Chapter 136: Regardless of Yesterday
The wooden cabin door creaked open with a long, awkward sound, letting in a few slivers of sunlight like water entering a vast ocean. On such a fine afternoon, even the small cabin was well-lit, revealing every speck of dust, not to mention the figure standing by the window and the person who came in and closed the door.
Bai Feifei could hear the footsteps approaching. She didn't turn around, still gazing out the window, wondering how things could be so cold and devoid of human presence.
She said, "Why, why you?"
Xie Huailing took two steps forward, glanced at Bai Feifei's profile, her face devoid of any emotion, and said, "Why ask this? Shouldn't I have come?"
Bai Feifei remained silent. This was the first time since they met that they had nothing to say to each other. The deathly silence seemed unwilling to revive. The corpse lingered in the air, wandering aimlessly like a summoning spirit. Whether it was shedding tears in the corner, no one knew.
Light takes countless shapes, and it can grope around two people here, yet they can't seem to utter a single word they want to say.
Xie Huailing didn't wait. She stepped forward, taking another step closer. She had to see Bai Feifei, and she had to make sure Bai Feifei came to see her, so she could say, "You asked me what I can't tell you, but you're the one who's unwilling to talk and is going your own way. So Bai Feifei, I've come to ask you."
Bai Feifei moved her lips, but her gaze was still outside the window. There was clearly nothing outside the window, and what she was facing was no longer there, nor was her heart.
Realizing there was no way to avoid it, she changed the subject from Xie Huailing's words, saying, "You still have time to go back now."
Xie Huailing replied, "If I don't get an answer, I won't go back."
Bai Feifei seemed to have turned into an ice sculpture. She remained silent, only saying, "I've said before, some things have nothing to do with you."
Xie Huailing suddenly found it both amusing and exasperating. Her gaze remained fixed on him as she pressed on, "And you? Do you mean I've never met you at all?"
Suddenly, without warning, there was no reply. Bai Feifei abruptly closed her eyes, then blinked to hide her reaction. She was still looking at the tree outside the window, but she didn't know how many branches it had. Just as she couldn't, couldn't say anything at this moment.
Time seemed to stand still, bypassing the wooden house. One second was quiet, the next, a thunderous roar echoed in my heart. Xie Huailing said, "There are some things you don't want to involve me in, but ultimately it's your wish, you're doing it for my own good. And my wish is that I'm not bothered by being dragged into this. I once asked you, aren't we friends? You said you'd answer me only after everything was over. It's not tomorrow yet, but I have to ask you again, aren't we friends?"
Bai Feifei avoided looking at her and also averted her gaze. Who had forgotten the snow at Jinfeng Xiyu Tower? No one had forgotten it.
“I shouldn’t have any friends. I’m all alone, with nothing but hatred,” she said.
But when people try to say the opposite of what they mean, they are often betrayed by their own words. What people truly want to say cannot be escaped, no matter how much they argue. The implication of this statement is that she admitted it; she did admit it.
Xie Huailing understood that she was regretting it, that was for sure—she regretted that Xie Huailing had come along today, regretted knowing her, and in the end, she still didn't want to involve Xie Huailing. She asked herself why she had dragged her into this.
Bai Feifei said softly, "If I die, all the power, wealth, and martial arts I leave behind will be yours. You can handle them. Now, leave."
Saying such nice things, there's no way Xie Huailing would leave. She was determined to ask, "What did Wang Yunmeng say to you?"
Bai Feifei didn't answer. She was unsettled and her mind was filled with conflicting emotions: "Didn't you want to take the things and clues from Wang Yunmeng?"
"What did Wang Yunmeng say to you?" Xie Huailing asked again.
Bai Feifei continued, "Then don't ruin your plans. I know you have things you want to do and a strong ambition to achieve them."
"Tell me what Wang Yunmeng said to you." That's the kind of answer she wanted.
Bai Feifei paused, a moment of speechlessness blurring her face and her eyes.
