Free Web NovelChapter 204: A MONTH HAD PASSED.
Guiying quietly obeyed. The food wasn’t extravagant.
It was a simple bowl of rice, vegetables, and soup, home-cooked and ordinary. For reasons he couldn’t explain, it almost made him cry.
After thanking the old woman several times, he carried himself upstairs before eventually wandering back outside with nowhere in particular to go.
The village had already settled into sleep.
There were no loud conversations, no traffic, and no bright lights flooding the streets.
When he looked up, the night sky stretched endlessly above him, scattered with stars so bright that they almost didn’t seem real.
The air was clean and the silence was gentle. Even the modest surroundings felt strangely comforting.
None of it was unfamiliar to him. He had lived with less. He had survived worse. Luxury had never been what made a place feel safe.
Guiying slowly sat down beneath the eaves and rested his head against one of the wooden pillars. Only then did he notice the moisture that had landed on his fingers. For a second he thought it was rain.
He looked up instinctively. The sky was perfectly clear. His gaze slowly lowered again until it rested on the tear that had fallen onto his own hand. Then another fell. Then another.
Before he realised it, he was crying. He cried quietly at first, then uncontrollably. He covered his face with one hand as his shoulders trembled.
"You always try to protect me from the things that cause me pain..." he whispered. His voice was barely audible. "...but you always fail."
He wasn’t even sure who he was speaking to anymore. It might have been his grandfather, Liuxian, or fate itself.
"I know it wasn’t your place to tell me who my father really was," he said. Another tear slid down his face.
"I know that," he added. His breathing became uneven. "But it hurts," he said.
The words came out broken. "It hurts to know I suffered this much for nothing."
Every memory seemed to return all at once.
Every insult, every look of disgust, every whispered comment, every meal eaten alone, every bruise, every humiliation, and every time he had convinced himself to endure just one more day because perhaps things would become better tomorrow.
He hadn’t deserved any of it.
He never had.
Thinking of everything he had endured, and everything he had carried into this second life believing it had somehow been his burden to bear, only made the tears come faster.
He laughed once through them.
The sound was quiet and painfully empty. "I didn’t deserve it," he said. His fingers curled tightly against his sleeves. "I didn’t deserve any of it." he repeated.
The words disappeared into the silence around him.
There was nobody to answer and nobody to comfort him.
There was only the gentle rustling of leaves overhead and the occasional chirping of insects hidden somewhere in the darkness.
The stars continued to shine with indifferent brilliance, stretching endlessly across the sky as though nothing in the world had changed at all.
Guiying wiped at his face with the heel of his hand, but the tears refused to stop.
They came one after another, carrying years of grievances that he had never once allowed himself to mourn properly.
For so long he had convinced himself that perhaps this was simply his fate. Perhaps he deserved it. Perhaps everyone else had been right. Now he knew they hadn’t.
And somehow that hurt even more. Not because the truth had set him free, but because it had stolen even the smallest comfort he had built for himself over the years.
If none of it had been his fault, then why had he suffered through all of it?
Why had nobody protected him?
Why had nobody spoken?
Why had everyone else known pieces of his own life before he did?
His shoulders trembled again as he lowered his head, allowing himself, for the first time in years, to cry without worrying who might see him.
Far behind him, hundreds of kilometres away, Liuxian drove through the night with no destination in mind.
Guiying had turned off his location. He hadn’t left a message. He hadn’t told anyone where he was going.
The roads branching out of the city seemed endless, and each one was capable of leading to countless different places.
Liuxian could only grip the steering wheel a little tighter and keep driving, hoping against reason that he might somehow catch sight of a familiar car.
Deep down, however, he already knew how impossible that hope was.
The night was vast, the roads were countless, and Guiying had vanished into them without leaving so much as a trace.
A month passed surprisingly quickly.
When Guiying first arrived in Janqing District, he had planned to stay one night. That night stretched to three, then to a week. Before he realized it, an entire month had slipped by in the small countryside village.
Looking back, he still found it hard to believe. Janqing wasn’t the kind of place people traveled to on purpose. The nearest city sat hours away, and most of the younger generation had left long ago for work.
What remained were fields, old houses, winding paths, and people who knew everything about everyone. It should have felt uncomfortable. Instead it felt peaceful.
The village woke early. By the time Guiying opened his eyes each morning, courtyards were already being swept and vegetables were already being tended. Voices carried news across the road that the whole neighborhood would hear, even if the news was rarely important.
Life settled into a routine before Guiying noticed it happening. Some mornings he helped Granny Wu water vegetables behind the inn. Other days he carried baskets through the market while the old woman haggled with enough intensity to frighten seasoned vendors.
The afternoons rarely belonged to him. Whenever the village children spotted him, they claimed his schedule as their own and dragged him into whatever they were doing.
Fishing, flying kites, settling arguments about crickets — it didn’t matter. Brother Gui had to come.
