Chapter 10: Sylvan Whispers and Illicit Currents
The village basked in twilight's amber embrace—apple orchards whispering behind Wang Huifen's clattering wok, thatched-roof smoke curling calligraphic serenity across the courtyard. Li Ruoya and her sister traded hushed confidences by the stone well, their harmony fracturing when Ruoxue's jade teeth ground like millstones at Grandfather's betrayal.
Xu Ling's spirit floated on this bucolic serenity… until his clinic key turned.
Beneath the gnarled scholar tree, Liu Shuxiang lay supine on his rattan chaise—her sun-faded cotton shift riding up ivory thighs in negligent invitation. Moon-pale limbs interlaced, coral-pink toes curled in feigned slumber. The neckline's treacherous plunge froze Xu Ling's breath—their clandestine springtime tryst surging through his arteries like forbidden wine.
A percussive assault on the door shattered the diorama.
"Lingzi! Life or death!"
Liu Shuxiang's lashes fluttered open, her sleep-soft gaze tangling with Xu Ling's. Crimson tides surged up his throat as he mouthed silent urgency toward the herb-storage alcove. The widow dissolved like incense smoke just as Xu Hai shouldered through, cradling Third Uncle's whimpering form.
"Tumbled from the walnut boughs," Xu Hai gasped, depositing the elder on the examination pallet. "Claims his backbone's shattered like celadon."
Xu Ling's fingertips mapped Third Uncle's spinal peaks and valleys. When qi penetrated the meridians, the truth materialized—vertebral fractures like earthquake fissures through parched earth.
"Seek steel and plaster in the county," Xu Ling decreed. "These ruptures demand Western alchemy. And Uncle—let saplings climb hereafter. Your bones now whisper winter ballads."
As Xu Hai's motorized rickshaw faded into firefly-studded twilight, osmanthus musk enveloped Xu Ling from behind. Liu Shuxiang's arms constricted like flowering vines, twin summits of warmth branding through linen.
"Healer Xu," she breathed against his jugular, "this lonely blossom wilts with… evening maladies. Might your unorthodox remedies revive fragile petals?"
Her questing fingers breached his waistband—
The clinic door groaned its protest anew—
---
Incandescent Ashes and Shattered Constellations
Liu Shuxiang's exhale seared Xu Ling's auricle—his consciousness detonating in supernova splendour. He shackled her wandering wrist mid-descent toward uncharted territories, voice grinding like tectonic plates.
"Elder Sister—if Ruoya discovers—"
The clinic portal imploded.
"Brother Xu, you—"
Li Ruoya crystallized mid-step, her ocular lenses fracturing into kaleidoscopic shards at the vision of Liu Shuxiang's stocking-sheathed calf entwined with Xu Ling's limb.
The pair sundered like colliding magnets. Liu Shuxiang's mirth chimed false as flawed jade. "Merely taking measurements for winter robes! This unseasonable chill—"
Her pretence wilted beneath August's molten gaze.
In the courtyard's petrified hush, Xu Ling's throat-clearing echoed like temple bells. "Has the evening meal been prepared?"
Li Ruoya dissolved into shadows. Liu Shuxiang's cosmetics deepened to peony-blood crimson. "Make peace with her," she breathed, evaporating like disgraced kitsune beneath the gibbous moon.
Xu Ling contemplated the star-lacerated firmament. This widow's dance with celestial flames courted mutual annihilation.
The supper table became a silent battleground—chopsticks clashing like duelling rapiers. After depositing the sisters at their threshold, Xu Ling sought asylum in his orchard cathedral.
The arboreal sentinels stood transfigured—boughs sagging under off-season florets glowing like stolen starlight. Xu Ling consecrated well water with spiritual quintessence, anointing roots until matins' first blush.
Depleted, he collapsed into samadhi's embrace.
At dawn's knife-edge, Wang Huifen's desperate knuckles detonated against his chamber door. "Lingzi! The orchard – it's –"
The intrusion ruptured his energy channels. Primordial forces rebelled—quicksilver magma inundating meridians never designed for such conflagration.
Xu Ling contorted, onyx-hued vitae erupting across floor planks. A leonine roar tore from his diaphragm, detonating every glass alembic in the apothecary.
Wang Huifen's shriek summoned her husband as their son's vasculature bulged obsidian beneath fever-crazed epidermis—a cartography of cosmic cataclysm.
---
Bountiful Thorns and Gilded Serpents
Time dissolved into liquid torment until Xu Ling marshalled the anarchic spiritual tides back into ordained pathways. Slumped against his bed's bamboo frame, muscles reduced to quivering silt, he resembled a puppet abandoned by its puppeteer.
Xu Wenhai's sandalwood door surrendered to a father's dread. "Child! You rival the death palette!"
