research Institute.” Then, he continued to look at the serial number on the subpage and found out which subordinate institute the vehicle belonged to.
“Officer, could you please call the Research Institute and notify them to come take it away? I was just hitching a ride today, and the driver had an urgent matter to attend to and left. This…”
She lightly bit her lower lip as if embarrassed to speak, a hint of distress showing in her eyes. Her voice was soft and gentle: “This is really a special situation, and I don’t know what to do.”
At times like these, the advantage of good looks was quite evident. With her face, the chances of being refused were slim—this was something Lin Wanwan had learned from a young age.
“Wait here while I contact a colleague.”
The traffic officer raised his hand, signaling Lin Wanwan to wait. He took a bulky black walkie-talkie from his belt, pulled out its long antenna, and began communicating with his colleagues on duty at the station. After reporting the unit name and license plate number, the police at the station a few hundred meters away made phone calls to follow up.
After several rounds of communication, the officer said to Lin Wanwan, “We’ve made contact, but you’ll need to wait here until someone from their unit arrives before you can leave.”
Lin Wanwan hadn’t expected the officer to refuse to let her go. There was nothing she could do—after all, she was the one who had gotten out of the car, the only “person involved” connected to it.
“I still have patrol duties to attend to. You should go back and wait in the car. I’ll keep an eye on it from the roadside. You must not leave on your own—that would cause problems. Only when the Research Institute sends someone to drive the car away can you leave, understand?”
The officer followed the rules strictly and methodically. Having lived in this era for some time, Lin Wanwan knew that once such words were spoken, she truly couldn’t leave the car even a step ahead of time today.
Sighing silently in her heart, she thanked the officer and returned to the car to wait. This time, however, she didn’t sit in the front passenger seat but moved to the back row.
Wasn’t it said that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings could cause a tornado? If even the slightest possibility existed, she wanted to make choices different from those in her prophetic dream. Only then could she figure out what the dream truly meant and whether it was related to her time travel.
Winter in the north was bitterly cold. While the daytime still had warm sunlight, as evening approached and the sky darkened, the temperature plummeted. Even sitting inside the car with the windows and doors tightly shut, Lin Wanwan couldn’t stop shivering from the cold.
Hadn’t the officer said he had already contacted someone to drive the car away? No matter how far they were, they should have arrived hours ago. As time passed, it once again confirmed that the dream was coming true.
She had to sit in this car and wait until the man whose face she couldn’t clearly see came to knock on the window.
It felt like a plot-driven game Lin Wanwan used to enjoy playing. No matter which option she chose, the main quest remained the same and had to be completed. The current situation gave her an absurd sense of following a fixed storyline in a game.
To make a good impression when meeting her boyfriend’s parents today, Lin Wanwan hadn’t worn a warm, thick coat to avoid looking bulky. Instead, she had spent her hard-earned savings from part-time translation work on a new camel-colored wool coat, which was utterly inadequate against the dropping temperatures.
Her fingers gradually grew stiff. Experiencing this cold firsthand felt different from how it had in her dream—as if her very thoughts were freezing. She felt her reactions slowing and couldn’t help but curl up to preserve body heat.
Time seemed to crawl even slower. She had no idea how long it had been—so long that Lin Wanwan wondered if she would have to spend the night in the car. Then, a series of steady footsteps approached from a distance, and the fogged-up car window was knocked.
At that moment, no matter who had arrived, Lin Wanwan felt like crying. Her nose tingled, and tears welled in her eyes.
“You’re finally here…”
Who was she waiting for?
Jian Shen didn’t know her, so of course he wouldn’t think the woman in the car was waiting for him. The call notifying the unit to move the car had never reached him.