There are souls chained together by a blazing, consuming love, and there are those bound by simple camaraderie and an unspoken oath.

Xiao Bo was never a peerless warrior like Hei Yanshan, whose blade could cleave the wind.

In Ancient China, he was just a common soldier, one among thousands on the freezing frontier, whose life was saved in a bloody skirmish by the fiercely quiet deputy.

From that day forward, Xiao Bo became the most loyal shadow of the "Li-Hei army".

He was the one who stood silent guard outside the command tent on those certain snowy nights, braving the biting cold so no one would interrupt the stolen moments between the General and his deputy.

He was the one who watched with a knowing smile as the two men's gazes met over the campfire, understanding that what existed between them was stronger than any earthly empire.

And he was also the one standing in the crowd on the day of the execution. Choking back tears, he watched helplessly as the Emperor’s paranoia ground the world’s two brightest stars into the dust.

When Li Zhanxan whispered that final, fatal wish beneath the executioner’s blade, Xiao Bo made a silent vow:

Whatever awaits them at the Yellow Springs, I will watch over my friend.

What he couldn't have known was the thousand-year hell that a single spilled cup of tea in the Heavenly Reincarnation Bureau would unleash upon them. The Bridge of Forgetfulness had done its work on him as well, stealing the names and the faces of the past, yet it could not completely erase the marrow-deep instinct to protect the soul that had once saved his life.

Caught in the crossfire of the Red Thread of Fate and the anomalous "Wish Protocol," Xiao Bo’s soul was also dragged into the endless cycle.

For lifetime after lifetime he reincarnated, always remaining close to Hei Yanshan, acting as the sole comforting anchor of permanence amidst the cosmic chaos.

Eight lifetimes. A thousand years of missed connections.

Xiao Bo was always there.

He saw the gravitational pull, the fleeting hope, and then the ruthless, invisible wall of the system that always drove a wedge between them at the very last moment. He silently assisted through the thousand-year agony of their love.

He was a good friend, a mute witness who manifested in every life to tend to his friend’s inexplicable, soul-deep wounds, even when Yanshan himself had no memory of why his heart was bleeding.

Even without his memories, Xiao Bo’s soul acted on a lingering, ancient resonance, a quiet gravity that always pulled him to Yanshan’s side whenever the world grew too cold.

And now, after a thousand years of lonely deaths and misguided steps, the year was 2026.

Inside the studio of the modern architecture faculty, the scents of graphite, fresh coffee, and paper mingled in the air.

The afternoon sunlight painted the drafting tables in gold.

"Hey, Yanshan! If you draw one more line on that blueprint, you're going to tear a hole in the paper!" Xiao Bo laughed, sliding a half-empty coffee cup onto the quiet, deeply focused boy's desk.

Hei Yanshan, the shy architecture student, jolted out of his trance, his fingers pausing on the pencil he had been gripping so tightly.

He offered his friend a faint smile, looking up. "I'm just trying to get it perfect, Bo-ge."

Xiao Bo hopped up to sit on the edge of the opposite desk, his legs swinging casually.

His gaze drifted to the webpage open on Yanshan's laptop. It displayed the dashboard of Yanshan’s own XHS page where he posted his urbex photography. Xiao Bo noticed a specific notification at the top of the screen – a heart from a frequent follower that Yanshan had been staring at.

Deep within his soul, beneath the veil of a thousand years of forgotten history, Xiao Bo felt a strange, familiar warmth at the sight of that notification.

He didn't know why, but he felt an inexplicable urge to encourage this connection.

"Staring at the likes from your favorite follower again?" Xiao Bo asked, his tone lightly teasing, though his eyes reflected a subconscious, tender concern.

Yanshan blushed slightly and quickly snapped the laptop shut, as if caught doing something illicit.

"I... I'm just gathering inspiration for spatial design. It's so... familiar, the way he interacts with my work. It's as if he understands what it means to be utterly alone in the dark."

Xiao Bo's heart clenched for a moment, a sudden, sharp pang of recognition that he couldn't quite place.

"You know, Yanshan," Xiao Bo said softly, his voice suddenly losing its everyday levity, adopting an older, deeper resonance that surprised even himself. "Sometimes people are like parallel lines on a blueprint.

It seems like no matter how far they run side by side, they will never meet. But life isn't a flat piece of paper. Space bends, and sometimes... sometimes even the strictest rules are rewritten."

Yanshan blinked at his friend in confusion...

For some reason, Bo-ge's presence always soothed him, as if it represented a very ancient, ingrained safety.

Xiao Bo simply offered a warm smile and ruffled Yanshan's hair, his hand moving with the same instinctive affection he had shown a comrade-in-arms in a snow-covered camp hundreds of lifetimes ago.

Even though he didn't remember the bureaucrats' glitch, Xiao Bo could feel the crackling tension of an inevitable shift in the air.

The heavens might obstruct them, and the Bridge of Forgetfulness might have stolen their memories, but he was here.

As a friend. As a witness...

He stood by Hei Yanshan throughout this present life as well, right up until that terminal fall from the sky, when the War God finally shattered the walls of destiny to find his way home.