Sheng Min never told Li Xuan that he had met with Zhao Jizhe.
Yet somehow, he felt like Li Xuan already knew.
That night, as Li Xuan wrapped an arm around his waist, he let out a faint sigh. “You…”
“Hmm?” Sheng Min, half-asleep, looked up.
Li Xuan didn’t say anything else. After a long time, he simply lowered his head and kissed Sheng Min’s brow. “Sleep.”
They never mentioned it again. Never brought up that person.
One morning, in the study, Sheng Min saw a transfer agreement. Li Xuan was practically giving away that internet café to Zhu Zhou for a fraction of its worth.
“Zhu Zhou’s doing a good job. I don’t need the café anymore. It’s almost New Year’s, let’s consider it his year-end bonus.” Li Xuan signed the papers right in front of Sheng Min.
Sheng Min nodded in understanding. Li Xuan looked at him for a few seconds, then put down the pen and pulled him into an embrace.
As they left the house together, Li Xuan stopped at a delivery center to mail the signed agreement.
Back in the car, he asked casually, “Do you have rehearsals this morning?”
“Not this morning,” Sheng Min shook his head. As the performance date approached, rehearsals had actually decreased, giving actors more time for personal reflection. He had planned to study the script more. “Why?”
“Come with me somewhere.”
“Okay.” Sheng Min agreed without hesitation, then asked, “Where to?”
This time, Li Xuan was silent for a little longer. After exiting the tunnel, he said, “The funeral home.”
Upon hearing this, Sheng Min quickly realized, and then noticed that Li Xuan was indeed dressed more formally that day. A black shirt and coat—though most of his clothes were dark-colored, so Sheng Min hadn’t noticed at first.
“Do we need to buy flowers?” Sheng Min asked, glancing at his own camel-colored coat.
“I’ve already ordered them. We’ll pick them up later,” Li Xuan replied, noticing his gaze. He pressed his lips together. “It’s okay, you don’t need to go inside. I actually don’t want you to…,” he paused, seemingly unsure of how to continue.
Sheng Min watched him for a moment, then gently placed his hand on the one Li Xuan had resting on the steering wheel. He spoke softly, “I understand. I’ll stay with you.”
The funeral home was located on the outskirts of the western city, a place Sheng Min had never been to before.
Various white buildings were scattered among the trees, looking from a distance like a grand garden.
But as they got closer, the wails became impossible to ignore. In the midst of grief, when the pain of losing loved ones hadn’t yet had time to fade, the air here felt heavier than in a cemetery, filled with the scent of death.
The memorial service for Shu Xin was held in the deepest part of the forest, in the memorial hall.
Li Xuan stopped the car, sat for a moment, unbuckled his seatbelt, and reached into the backseat to grab the white carnations.
“I’ll be back soon.”
“Okay.” Sheng Min smiled at him. “I’ll wait here. I won’t go anywhere.”
The memorial hall was filled with wreaths and pine trees. There was no mourning music playing, only a pianist in black sitting in one corner of the hall, playing a widely known Scottish folk song.
The song spoke of long-gone days, asking when they would meet again, and where.
Li Mingge stood by the memorial table. Behind him, the couplets and funeral banners fluttered in the wind.
Compared to the last time they met, he looked much more composed, his crazy expression gone, dressed neatly, but it was hard to say which state was better.
At this moment, his meticulously combed hair had turned completely white, his frame thin and frail. It was hard to imagine that a living person could look so withered and aged.
He stood tall, but it was obvious that it was a struggle. The people who came to pay their respects whispered some words of comfort, true or not, but Li Mingge didn’t seem to react much. He gave a numb nod in acknowledgment, until he saw Li Xuan.
In an instant, his whole body stiffened, as if the air had turned into thin ice, freezing him in place.
Soon, someone noticed where his gaze was fixed and looked toward Li Xuan’s arrival.
“Who’s that?”
