The wound at the corner of his mouth was the slowest to heal. After a night’s sleep, a scab would finally form, only to be torn open again the next day by a large gulp of water or a hearty meal. This cycle repeated itself, and the wound where Yu Mo had bitten Qi Lian still hadn't fully healed even after ten days. The broken skin on his lips, however, had long since mended.
Every morning, as he shaved in front of the bathroom mirror, he would study the mark. It was an imprint Yu Mo had left on him. If it didn't heal, then so be it; it wasn't as if it would kill him. He felt that, in a way, it served as a memento.
He went back to the hospital twice more, waiting at the entrance as before, but he never ran into her. If she hadn't sent a message later saying she had been discharged, he might have continued waiting there like a fool.
The messages he sent to Yu Mo were like stones sinking into the ocean.
She had suddenly vanished!
He comforted himself with the thought that Yu Mo wasn't an unreasonable person. Her attachment to him couldn't have been faked. He told himself to give her time; perhaps she was just tired and needed space.
Qi Lian suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, startled awake from a dream. He had dreamt of Yu Mo.
Relieved it was only a dream, he clutched his aching heart and slowly lay back down.
This was his fourth day in Longcheng. The project here was small, so he had only brought Qi Shuai along. It would be wrapped up in about two days. It was a relief that it would only take a few days.
He stared at the fretwork-patterned antique lamp on the ceiling, unable to fall back asleep.
The hotel room was on the first floor. Whenever a car passed on the road outside, its headlights would flood the room with light, rendering the cheap curtains useless.
A sentence Yu Mo had said back at the Hilton suddenly flashed through his mind: *"Qi Lian, I’m so glad I met you in Lianhua."*
His heart convulsed in the deep silence of the night.
Had she been saying goodbye to him even then?
He simply didn't want to believe it. He couldn't believe that someone could be so desperate to consume the other one moment, the lingering heat of passion still in the air, only to speak words of eternal parting the next.
What kind of hardened heart could do such a thing? He certainly couldn't.
He flipped out of bed and sat up, pulled on his clothes, and grabbed his phone and car keys from the nightstand. He crept out of the room.
It was past three in the morning. A small supermarket in a shack next to the inn was still open, a bright red lightbox standing by the door.
Under the dim yellow light, the owner was dozing behind the counter, his head nodding like a pestle.
Every now and then, a car would speed past with a *whoosh*, vanishing into the distance.
Qi Lian looked up at the sky. There was no moon tonight, only one or two stars visible in the deep blue expanse.
The temperature had dropped enough that he felt a slight chill. If Yu Mo were here, he would have insisted she wear a coat, or she’d be hopping around from the cold.
He bent down to slide into his car and began the drive toward Jinning.
Qi Shuai woke up just after six in the morning. Seeing the empty bed beside him, he assumed Qi Lian had simply started the day exceptionally early. He wondered why his boss was pushing so hard for such a small job.
After washing up, Qi Shuai went to a nearby alley for a bowl of wontons.
He and Qi Lian had eaten these wontons for several mornings in a row. The meat was fresh, the dried shrimp broth was seasoned perfectly, and at only six yuan a bowl, it was incredibly cheap compared to Jinning.
On the first day, Qi Shuai had slapped his thigh and cursed, "The prices in Jinning are absolute highway robbery."
After finishing a bowl of wontons and a sesame cake, he walked toward the construction site under the rising sun, only to find that Qi Lian wasn't there. That was strange.
He called Qi Lian. The phone rang and rang with no answer. Worried, he called a second time before someone finally picked up.
Qi Lian’s voice sounded as if it were coming from a vast distance. It was hard to tell if he was just half-awake or if the signal was poor, but he sounded utterly drained.
Qi Shuai shouted a few "Hellos" into the phone. "Where are you so early in the morning, Brother?"
"Qi Shuai, do me a favor. Finish the rest of the work in Longcheng for me. Bring my things back from the room when you're done."
"Wait, wait, what do you mean? You're leaving me to finish this alone? No, Brother, Brother..."
"All the money from this job goes to you. If you can't handle it, call Jiang Yuan."
"No, no, it's not about the money. Hello? Hello!"
The line went dead. Qi Shuai stared at his phone in a daze, feeling as though his backbone had suddenly been removed, leaving him lost and bewildered.
Qi Lian tossed his phone aside. He leaned over the sink, suppressing waves of nausea. Nothing actually came up; it was just a series of dry heaves.
With a trembling hand, he turned on the faucet and let cold water blast over his head. It was freezing, but his nerves were so numb it took a moment for the sensation to register.
He lifted his head and wiped the water from his face, letting the droplets from his hair soak through half of his shirt.
He opened the mirrored cabinet above the sink. Unsurprisingly, only a few of his belongings remained inside. They stood there lonely, abandoned by the former liveliness of the space, much like their owner.
The closet that had once been bursting with clothes, the cabinet that could barely fit all her cosmetics, the cardboard boxes that had occupied an entire wall of the small room—all of it was gone. It was as if they had never existed.
His deepest fear had finally become reality. The dream had ended.
During the four days he was away, she had moved out in secret, not even deigning to give him a proper goodbye.
To him, this was half his life, a heart given away, a promise for the future. To her, it was just a move, and then it was over.
He sent her a message: *When my father left, he didn't say a single word of goodbye to me. Are you going to treat me the same way?*
That evening, a transfer of over two million yuan appeared in his bank account. It was about two hundred thousand more than he had originally given her. Every cent was calculated with clinical precision. She had never intended to stay; no amount of passion or tenderness could hold her back.
He had underestimated her.
The ground-floor unit to the east had an oleander planted outside the wall. It was lush and full of small red flowers, its branches stretching enchantingly over the path.
How beautiful it was, and how utterly poisonous.
He felt that this was just how life was meant to be. Fate was determined to make things difficult for him; the harder he tried to hold onto something, the less he could keep it. So be it.
He was born in Lianhua and raised in Lianhua. He was destined to grow old and die here, to rot in this soil, and eventually, to turn to dust and mingle with the ancestors of generations past.
A life spent, and thus it ends.
***
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Echoes of Lotus District | Chapter 59 | So This Is Life | Novela.app | Novela.app
