Chapter 25: Ruins
The alley is very quiet.
Xiahou Ming didn’t know how long she had been squatting here.
When she finally raised her face from her knees, the sun had begun to set, dyeing the exit of the alley a glaring orange-red.
Ling Yicai has left.
She didn’t know when she left.
At her feet, an unopened bottle of purified water sat quietly, with tiny water droplets condensing on the bottle, indicating it had been sitting there for a long time.
Xiahou Ming silently picked up the bottle of water and held it in her hand.
She held onto the wall and stood up shakily, her legs numb from being curled up for so long.
Like a ghost, she walked out from the shadows of the alley and joined the crowd on the weekend evening.
The streets are very busy.
Fashionably dressed peers were laughing and joking in groups of three or four, holding the snacks they had just bought.
Young parents were holding their toddlers’ hands, with satisfied smiles on their faces.
The most popular love songs were playing on the store’s speakers.
None of this has anything to do with her.
She just walked around aimlessly, like a lonely soul excluded from the world.
When she passed the alley where the “Black Hole Video Game Room” was located, she subconsciously stopped.
The crooked neon signs at the door hadn’t lit up yet, but she couldn’t move an inch.
‘Why?’
She asked herself.
‘Why did my world become like this in just one week?’
Yu Yuhui said she was a butterfly.
That transformation was a rebirth.
‘But will the butterfly feel happy when it breaks out of its cocoon?
Or was it just a long and painful torture with skin torn and bones broken?’
Ling Yicai said that she was a patient.
She wants to heal her.
‘But why would she use that method… to “treat” me?
I shouldn’t have pushed her away.’
After becoming such a horrible state, the only person who was still willing to take care of her and even her crazy mother was Ling Yicai.
‘But…’
Whenever she thought of Ling Yicai’s eyes filled with paranoia and fanaticism last night, and that forceful kiss in the alley, her stomach churned.
A sharp roar of an engine interrupted her thoughts.
Several modified motorcycles whizzed past her, carrying several flamboyantly dressed men and women, laughing loudly as they sped off into the distance, leaving the smell of low-quality gasoline in the air.
Xiahou Ming watched their disappearing backs.
‘Are they…free?’
She suddenly felt dizzy, her body reaching its limit due to the mental tension of the whole day.
Her eyes went dark and she staggered to her knees.
The mineral water bottle in her hand also fell out and rolled twice on the ground.
She fell to the ground, gasping for breath.
She saw her hands supporting herself on the concrete floor, her five fingers slender and pale.
She saw the outline of her chest drooping slightly due to her leaning posture.
‘—Who am I?
—Am I Xiahou Ming?’
This thought exploded in her mind like a thunderclap.
She reached out, grabbed the bottle of mineral water that had fallen to the ground, and roughly bit open the cap with her teeth.
Then, she poured the cold liquid on her head.
The water poured down from the top of her head, soaking her hair and cheeks, flowing down her neck into her collar, bringing a cold sting.
She gasped violently, and her confused vision gradually became steady.
Water gurgled out from the overturned bottle, winding its way across the uneven ground, reflecting the dim light of the evening sky.
She wanted to see her face clearly in the small puddle.
See clearly who she really was.
But she could see nothing.
There was only a blurry and distorted reflection.
“…Let’s go home.”
A voice said to herself in her heart.
When she pushed open the shabby wooden door, her mother was waiting anxiously in the room.
“Xiaoya!
Where have you been?
You scared me to death!”
Her mother rushed over and grabbed her hand, but immediately felt the cold dampness on her clothes.
“Why are you soaked?”
Her mother looked her up and down in panic.
“Hurry!
Take off your wet clothes!
You’ll catch a cold!”
While mumbling, the mother began to take off her wet clothes with swift hands and feet.
She did not resist.
Soon, the only thing left on her body was the white underwear that Ling Yicai bought for her.
When her mother saw the unfamiliar women’s underwear on her, she was stunned for a moment, and then a relieved smile appeared on her face.
“That’s right, girls should wear girls’ clothes.”
She nodded with satisfaction.
“Hurry, go dry your hair.”
Xiahou Ming didn’t listen to what her mother said.
She just walked into the kitchen naked.
The debris on the ground had been cleaned up, and there were still some vegetables that Ling Yicai had bought, placed alone on the stove.
She silently began to wash rice and vegetables, then lit the gas stove.
The cold air pressed against her exposed skin, and every time she bent down and stretched out her hand, she could clearly feel the unfamiliar restraint on her chest and the pulling on her shoulders.
This set of underwear, like a torture device, constantly reminded her that this body no longer belonged to her past self.
At the dinner table, her mother seemed to have no appetite.
“Xiao Cai came back once before,” she whispered to Xiahou Ming, “and took away all her things and swept up all the broken dishes on the floor.”
“Did you…have a fight?”
“She also left this for you.”
Her mother took an envelope from her pocket and handed it to her.
Xiahou Ming opened the envelope.
Inside were ten neatly stacked ten-yuan bills.
‘Is it the pocket money she saved bit by bit?’
Xiahou Ming recalled that before she became a girl, Ling Yicai always used various excuses to secretly give her money.
At that time, she always accepted it with a curse, and then turned around and used it to buy medicine for her mother.
Her heart seemed to be pulled by something.
“Mom, we’re fine.”
She put the money away and said softly.
After dinner, her mother went back to her room to watch TV.
Xiahou Ming sat alone in front of the empty dining table.
Her eyes fell on the aluminum lunch box forgotten in the corner.
She didn’t know if Ling Yicai didn’t see it when she left, or if she simply didn’t want to touch that woman’s things.
The food inside is still there.
Xiahou Ming stood up and brought back the cold lunch box.
She opened the lid.
The dish that seemed delicious yesterday has turned into a disgusting, weirdly colored sticky substance after more than thirty hours of fermentation.
There was even a thin layer of gray-green mold on it.
She looked at the box of “rice,” picked up the chopsticks and reached in.
She remembered that the day before yesterday, she had laughed at her for “frying the eggs too hard.”
‘This one seems… not overcooked.’
What kind of mood was Yu Yuhui in when she made this meal?
She thought.
‘If…if I hadn’t come home yesterday.
If I went to the rooftop.
What will these dishes taste like?
Will the egg be like the one I make myself, slightly burnt on the outside but still smooth and tender on the inside?
Will those dried radishes no longer be so salty, but have just the right sweetness and crispness?’
With an expressionless face, she used her chopsticks to pick up a large mouthful of the unrecognizable food and put it into her mouth as if it were a normal dinner.
The taste that came from the tip of her tongue was not what she had imagined.
There was only a strong, sickening bitterness mixed with sourness and mold.
Nausea.
It’s totally inedible.
A drop of warm liquid slid from the corner of her eye without warning and fell into the box of disgusting food.
Then, the second drop, the third drop…
She didn’t stop.
She ate and cried at the same time, her tears mixed with the food, crushed numbly by her, and then mixed with saliva, she swallowed it forcefully.
It seems that as long as she finished eating this lunch, she could fill the emptiness in her heart.
It seems that as long as she swallowed this “punishment” completely, she could get back that only “connection.”
Tears kept falling, blurring her vision.
In her stomach, the smell of corruption began to surge wildly.
She couldn’t bear it anymore.
She pushed the chair away, rushed to the trash can in the corner, and bent down.
“Vomit—!”
With a burst of heart-wrenching retching, she vomited out everything she had just eaten, along with all the grievances, pain, and confusion of the whole day, into the dim room.