"No infirmaries," Xu Ling croaked, clawing at consciousness. Wang Huifen's epiphany pierced the fog: "The orchard – it births ambrosial yields!"
Resurrected by the proclamation, Xu Ling's qi resurged. He vaulted upright like a carp breaching the Dragon Gate, scourging nocturnal tribulations before marching toward destiny.
The orchard throbbed with sacrilegious vitality. Trees arched like gilded chandeliers, boughs groaning under fruits luminous as stolen suns. Villagers clustered at the perimeter, their susurrations a locust-swarm of envy.
Wu Tiedan's basilisk glare poisoned the periphery. His conspiracy with Liu Dagou's herbicides had combusted spectacularly—these arboreal phoenixes had resurrected from toxic pyres.
"Lingzi! Divulge your arcana!"
The rabble engulfed Xu Ling—a deluge of honeyed avarice. Matron's proffered matrimonial candidates like temple votives:
"My kinswoman—a hamlet Helen!"
"Preposterous! My niece ministers as Elysium's handmaiden!"
Xu Ling navigated the siege, memories of his family's quarantine-year desolation acid-etched beneath this newfound reverence. Behind the gilt-edged façades, he recognized the visages that once barred their thresholds during his father's crucifixion by illness.
Wu Tiedan's viperous hiss slithered through the din. "Savour your pilfered bounty, mountebank. Every Eden breeds its serpent."
The menace dissipated into cinnamon-tinged zephyrs as villagers resumed their courtship quadrille. Xu Ling's fingertips grazed a peach's velvet epidermis—its qi harmonics confirming these were no mere fruits, but alchemical lodestones.
Yú Mèngnà's arrival loomed. Let the reaping commence. Let ledgers be balanced.
---
Ambrosial Allure and Silken Whispers
"Matchmaking? Our Lingzi's radiance eclipses such trifles!" An elder's stentorian rebuke silenced the matchmaking coven, though generational fissures trembled beneath the orchard's golden boughs.
The squall of discord stilled when Li Ruoya materialized, propelling her sister's wheelchair through the grove's archway. The sisters' arrival cast a numinous hush—their jade-like composure transmuting villagers into reverent statues.
"Aunt HuiFen spoke of your… alchemical yield." Li Ruoxue's glacial tone fractured as her gaze ensnared the vines. Grape clusters dangled like crystallized twilight, their diaphanous skins pulsing with captured constellations.
Ruoya's breath caught, navigating closer. "These defy nature's ledger," she murmured, fingers trembling near a pendulous orb. "Frosted lunar essence woven with celestial filaments."
Xu Ling's lips curved at their wonder. "Proprietary elixirs," he divulged, observing Ruoxue's throat convulse with restrained craving. "The same alchemy that transformed your apples."
The confession bleached Ruoxue's knuckles against wheelchair mahogany. Pride duelled with ravenous need in her gaze—a spectacle Xu Ling found infinitely more nourishing than the villagers' gilded sycophancy.
Post-inspection of nature's treasury, he summoned Yu Mengna.
"Mmm…" Her somnolent contralto vibrated the receiver. "Dawn's blush lingers, agrarian princeling. Yearning for your patroness?"
Xu Ling's Adam's apple bobbed. Recent widowly provocations merged with Mengna's velvet rasp, threatening meridian conflagration.
"The crop", he rasped. "Awaits reaping."
Static void. Then linen whispered against skin as Mengna ascended. "Fables before sunrise? Saplings stood infantile yesterday!"
Video luminescence unveiled her swathed in creased satin, clavicles shimmering like Nüwa's sculpted marble. Xu Ling's lens traversed gemstone persimmons and peaches crowned with solar coronas.
Mengna's inhalation fractured. "Harvesters deploy ere noon. And Lingzi?" Her timbre liquefied to honeyed smoke. "Reserve the most succulent cluster… for nocturnal symposium."
The connection expired amidst villagers' resurrected clamour. Ruoxue's wheelchair advanced with arthritic protest.
"These grapes", she proclaimed, severing one with regal defiance. "Demand… rigorous appraisal." Incisors breached the orb with assassin's precision, juice like phoenix tears incarnadining her mouth's altar.
In penumbral recesses, Wu Tiedan's silhouette dissolved—a serpent retreating to distil fresh toxins.
---
Silken Allure and Bittered Blossoms
Yu Mengna's onyx lace negligee draped her form like starless midnight, unadorned complexion glowing with pearlescent vitality. "Lingzi", she breathed, fingertips skimming her décolletage, "Shall I traverse the darkening roads to… *examine* your cultivation?" A flush mirroring her orchard's crimson apples suffused her throat.
