Chapter 18: Lucky
“I’m so glad my mother found someone she likes. But my luck seems to have run out. This time, I can’t seem to catch that ray of light. I’m sorry, I’m unfilial. Please don’t think of me in this life.”
Su Xi wrote her name at the end of the letter, without a surname… just the single character “Xi.” This was the name her mother had given her on the day she was born. It had the meaning of hope, and it meant that she would have a bright and brilliant future.
She folded the letter and put it away. She looked at the phone in her hand. The call log was full of missed calls. Her plan this time was full of loopholes, and it was only a matter of time before she was discovered. She was already very satisfied with everything that had happened now, and she no longer asked for anything else.
Su Xi went back to the bedroom. The boy in the dark room was still sleeping soundly. It seemed that he had been very tired these past two days. She couldn’t help but smile. She got into bed and curled up in the blanket. Her movements were very careful, but she still woke up the other party.
Su Yu frowned. He couldn’t open his eyes. His drowsy voice was gentle and soft. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just went to the bathroom. Go back to sleep.”
Su Xi smiled and placed a kiss on the boy’s forehead. The gentleness enveloped his consciousness and pulled the boy back into his dream.
She gazed at the boy’s defenseless sleeping face in the hazy moonlight. The other party’s breathing was even and gentle. Her slender, onion-like fingers ran through the boy’s thick, smooth black hair. The soft hair was messed up and scattered. The lust, after being vented, was stripped away. Another desire emerged and began to stir.
The hand behind her back was holding something hard and cold under the pillow. The bright moonlight was mercilessly reflected by the smooth surface, and a silver glint was extinguished in the darkness.
…
How many days had she imprisoned the boy? Four days… no, five days. She had been off her medication for five whole days. Actually, she had never seen a psychologist. She knew best whether she was sick or not.
She had thought that the night before their departure would pass quietly, but her crimes seemed not to be so easily washed away. She had a colorless nightmare…
The colorful colors in her eyes suddenly dimmed, and the colors scrambled to fall off her retinas. She… suddenly couldn’t see the light.
Everything familiar had turned gray. She couldn’t see the dark green mold on the ceiling of the old house, couldn’t see the blue-purple medicine applied to her wound, and couldn’t see… the white light left by the boy when he left.
This made her feel scared. She had fled her familiar home and gone to a city that was completely strange to her.
Getting into Qingchuan University was just a byproduct of her plan. Hatred supported her as she dragged her broken body, barely surviving like an unconscious corpse. On the day of her father’s funeral, the people who attended the funeral all thought that she couldn’t accept the fact and comforted her carefully.
Actually, she was just uncontrollably excited, her whole body trembling. But the strange thing in her chest seemed to be just a final flicker. It had pounded for a little while and then completely stopped. Not long after, it began to emit a foul smell of decay and withering.
She had lost her hatred and couldn’t find a new hope.
But human nature is greedy. After experiencing the colorful and beautiful, who could endure the boring?
The days in Qingchuan were not as good as she had imagined. The world without color was really painful. It was a gray and dark place everywhere. She was confused by this emptiness, which was as if her internal organs had been hollowed out. It was different from the fear of death, but a hunger for some unknown desire that could not be satisfied.
She was studying clinical medicine at Qingchuan University. The content was very tedious and boring, but she had always been very smart and learned everything quickly. Her theoretical scores were always at the top of her class, and her good looks had also won her the admiration of many boys.
She was not interested. The bright red roses that her suitors sent her had no color in her eyes, like handmade works made of white paper.
Fortunately, luck was on her side. Her life would always encounter a little bit of light to live on when she was about to give up. She was a person who was chasing a flame in the vast dark night, and she was even enjoying it…
Clinical medicine was a subject that required a solid foundation of theoretical knowledge and a lot of practice. Not long after school started, she came into contact with the knowledge of dissection for the first time.
During her first dissection class, her dissection subject was a rabbit, a snow-white, living, and breathing thing. While the other students were still hesitating, she began to dissect on the dissection table in a corner, following the steps taught by the teacher.
She tied the rabbit to the dissection table, and the sharp blade slowly cut open the rabbit’s soft belly. Blood quickly trickled out, dyeing the rabbit’s snow-white fur red. There was no sign of life.
She suddenly remembered her father lying in the hospital. When the doctor announced that the rescue had failed, her gaze passed through her mother’s fingers and saw the man lying motionless on the hospital bed.