“Is that their son?” The response was unsure.
“Wow, he’s grown up… I saw him when he was little.” The person who asked clicked their tongue in disbelief.
“Really?” Another person questioned, “A son wouldn’t be showing up now…”
They didn’t dare say more, but it was obvious that Li Mingge’s state didn’t seem like one of a father meeting his beloved son.
Naturally, these murmurs couldn’t escape Li Xuan’s ears, but he ignored them, not caring.
He didn’t even look at Li Mingge.
Instead, he slowly walked to Shu Xin’s photo. The woman in the black-and-white picture was still very young, in her early twenties, full of grace and vitality, her youth shining brightly.
Even now, she remained the most striking figure in the entire memorial hall, the red satin draped over the urn the only bright color in the otherwise gray-white scene.
How absurd.
“My mom was so beautiful when she was young.”
The real Li Xuan had once said this to him.
She was indeed beautiful, Li Xuan thought, lowering his eyes. He slightly bent down and bowed, then gently placed the white carnations next to Shu Xin’s photo.
The scent of the flowers and the dew lingered on the back of his hand, and even as he reached the car, it hadn’t completely faded.
But when Sheng Min took his hands in his, all the slight discomfort vanished.
“Weren’t you supposed to wait inside the car?”
“I wanted to see you earlier.” Sheng Min pulled his slightly cold hands to his lips and kissed them through his mask. “Shall we go back?”
“How about we walk for a bit?” Li Xuan thought for a moment, took his hand, and placed it in his coat pocket. “There’s been a lot going on with the company lately, and I rarely get out. It feels like it’s been a while since we’ve walked together.”
Sheng Min paused, then nodded. He subtly adjusted their hands, interlocking their fingers.
Apart from the main road, there were many narrow stone paths in the funeral home. They chose a random path, not paying attention to direction, just walking slowly.
Winter was the peak season for death, and the funeral home was filled with people coming and going. You could hear voices and footsteps, but they were separated by the trees, faint and indistinct. At the end of the narrow path, there was no one else in sight.
The weather was nice that day. After the sun came out, the fog quickly dispersed. The air was still cool, with a hint of icy freshness, and the places where few people passed had less trimmed vegetation. In the cold winter, the vegetation grew thicker than elsewhere.
At first, they didn’t speak. As they walked, Li Xuan seemed to remember something, suddenly laughing. When his eyes met Sheng Min’s, he shrugged. “…I didn’t notice, but lately, our walks are always in places like this.”
Cemeteries, funeral homes… places near the boundaries of death.
Sheng Min smiled. “It’s not so bad. It’s quiet.”
He wanted to add, after all, with you, anywhere is the same. But he felt they both knew that, so it wasn’t necessary to say.
They continued walking slowly, eventually circling back. The green trees parted again, revealing the white roof of the memorial hall.
Li Xuan’s car was parked in the lot across from them, and now, a person was standing in front of it.
Li Xuan noticed the person, and his steps faltered for a moment, but as he walked over, he didn’t hesitate.
“I didn’t expect you to come,” Li Mingge said after a while, casually glancing at their joined hands before his gaze returned to Li Xuan.
“I didn’t expect it either,” Li Xuan said indifferently.
Li Mingge showed no particular reaction to this somewhat casual response. With Shu Xin’s death, his “madness” seemed to have improved instead. His emotions appeared more stable than at any other time in the past few months.
“Do you have nothing to say to me?” he asked Li Xuan.
Li Xuan replied without much sincerity, “My condolences.”
“My condolences…” Li Mingge closed his eyes briefly. “Everyone has been saying that to me lately, but no one tells me what I should actually do to grieve properly… In the first two days after she passed, I stayed by her side all the time. At night, I kept dreaming of her. I thought about reaching out to you… but she told me to let it go… And besides, I didn’t know what use it would be to find you anymore.”
Li Xuan frowned slightly, but Li Mingge seemed lost in thought, as if he was just mentioning it in passing, his mind already elsewhere.