Xu Ling averted his gaze from the screen's dangerous allure. "The harvest compels your scrutiny, Na-jie." He rotated the lens toward sagging vines, amethyst clusters pendant-like celestial chandeliers.
Mengna's inhalation fractured. "Their fragrance permeates the digital veil!" She cast aside her cashmere throw, the camera capturing a half-second tableau of moonlit limbs as she surged upright. "Preserve the plumpest bunch—your Na-jie demands inaugural savouring!"
The connection severed mid-movement, freezing on a phantom of rippling silk that branded Xu Ling's retinas.
"Enthralled by urban enchantresses?" Liu Shuxiang materialized like an avenging dryad, her daisy-stitched apron clashing with tempestuous eyes.
Xu Ling secreted the phone like illicit treasure. "Professional consultation regarding yield quality."
Shuxiang's mirth carried hoarfrost's edge. "Consultations conducted in midnight dishabille?" Her inquisition dissolved as Xu Dong's cadre arrived, work-calloused hands reverent upon otherworldly grapes.
Xu Ling apportioned the clusters like sacred relics—Shuxiang's allotment deliberately opulent, each orb swelling with perilous potential.
Domesticity unveiled Li Ruoxue's profile carved from Carrara disdain while Ruoya accepted the offering. "Shall I cleanse these, Xu-ge?" Her whisper fluttered like captive moth wings beneath his nose-brush touch.
"Reserve the most resplendent for your private enjoyment," he murmured, savouring her auroral blush.
"Reducing my sister to menial drudge?" Ruoxue's wheelchair advanced with creaking indictment. "You incorrigible—"
"At least she reciprocates generosity," Xu Ling parried, plucking a grape with calculated languor. "Unlike pampered larks that peck their benefactor's palm."
Ruoxue's lips parted—a garnet droplet escaped as incisors breached the fruit's membrane, nectar cascading like liquid retribution down her jawline.
Beyond the threshold, engines roared their pagan hymn. Mengna's vermilion convertible devoured the village's dust-clouded arteries, its advent presaging cyclonic reckonings.
---
Nectar's Covenant and Veiled Longings
Xu Ling dismissed the sisters' discord, his gaze anchoring on Ruoya's curved silhouette by the moss-crowned well. Her fingers danced through liquid sunlight, transforming grapes into glimmering topaz orbs. "The man who weds Ruoya inherits eight generations' celestial merit," he mused, delighting in her nape's auroral blush.
Wang Huifen emerged, nodding like a temple sage. "Such grace and diligence—matriarchs would duel for such a daughter-in-law."
Ruoya's scrubbing crescendoed, porcelain knuckles bleaching as she bottled euphoria. Ruoxue manoeuvred closer, her whisper serrated. "Since when do Li scions debase themselves as kitchen chattel? Has that agrarian warlock hexed your wits?"
A grape stifled Ruoxue's venom. Her eyes dilated—ambrosia's torrent flooded her senses. "Celestial!" she gasped, patrician pretences dissolving like sugar in stormwater.
Yu Mengna's arrival harmonized with Ruoxue's revelation. "What alchemy transpires here?" The magnate accepted Ruoya's offering, her cosmopolitan mask fracturing as teeth breached the fruit's sanctum. Nectar's eruption silenced the grove.
"Transcendent", Mengna exhaled, tongue capturing a violet droplet. Her gaze ensnared Xu Ling—ravenous, strategic.
Ruoya flitted between them like a leaf-borne swallow, arranging seating while Wang Huifen conjured jasmine steam. Xu Ling's smirk bloomed as Mengna's vermilion-taloned finger caressed a grape's curvature. "These shall ransom imperial treasuries."
Their orchard pilgrimage pulsed with unsung currents. Mengna's exposed shoulders gleamed like nacre in crepuscular light, each footfall echoing their frozen video frame's intimacy. Villagers' salutations evaporated as they breached the grove's threshold—a nave of vines prostrate beneath gemstone burdens.
Mengna's inhalation fractured the dusk. "They… *radiate."
Xu Ling harvested a grape, its core-light staining his palm with pilfered moonglow. "Not produce, Na-jie. These are desires distilled."
Her lacquered hand engulfed his, syrup seeping through interlaced digits—a saccharine pact binding destinies yet uncharted.
---
Gilded Vines and Sibilant Schemes
Yu Mengna stood petrified before the vineyard's glory, pupils expanding to devour grapes shimmering like amethyst teardrops suspended in midair. The orchard's ambrosial fragrance—honeysuckle entwined with lunar dew—compelled her throat into involuntary convulsions. "These defy Gaia's rulebook," she exhaled, fingertips trembling above a grape's prismatic membrane.
