Chapter 193: A Pair of Reflections
"Finished talking?"
"Otherwise what?"
Xie Huailing yawned slowly, shook his head, and then looked up again, seeing that the night was as deep as ink, with no end in sight.
Wang Lianhua didn't wait for her for too long, but he still asked that question. The young man crossed his arms and leaned against the wall outside the house. Although he was talking to Xie Huailing, he didn't look at Xie Huailing. He only looked at the sky, just like she only looked at the sky. The two were similar in many ways, and they were also strikingly similar when they didn't want to look at each other.
Xie Huailing hadn't even finished yawning when she sneezed. The sudden chill of the night, a transition from summer to autumn, caught her off guard. She said, "When are you going to stop posing? Are you going back or not? You're addicted to the cold wind, I don't care about you anymore, I'm leaving."
Wang Lianhua laughed inexplicably: "Then you go first. It's easy to have someone send you back to Jin Feng Xi Yu Lou, Miss Xie. It doesn't matter whether I'm here or not."
“Yes.” Xie Huailing said succinctly, going along with his meaning, “It’s the same whether you’re here or not.”
The two fell silent again. Some people, who are not usually so sarcastic, often find it difficult to control themselves and treat her the same way they would treat others. Perhaps it's because they can no longer go back to a playful relationship, and in fact, it never even started with playfulness. The friendliness only existed for a fleeting moment, and that fleeting moment has long since ended.
Their relationship was over, and now he hates her.
Hate is enough. Keep hating, only the hatred between the two of you. Remove the mutual loathing and don't involve anyone else.
Wang Lianhua finally stood up from the wall, no longer pressed against it. There were now two more people between him and Xie Huailing, so the difference between walking side by side and not walking side by side wasn't significant. They slowly walked downstairs. The carriages of the Divine Marquis's Mansion had disappeared not far away. The streetlights hadn't dimmed, but the more people there were, the fewer people there seemed to be, and the colder it felt.
After going down another floor, Wang Lianhua asked, "Then who do you need?"
He had met many people, many of whom he hadn't specifically sought out. Coincidences always gave him a headache, and he kept shifting his focus. Wang Lianhua said, "Su Mengzhen, your good cousin, how could my mother have believed your lies back then? I believed your lies too. He certainly has a grand air about him, but despite all that pomp, he doesn't have a single bit of 'official' airs."
In any case, she still ended up getting engaged to Xie Huailing.
Wang Lianhua continued, "And another one, oh, the one I bumped into next to Shaman. I hadn't noticed at first, but tonight I thought that Shaman wouldn't go so quickly to complain, and Bai... Bai Feifei isn't the type to complain, so I suddenly realized."
When Bai Feifei was mentioned, Wang Lianhua was unsure how to address her, and in the end, he called her by her full name. It was best to treat her as a stranger: "Who is he? He's not from the Golden Wind and Fine Rain Pavilion, is he? He looks rather weak, but I doubt he's anything good."
Wang Lianhua didn't let any of them go. He even pointed out Wuqing and commented on them all. He didn't let her off the hook either: "There's also the head of the Four Great Constables of the Divine Marquis's Mansion. It's amazing that you have a connection with him. Aren't you worried that he might arrest you one day? Or do you pity him? No wonder."
"Heh, if you count carefully, there are so many people, and I'm guessing it's not even the whole group. Miss Xie is really charming. Why don't you teach me sometime?"
The voice was like a persistent ghost, circling around and pressing close, sending chills down your spine: "But first, tell me, who do you want?"
"Why do you ask me this question?" Xie Huailing avoided the question, and Wang Lianhua, whom he could see out of the corner of his eye, did not come closer. Surprisingly, his words had such an effect. "And why should I tell you?"
The two passed by a window and came to a terrace. The terrace faced the moon and was filled with moonlight, as empty as a lake. The petals and broken branches on the ground in the lake were small pebbles. The bottom of the pond also contained only small pebbles. Water that is too clear has no fish.
Wang Lianhua stopped. It was as if the moonlight had cut off his path, and the floor in front of him had turned into a cliff. He was about to stop when he said, his face expressionless, unable to react to anything, showing her nothing: "Why didn't you tell me?"
He doesn't approach her, he will never approach her again, they will always be separated by something, cutting them both in two, gazing at each other from afar, the air becoming a mirror, reflecting both of them at the same time, reflection upon reflection.
Her face was expressionless, and she had nothing to show him.
Wang Lianhua said, "What makes you think you can have anyone else?"
His resentment wouldn't build up; she had lost the possibility of him suppressing his resentment. He would say whatever was on his mind, since he had already said all the hurtful things. When had they ever thought about each other, when had they ever thought about making the other person feel better? How disgusting: "Xie Huailing, you should pay the price. You should pay the price for my hatred."
If he has an expression, will he be sorrowful? If he is sorrowful, she might fall silent again.
But he was both sorrowful and proud, so she would not express her pity.
She could see his pain in many people, but he refused to let her see it, insisting that she pretend to be blind.
"First of all, I don't think I need to pay a price. I don't think there was anything wrong with what I did. I admit that I hurt you, and you should take the consequences yourself."
"Secondly, the price shouldn't be this kind of price."
