The room quickly fell quiet. Sitting on the sofa, Su Mingxi flipped through the manga pages one by one.
At some point, Su Qingxiao had ended up standing behind her.
In the China version of 5 Centimeters per Second, of course the character names and place names had been changed, and the timeline adjusted to fit the plot.
And since Xia Jing was from Shanghai, the setting had naturally been shifted to Shanghai of more than ten years ago.
As for things like sakura-lined streets and railroad tracks cutting through a city—those might not exist exactly like that in real life, but it didn't really matter. Ninety percent of the schools, buildings, and streets shown in manga didn't exist in reality anyway.
But because Shanghai really was huge, and the era matched, Xia Jing had actually managed to find a similar sloped path in the library's reference materials—a slope that ended at a set of train tracks. The only difference in real life was that there were no cherry trees lining the road.
He'd reproduced those scenes in his manga…
The story opened with a boy and a girl running and chasing each other along the slope.
Their conversation unfolded.
"You know, they say it's five centimeters per second."
"What is?"
"The speed at which cherry blossoms fall—five centimeters per second."
"Akari, you sure know a lot," the boy said.
Su Qingxiao turned to the next page.
Petals rained down like a shower of sakura, slipping through the gaps between the girl's slightly spread fingers. She turned back to look at the boy, smiling softly.
"Hey, don't you think… it's almost like it's snowing?"
Something inside Su Qingxiao was… a little moved.
She was the type to get easily immersed in a story, and coincidentally, thanks to the soul fusion, Xia Jing's art style was exactly the kind that pulled you in—beautiful, polished, with backgrounds and compositions full of atmosphere.
So that's what the title 5 Centimeters per Second means?
His dialogue has such a nice poetic feel to it, she thought as she glanced sideways at Xia Jing quietly sipping his coffee.
Next, the plot got down to business.
The boy and girl ran all the way to the end of the slope. The girl crossed the tracks first, and then the crossing gate came down between them, leaving them on opposite sides of the barrier.
The girl opened her umbrella and turned back to him with a smile.
"Akari…" the boy called out.
"Takaki… it'd be so nice if we could watch the cherry blossoms together again next year," the girl said with a hopeful expression.
Then a train roared through between them, blocking their view of each other.
By this point, the leg Su Mingxi had resting on the other had already dropped down. She straightened up on the sofa; where she had been turning the pages fairly quickly at first, she now actually went back to reread the pages she'd just passed.
The 5 Centimeters per Second manuscript was a little over a hundred pages long. Following the conventions of Xia's manga industry, the first two chapters—"On Cherry Blossom" and "Cosmonaut"—could be split into several serialized episodes.
The final chapter, 5 Centimeters per Second, stood alone as the last episode.
In total, the manga comprised five chapters.
No music, no voice acting.
All that could be heard in the silent villa living room were the soft rustle of pages turning and the changing rhythm of two women's breathing—sometimes heavier, sometimes lighter—as the story progressed.
It was impossible for Xia Jing to perfectly recreate every shot of the anime version of 5 Centimeters per Second in black-and-white manga form, but the loneliness, isolation, and sadness that permeated the original film were steadily accumulating across the pages, seeping into the hearts of the two sisters, Su Qingxiao and Su Mingxi.
The girl Akari and the boy Takaki, who had become best friends at school thanks to their shared interests, had assumed they would move up through school together and always stay by each other's side.
But then Akari was forced to transfer schools for family reasons. On the night before she left, she mustered her courage to call Takaki, only to get an emotionally overwhelmed, negative response from him.
After the transfer, Takaki never forgot the hurt he'd caused her at the moment she needed comfort most. A year later, through their exchanged letters, the boy and girl finally acknowledged that they wanted to see each other again…
And then they put that desire into action.
Takaki made detailed plans—the train lines he'd take, where to transfer, the arrival time—everything was arranged clearly in the story and agreed on with the girl.
But… the train was delayed by snow and wind.