Xu Ling inclined his head, ancestral pride simmering beneath peasant humility's guise. "Rootstock resilience dances with elixir alchemy." His cerebellum already calculated profit margins from their forthcoming citadel of pomological decadence.
"Mobilize harvesters this hour," Mengna decreed, extracting her onyx-encrusted communication talisman. "But first—appraise our sanctum's metamorphosis?"
The boutique's chrysalis-stage interior hummed with artisans laying alabaster tiles mimicking glacial starlight. A grizzled craftsman squinted at Xu Ling's query: "Two dawns with golden incentives, young liege. A celestial week sans."
"Accelerate", Mengna ordained preemptively, her vermilion stiletto hammering staccato impatience. "Now, behold the viper's nest."
"Jade Oasis Fruit Pavilion" loomed ahead, its emerald sigil oozing oligarchic aspirations. Mirroring Mengna's flagship in imperial scale, it deployed orchid-graceful servers schooled in aspish courtesy. A uniformed acolyte materialized bearing dragonfruit canapés before their second breath within.
"Divine patroness," the server oiled, presenting garnet-hued flesh on an obsidian reliquary. "Our alchemical *Chronos Elixir* transmutes senescence—peer-reviewed by Delphi's oracles."
Mengna's mirth chimed like fracturing Venetian crystal. "Their mummery nearly atones for pedestrian produce." Her whisper carried bergamot venom. "Your apples cratered their gilded monopoly last equinox."
Xu Ling observed the balletic precision—patrons ushered through papaya-scented grottos by staff wielding holographic codices. "Methodical", he allowed, though his septum detected formaldehyde beneath the store's candied guava miasma.
"Algorithmic sterility," Mengna rebutted, steering him past alabaster strawberry ziggurats. "Our sanctum shall elevate fruit to sacrament—your grapes, the communion wafers."
As they exited, a calculated fracture entered her baritone: "Lingzi... this crusade demands your ceaseless vigil." Her enamelled talon grazed his radial artery—a silken-spun covenant.
The vineyard thrummed with anticipatory luminescence as gloaming intensified. In distant glass towers, a rival tycoon monitored surveillance streams, molars pulverizing at the radiance poised to recalibrate the county's gastronomic cosmos.
---
Tart Allure and Venomous Shadows
The attendant cradled a disposable crystal-clear cup, its golden nectar shimmering under fluorescent lights. Fragrant notes of passionfruit—tangy yet delicately saccharine—wafted through the air, an olfactory siren call to patrons of Yunshan County, where such tropical rarities seldom graced provincial soil.
Yu Mengna inhaled the bouquet before accepting the proffered drink. A tentative sip bathed her palate in citrussy ambrosia. "Remarkable," she murmured, fingertips grazing the cup's condensation. "Your passionfruit—what's the price per jin?"
The clerk's demeanour brightened like sunrise over orchards. "Welcome to Fruit Melange's grand opening, madam!" she trilled, ushering Yu Mengna toward gilded shelves where rubied pomegranates and obsidian mangosteens held court. "All produce enjoys a twelve percent inaugural discount. Should you enrol in our emerald membership—" she produced a lacquered card gleaming with faux verdigris— "a perpetual twenty percent privilege awaits. This celestial offer dissolves like morning dew in three moons' time."
Though her own boutique's ledgers flashed through her mind—the siren song of bulk-purchaser discounts—Yu Mengna waved a dismissive hand. "Let us commence with a modest selection, if you please."
Unfazed, the attendant curated a woven willow basket, its artisanal craftsmanship belying the store's commercial veneer. Meanwhile, Xu Ling's gaze swept across the emporium's staged perfection until a serpentine chuckle froze his appraisal.
Yang Feng materialized like a wraith from the dragonfruit display, an oily smile cracking across features that might've been handsome were cruelty not etched into every crease. "The mountain herb peddler stoops to inspect peasant fare?" he purred, saccharine as the passionfruit pulp.
Xu Ling's retort came polished and cold. "One marvels at former apothecaries turned grocers. Does your sister still grind medicinal roots, or has she embraced this… produce pantomime?"
The barb found its mark. Yang Feng's nostrils flared—this upstart had cost him his prestigious apothecary position at Everbloom Medicinals, reducing him to hawking overpriced persimmons. Only his sister's mercantile genius had salvaged their fortunes, though the humiliation still festered like a gangrenous wound.
"Gawk all you wish, peasant," Yang Feng hissed, adjusting his Italian leather apron with performative elegance. "These wares exist beyond your straw-hatted comprehension. Fruit Melange caters to connoisseurs." His gesture encompassed jewel-toned kiwano melons and Buddha's-hand citrons arranged like a Versailles still life.
Yu Mengna's laughter tinkled—windchimes laced with strychnine. "Darling", she cooed, entwining herself around Xu Ling's arm like clematis embracing oak, "does this antediluvian gargoyle trouble your recollections?"
