Chapter 22 Part 1

“You’re nothing special after all!”

Yin Yu: “…Is that so?”

Yin Yu wasn’t angry. Instead, a subtle, unreadable smile flickered across her face. “I thought there might have been some misunderstanding back then. It seems I was wrong. But perhaps this is for the best. There’s no need to cling to past affections.”

She said it lightly, as if dismissing a trivial matter.

But the more Zhu Ming listened, the more something felt off. The Yin Yu before her felt too real, so real it made her a little uneasy. Suddenly, she didn’t want to continue playing along with this illusion.

Zhu Ming reached out and seized the woman’s slender, elegant neck, her voice vicious. “You’ve got nothing, don’t have any tricks, and you’re still putting on this act?! Change back right now, do it!”

The pulse of blood and the delicate texture beneath her palm felt unnervingly real.

Yin Yu’s hand gently rested on Zhu Ming’s, prying Zhu Ming’s fingers away one by one.

Her strength was considerable, a match for Zhu Ming.

Zhu Ming stammered, “Ch-Change back…”

Yin Yu just gazed at her with a silent smile. Her clear, limpid eyes were full of incredibly complex, vivid emotions. Sparkling sunlight, rippling water—the person before her was no flower in a mirror.

Zhu Ming flung Yin Yu’s hand away as if burned. In one fluid motion, she hopped off the table and spun around, heading for the exit. She forced a dry laugh. “Heh, what a shameless illusion. I’ve exposed it and it still refuses to dissipate. Room 2007… where’s Room 2007? Never mind, I won’t bother looking. I have things to do. Bye.”

Her words came faster and faster as her pace quickened. Hearing the sound of a chair scraping behind her, she abruptly lunged forward, trying to jump directly off the roof—Thud!

Mid-air, Zhu Ming was bounced back. She tucked into a roll, springing to her feet on the opposite side of the rooftop. Her face darkened. It was just her luck that Xiao Cheng’s barrier, meant for trapping others, had turned into her own cage.

A familiar voice drifted towards her, unhurried. “Are you afraid of me?”

Zhu Ming shot back without thinking, “Bullshit!”

She sprang up, abandoning all pretense. Wheeling around, she raged at the woman standing in the center of the rooftop. “Things are different now! I’m not the worthless nobody I used to be! Did you think you could keep playing me like a fool?!”

“Then why the guilty conscience?” Yin Yu tilted her head, long hair cascading down, as if genuinely curious.

Blustering, Zhu Ming retorted, “Who has a guilty conscience?! I was just testing you! It’s perfect you showed up. I’ve been wanting to capture and interrogate you for ages. It’s a shame you ran away so fast back then.”

Yin Yu let out a low chuckle. “If you really wanted to know something, you could have just asked me.”

“Ask you?” Zhu Ming didn’t believe a word from that deceitful mouth. Or perhaps, the deep-seated doubts she’d kept buried were indeed making her prickle with guilt. But she would never show weakness in front of Yin Yu. “If you were willing to talk, why did you just run off back then? You hid for seven whole years. What else is there to say? Your schemes were exposed long ago!”

Yin Yu looked at her with a hint of exasperation. “Mingming, I never intended to hide from you. The timing just wasn’t right. There was no need to appear before you.”

Zhu Ming huffed, annoyed. “Don’t call me Mingming. It makes me sick. I was too naive back then, actually thinking you were a good person. It only hit me later—how could someone like you ever fall for someone as lonely and stupid as I was? You only approached me because of my background, wasn’t it?”

Yin Yu considered this, then nodded, smiling. “I suppose you could say that’s not wrong.”

Zhu Ming: “…” And she actually had the nerve to smile at that?

Fine. Zhu Ming laughed out of sheer fury. “Well, I’m truly honored. Thank you for going to so much trouble just for me.”

Yin Yu looked up at her gently, using that same gaze Zhu Ming had been unable to resist then and still couldn’t now. A gaze that seemed to try to understand the depths of her heart—gentle, accepting, understanding, and moved. No one could resist being looked at like that.

Zhu Ming stepped back, bumping into the round table. The whole situation felt absurd. “What’s your real purpose in showing up again? Why not just come out and say it?”

Yin Yu took a step forward. Her gaze towards Zhu Ming was like a bank of fog, laced with playful mockery. “Purpose? If I must have one… you should know it. It’s the same as it was seven years ago…”

In the tense, charged air, the cold sneer on Zhu Ming’s face froze.

Seven years ago, Zhu Ming wasn’t in the Flower Capital. Her life trajectory, her living situation, her personality—they were completely different. If you found her old classmates, they probably wouldn’t believe the current Zhu Ming was the same lonely, slow, ostracized girl from before.

All that change began entirely with Yin Yu.

When she was 18, Zhu Ming was attending her senior year of high school in a small city. She came from an orphanage. Isolated and slow to react, but at least able to communicate and learn, so the orphanage director insisted she attend a regular school.

