Time behaves differently when you do not have a heartbeat to measure it. The days do not bleed into one another so much as they stack up like old newspapers, quiet and heavy. Xiaoyu watches the calendar on the faculty office wall flip to May. It is the final week leading up to the forty-ninth day since her accident, the traditional boundary where the old folk songs say a soul must either find its way forward or fade into the landscape completely.

She spends her remaining mornings wandering the hallways of the senior building, a silent observer of the frantic, beautiful chaos of high school life. The atmosphere is thick with the scent of cheap instant coffee and the sharp ink of fresh mock exams.

When she walks past Room 302 during the morning break, she sees her classmates crowded around the bulletin board. They are holding the stapled packets of her Physics notes, the edges already crinkled and stained with ink and grease from cafeteria flatbreads.

"If Xiaoyu hadn't broken down the mechanics of angular momentum this way, I would have dropped to a single-digit score," one of the boys from the back row says, pointing at a neatly drawn free-body diagram on the page.

"Her handwriting looks like a computer font," a girl replies, tracing the printed lines with her thumb. "It is like she knew exactly where we would get stuck."

Xiaoyu stands at the edge of the crowd, a small, invisible smile touching her lips. She remembers the late nights she spent under her desk lamp, her hand cramping as she tried to make sense of the universe for her own sake. She never thought those silent hours would become a lifeline for fifty-four other people. Her existence left a permanent mark on this room. She mattered.

She drifts down the aisle toward her old seat. Xu Jiang is sitting there, his chin resting in his hand as he stares out the window at the basketball courts. His school bag is draped over the back of his chair.

Xiaoyu leans down to look at the bag. Clipped to the metal zipper of the main compartment is her scuffed, cheap Chagee milk tea keychain. The tiny plastic cup sways gently with every small movement he makes. He hasn't hidden it away in a drawer or a box. He wears it openly on his back, carrying a piece of her memory through the crowded corridors every single day.

She reaches out, her hand hovering just millimeters away from his shoulder. She wants to tell him thank you. Thank you for finding the carving under the desk, thank you for protecting her notebook, and thank you for remembering her when the world moved on.

Before her fingers can touch his uniform, a sudden, sharp sensation flares in the center of her chest.

It is not painful, but it is incredibly powerful, like a deep, magnetic current pulling at her very core. The temperature around her does not drop, it warms up, humming with a strange, cosmic energy. The magnetic tug does not originate from the classroom or the apartment compound. It is pointing outward, past the heavy iron gates of the school, past the concrete skyline of her hometown.

The pull is directing her toward the long-distance bus station on the south side of the city.

Xiaoyu takes a final look at Xu Jiang, watching the quiet strength in his profile as he turns a page in his textbook. The classroom around her begins to feel slightly distant, the scratching of pens fading into a soft, background hum. Her time here is finished. The roots she needed to plant have grown, and now, the universe is calling her to move.

She turns away from the rows of desks and walks out of Room 302, letting the warm, unyielding gravity of her ghost-heart guide her steps down the stairs and out into the afternoon light.