When Xie Tao saw Zheng Wenhong again, she knew it must have been Fu Miaolan who told him.
“Xie Tao, I’ll help you with your re-enrollment.”
Zheng Wenhong said, handing a cup of juice to Xie Tao.
Separated by the bubbling hotpot, Xie Tao took the cup of juice from his hand. Upon hearing his words, she almost reflexively refused, “No need, Uncle Zheng.”
Zheng Wenhong seemed to have anticipated her refusal, so he said, “Xie Tao, you don’t have to rush to refuse. You should consider the practical situation. Do you have enough money to pay the tuition fees now?”
Xie Tao held her chopsticks, falling silent for a moment.
She couldn’t deny that Zheng Wenhong was right.
Seeing her silence, Zheng Wenhong spoke again, “Xie Tao, I am legally your guardian, and I hope you won’t refuse me on this matter.”
Xie Tao lowered her eyes, as if seriously contemplating for a while.
Then she looked up again at Zheng Wenhong, “Thank you, Uncle Zheng.”
Hearing her words, Zheng Wenhong knew she had agreed.
Finally, he relaxed his brows, a slight smile of relief appearing on his face, “I should be the one thanking you. If you had refused me again, I wouldn’t know what to do.”
Xie Tao understood the implication of his words but didn’t say much more.
She never mentioned Su Linghua, and neither did Zheng Wenhong.
“Uncle Zheng, I will pay you back the money in the future.”
After finishing the hotpot, Xie Tao stood up and said to Zheng Wenhong.
Zheng Wenhong put down his chopsticks, looking steadily at her, “Your mom said hotpot was your favorite.”
“Especially from this place.”
His sudden remark made Xie Tao take another look at the hotpot restaurant, reminding her of an incident from many years ago.
The day she arrived in Nan City, she was nine years old.
On that snowy evening, Su Linghua took her here for a hotpot meal.
Sitting by the window, through the swirling steam, she turned her head to gaze at all the unfamiliar neon lights outside the glass.
Back then, she didn’t know that the toughest years of her life had just begun.
“Xie Tao, do you really not miss your mother?”
As she walked past Zheng Wenhong, she heard his voice from behind, “I saw you at the station that day.”
Xie Tao’s figure stiffened slightly.
It seemed like a long time before Zheng Wenhong heard her voice.
“I never said I didn’t miss her,” she said. “But Uncle Zheng, that doesn’t mean that everything between her and me can just be as if nothing ever happened.”
Because Su Linghua was her mother, because she had genuinely given her love, and all those beautiful memories, she inevitably missed her.
But the hurt couldn’t just be erased by this longing.
She had already lost any way of facing Su Linghua.
Just as Su Linghua could only approach her through Zheng Wenhong.
When leaving the hotpot restaurant, Xie Tao looked at the traffic flowing in the distance, sniffed, suppressed the slight sourness in her heart, and started walking towards the small hotel.
During the time before returning to school, Xie Tao had found a part-time job.
Having learned to make cakes and some desserts from Fu Miaolan, coupled with her skill in making crisp sugar candies, she quickly found a job at a dessert shop.
The dessert shop’s owner was a woman in her thirties, very stylish, and very approachable.
As for housing, Zheng Wenhong had offered to help her with it, but Xie Tao refused.
The owner of the dessert shop was very kind and helped her find a place to live after hearing that she was looking for one.
The apartment was in an old alley behind the dessert shop, small, but for Xie Tao, it was enough.
During this time, Xie Tao visited Zhou Xinyue twice.
But since Zhou Xinyue refused to see her, she could only stand outside the ward each time, looking through the glass window at her.
Xie Tao had seen her pull out the IV needle that the nurse had just inserted into the back of her hand, seen her refuse to take her medicine after a breakdown, vomiting uncontrollably.
That fierce appearance was something Xie Tao had never seen before, an unfamiliar sight.
How much Zhou Xinyue was suffering, Xie Tao knew she could never truly empathize with.
But seeing her like this, Xie Tao felt even more that she should do something for her.
On the night she moved into the rented apartment, Xie Tao sat at the table, holding a bowl of instant noodles, looking at the sky outside the window.
There were no stars or moon, but there were twinkling lights between the tall buildings in the distance.
After eating a few bites of instant noodles, Xie Tao picked up her phone and went into WeChat. Her gaze stopped on the avatar that was blank, the name also blank.
She had deleted this stranger twice.
But every time it would cause the phone to freeze, and then it would just crash.
Perhaps her phone really had a problem.
After she sent a WeChat message that one time, she and this person would occasionally chat for a bit.
In her impression, this was a person of few words.
And when chatting, always reluctant to use punctuation marks.
Their speech even had a somewhat pedantic tone.
Because of the matter with Zhou Xinyue, coupled with Zheng Wenhong repeatedly coming to talk to her, Xie Tao harbored many suppressed emotions, yet found no outlet for them.
