Chapter 44: “Safe Travels” Part 2

She was an extremely young woman.

Wearing a blue baseball cap with a low brim, she handled the gas nozzle with crisp efficiency. Her features blurred in the glow, her outfit a midriff-baring tight tank top and cargo pants.

Her pale golden hair, casually tied back, refused to stay put. The wind tousled it wildly, scattering it in the dawn light—like something vibrantly alive within reach.

The bright light seemed to melt gold. Kong Liyuan propped her face lazily against the glass and watched this utterly ordinary scene unfold beyond her pitch-black one-way window.

The unfamiliar song looped several times in the convertible idling beside her.

Finally, the young woman finished fueling up, got back in, and remained a blur through the window.

The engine roared to life from the white convertible, vibrant and exuberant.

Like a fire crackling wildly. Kong Liyuan listened through the sealed window, watched through the hazy glass.

The black car and the white one stood side by side for the briefest moment, like a fleeting delineation of boundaries.

The repressed black car held a hazy figure inside; the flamboyant white car contained someone whose very voice rang clear and distinct.

Then the white car shot forward, carrying a splash of orange-red brightness—the bouquet of California lupine on the driver’s seat.

And this young woman, who seemed soft and gentle at first glance, unmistakably lifted her chin toward them the instant her engine revved.

As if she could see Kong Liyuan watching from the shadows, though clearly she couldn’t.

The young woman raised her hand high in a bright, carefree wave, leaving behind a thoroughly exhilarating farewell.

Kong Liyuan guessed that this farewell was directed merely at a car she had briefly shared the road with.

The woman’s carefree laughter flowed across the hazy, thin glass, suddenly sharpening into clarity.

In that fleeting second, Kong Liyuan thought calmly: This world was too unfair. Why were some people so skilled even at goodbyes in a mere encounter, while for others every parting felt like utter death?

The flying golden hair kicked up a cloud of dust, trailing flamboyant exhaust that slashed a bold, heavy stroke through the hazy blankness before charging out of sight.

Li Qiao returned to the car after finishing her call, long after the white convertible had departed.

Kong Liyuan had glanced casually through the cracked door then and noticed:

This dawn was, quite perfectly, golden.

Daylight gradually emerged, enveloping everything relentlessly and sweeping away that brief golden gleam. Li Qiao glanced at her through the rearview mirror, pondered for a moment, then smiled.

“Do you think it’s better to be Li Yi, or to be Kong Liyuan?”

On the first day of the journey, Li Qiao had asked this question inside the sealed, pristine car.

Now, as the journey ended and Los Angeles daylight climbed the sky, chasing away the bloody dawn—

Li Qiao had arrived in a battered pickup amid the chaos. Even in the confusion, she still looked at Kong Liyuan that way, gazing through the swirling white mist at the bloodied, ragged figure Kong Liyuan had become, and smilingly repeated the same question.

Amid the dying embers of a Red Wine Burst-Bead Cigarette, Kong Liyuan calmly recalled one thing.

—from the very beginning, she had slashed her own cheek, swapped clothes with some random passerby, walked barefoot along a desolate highway, carrying the lingering “Li Yi” still unwilling to leave her body, and flagged down this young woman’s car…

All just to share the same stretch of road with her.

She had known all along that this journey was destined to end in Los Angeles. She had also known that it could only—and would only—end this way.

She believed the young woman traveling with her knew it too, or else they wouldn’t have shared the road for so long.

But why had this short stretch of highway kept them together for so long? Why did it leave such a lingering aftertaste?

Was it because the remnants of Li Yi had been worn away completely by the road, or because the true Kong Liyuan had been drawn out along the way?

Kong Liyuan couldn’t tell the difference, nor could she provide an answer. She could only respond to Li Qiao’s initial question amid the hazy drift of cigarette smoke, as if her soul had left her body.

“Wanting to carry the flower on this journey, yet afraid it’s poisonous and dare not touch it; wanting the wind to carry the flower’s free fragrance, yet needing to buckle its seatbelt.”

“I want to know what kind of person this will turn out to be.”

This seemed to be one of the qualities that had first captivated Kong Liyuan. Li Qiao quietly tapped the steering wheel, waiting for her to continue.

Kong Liyuan stared at the cigarette in her hand, now burned down to the filter. It scorched her fingertip, but she still refused to let it go.

“And no matter what I say, she believes me—without any reason.

She doesn’t ask about my past or what comes after the endpoint. She sees me, and she believes only in the instant I appear before her. Pretty strange.”