“Then came the cremation…” He seemed to struggle with the word, pausing before continuing, “Since the cremation, I haven’t dreamed of her even once…”
His aged face trembled slightly as he asked, cautiously and carefully, “Do you think it’s because she doesn’t want to see me?”
“That’s possible,” Li Xuan replied. He felt Sheng Min tug at his hand, so he pressed his lips together and fell silent.
Li Mingge, however, gave a faint, weak smile at those words. “You really haven’t changed at all… When I first found you all those years ago, you were just like this.”
“I don’t think there’s any need for us to reminisce,” Li Xuan said.
But Li Mingge acted as if he didn’t hear and continued, “Lately, I’ve been thinking… If I hadn’t sought you out back then, would everything have turned out differently? But today, I’d rather see you than him. Children come into this world to settle debts with their parents. If he had never been born, his mother wouldn’t have had to suffer for so many years. If she hadn’t tried to save him, she wouldn’t have found you, and everything that followed wouldn’t have happened…”
His words were disjointed, more like rambling. The more Li Xuan listened, the more he felt like sneering. He cut him off, “Why don’t you just say she shouldn’t have married you in the first place? Weren’t you the root cause of it all?”
“Of course.” Surprisingly, Li Mingge didn’t argue. Instead, he said, “I know. If she hadn’t married me, she wouldn’t have given birth to that child.”
Was today’s outcome really just because of that child?
Li Xuan couldn’t understand Li Mingge’s thoughts. He exchanged a glance with Sheng Min and saw the same helplessness in his eyes. But neither of them tried to correct Li Mingge—there was no point.
Li Mingge claimed that Li Xuan hadn’t changed, but he himself hadn’t either. He always needed someone to blame. Zhao Jizhe had been sent to prison, and in his dreams, Shu Xin told him to let go, so now he had turned to blaming a dead person who couldn’t argue back.
Some things never change.
“But I couldn’t not marry her—she was too wonderful.” Li Mingge was lost in his emotions, unable to pull himself out. “…When I met her, I had nothing. I was a poor student who had to borrow money for tuition. She was the teaching assistant for my physics class, the vice principal’s daughter, the department chair’s most prized graduate student.”
As he spoke, a smile involuntarily appeared on his face, as if he could still see Shu Xin from over twenty years ago—brilliant, beautiful, a physics prodigy so talented that no one could ever claim she had only succeeded because of her parents.
So many people admired her—why had she chosen him? Even now, Li Mingge couldn’t understand.
He had grown up with divorced parents, barely scraping by on the meager income his mother earned from odd jobs. He had been poor.
But Shu Xin was a star, the daughter of a high-ranking government official. A girl from a family like that would never be expected to settle for a struggling young man. Over and over, her family had tried to break them apart in the most predictable ways.
Even when Li Mingge finally secured a teaching position at the university, her family still refused to accept him, looking down on his poverty and fearing that their daughter would suffer.
‘We raised her like a princess, giving her everything she ever wanted. You’re a good person, but love alone isn’t enough. Hard work doesn’t change reality. Sweet words are easy to say, but what can you actually give her?’
They questioned him like this while constantly arranging blind dates for Shu Xin with men who were their equals in status.
Her parents had been dead for over a decade now, yet their scornful voices still echoed in his memory.
“Back then, I swore to myself that I’d make them regret it. I’d prove to them that Shu Xin didn’t choose the wrong person. Whatever she wanted, I would give her!”
For the sake of this promise, Li Mingge resigned from his teaching position and founded Xingge Optics.
He had never done business before, but Shu Xin had supported him completely. The first investment came from her. Even the company’s core patents were her work. She had originally specialized in astrophysics—a field she loved, grand and poetic—but she had changed directions to study optics just for Li Mingge. She poured years of effort into it, only returning to her own field after the company was well established.