Her classmates all knew she had some intellectual deficiency and spread rumors that she was mentally ill, claiming the mostly expressionless Zhu Ming would become a psychopathic killer. They said mentally ill people weren’t held legally accountable for murder, so they had to keep their distance!

But if it were only keeping their distance, Zhu Ming would have welcomed it with open arms.

Then Yin Yu appeared. Her presence was like a safe harbor, offering Zhu Ming a place where she could finally let her guard down completely.

She never found Zhu Ming foolish or hopeless. She was gentle, patient, and never showed a hint of impatience. She was the most sincere one, genuinely listening to Zhu Ming’s feelings and believing her—she was different.

“So many people say I’m sick, that I have severe auditory hallucinations,” Zhu Ming had said. “But I don’t think they’re fake. I’m not a psychopath.”

Only Yin Yu accepted her. As the school nurse, she offered a different, validating opinion. She believed Zhu Ming wasn’t ill.

Yin Yu would compliment her. She took her to try delicious food she’d never tasted before. She gifted her flowers from the treetops and perfect fallen leaves. She bought her headphones to block out the noise of the world. She promised to take her to the amusement park on her birthday. She helped her with extra lessons after class. She would watch her daydream about the future and smile gently—a future that, without a doubt, had Yin Yu in it.

Under Yin Yu’s warmth, Zhu Ming achieved scores better than she ever had before and got into university. Though those scores meant little to most people, for Zhu Ming at the time, it was a clear injection of hope into her otherwise gray life.

Zhu Ming fell in love with her, almost irresistibly. How could she not fall in love with someone like Yin Yu? Yet… it was all just an illusion.

After receiving her acceptance letter, Zhu Ming couldn’t bear the thought of leaving for another city and being separated from Yin Yu. She made a decision. She would take their relationship to the next level, making them inseparable.

That rainy night, she gathered every ounce of her courage and went to find Yin Yu. And what happened?

She drank a bottle of some beverage left on the table and promptly lost consciousness. Even in her drugged sleep, she could feel a pain like her whole body was exploding.

She would never forget the agony of that night, the feeling of being burned alive. She would never forget the sensation of every cell in her body erupting, teetering on the brink of death.

If it had only been physical pain, she could have endured. But in her hazy delirium, Zhu Ming overheard a conversation between Yin Yu and someone else.

Before that day, she never knew Yin Yu had such strange friends. She never knew what shady dealings Yin Yu was involved in privately. All she heard was:

“Why do you not simply extract Zhu Ming’s soul directly?”

“The time has not yet come. I wish to make some adjustments to the plan.”

“Have you truly fallen in love with her?”

Yin Yu’s light laughter was the reply. “Love? Can beings like us even fall in love with humans? It seems like a novel experience. Unfortunately, I have not. What I feel for her… would not qualify as love. Hm? Awake already?”

Those voices looped endlessly in Zhu Ming’s mind. With agonizing effort, she pried open her heavy eyelids to look at Yin Yu. Perhaps it was the ordeal she’d just endured, on the cusp of life and death, but she saw through the human shell, glimpsing a sight she would never, ever forget.

It was her nightmare, one that haunted her for a full seven years. The greatest terror she had ever experienced.

At that moment, overwhelmed with fright, Zhu Ming blacked out again. When she woke, everything seemed to have returned to normal.

She was lying in Yin Yu’s home. A vase on the windowsill held white lilies touched with rainwater. Yin Yu was in the kitchen chopping something. Recalling the words and the ordeal of the night before, Zhu Ming could still feel a phantom ache deep in her bones. She slipped out of bed on silent tiptoes.

She realized suddenly that she actually knew nothing about Yin Yu—nothing of her past, none of her friends.

Zhu Ming passed Yin Yu’s bookshelf and saw the strange titles: Book of Changes, Spiritual Analysis, Nine Hundred Divine Powers… She hadn’t thought much of them before, but now they sent a chill down her spine.

Finally, she saw a piece of paper with the Eight Characters of Birth written on it. And her own name.

Helplessness and despair crushed Zhu Ming.

The love she’d dreamed of was fake. Her lover was fake. Everything was fake. Not only was it all fake, but Yin Yu was actually planning to kill her.

The passionate love of her youth shattered into a million pieces right there.

She didn’t know how she managed to keep her composure and walk out of the bedroom. Yin Yu, in comfortable house clothes, placed a freshly made breakfast on the table and wrapped her in a gentle embrace. “What’s wrong? Why are you unhappy?”

Zhu Ming finally reached her breaking point. The agony of being deceived and toyed with surged up from her stomach. A wave of nausea and revulsion hit her, and she nearly vomited.

She shoved Yin Yu away with all her might and fled through the door in a panic.

Yin Yu did not chase her.

She ran all the way downstairs. Breathing the fresh air, her frantically pounding heart finally started to calm. The ground was covered in puddles. She turned back hurriedly, catching sight of Yin Yu standing at the window, watching her leave from a distance.

The gentle, tender smile on the woman’s face had vanished completely. Her gaze was cold and distant.