“Did you tell her a lot of lies, then?”

“You know I didn’t. I never had anyone to find in the first place. I wasn’t injured, and the endpoint wasn’t Los Angeles.”

“What about besides that?”

Kong Liyuan pinched the still-hot cigarette between her fingers and said nothing.

“No other lies, right? I figured as much,” Li Qiao said with a laugh. She didn’t really consider it lying.

Kong Liyuan did have someone she was looking for, and she had been injured—though Kong Liyuan herself wouldn’t acknowledge it. And if Li Qiao pointed that out, Kong Liyuan would probably accuse her of splitting hairs.

She was an incredibly stubborn person.

“She’s a very tolerant one, then,” Li Qiao concluded with a grin.

Kong Liyuan clearly didn’t care for the assessment. She lifted her eyelids faintly and fixed Li Qiao with a stare—a silent, unequivocal dismissal. She didn’t answer the second question either, but it didn’t matter. Li Qiao shrugged it off. She was sure Kong Liyuan would find the answer in her own heart eventually.

“Hey, what happened to that necklace your mom left you?” Li Qiao asked suddenly as she started up the rusty red pickup truck.

She remembered that before this, Kong Liyuan had always worn the necklace—even though there were rules against bringing sharp objects inside.

Kong Liyuan insisted on bringing it every time, arguing her case at length until Li Qiao, parched from the debate, finally agreed to keep it safe. Then Kong Liyuan would gaze at her with utmost calm and say in the coldest tone:

If you lose it, I won’t survive these three days.

That had been her line for over a decade, never changing. So why would something so precious vanish after just one trip?

The rusty red pickup merged into the noisy flow of traffic. Kong Liyuan stubbornly clutched the cigarette that was on the verge of burning her, her hoarse voice scattering in the gradually warming breeze.

“Naturally, it went where it belonged.”

That was an unusual answer. Li Qiao perked up with interest, wondering what “where it belonged” could mean. She glanced at Kong Liyuan, who looked like a pool of congealed blood in the wind.

Kong Liyuan said nothing. When the cigarette butt finally slipped from her grasp, her gently lowered lashes trembled uncontrollably.

After another long silence, she finally wrapped up the burned-out butt.

She slumped lazily against the car window, staring out at something—or nothing—her face sharp and listless in the breeze.

“Looks like it went to a good place,” Li Qiao said softly.

Kong Liyuan offered no reply.

Li Qiao let out a faint sigh. Ever since Kong Liyuan had walked out of the hospital, she’d known this calm would return.

It meant her mild manic phase had ended. As a professional psychologist, Li Qiao easily recognized the signs.

A brief period of elevated mood compared to usual, dramatic ideas, even becoming someone entirely opposite to one’s normal self… These were common traits of mild mania.

They were also the features Kong Liyuan displayed during this time. But Li Qiao preferred to call the Kong Liyuan of this phase Zoe.

If someone happened to encounter only this version of Zoe—if they were drawn only to her during these three days—it would be both great fortune and great misfortune.

In this psychological state, Kong Liyuan possessed boundless charisma and vitality, more alive than ever.

Like a cigarette burning wildly, lit for a fixed time, every mark on its length counting down the seconds clearly.

Each time, destined to burn for only three days.

As someone who had witnessed this shift a dozen times, Li Qiao knew how cruel it was—and how powerless she was to change it. Sometimes, she even found the manic Zoe more appealing.

The dawn of June twenty-first was always the key marker for the phase’s end. Over the years, it had never deviated once.

Even though Li Qiao desperately hoped for some variation, if only to prove it wasn’t so rigidly predictable.

But it never had. Not until this time, when a slight change seemed to have occurred.

Before this year’s manic phase began, some movie character’s shadow had crept into Kong Liyuan’s body—that woman named Li Yi, like a fuse buried deep in her heart.

So instead of forcing herself into the sanatorium, she made a completely whimsical decision: to share the road with a woman she’d met along the way.

And even after the mania ended, that other woman seemed to have picked up some of this slowly smoldering vitality.

Did these qualities, so uncharacteristic of Kong Liyuan, come from Li Yi… or from that unfamiliar young woman?

Li Qiao couldn’t quite figure it out.

But she had a strong feeling that it wasn’t a bad thing—and that this journey marked a crucial turning point.

She had always believed that the name Kong Liyuan implied a fierce, expansive freedom. She shouldn’t live so suspended and empty.

Better to be a splash of bright red blood than a puff of lifeless smoke.