The "uncle" epithet hung like a guillotine blade. Yang Feng's complexion mottled—aubergine purpling beneath carefully curated tan. His retort died aborning as Xu Ling's attention snapped toward the storeroom's rattling bead curtain.
There she stood—Yang Li, her vermilion cheongsam clinging like a second skin, obsidian hair coiled in a victory roll that could've drawn blood. The sister. The architect. The true power behind Fruit Melange's gilded façade.
Xu Ling's pulse stuttered. Yu Mengna's manicured nails bit into his forearm as the air thickened with unspoken reckonings.
Echoes of Jasmine and Regret
Yu Mengna traced Xu Ling's arrested gaze to where a vision in ivory chiffon glided through the produce aisles. The newcomer's onyx tresses flowed like liquid night beneath the store's artificial halogens, her porcelain features arranged into a smile that could thaw Siberian frosts.
"Xiao Ling," the apparition breathed, syllables trembling like cherry blossoms in a spring breeze. Two years hadn't softened the ache Lin Yuqing's voice carried—nor the way her delicate fingers knotted themselves in silent supplication.
Yu Mengna's grip on Xu Ling's arm became vice-like. This wraith from his past—the medical school paramour whose betrayal still haunted his midnight hours?
Even Liu Feng's bluster dissolved in the charged silence. "You… know this gutter rat?" he spluttered, gesturing at Xu Ling with a mango still bearing its $12.99/lb sticker.
Lin Yuqing's nod sent twin diamonds spilling down her cheeks. "Might we converse privately?" She entreated Xu Ling, the Jiangnan dialect of their student days softening the request into something perilously intimate.
Yu Mengna felt perspiration bloom between their clasped palms. As Xu Ling extracted himself with murmured assurances about passionfruit selection, she noted how his pulse thrummed against her wrist—a hummingbird's wings beneath clinical detachment.
The office engulfed them in gardenia-scented nostalgia. Lin Yuqing's trembling fingers traced the jade paperweight Xu Ling had gifted during their third-year finals. "They threatened to disinherit me," she whispered, lacquered nails biting into palms. "When your father's accident occurred… I nearly came. But Li Guangfei's men were watching—"
Xu Ling raised a hand, the gesture slicing through memories like a scalpel. "The river of time flows but one direction," he intoned, clinical precision masking old wounds. "What's drowned needn't be dredged."
Her anguished sob followed him into the corridor. Liu Feng materialized like an avenging spirit, reeking of overpriced cologne and wounded pride. "Defiler! You left her ruined!"
Xu Ling's derisive snort halted mid-escape. The accusation hung suspended—until Liu Feng's next words detonated like shrapnel:
"My sister's child—Li Yunfei's b*st*rd—exists because you failed to shield her!"
In the produce section, Yu Mengna's wicker basket met the floor with a crash. Passionfruit rolled across polished tiles like grenades from a split satchel, their golden flesh pulsing with the rhythm of long-buried truths now erupting into daylight.
Bitter Harvest of the Hothouse
Liu Feng's booming voice reverberated through the sterile air, transmuting the boutique into a theatre of scandal. Patrons clutched carambola slices forgotten, their salacious murmurings curling upward like vines sensing decay.
*A fallen angel behind this Edenic façade?* Male onlookers craned their necks, pheromones mingling with the cloying sweetness of overripe guavas.
"An... intervention?" Xu Ling's inquiry sliced the humidity. Lin Yuqing's cosmetics—those masterful brushstrokes of innocence—had blurred the truth. Beneath her trembling veneer pulsed calculations even the Jiangnan Medical faculty never apprehended.
Yu Mengna's pearlescent nails dug crescent moons into passionfruit flesh. * The jilted lover's confession—how delectably treacherous.
"Slanderer!" Liu Feng's fist cratered a display of glacé kumquats. "Your peasant hands tainted her purity!"
"*Silence.*"
Lin Yuqing materialized like a shattered porcelain doll, tear tracks eroding her meticulously constructed artifice. Liu Feng's obeisance was instant—the rabid hound collared by invisible chains.
"I desecrated our destiny," she whispered, skeletal fingers splayed where life once quickened. "This barren vessel… Does it slake your vengeance?"
Two winters past, Xu Ling would have cradled her anguish as sacrament. Now he traced idle circles on Yu Mengna's hipbone.
"The car, Nana."
Outside, the BMW's engine snarled its contempt. Liu Feng's tongue swiped greedily across cracked lips—*the simpleton reclining in leather worth more than his ancestral plot.*
Lin Yuqing observed departure through fingers clenched like birdcages. Once, Xu Ling's devotion had burned brighter than the Jiangnan library's midnight lamps—the brilliant intern who'd memorized her menstrual cycle better than pharmaceutical formulae.
