"Are you going to pick up Xiao Yueyue...?"
Yi An's voice emerged from the shadow of the weeping crabapple tree, and the hem of his black nightgown swept across Ye Qingliu's trembling ankles.
Ye Qingliu instinctively shrank back towards the Monstera deliciosa. The fever made his pupils misty, and he actually mistook the jade pendant on the woman's earlobe for the frog doll his sister was holding before she disappeared.
"Get out of the way..." The baby voice wrapped in panting spread in the night air. Ye Qingliu clenched the glass marbles in his palm - that was the one Hua Jinyue stuffed into him before being taken away, and there was a frozen freesia inside.
The sound of crocodile leather high heels crushing the ceramic basin startled a night owl. When Yi An bent down, the platinum necklace fell down, and the photo of his cousin embedded in the pendant was facing the boy's flushed face.
The same nightgown from twenty years ago was still locked at the bottom of a camphorwood box, but now it was reborn in the body of the enemy's son in a more cruel way.
"Thirty-nine.8 degrees." The electronic thermometer beeped behind Ye Qingliu's ear, and Yi An pinched his jaw with the hand wearing the wedding ring.
"You're fever-stricken like a red apple, and you still want to be a knight?" Rose perfume mixed with the mint scent of the fever-reducing patch penetrated Ye Qingliu's nostrils. He suddenly bit the crescent scar on her palm. It was the scratch she got from a cake knife when she was celebrating her sixteenth birthday.
The pain made Yi An reflexively shake his hand, and Ye Qingliu fell into the koi pond like a puppet with broken strings, startling a piece of broken moonlight.
His sleeves were rolled up to reveal his bruised elbows, which had been scratched by steel nails while crawling through the ventilation duct. Blood was now oozing from them, dyeing the pool water light pink.
"I want my sister..." The sobs with a baby voice created ripples on the water surface. Ye Qingliu's wet eyelashes stuck together into several clumps, and under the moonlight, they looked like the silk flowers wet by the rain on the day of Hua Yueyao's funeral.
Yi An squatted down on the pebbles by the pool and suddenly found a cinnabar mole under his collarbone - the position was exactly the same as the scar caused by his cousin's burn.
When the gilded nails pinched the red mole, the reflection on the pool surface suddenly distorted into a double mirror image.
Ye Qingliu saw his mother's silhouette emerging behind Yi An, while in reality, the pearl necklace was strangling his fragile throat. The high fever made Ye Qingliu hallucinate, and the orange-red tail fin of the koi fish transformed into the poppies that covered his mother's hospital room before her death.
"Little Moon should learn how to put the puzzle together now. Do you want to be buried with her?"
When Yi An grabbed Ye Qingliu's collar and pulled him out of the water, Ye Qingliu's hot forehead was resting against Yi An's neck. This intimate posture, which once belonged to her cousin Hua Yueyao, made her whole body stiff.
The hot breath exhaled by Ye Qingliu burned the wedding ring at the artery, and every cut of the word "Xi" on it bleeds blood in the moonlight.
"Mother.…….."
Ye Qingliu's mumbling made Yi An's temples throb. Ye Qingliu's eyes, blurred by fever, were trying hard to look at the scenery not far away.
His hot fingers suddenly grabbed the belt of her nightgown, with a force as light as when her cousin pulled the corner of her school uniform on the hospital bed.
The thermometer slipped from her fingers in an instant and hit the ground on the goose eggs with a crisp sound.
(Meanwhile, on the other side…)
Chen Chunhua knelt beneath the crystal chandelier, amidst a pile of broken glass, like a statue forgotten by time. The shards were no longer as sharp as they had been at the beginning; they had swelled with blood, their edges dulled, like countless dim stars embedded in her flesh.
The initial sharp pain had turned into a lingering dull sensation, as if countless tiny teeth were gnawing at her bone marrow.
Moonlight flowed over her body like icy water, coating every wound with a bluish-white glaze. Her knees had long lost all feeling, and only the occasional twitch of her nerve endings reminded her that this body was still alive.
Blood congealed beneath the skin, forming strange lines like a dark red spiderweb, spreading from the knee to the calf. The edges of the deeper wounds began to turn white, oozing clear tissue fluid, which mixed with the dried blood scabs to form amber crystals.
The fabric of Chen Chunhua's skirt had long since grown together with the wound, and every slight tremor would pull at the newly formed granulations. Some of the glass fragments were buried too deeply, wrapped in the hyperplastic tissue, forming pearly nodules, creating an uneven texture under the skin.
"I don't know what's happened to Qingliu and Jinyue..."
"You have one hour and forty-two minutes to keep your payroll card..."
Butler Li's voice sounded behind Chen Chunhua, and the ticking sound of the pocket watch was particularly clear in the silent night.
The blood spread across the ground like a dark mirror, reflecting her shaky figure. The edges of the pool began to oxidize, taking on a rusty brown rim, while the center remained eerily bright.
Butler Li stood aside and looked at the nanny Chen Chunhua quietly. It was the first time he saw the young master and the young lady being so close to this ordinary nanny. What kind of magic power did this nanny have?
"After all, you shouldn't meddle in other people's business."
Butler Li spoke calmly, as if he was discussing the weather.
The cracks between Chen Chunhua's fingernails were filled with glass powder, which sparkled with tiny phosphorescent light in the moonlight, as if she was holding a handful of crushed stars.
Upon hearing this, Chen Chunhua's breathing slowed to a crawl, each rise and fall of her chest causing the wounds all over her body to vibrate. The tiny particles of glass embedded in her tendons trembled slightly with her pulse, making a subtle sound that only she could hear.
The deepest pain came from just below the patella, where there was a triangular piece of glass that burrowed deeper into the joint with every heartbeat.
Chen Chunhua's skin slowly began to take on a translucent texture, like repeatedly washed parchment. Veins snaked beneath her skin like bluish-purple rivers, severing them at her knees into fragmented tributaries cut by broken glass.
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