In that era, information wasn't nearly as convenient as it is now. If the boy wasn't there at the appointed time, Akari waiting for him would probably just assume she'd been stood up.
Especially in that kind of bitter cold…
As the train sat still in the heavy snow, Takaki, already having missed the promised time by far, broke down and cried, torturing himself with guilt as he prayed in his heart—
Please, Akari… don't wait for me anymore.
The story's sadness kept stacking up, little by little, until…
In the early hours of the morning, after being delayed by several hours, Takaki finally arrived at the station. Convinced that Akari must have gone home already rather than wait in sub-zero temperatures, he pushed open the door of the waiting room—
Su Mingxi turned to the next page.
Under the glow of the kerosene heater, the waiting room wasn't very bright in the black-and-white drawing, but in that empty space at dawn, the small, hunched back of a girl sitting with her head bowed instantly caught her eye.
A surge of emotion hit her.
Akari… she was still waiting.
Compared to her sister, Su Qingxiao's composure was much worse. By this point, her nose had already turned red. But crying over someone else's manga felt way too embarrassing, so she kept her face deliberately blank, pretending to be cool.
She stole a glance at Xia Jing and found that he was watching her with a smile.
That smile made her feel a little lighter inside.
Yeah… he looks like such a sunny guy. Even if the art and story feel lonely and sad, the ending is probably going to be a good one, right?
They kept reading.
Akari had thought Takaki wasn't coming and had only stayed in the waiting room out of one last thread of hope. When the boy finally arrived…
Su Mingxi turned the page again, and whatever calm she'd managed to maintain vanished. A flicker of pain crossed her eyes.
There wasn't a single line of dialogue on the page. After realizing Takaki had arrived, Akari clutched his sleeve tightly, her head bowed so low that her face was hidden. Not one speech bubble explained how she'd waited from eight in the evening until dawn, how she'd struggled with herself again and again, or why she couldn't bring herself to go home and rest.
But the few tears falling onto the back of her hand said more than a thousand words.
Su Mingxi stared at that one page for a full two minutes, working to steady her emotions.
In the scenes that followed, the two of them walked together through the snowy streets, shared a gentle kiss beneath the cherry tree, and spent the night talking in an abandoned wooden shed by the roadside.
Then morning came, and they parted at the station.
They exchanged blessings in front of the platform.
Would they… see each other again?
Could their promise to watch the cherry blossoms together next year still be fulfilled?
When she turned the next page, Su Mingxi realized that the first chapter, "On Cherry Blossom," had ended.
The title of the second chapter was Cosmonaut.
Cosmonaut?
Why that title?
She read on.
This time, the story was told from the perspective of a country girl named Kanae, who lived in a seaside rural town and attended high school there. The boy who'd transferred in from Shanghai, Takaki, gradually became the center of her narrative.
Her unrequited crush on him. Her admiration. Her secret love.
Takaki was always staring off into the distance alone, as if thinking about someone.
He was always using an old mobile phone, as if texting someone.
Was he in contact with Akari?
That was exactly what Su Qingxiao thought as she read.
And if that was true, wouldn't that mean Kanae's love would end in nothing?
Because the point-of-view character in this chapter was Kanae, the heavy loneliness and sorrow from the first chapter didn't show up right away.
But when Cosmonaut reached its latter half…
The narrative suddenly shifted to Takaki's point of view.
He and Akari had long since stopped contacting each other. Those messages he typed into his old phone, the ones that looked like they were being sent to someone—were really just products of his loneliness. In the end, none of them were ever actually sent. There wasn't even a recipient for them anymore.
Takaki and Akari… had completely lost touch.
Seeing that, Su Qingxiao felt her heart jolt violently. She looked up at Xia Jing again. His expression was calm, and when he felt her gaze, he just smiled at her.
Hey, Xia Jing—what kind of plot twist is this?
In the first chapter, Akari and Takaki clearly liked each other so much. How could they just… stop contacting each other after only a few years?
Could a mere few hundred or thousand kilometers of distance really stop two people who truly loved each other?