Li Qiao thought this as she glanced once more at Kong Liyuan in the passenger seat amid the crowded, bustling traffic.

“Why do you keep staring at me?”

Kong Liyuan asked abruptly, as if she’d noticed Li Qiao’s overly lingering gaze.

“Huh? Was I staring?” Li Qiao laughed, then slowly withdrew her eyes with a sigh.

“I was just wondering—if Los Angeles weren’t the endpoint of this road, things might have turned out better.”

“The endpoint could only be Los Angeles,” Kong Liyuan said calmly. “We were just two strangers sharing this stretch of road. That’s more than enough.”

Any further, and it would only sour.

“You really think so?” Li Qiao countered.

Daylight grew brighter, the road noisy and congested. Kong Liyuan closed her eyes wearily, offering no further answer.

Dim light seeped beneath her eyelids, flowing slowly like the hazy boundary between dream and waking.

Her last cigarette burned out, and with it, the painkillers finally wore off. The wound in her waist and abdomen throbbed viciously, promising sweet, unrelenting revenge—or punishment for her lapse.

It nearly made her break out in cold sweat.

Yet she curled up stubbornly, refusing defeat. Even if her face was deathly pale, at least this pain would sharpen into crystal clarity through the long, endless daylight.

Li Qiao seemed to notice her exhaustion. She asked a few questions and checked the bandaged wound under medical care, finding nothing seriously wrong. She didn’t press further.

Instead, amid the endless stream of cars and shafts of golden sunlight sliding overhead, she casually flipped on the radio.

Surprisingly, it was a familiar station, right at the familiar segment. A familiar song—”California Dreamin'”—began to play, announced by a familiar host in halting Chinese:

“Today is June twenty-first, the birthday of a lady from Los Angeles. She wants to say to a lady whose name she doesn’t know…”

Kong Liyuan’s head rested against the car window, her sweat-dampened hair tousled wildly by the daylight breeze. Amid the sharp pain, she forced her eyes open, gripped by a sudden illusion—

That clumsy voice suddenly turned into a crisp, high-pitched feminine one.

And beyond the car window, a white vintage sedan kept pace alongside them.

A streak of golden dawn hovered at the edge of her vision, as if about to drop right onto her eyelids. The young woman sprawled in the passenger seat of the moving car, traveling parallel with her.

Gazing tirelessly, painlessly, a bouquet of orange-red California lupine in hand. She smiled languidly and said,

“I checked the weather forecast ahead of time. It says the temperature in Los Angeles today is under thirty degrees. Even if there’s some discrepancy, I doubt it’ll hit thirty-seven degrees.”

Golden light streamed into the depths of her eyes. She struggled to lift her gaze and saw that golden hair—hair she had stroked so many times—floating in the air, clean and radiant, almost within reach at that moment.

With her last ounce of strength, she bit her lip to keep from passing out.

The young woman seemed to be drifting in the wind still, weaving through illusory streams of traffic and halos of light, her smile unwavering. Those hazel eyes brimmed with a soft, untamed wildness.

“So, safe travels.”

Kong Liyuan closed her eyes, letting out a faint, soft laugh. How could there be such a person in this world, someone with a heart so open and clear?

Even their farewell was so romantic and expansive, making her own barren, desolate heart feel all the more timid and ordinary by comparison.

Amid the sharp, relentless pain, she laughed aloud. For a fleeting second, she recalled those words spoken by Sasha in Tommy Butler’s Catching Falling Leaves:

—We’re too obsessed with endings. This world holds so many great lives and beautiful loves to witness and cherish, but if the outcome isn’t perfect, we label it a tragedy.

That was the essence of the young woman’s aura: part unflinching clarity, part romantic innocence.

This person didn’t dwell on endings.

She cared only whether their time together had been vibrant—and yet she had still granted Kong Liyuan this complete, luminous goodbye.

Kong Liyuan could never manage something like that. And as if to counter such a grand farewell in kind, the pain from the wound at her waist surged to an unbearable peak in the next instant.

All her senses dragged her downward, like ashes settling after a fire burned out.

In her daze, she opened her eyes once more. The hallucination had vanished. Outside the car window stretched only the rush of traffic and a wind that whipped at her ears, as if eager to swallow her whole.

The world blurred into gold. In the depths of her fading consciousness, Li Qiao’s voice emerged, faint and indistinct.

“Hey, what a coincidence—this person…”

She sounded surprised. After a long pause, she finally finished the thought.

“Shares your exact birthday.”