NOVEL ONLINE FREE Chapter 20: Chapter 20
The snow on February 14, 2025, was heavier than that in 1998. As soon as Xiao Nuan's delivery truck landed, she was dazzled by the neon billboard in the snow - "Li Ji Sausage, buy three get one free, Valentine's Day only". The young Li Xiaoming in a red jacket was squatting at the door of the store to repair the sausage machine. The sparks from the screwdriver exploded in the snow, just like the ice crystals in the cracks of time and space in Chapter 19.
"Your sausage machine has a silver chain stuck in the gear." When Xiao Nuan squatted down, her fingertips touched the cold metal. Li Xiaoming looked up suddenly, and the snow on his eyelashes fell on the back of her hand - this face had a clearer outline than the boy in 1998, but it overlapped with the vicissitudes of life twenty years later. What's more amazing is that the screwdriver in his hand has a curved blade that fits perfectly with the broken end of Kailan's silver bracelet.
[The barrage suddenly exploded]
"!! Isn't this a spare part from Professor Kai's lab?"
"Boss Li had curly hair when he was young!"
"Look at the side of the sausage roaster - there's a little sun sticky note!"
Xiao Nuan followed the instructions of the barrage and touched over. On the yellowed sticky note was a familiar graffiti: half a sausage wrapped in a silver chain, with "2025.2.14, snow" written next to it. At this time, Li Xiaoming suddenly pressed her wrist, and the orange mark was getting hot, overlapping with the frostbite mark on his palm to form a complete gear: "Are you the one... the deliveryman from the future?"
The sausage roaster suddenly made a harsh buzzing sound, and the casing in the drum began to become transparent, revealing a scene from the laboratory in 1998: the young Professor Kai was stuffing the silver chain into the sausage, while the seventeen-year-old Kai Lan was crying beside her, and the broken silver bracelet was strung together by Li Xiaoming with a sausage skewer. Xiao Nuan's delivery box vibrated. The perfect sausage brought back from 1998, the Mobius strip on the casing was rotating in the opposite direction.
"The beacon is repelling repair." Bingdian's voice came from the delivery car radio, mixed with the sound of electricity, "The silver chain in 1998 was forcibly embedded in the timeline of 2025, causing the warm frequencies of the two time and space to hedge." His popsicle mark appeared on Xiao Nuan's retina: "Someone must stay in 2025 and use their own time anchor to fix the silver chain."
Li Xiaoming suddenly took out an iron box from under the sausage roaster. Inside was a silver chain maintained with sausage oil, and the buckle was engraved with "KL" - Kai Lan's name. "I picked it up in the lab ten years ago, and I always felt that I should keep it." His voice was hoarse with snow particles, "Professor Kai said that day that this chain can lock the warmest thing in time." [The barrage began to flash red] "Warning: Spacetime anchor point offset 78%" "The silver chain is corroding the core of the sausage roasting machine" "Li Xiaoming's lifeline resonates with the silver chain!" Xiao Nuan watched Li Xiaoming wrap the silver chain around the gear of the sausage roasting machine, and suddenly remembered the order note at the end of Chapter 19. She suddenly pulled open the lining of the delivery uniform, and there was a sticky note soaked in sausage oil hidden inside, which was stuffed into her by Professor Kai in 1998: "When the silver chain meets the smell of sausage, time will find a patch by itself." The drum of the sausage roasting machine suddenly stopped turning, and the transparent casing emerged a picture twenty years later: the white-haired Li Xiaoming was putting a new silver bracelet on Kai Lan, and Professor Kai on the hospital bed was holding half a sausage in his hand, with the silver chain exposed from the casing. Xiao Nuan understood instantly - the so-called time patch is never to repair the past, but to make each regret of time and space become an anchor of warmth for each other.
"I'll stay here." Li Xiaoming suddenly buckled the silver chain on his wrist. The temperature of the sausage roaster climbed up to his body along the metal, and the frostbite mark began to glow. "I always said in 2048 that the snowy night in 2025 was the warmest. It turned out that it was not because of the sausage roasting, but because..." He looked at Xiao Nuan with a sudden tenderness, "Someone came from the future and told me not to give up."
The silver chain burned red on his wrist and merged with the roller of the sausage roaster. Xiao Nuan saw that the frostbite on his palm was healing, and the orange mark on her wrist had a silver chain pattern. The barrage suddenly turned gold:
"Time patch generation detected - 'Unsent silver chain'"
"Li Xiaoming (2025) becomes a new space-time beacon"
"Sausage roaster synchronization rate 100%"
The delivery vehicle's navigation lit up again, and the destination changed back to "Parallel Space-Time Convenience Store". Xiao Nuan took a last look at Li Xiaoming, who was oiling the sausage grill. His red jacket was covered with snowflakes, but it seemed to be wrapped in a layer of warm light. In the rearview mirror, the snowy night of 2025 was receding. Under the neon sign of Li Ji Sausage, there was a figure in a white coat - it was Kai Lan in her youth, holding a skewer of sausages in her hand, with a silver chain hanging from the casing, shaking like a small sun.
The sausages in the incubator returned to normal temperature, and a new line of words was engraved on the Möbius strip: "Every unfinished hug is the candy that time leaves for the future." The phone notification sounded, it was a text message from 2048, the sender was Kai Lan: "My dad said that he deliberately baked the silver chain into my intestines because he was afraid that I would forget it when I grew up. On that snowy night when I was seventeen, someone used a sausage skewer to string broken bracelets for me."
Outside the car window, the snow turned into rain. Xiao Nuan touched the mark on her wrist, and the silver chain lines were getting hot. She knew that at the next node in time and space, she might meet the seventeen-year-old girl with the broken bracelet. This time, what she wanted to give her was not only grilled sausages, but also the words "It's okay" that were hidden in the folds of time and were thirty years late.