At the very end, it all boils down to this one sentence: "It's not worth it for me."
"Whether it's worth it or not isn't up to you to decide." Suddenly feeling a pang of sorrow, Xie Huailing was so angry that she wanted to laugh, but instead of calming down, she was overcome with grief. Finally, she said sharply, "What do you take me for? Do you think I absolutely need her? If my ambitions would collapse without Wang Yunmeng, then my aspirations would be ridiculous!"
After saying all that, she exhaled a breath that had been stuck in her chest. Xie Huailing then said, "Feifei, tell me, what exactly did she say to you?"
Loose, mournful, cracked with fine fissures... even bricks and stones would be chipped away, so how could a person be an inanimate object? Bai Feifei, seemingly indifferent to everything, turned her head back, her gaze falling on Xie Huailing, and finally answered.
“Some old stories, about the people who gave me life, my mother, Chai Yuguan, and me.”
As she spoke, an overwhelming surge of hatred overflowed, a weight no human could bear, and she became the medium, the vessel. Clearly provoked to the extreme, her words grew colder and calmer with each passing moment: "After she finished speaking, she offered me a deal. She gave me the opportunity to kill Chai Yuguan with my own hands, but I had to follow her instructions tomorrow. She also said that if I agreed, I should come here today to keep the appointment."
Xie Huailing's original plan was for Chai Yuguan to die at Wang Yunmeng's hands. At that time, she persuaded Bai Feifei, but Bai Feifei didn't care. As long as Chai Yuguan died, she didn't care whether he died at her hands or not. So what exactly did Wang Yunmeng say that made Bai Feifei's hatred so intense that she made such a choice?
Xie Huailing wished he could kill him: "Wang Yunmeng is just using you."
"I know, I'm using her too." Bai Feifei smiled sarcastically. Only when she was face to face could her expression be fully revealed, revealing the distorted pleasure and the obsessive, unorthodox ways she had always had. "She thinks she can use me as a stepping stone tomorrow, but what will the outcome be? Who will win is still uncertain."
But she would die, almost certainly not. Xie Huailing knew that, and Xie Huailing knew that she knew it too.
"As for me," Bai Feifei still said, "I live for this matter. Whether I can live after tomorrow is not that important. You can rest assured that I will not involve you. Although Wang Yunmeng discovered me by your side, I insisted that I had been lying in ambush at Jinfeng Xiyu Tower for a long time, and she would not have any other clues."
So she said, "Don't worry about me."
She had already arranged a backup plan for Xie Huailing to continue the project, and then she said, "Don't worry about her anymore."
"I can't do it."
Without the slightest hesitation, and there was absolutely no way she could hesitate, Xie Huailing resolutely refused. She took another step, getting closer and closer, almost pressing forward, and said, "There's one thing I just can't do. The more you want me to leave, the more I want to take you with me."
Bai Feifei suddenly sneered. In her eyes, a twisted madness was like a shadow, inseparable from her, and even intruded into Xie Huailing's eyes, making it impossible for her not to see her: "What's the use of you thinking about it? Why would I go with you? From the moment I was born, I was destined to kill him. If I can't kill him, what am I to have lived until now!"
She was indeed shouting, and there is no denying that.
Xie Huailing respected her, so he never asked about those things; they were all expressions of sorrow at this moment. The sorrow solidified, and the underlying tone of hatred, besides love, could also be pain—a pain that cuts to the bone and then grows back.
Every day and every night brings new kinds of pain.
Bai Feifei will either die from hatred or die with hatred, seeking revenge.
Xie Huailing remained silent, but seeing her sorrowful expression, he couldn't help but feel grief himself. A sigh appeared on his brow, and he pressed down on a branch. The two looked at each other, and only then, through that look in their eyes, did Bai Feifei tell the whole story—a story she had never wanted to tell.