Her fingertip explored the cicatrix beneath imported French lace. Worth every scalpel's kiss. That monsoon-drenched evening when Li Guangfei's blade hovered at Xu Ling's jugular… Her womb proved cheaper currency than his pulse.
"Patience," she exhaled, breath fogging the boutique's Alpine-cold glass. Neon signage painted her reflection gorgon-like amidst the dragonfruit spines. "His jewels. His seed. His final gasp—all shall wither in my palm."
The vow perfumed the air—narcotic and lethal as manchineel sap, its roots tunnelling deep into poisoned earth.
Monsoon Confessions
Yu Mengna's breath fogged the BMW's climate-controlled air. "Tell me truthfully—that porcelain doll back there," she ventured, fingertips tracing the steering wheel's stitched leather, "she's the Jiangnan Medical phantom who still haunts your nights?" The query escaped like a caged songbird, desperation perfuming its wings.
A muscle twitched in Xu Ling's jaw. "Relics gather dust in museums," he deflected, watching raindrops perform suicidal dives against glass. The image of Lin Yuqing's clinically sterile womb bloomed behind his eyelids—a grotesque inverse of the girl who'd once blushed at hand-holding.
Chopin's nocturne swelled to fill the void. Yu Mengna coaxed the vehicle into a sidestreet's embrace, scarlet paint bleeding into grey concrete. "My inaugural fruit emporium", she began, laughter sharper than a produce knife, "was torched by love's negligence."
Xu Ling's attention snapped to her profile—a Camellia japonica wilting in real time. "What necromancy killed it?"
Her smile curdled. "A tragedy in three acts: childhood sweetheart, scholarship prodigy, parents who hoarded dignity from trash heaps." A jagged fingernail picked at the gearshift. "I fed him textbooks and rice bowls, believing ambition might sweeten poverty's rot."
Lightning bifurcated the firmament. Yu Mengna's icy grip found his palm—a reflex older than heartbreak.
"Steady," Xu Ling soothed, engulfing her tremor. Beyond their humid capsule, Yunshan County dissolved into Turner's watercolour nightmare.
She recoiled as if burned. "Apologies, the storm—"
"Typhon himself applauds this performance," he murmured, releasing her. "What epilogue followed?"
But the spell broke. Yu Mengna's lacquered armour resealed. "Leave gravestones unturned." Her nod toward the tempest carried theatrical flourish. "My sanctuary's three blocks east—care to outrun the clouds?"
Xu Ling's affirmation came absentmindedly, neurones still parsing Lin Yuqing's calculated tears—more authentic than Qiu Zhenzhen's silver-screen affectations.
The sedan navigated flooded arteries with geriatric caution. Yu Mengna's truth—a malignancy shared only with ventilators and fruit flies—pulsed beneath her designer blouse. Better cancerous isolation than vulnerability's dissection.
Precipitation hammered the sunroof—nature's morse code ticking toward revelation. When the brakes sighed before a Brutalist tenement, Xu Ling noted how rust stains mimicked tear tracks on concrete cheeks. Protocols of detachment lay drowned in gutter streams; unspoken codes rewritten by shared lightnings.
Thresholds of Intimacy
"Shelter here until the heavens cease weeping," Yu Mengna beckoned, her violet blouse translucent as dragonfly wings beneath the monsoon's assault. The sprint from sedan to stairwell left them breathless—two moths battering against a waterfall's silver curtain.
Xu Ling surveyed the Brutalist architecture, its concrete bones groaning under ivy shrouds. "You reside… here?"
"A chrysalis against life's tempests," she replied, ascending steps polished by decades of anonymous footfalls. The absence of elevators in a fruit empire heiress's abode whispered of purgatorial penance—or meticulously crafted illusion.
The third-floor revelation stole his breath: walls vaporized to create an expanse where mid-century modern furniture floated above golden teak. Osmanthus incense coiled around them—an olfactory sonnet more intoxicating than her trademark bergamot.
"Your footwear," Yu Mengna murmured, kneeling to replace his mud-caked boots with supple calfskin loafers. Xu Ling's sun-bronzed fingers twitched near the nape of her neck—close enough to count raindrops beading along her hairline. The shoes' precise fit kindled embers of suspicion.
The bathroom unfolded as a shrine to masculine artifice: a badger-hair brush poised beside volcanic pumice stone, twin towels draped like lovers' hands awaiting reunion. Xu Ling scrubbed himself raw beneath a waterfall showerhead, steam failing to purge the acid tang of jealousy.
A knock fractured his brooding. "Dry garments".
