Chapter 15, a short side story: The mute lets go, this is fucking open air!

The echo of the bronze door closing still reverberated through the snow-covered mountains. Hei Xiazi wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, his gaze behind his sunglasses falling on Wu Xie, who was kneeling in the snow. The boy's shoulders trembled, like a statue frozen stiff by the wind and snow.

"Blind man, take good care of Wu Xie." Zhang Qiling's voice was as cold as ice, yet it carried a hint of barely perceptible fatigue.

Black Bear grinned, his teeth grinding against the bitter taste on his lips: "...Okay."

Over the course of ten years, he personally transformed Wu Xie from naivety into a sharp blade. Gunfire in the desert base, traps deep in the jungle, psychological warfare in the ancient tomb—Hei Xiazi imparted all his knowledge to him. As the seventeenth life ended, Wu Xie, clutching a blood-dripping dagger, murmured, "Is that enough?"

Hei Xiazi lit two cigarettes, stuffing one between his teeth: "That's enough for you to exchange for his freedom."

As the flames from the explosion at the Wang family headquarters illuminated the sky, Hei Xiazi turned and walked into the shadows. Suddenly, an unbearable pain shot through the old wound in his chest, as if ice picks were chiseling into his ribs.

On the day the bronze gate reopened, Hei Xiazi leaned against the rock wall, drinking. He saw Zhang Qiling walk out step by step, saw Wu Xie and Fatty rush to embrace him, and saw those indifferent eyes sweep over everyone—finally stopping on him.

"Dumb." He took off his sunglasses, his gray pupils reflecting the coldness of the snow-capped mountains. "Do you still recognize me?"

Zhang Qiling frowned slightly: "Have we met before?"

The flask slipped from his fingers, the strong liquor seeping into the snow like spilled blood. Black Bear chuckled softly, a metallic taste rising in his throat as he turned: "Very good... at least I won't have to collect your corpse for the rest of my life."

He went south to Guangxi and bought a stilted house in a border village. The night his eye disease worsened, he groped his way into the nanmu coffin that had been prepared beforehand. His fingertips touched the carvings inside the coffin, the initials "Q&Z" that the two of them had carved in a basement in Germany seventy years ago.

"Xiao Qi is late." He closed his eyes, letting the darkness devour the last ray of light.

In the dead of night in Yucun, Zhang Qiling awoke from a nightmare. The excruciating pain in his heart caused him to curl up on the bamboo bed, his mind filled with the image of Hei Xiazi lying in a coffin, his lips bluish-purple.

"Something's happened!" He grabbed the Black Gold Ancient Sword and rushed out the door. Wu Xie and Fatty blocked his way in the courtyard, exclaiming, "Brother, where are you going!"

“Mongolia, and then Guangxi.” His voice was hoarse. “He would go to these two places whenever he was sad.”

The last clue Xie Yuchen pulled out pointed to the pastoral area on the Sino-Mongolian border. Zhang Qiling rode his horse at full speed for three days and found the yurt with wind chimes hanging on it. There was only a half-bowl of cold milk tea on the table and a tattered black leather coat on the yurt bed.

A note was pressed under the wind chimes: "Master Zhang, my old friend has gone to the Eternal Heaven. Do not look for him."

He slammed his fist into the pillar, his knuckles cracking and blood seeping into the wood: "Qi Huan... you won't even give me a little more hatred."

The night Hei Xiazi was reborn back in the courtyard house, he held a dagger to his heart in front of the bronze mirror. As the tip of the blade pierced his skin, a gray shadow of a carrier pigeon suddenly swept past the window—it was the urgent message code he and Zhang Qiling had agreed upon in the last century.

"I really owe you a damn debt..." He threw down the dagger and rushed to Inner Mongolia overnight.

In the third spring, while teaching children horse-taming in the pastoral area, he heard familiar footsteps in the distance. Black Bear swung his belt and wrapped it around the newcomer's wrist: "Zhang Qiling, you son of a bitch—"

Before he could finish speaking, he was forcefully pressed into the pile of straw. Zhang Qiling bit the back of his neck, choking back tears: "The coffin... I saw you lying in the coffin..."

That night, Hei Xiazi was chained to a yurt bed with silver chains. Zhang Qiling knelt down to wash his feet, his eyelashes still damp with moisture: "Back in Tibet, you chained me up like this too."

"So you're getting revenge on me?" Black Bear kicked him in the chest. "Get lost after you've had your fun!"

Zhang Qiling suddenly bent down and licked away the bloodstains on his ankle: "Not enough, I want to lock him up for the next life."

The bells jingled through the night from the silver chain. Black Bear, panting, bit his shoulder: "Mute Zhang... are you fucking a dog?"

“It belongs to you.” Zhang Qiling kissed his wet eyelashes. “When you found me in Germany back then, you said I was your little wolf cub.”

At dawn, Black Bear suddenly laughed out loud: "Do you know why I still can't escape you even after starting over?"

He tore open his shirt to reveal a scar on his chest: "Seventy years ago, when I took a bullet for you, shrapnel got stuck here... Every time it rains, it hurts so much that I want to cry to you."

Zhang Qiling placed his palm on the scar: "Bite me if it hurts in the future."

Amidst the clinking of chains, the dawn light on the grassland bathed the intertwined figures.

On the old-fashioned green train back to Beijing, Hei Xiazi, with his head resting on Zhang Qiling's lap, ate a milk candy: "What if I lose my memory again?"

Zhang Qiling popped a mint into his mouth: "I'll feed you a candy every day until it's sweet enough that you're willing to get to know me again."

The courtyard erupted in chaos. Wu Xie stared at the matching silver chains on their wrists and stammered, "What's this...?"

The fat man pasted the "double happiness" character directly onto the door frame: "Please pay the gift money, thank you!"

Xie Yuchen threw a stack of marriage certificates at him: "Sign them, so that someone won't pretend to have amnesia and renege on their promise again."

At night, Black Bear was pinned under the old locust tree in the courtyard: "Hey, you surnamed Zhang! This is the open air—! Dumb, stop! That's not how the Zhang family's tomb raiding technique is used, hmm~"

Zhang Qiling bit open his shirt button: "Back when you were teaching me how to kiss here, you weren't afraid of being embarrassed."

Returning to Changbai Mountain in late autumn, Hei Xiazi gave the middle finger to the bronze gate: "Back then, some mute guy pretended to have amnesia here to fool me—"

Suddenly, Zhang Qiling slipped a ring onto her finger. The bronze door reflected their intertwined figures, and the inside of the ring was engraved with "Q&Z 1910-∞".

"Aqi, if I forget again..."

“I’ll tell you a story every day—about how Hei Xiazi loved Zhang Qiling for a hundred years.”

The wind and snow howled past, and he kissed away the frost from the corner of the man's eye: "This time, I'll wait for the door with you."