"You want to know everything, so why shouldn't I tell you now? Twenty-one years ago, my mother was defiled by this beast. He tortured her relentlessly for the Ghostly Secret Manual. My mother only escaped after he returned to the Central Plains and gave birth to me. Therefore, I was born to seek revenge. The meaning of my martial arts training and the meaning of my life is to take his life. My misfortune will not end, and he will never be able to live any longer!"
“And what Wang Yunmeng told me…” Bai Feifei sneered, the voice forced out from her chest, “It’s about how that beast tormented my mother back then. My mother wrote a letter in blood, hoping someone would save her. After he found it, he snatched the letter away. Then, when he was with Wang Yunmeng under the moon, he told her that my mother was an unfortunate woman he had saved, using the letter in blood as a topic of conversation to please Wang Yunmeng—I want to kill him.”
At this moment, Bai Feifei was extremely calm. What she said was exactly what was in her heart. Even if she thought about it ten thousand times, even if she thought about it for ten thousand years, it would still be these five words: "...I want to kill him. I want to make him suffer to the extreme, and then kill him. Even if I die, what does it matter? The debt of a lifetime must be repaid by him!"
She could no longer control herself; her life had begun for this purpose. Perhaps she hadn't yet truly possessed her own life; her life now was defined by the word "revenge."
"But is it worth it? To risk your life, to lose your life, for such a despicable piece of trash? He's not worth that price!"
At this point, Xie Huailing couldn't help but feel a surge of hatred, but this hatred wasn't directed at Bai Feifei; it was directed at the source of the sin. It was as if she were trying to pull this person out of the sea, while everyone else, except herself, would rather sink. She said, "You've already lost twenty years of your life for him, do you want to bury the next few decades as well?"
“You have extraordinary talent and unparalleled wisdom. You should have had another career that would make you famous throughout the world. Bai Feifei, I don’t believe you are willing to do this. I don’t believe you would prefer this.”
In terms of martial arts, no woman of her generation can rival her; in terms of intelligence, no one surpasses her except Xie Huailing; in terms of appearance, even Shi Guanyin would harbor resentment towards her; and in terms of ruthlessness, viciousness, methods, and decisiveness, no one in the world can compare to Bai Feifei!
Bai Feifei was unaware of this.
She was proud, always proud. To stand atop a high place and shout, surveying a thousand mountains as small—wasn't that her wish?
But... "But so what?"
Bai Feifei had no emotions left, only the extreme pleasure of being on the edge of a cliff, the pleasure of revenge squeezed out from her own soul. She said, "But so what? If I can't kill him with my own hands, if I'm filled with endless hatred, what glory will my life have? If I'm trapped in hatred, I'll be devoid of emotion and love!"
Xie Huailing was so angry he almost laughed, wishing he could give her a friendly punch to shatter her smile.
"When you sing, without feeling or love, am I a dead person? How come I don't know?" Xie Huailing held her shoulder and noticed that she had also become very thin, like a willow branch. "Come with me. If you don't have an answer, then I will give you the answer. I will take you away!"
She touched her frail frame; it was this body that bore the weight of twenty years of hatred, destined to kill two generations. She also cut her off, determined to quell her reckless madness and drag this person out, forbidding her from saying another word.
She made a promise for this.
"I make a promise to you about the decades to come. Life is unfortunate, and how can misfortune pervade a lifetime? It is said that life is full of regrets, so let them flow eastward. All of this is only important from now on."
"Furthermore, if you insist on killing Chai Yuguan at your hands, we can talk about it again. Saying that he is all alone is wishful thinking."
Even the most callous person isn't that callous; no one in this world is made of stone. She'd rather take on more responsibility from now on.
Xie Huailing said, "What you want to accomplish, I will do with you."
Bai Feifei stared at her blankly.
She fell silent. Trying to say something, to hate someone, was no longer something she could do. She felt a slight bitterness, but didn't know where it came from. The dense, astringent feeling belatedly surfaced; had it found a crack in the surface, or had it finally found release? She knew nothing.