He cracked the door, extending an arm glistening like forge-tempered bronze. Yu Mengna's pulse fluttered—the linen bundle in her grasp still whispered of her father's ghostly vetiver embrace.
"Gratitude, *jie*." The honorific clanged like manacles.
Her retreating silhouette through frosted glass sketched forbidden calligraphy—damp fabric clinging to the dip of her spine, rainwater charting tributaries along her thigh's geography. Xu Ling averted his gaze to moon jars cradling orchids, their petals trembling in the air-conditioned chill.
The grey towel smirked from its hook, accomplice to staged domesticity. Somewhere between monsoonal downpour and the musk of decades-old sandalwood drawers, the choreography of professional detachment began its irreversible unravelling.
Azure Whispers and Veiled Truths
Xu Ling clutched the borrowed garments, his heart plummeting into fathomless depths. *Her sanctuary harbours another's shadow.* He resolved to erect emotional ramparts henceforth—to descend into Li Guangfei's moral quagmire was unthinkable.
The oversized cotton shirt hung limply on his frame as he emerged. "The bath awaits, Na-jie," he declared brusquely, retreating from her jasmine-infused aura.
Yu Mengna's sneeze—a porcelain chime—preceded her disappearance behind fogged glass. Adrift in the cerulean sanctuary, Xu Ling sank into sofa cushions the hue of stormy Adriatic waves. A British Shorthair stretched luxuriously, its fur mirroring the room's maritime palette.
*Miaow.
Emerald eyes regarded him with regal entitlement. Velvet paws kneaded his weathered palm.
"Indulge Her Highness's appetite," Yu Mengna's muffled command drifted through steam. "The console's lower recesses hold her tribute."
Blue Treasure pranced in ecstatic circles as Xu Ling produced the kibble. "Our capricious sovereign rarely bestows such favour," Yu Mengna observed, emerging like Aphrodite rising in champagne-hued silk. Droplets from her hair christened the Isfahan rug as she knelt, décolletage glimmering perilously close to his peripheral vision.
Xu Ling recoiled, the remote control's jagged edge biting his thigh. The television erupted with saccharine urgency: "Scandal at Dragon Sky! Qiu Zhenzhen's midnight tryst with mystery magnate!" Grainy footage paraded the actress's cocooned figure, followed by a rose-bearing silhouette twenty minutes hence.
"Beauty often courts calumny," Yu Mengna murmured, settling close enough for damp tendrils to brush his neck. Beyond rain-streaked windows, Yang County's drizzle mirrored the screen's precipitation—reporters swarming like piranhas beneath hotel marquees.
"Current feed?" Xu Ling's abrupt intensity crackled like static.
Yu Mengna's eyebrow arched. Qiu Zhenzhen—that alchemical blend of ingénue and dominatrix—had clearly ensnared another victim. Yet Xu Ling's rapt fixation carried peculiar ferocity, his pupils dilating like a predator scenting blood.
The feline's tail flicked the remote. Unobserved, channels cycled through snowstorm interference before resolving on enhanced surveillance footage. The "married paramour" removed his fedora beneath lobby chandeliers.
Li Guangfei's vulpine grin filled the screen.
Labyrinths of Desire and Deliverance
Yu Mengna stood petrified in the wake of Xu Ling's exit, her champagne silk negligee—a calculated masterpiece of Parisian lace and whispered seduction—now hanging as limply as her wounded pride. She traced the gilded mirror's edge, fingertips skating over the topography of her own myth: a décolletage polished with crushed pearl creams, a waist cinched by personal trainers' masochistic diligence. *How could such artistry fail to ensnare him?
Meanwhile, Xu Ling ascended Dragon Sky Hotel's glass monolith, rain-slicked fingertips finding purchase in millimetre-thick window seams. Each vertiginous pull upward resurrected memories of Qiu Zhenzhen's shattered composure that fateful night—the way moonlight had pooled in her collarbone's hollow like liquid mercury when she whispered, *"Don't let him find me."
"Level?" he growled into his phone, boots scrabbling against eighth-floor storm drains.
"Eight-three-eight", Qiu Zhenzhen's voice frayed at the edges.
The suite's Baroque ceiling swirled above her like a fresco of damnation. Seventeen unanswered calls from her agent pulsed crimson on the bedside table—a metronome counting down to career annihilation. The first *clink* of metal on glass she mistook for paparazzi helicopters until Xu Ling's silhouette coalesced beyond the hurricane pane—a phantom from both her darkest hour and most illicit fantasy.
Their breath patterns duelled across the soundproof barrier, her lacquered nails scoring futile arcs on industrial silicone seals. Xu Ling pressed his palm to the glass, fingertips fluorescing faint jade—a qi technique Grandfather Lin had beaten into him during monsoonal midnight drills. The sealant began dissolving like spun sugar.
