A note on method

This volume was reconstructed from the messages exchanged between Yu and Feng from May 31, 2021 to June 29, 2022 — 107,935 messages across fourteen months. The factual spine — message counts, the affection and tension readings, the long-arc trends, the worst-tension and most-affectionate months — comes from a month-by-month analysis of the full trove. The quotes were drawn from the scored romantic and tension windows of that period; every Chinese line quoted here is reproduced verbatim from the record, unaltered.

The export was imperfect. About 0.81% of the messages carry a single lost character, shown here as □ — a place where the file could not keep what was typed. A handful of lines arrived too garbled to read, tangled with stray export glyphs and identifier fragments, and those were simply left unquoted; there was, fortunately, no shortage of clean material. Where a line survived around its wound, it was kept, because the feeling almost always survives the gap.