At this moment, she was oblivious, as if she would just wait like this until her final chapter. Once the final chapter was over, the book titled "Bai Feifei" would be turned over again from the beginning, back to twenty-one years ago, when a baby cried and was born.
Her vision blurred, but Xie Huailing's face remained clear. The unfamiliar warmth, which she had never known before, had been delayed for countless years, but it had finally arrived.
Then she swallowed, then tried to expel… A sob began, and Bai Feifei shed two lines of clear tears.
.
"……mother."
After leisurely waking from her afternoon nap, Wang Yunmeng leaned on the soft couch with one hand, like a spring flower blooming again, and slowly let out a lazy yawn. There were no traces of time on her face; aging had never visited her. Her beauty remained unchanged, infinitely charming. Then she slowly raised her eyes and saw her son, Wang Lianhua, standing at the station entrance. She called out to him softly.
"You've come to see me again?" Wang Yunmeng covered her mouth with her hand, brushing the hair that was sticking to her face. She was clearly well aware of her son's carefree nature. "Tomorrow is for important business. You can't possibly have to do something else."
Wang Lianhua smiled modestly, as he always did in front of his mother, and said, "I've just come to pay my respects. Tomorrow is such an important day, of course I won't go out."
Wang Yunmeng nodded in approval, then looked away to examine her hair in the mirror. Wang Lianhua remained standing there, his gaze lowered, inexplicably alone, as if he weren't standing there, but rather in the center of some crack, and no one knew what he was thinking.
But Wang Yunmeng didn't notice.
She changed her hairpin, satisfied with her stunning beauty in the mirror, and then said while drawing her eyebrows with her hands in her sleeves, "I have to see guests today. You keep an eye on the front yard for me. If anything happens, just handle it. If Xie Huailing sends any news, wait until I get back before dealing with it. I need to focus on entertaining my guests."
With something on her mind, Wang Lianhua dug her neatly manicured nails into his palm upon hearing the name, the nails sinking deep into his flesh.
What he couldn't stop was the persistent, intricate resentment that seemed to pull him into a dream world. When he was aimless, he often hated her, hated the rift, hated the situation… in the end, it was all her. The person he desperately wanted to kill lay in a clear stream, and he would lean down, meet her gaze, and the peace would last no more than three seconds before they were arguing again. They mocked everything about each other, asking why the other had the right to read the same books; they wished they could kill each other. The stream would never run dry, and the conflict would never cease.
The words spoken in a calm and peaceful manner were only occasionally recalled during arguments. When they stabbed each other until they bled profusely, he would think back to the moment when he first saw her and stared at her in a daze. In fact, he never properly asked her what she thought after reading those books.
Then he felt like vomiting, but he felt he should never have asked. He felt extremely nauseous and suddenly just wanted to hold her head and strangle her, and preferably kill her in the river. Her words haunted him at that moment.
[Wang Lianhua, is this really what you want?]
His hands and feet turned ice-cold, and he was filled with extreme hatred, unable to speak. He pressed down on her head, wanting only to kill her and let her die.
"By the way, where are the guests? Have they arrived yet?"
Wang Yunmeng suddenly turned around.
The illusion abruptly ended; the warm spring breeze ceased abruptly. He could no longer feel her movements in the river, nor could he feel her breath on his palm. He released her in panic and saw her eyes, which would never open again. Blood, like red silk, oozed from the back of her head. The river water gradually became clearer, revealing only her body as it slowly lost its warmth.
He was the only one left in the river. His hands were visibly stained red, countless drops of blood rolling down his face, quickly draining through his fingers. When he looked up again, the river was gone. He was on the shore, the crimson tide gently washing over him, rising past his knees and her chin. The touch felt like when he was a child, nestled in his mother's arms, being held by her. He was facing her face.
This is a corpse.
This is a corpse.
His wish was fulfilled; the illusion vanished, and Wang Lianhua's soul returned.
"No," he said. "No guests have come today."
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