The little thing in her chest had come back to life. It was pounding wildly in her chest, making her ribs ache. Her blood was also boiling, rushing in her blood vessels.
A living life with a past and a future was thus taken away by her. She realized this bloody fact, and then she saw a little bit of color appear on her retina. It was red, not the red of a rose, nor the red of a sunset, but the red of blood, the color left by the warm liquid that had flowed through her palm.
She would have ended this life hastily because she couldn’t stand the boredom. But fate had given her a hope to live on, just like the ray of light that the boy had brought her.
But the chance of finding the boy’s back in the vast sea of people was so desperate that she would rather fall into this short and simple pleasure than continue to live such a numb and boring life.
She went to the dissection room more and more frequently, like a child who had tasted candy for the first time. She felt addicted. Things that could bring pleasure were always addictive.
She would complete the bloody and perverted things that her classmates found disgusting on the dissection table in a corner by herself. She would even friendly help other classmates. She would end a bright red life with a knife, and before she had time to wash the blood on her gloves, she would look up and say to her classmates with a smile.
“See, it’s very simple. Just stab it in and pull it out.”
But slowly, the small animals that had been anesthetized and had no room to struggle could no longer satisfy her. She became empty again.
There were classmates in her class who were jealous of her. They spread rumors that she was a complete pervert. So they all began to feel that her cold gaze, which she would cast on her classmates after she had dissected the animals on the table, with a knife still dripping with blood in her hand, was really creepy.
The fact was not so, at least at that time… she had never had such a thought. But she was as if she had been called out and fell into an extreme self-doubt. She began to be afraid that the rumors might one day become a reality, that her desire would really expand and explode, and the fear in her heart would solidify bit by bit. She frequently fell into nightmares from then on.
Later, she dropped out of school. She hated her father and despised the man’s reckless behavior of bringing pain to others. Even if the blood of the evil person was flowing in her body, and the violent genes were ingrained in her bones, she would never point the sharp tip of her knife at the innocent people around her.
Collapse often only takes a moment. It was probably a wake-up call after a nightmare. In the dream, she had really found the boy, but she was just a spectator in the story. She saw herself and the boy go through a reunion, acquaintance, and love in the dream.
Everything between them was very smooth. But the content of the dream suddenly changed. The colorful colors disappeared again, and the gray and gloomy became the background of the dream. In the dream, she was holding a knife, her face twisted and deformed. She held the dagger tightly in her hand and pressed it against the boy’s heart.
Because the boy had deceived her. He only liked the beautiful her, not the ugly and self-conscious ugly duckling of the past. The boy was just being hypocritical with her. She wanted to kill the boy, to cut open his stomach with a knife, and to preserve him in a solution to make a non-decaying specimen.
Later, she really did it. The tip of the knife stabbed down fiercely, cutting through the hazy and blurry halo in the dream. The evil and violent factors in her bones were boiling and cheering in her mind. She had killed her father but could not escape the evil genes he had left her.
Kill him… kill him… liar… kill him!
The warm, fresh blood couldn’t stop flowing out, passing through her wrist. Her world finally had color again.
The dark green mold, the blue-purple medicine, the white light the boy had left her…
They were all stained and defiled by the aggressive bright red. Her retina was a bloody mess. Her world was filled with a bleak color of violence and blood, as if it had already predicted her ending.
That morning, she sat up from the bed, her clothes soaked. She looked out the window through the curtains. The gray and heavy clouds were like a heavy stone, pressing on her heart.
She went out alone, with nothing but a very beautiful dagger. The dagger was secretly hidden under her mother’s pillow, and she had stolen it, naively wanting to kill her own father with her own hands. She had never told her mother about this. The other party only thought that it had been accidentally lost when they were moving.
She walked numbly in the deserted alley. The weather was gloomy, and it seemed that it was about to rain. It was good. It wouldn’t make her death look too ugly. She had always been a self-conscious girl who loved beauty.
A few female hooligans blocked her way, and she was immersed in the relief of impending liberation and couldn’t be bothered. She gave the other party everything they wanted, and she was calculating in her heart whether she would see the color of the blood flowing from her body. Then she squatted on the ground and waited for them to leave.
But she would never forget that ray of light that shone through the clouds.
The boy, dragging his suitcase, appeared at the entrance of the alley without any warning. He stood in front of her and reached out a hand to her, as gentle as when he had looked down at her and asked if she was injured more than a decade ago, so radiant…
Fate was always on her side, giving her hope when she was at her most desperate.
At that moment, she felt that she was really lucky.