But keeping it in for too long, she sometimes felt very uncomfortable.
Perhaps because she had no one to confide in, she would occasionally chat with him and unwittingly nag about some things.
Even if the other party was sparing with words, and sometimes did not even bother with her.
Xie Tao felt that being able to speak out was already a great relief.
—
When Wei Yun came out of the water prison, his eyes were like ice and broken snow, yet his face remained calm throughout.
“Shao Anhe has raised a good dog.”
He scoffed coldly.
“My lord, this man is too stubborn. I have interrogated him for several days, but he has never disclosed the whereabouts of the roster,” Wei Jing said, standing by with his head bowed.
Wei Yun seemed to carelessly adjust his sleeves, his voice clear and cold, as if speaking about something trivial, “Then kill him.”
“But the roster…” Wei Jing cautiously looked up.
“No hurry.”
Wei Yun looked towards the deep night sky dotted with scattered stars. The light from the lamps under the eaves reflected on his side face, adding no warmth to his visage.
“This matter, someone else is more anxious than we are.”
His speech was slow, still with a hint of coldness.
As Wei Yun turned to leave, Wei Jing only managed to see the moonlight reflecting on his clothing, as cold as snow, untainted by dust.
Wei Jing remained silent, and as he came back to his senses, he hurriedly followed.
In the bathhouse, steam was dense, and smoke swirled around.
Wei Yun sat in the bathtub, his long, silky black hair draped behind him, covering most of his fair back.
He held a copper pendant in his hand, his slender fingers slightly bent, occasionally stroking the edge of the talisman. When he looked down, his long eyelashes concealed the expression in his eyes.
The candlelight was dim yellow, casting faint shadows.
The son of Shao Anhe, Shao Junkang, seemed to have vanished into thin air. None of the people he sent out brought back any useful information.
Wei Yun closed his eyes, leaning against the side of the bathtub, seemingly pondering something.
Suddenly, he distinctly felt the copper pendant in his hand start to heat up.
When Wei Yun opened his eyes, he saw the luminescence flying out from the talisman, which in a blink turned into a letter, gently landing in front of him.
He slightly furrowed his brow.
Moments later, he reached out to pick up the letter that had fallen into the water.
When opening the envelope, the letter inside was somewhat soaked, but the ink on it had not spread, remaining neat and clear.
“Are you there?”
Just three words.
Still accompanied by a strange symbol.
To probe the identity and purpose of this mysterious person, Wei Yun had been maintaining such a cryptic connection.
But for many days now, all he knew was that the other party was a woman, somewhat talkative, and beyond that, there wasn’t much else worth exploring.
These days, he had received dozens of letters, but they were all about trivial matters.
He would occasionally respond to a few out of patience, but most of the time he couldn’t be bothered.
Wei Yun crumpled the letter, standing up with an expressionless face, accompanied by the sound of water.
He took a robe from a rack nearby, put it on, covered it with an outer robe, and then, clutching the ball of paper, left the bathroom.
Xie Tao was lying on the bed, yawning. When she heard the notification sound from WeChat, she immediately picked up her phone to unlock it and clicked into WeChat.
It was that person.
“What’s up”
Just two simple words.
Xie Tao was actually troubled by the matter concerning Zhou Xinyue. She felt that Zhou Xinyue wasn’t the type to endure in silence.
There must be some reason why she didn’t reveal anything to her parents or even Xie Tao when she was threatened with violence.
The reason she stayed behind, the reason she chose to resume her studies at Tiancheng Private High School, which Zhou Xinyue had attended, was to find those who had threatened Zhou Xinyue and discover why Zhou Xinyue didn’t want to tell anyone about it.
But how exactly to do that?
She hadn’t figured it out yet.
She poked the screen with her finger and sent a message:
“Hey, if I want to get back at a bad person, how should I do it?”
At that moment, Wei Yun, sitting in front of his desk, watched as the copper pendant again revealed a faint golden glow, gradually emerging to form a letter.
He opened the envelope, accustomed to her horizontal writing from left to right over many days.
Upon seeing her message, Wei Yun’s serene face showed no particular emotion, only a hint of mild derision in his eyes.
He picked up his pen and wrote a line of ink on the paper.
The moment he put down the brush, pressing the letter under the copper pendant, the paper immediately disintegrated into a faint golden glow, vanishing into the pendant without a trace.
Xie Tao was drowsily closing her eyes, but the next moment, her phone vibrated, and the notification sound from WeChat went off.
She instinctively opened her eyes.
She quickly rubbed her face to wake herself up and then clicked into WeChat.
The reply from the other side was still sparing with words:
“Report to the authorities.”
Xie Tao was a bit dumbfounded.
What, report to the authorities?
Report, report to which authorities?