He had thought they could finally realize their dreams, but then she got pregnant. Everything fell apart.
“We should never have had that child,” Li Mingge insisted.
The child hadn’t been planned. They had wanted to wait a few years, but when she became pregnant, Shu Xin didn’t want to terminate it, so they had the baby. Yet from the moment their son was born, it was as if misfortune followed.
He had watched Shu Xin cry, his heart aching, and even recalled the words her parents once said—had her choice been a mistake after all?
No, impossible. He refused to believe that. He was the one who loved her most, the one who was meant to be with her.
Besides, he had money and power now. He could give Shu Xin everything she wanted, just as he had promised.
She wanted to save their son, so he searched the world for a bone marrow match.
But in the end, their son died, and his brilliant wife lost her mind. That didn’t matter—if she recognized someone as their son, Li Mingge would make sure they stayed.
Whatever she wanted, he gave her! He had done everything right, perfectly.
Then why… Why did Shu Xin still have to die?
Li Mingge was completely absorbed in his emotions, speaking with deep sincerity, while Li Xuan, expressionless, looked even more indifferent in contrast. “You don’t need to tell me any of this.”
“Who else can I tell?” Li Mingge’s face was full of sorrow. “Someone has to remember her.”
“Does she still remember your love?” Li Xuan’s lips twitched slightly. “Your father- and mother-in-law must regret looking down on you back then. If they knew in the afterlife, they would surely—”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence before Sheng Min tugged at his hand again.
“What right do you have to question whether I loved her?!” Li Mingge caught the mockery in his tone and became agitated once more.
Not love her? Of course, he loved her.
The child, whom he had once regarded as a misfortune, had given such an accurate assessment back then — his love was so self-righteous.
“President Li.” Sheng Min sighed and spoke before Li Xuan could, saying something seemingly unrelated. “I think your wife had deep feelings for you.”
At this point, Li Mingge’s emotions, which had been fluctuating, abruptly settled down.
“She always listened to me…” Li Mingge’s voice softened abruptly, though his words were difficult to say. “She always agreed with me… That day, I told her to wait for me, and she said okay…”
A murky tear slid down from the corner of his eye.
“Why didn’t she wait for me…”
He repeated the question over and over, then turned and slowly walked away, disappearing as unpredictably as he had arrived.
By strict count, Li Mingge was just past fifty, yet from behind, he looked like a man who had aged beyond his years.
“We should go back.”
Li Mingge walked to the side of the memorial hall, where a kind staff member helped him. Li Xuan withdrew his gaze and said to Sheng Min.
Sheng Min nodded, but though they said they would leave, neither of them moved.
After a moment, Sheng Min glanced around. Seeing no one passing by, he took off his mask and leaned in to kiss Li Xuan.
After they parted, he raised his hand, his thumb gently rubbing the slight crease between Li Xuan’s brows. “Are you okay?”
“There’s something…” Li Xuan was silent for a moment, then spoke in a roundabout way. “I never told you… but it’s not really that important…”
His tone was calm, yet he still paused midway. Sheng Min studied him for a moment before taking the initiative to say, “I know.”
“You know?” Li Xuan was momentarily surprised.
“I was only guessing, but now that you’ve said this, I feel like I must be right.” Sheng Min smiled. “And then?”
Li Xuan lowered his gaze and took a test report from his other pocket, handing it to Sheng Min.
The lymphocyte toxicity test showed a result—he and Shu Xin were not a match.
Sheng Min read it quickly, then put it away without handing it back.
“Would you have done it?” After a moment, he asked softly, “If you were a match.”
“No.” Li Xuan seemed to have already thought it over a thousand times. He didn’t hesitate, his answer light but firm.
Sheng Min smiled. It was hard to say whether he believed him or not, whether he felt relieved or not. He only leaned in and kissed him again, wrapping his arms around his back and whispering with a sigh, “You are, without a doubt, the softest-hearted person I have ever met.”