Xie Huailing said, "I don't hate you, and I won't continue to entangle with you like this."
Wang Lianhua was about to utter his third "Why?" when the bird in his heart crashed again, leaving him speechless. The person who should never have said that was Xie Huailing, who casually said he didn't hate me. What right did he have not to hate me? Was that something he could decide? You say you don't hate me, so you don't hate me? You've let go of all your resentment, but what do you take me for? What right do you have to let go? What right do you have to understand me?
He thought of a possibility called forgiveness, or an even more beautiful possibility, so beautiful it was nauseating, so beautiful it drove him to despair: It's not your place to forgive me, it's not your place to pity me, it's not your place—
He swallowed the word again.
“Impossible,” he said. “Impossible.”
They suddenly returned to calm. The brief emotional outburst was like a fleeting moment under the moon, the flower dying instantly, and they no longer wanted to communicate. People used to think, is there really anything in this world that can't be said? Later they realized that everything can pull people together, and the ending is destined.
But how could they truly find peace, letting the moonlight engulf them? When people can't say what they want to say, they'll say something else, and there's still a long, long time before they drown in the night.
Because they still wanted to say something.
As a result, more fissures will emerge, replacing what people don't want to say, what they're protecting with their pride, and what they can't say but say anyway.
She wasn't the only one who refused to turn around. Xie Huailing only looked at the silvery light on the ground. The silvery light had nothing; it had been praised for a thousand years, yet it also had nothing. She said, "Nothing is impossible; it's just that you haven't thought it through."
Wang Lianhua could no longer bear it. Flowers bloomed and withered, rivers flowed backward, and all his emotions surged up, calling him back to the firelight, back to the day Wang Yunmeng died: "Explain yourself clearly! I didn't think things through, so I should accept the fact that you killed my mother? I didn't think things through, so you should kill her?!"
He finally turned around, forcing Xie Huailing to look at him. The two of them had nowhere to retreat, and could only be thankful that there was no one else in the building, because Xie Huailing said, "If I hadn't killed her, and she had killed me, would you have said these things to her then?!"
Wang Lianhua's expression went blank once again.
His words were washed away by the tide, and he truly returned to the fire.
It should be said that Xie Huailing shouted those words; she rarely looked like this. She had nothing she liked, nothing she cared about. Her emotions were submerged, never surfacing. She relied on interests to regulate her emotions, and this was the first time, outside of work, that she had done so.
"You can't solve this at all." Humans aren't plants or trees; even if someone is inherently cold-hearted, there's still something there, a faint but real sincerity. She said, "No matter how this ends, you can't solve it. You don't want your mother to kill me, and you can't bring yourself to stop her. You'd rather let me go than dare to say you want to come with me. Today I killed her, and you hate me now. If she had killed me yesterday, you would have hated her too."
"And from beginning to end, you hate yourself, don't you? Do I have to spell it out for you? The right to choose has always been in your hands. It's not that you can't do anything, it's that you're unwilling to do it."
Just like the difference between Wang Lianhua and Bai Feifei, not all of the suffering Wang Lianhua endured came from Chai Yuguan, unlike Bai Feifei's. Before Chai Yuguan betrayed Wang Yunmeng, Wang Yunmeng had already inflicted at least 50% of his suffering on him, and in the end, Wang Lianhua simply pretended not to see it and transferred it all to Chai Yuguan.
Therefore, he couldn't make a choice.
His mother sometimes loved him, but didn't she also cause him pain? If his mother caused him pain, wasn't she still his mother?
A thousand sorrows welled up in her heart, which she poured out as a tear. Wang Lianhua, however, calmed down, her grief turning into a smile as she gazed at Xie Huailing.
They always looked into each other's eyes, seeing themselves reflected in each other's eyes, and seeing themselves was also seeing the other. Mirrors were everywhere; he dared to say he had never left his seat for a moment. He dared even more to say: "Yes, I admit, what you said is true, I can't make a choice, but if I want to hate you, so what?"
"Xie Huailing, you make it sound so good, that you don't care about many things, but if you were me, how much better would you be? I believe you would make a more ruthless choice, but when making that choice, wouldn't you feel another kind of hatred?"
"Just like you say you don't regret anything from the past, does that mean you can pretend it never happened? Won't they come after you at night like I remember my mother? I know they will, just like me."
"So let's not talk about each other."
Wang Lianhua laughed again. Tonight's events had escalated to this point, and they still had to go back together. He genuinely found it laughable, but then the laughter faded. He felt like crying, and not just for himself.
It's not just one person who can't laugh.
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Ms. Xie: It's gone viral.
Wang Lianhua: It's exploded!
These two are best suited to stab each other in the back. They don't even need to talk about their respective families of origin; they can stab each other accurately based on their own guesses.
Actually, if Ms. Xie had turned back halfway through tonight, or if Wang Lianhua had softened, or if Su Mengzhen had woken up after they went back (it seems like a spoiler), the ending would have been obvious.
But that's just how fate plays tricks on me.
Just a heads-up for the next chapter: it's mostly based on Ms. Xie's own character development, with very little fan fiction content. The chapter after that will be the same. If you mind, please don't buy it. It won't affect the bonus chapters. I won't set a 100% subscription requirement.
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