Back in the sapphire-lit apartment, Yu Mengna's laptop bathed her face in forensic blue. Tabloid spreads of Qiu Zhenzhen mid-laugh—lips stained pomegranate-red, hair a calculated chaos of midnight waves—contrasted brutally with her own boardroom-portrait precision. A tentative experiment: shoulders sloped in counterfeit abandon, neck arched like a Degas ballerina. The mirror reflected not a siren but a spreadsheet oracle playing dress-up—the realization drew laughter sharpened with self-recrimination.
Unobserved on lobby surveillance feeds, Li Guangfei adjusted his Armani tie beneath crystal chandeliers. The roses he'd sent lay trampled into Burgundy pulp beneath reporters' Italian leather soles. His reflection in the elevator's brass doors wore neither smirk nor scowl—only the same feral intensity that tightened Xu Ling's jaw as another window seal surrendered.
When the final silicone strand snapped, Qiu Zhenzhen reached through the breach—not toward salvation, but to brush a raindrop from Xu Ling's stubble. "Madman", she breathed, the word carrying the weight of every script where heroes died in reel three. Yet as his hand closed over hers—callouses catching on her Yanaumi diamond bracelet—she felt not a leading lady's calculated tremble but the visceral shudder of a gazelle discovering lions hunt alone.
Twenty-three floors below, Yu Mengna's finger hovered above her trackpad. A single click would unleash forensic accountants upon three entertainment conglomerates' offshore labyrinths. The blue light sculpted her face into a Kabuki mask of resolve, lips unconsciously miming Qiu Zhenzhen's paparazzi-perfect pout.
Somewhere between disintegrating gaskets and encrypted servers, carefully constructed personas began their inexorable unravelling.
Chasms of Gravity and Fractured Vows
The fractured glass cascaded inward with a cataclysmic roar as Xu Ling collapsed against the marble wainscoting, his spiritual reservoirs drained to their dregs. Yet the residual qi now coursing through his meridians gleamed with transcendent purity—like base ore smelted in celestial forges, leaving only astral quintessence.
Qiu Zhenzhen gazed into the vertiginous void, her throat constricting. "You... traversed the building's viscera?" Her voice frayed like aged silk, eyes tracking the paparazzi swarm below—insignificant as locusts beneath this aerie.
Xu Ling drained her celadon chalice in three draughts. "Our egress mirrors our ingress," he intoned, secreting the stolen vessel within his jacket—an inexplicable compulsion he declined to interrogate.
The actress's protest dissolved as he enfolded her in a rescuer's embrace. Nocturnal zephyrs shrieked through the breached fenestration, lashing her obsidian tresses into Medusan coils as they teetered above the metropolis's maw.
"Still your tongue," he growled, calloused palm suppressing her whimper. "Lest we summon scavengers."
They surrendered to gravity's maw. Qiu Zhenzhen's consciousness dissolved before they breached the fifth stratum, her form slack as a broken puppet. Xu Ling's free hand transmuted into a living anchor—fingers scoring crimson hieroglyphs on cornices and corroded conduits until asphalt rose to meet them.
Within the Nile Suite's sepulchral penumbra, Xu Ling resuscitated her via the *renzhong* nexus. Her eyelids parted to confront his countenance—a wrathful bodhisattva carved from shadows.
"Defiler!" She recoiled across Belgian linens, limbs mapping themselves for betrayal.
"You succumbed to dread's embrace," he countered, retreating to the minibar's sanctuary. The chalice against his breast now burned like sacrilegious plunder.
Her tremulous fingers explored unbroken contours. "Newton's laws... How?"
Xu Ling's mandible hardened. Her disbelief resurrected Lin Yuqing's silvery mockery—that crystalline scorn greeting his maiden qi demonstration. The memory's vitriol still corroded.
Across the urban sprawl, Yu Mengna's surveillance mosaics flickered. Feed γ-12B chronicled Li Guangfei pulverizing a solitaire earring beneath his oxblood Oxfords, thumb jabbing a memorized sequence into his device.
The burn phone vibrated—insistent as a trapped hornet. As Qiu Zhenzhen fled to the bathroom's clinical radiance, he glimpsed the glowing characters: **Lin Yuqing**. Phantoms of sterile wards and monsoon-soaked confessions assailed him—barren wombs, comatose vigils, covenants sworn amidst thunder's timpani.
When she reemerged—armour restored via Rouge Dior and studied nonchalance—her pronouncement rang hollow as a prop sword: "Our ledger stands balanced."
In the liminal silence between sundered glass and shattered oaths, the calculus of debt and yearning shifted—variables in an unsolvable equation both were fated to endlessly parse.
To be continuous…