The dishes and wine were brought into the private room. Xie Guan and Huo Mingjun each took a cup—one filled with wine, the other a white porcelain bowl filled with sweet soup—and clinked them together, saying, “Congratulations on finishing the shoot.”
“Thank you.”
Xie Guan downed half a glass of wine in one gulp, making Huo Mingjun worried about his drinking habits. However, since they finally managed to have a meal together, Huo Mingjun sensed that Xie Guan was not in a good mood. To avoid dampening the mood, he urged Xie Guan to eat a few bites of the dishes first to fill his stomach, so he wouldn’t get too drunk and cause trouble.
Huo Mingjun had almost no temper with Xie Guan now. He appeared extremely stern and imposing outside, but in front of Xie Guan, he felt at ease enough to drop that demeanor. Luckily, Xie Guan was not the kind of person who made a fuss over every little thing. Although he was occasionally a bit moody, he was reasonable most of the time. He never took Huo Mingjun’s declaration of wanting to pamper him seriously, just feeling that Huo Mingjun was good to him, so he wanted to reciprocate that kindness. Both of them carried a mindset of indulgence and concession, but there was no sense of mutual respect. Instead, they seemed more clingy than ordinary friends.
Huo Mingjun looked at Xie Guan and asked, “You’ve been finding excuses to avoid seeing me before. What happened today? Did something upset you?”
Xie Guan lethargically raised his eyelids and teased him with a glance, “Nothing. I just wanted to see you. Is that not allowed?”
Huo Mingjun used a separate pair of chopsticks to pick up the last shrimp and handed it to him.
“Of course, it’s fine. But you’ve got ‘I have something on my mind’ written all over your face. Come on, share it with me. I can be your soul mentor.”
Xie Guan silently finished the shrimp, and raised his glass. Huo Mingjun understood, touching his small bowl against Xie Guan’s glass. Xie Guan tilted his head back and downed the full glass of wine in one go.
“Drink a little less,” Huo Mingjun couldn’t help but advise, “This wine has a strong aftereffect. Be careful not to have a headache tomorrow.”
“Huo Mingjun,” Xie Guan’s eyelids drooped as if he was slightly drunk. He called his full name, “Isn’t it good the way we are now?”
Huo Mingjun’s heart skipped a beat, but his facial expression remained unchanged, like unmoving marble. “What do you mean by ‘the way we are now’?”
Xie Guan explained, “I mean this occasional sharing of a meal, occasionally meeting, occasionally caring about each other. No matter how long it takes in between, when we meet again, we can still have a lively conversation. This kind of relationship doesn’t involve too much worry. We don’t need to share secrets, and even if the relationship breaks, it won’t cause… um, significant harm.”
Huo Mingjun’s suspended breath quietly loosened. He raised his hand to adjust his collar, pondered for a moment, and said calmly, “Most relationships between people are like this. But the fact that you asked me this means that deep down, you know we can’t achieve that.”
“You might be scared by what happened before, afraid of repeating the same mistakes, not wanting to get too close to people. It’s normal, it’s okay. It’s precisely because of this that I want to explain the whole story to you clearly, so you won’t have any lingering doubts.”
Xie Guan remained silent. Although he didn’t explicitly say it, his attitude was equivalent to tacit agreement.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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Xie Guan nodded, “Creating a substitute, it shows deep emotions, doesn’t it?”
“His name, which you know, was Cheng Sheng,” Huo Mingjun’s lips curled slightly, his smile carrying a hint of bitterness, “He was from Cheng Family Village in Pingpu County, H Province.”
“The year I met him, I was 22 years old. Before that, I never went to Cheng Family Village and didn’t know him at all. I spent less than five days with him; it can’t even be considered a relationship. But it was this person who took a bullet for me and fell off a cliff because of a car accident.”
“You…” Xie Guan’s pupils slightly contracted, he involuntarily lowered his voice and asked cautiously, “What happened?”
Huo Mingjun gazed into his dark eyes, feeling like he was being stared at by a small creature with watery eyes, his heart inexplicably softening, “That year, I was kidnapped to Cheng Family Village.”
“The specific reasons involved family secrets, so I won’t say more. In short, due to various obstacles, the Huo family didn’t launch a rescue operation immediately. So, I was taken to Cheng Family Village outside B City and hidden there on Daxing Mountain.”
“The kidnappers kept me in an old house in the village. The courtyard walls were high, surrounded by desolate wilderness. With hand and leg cuffs on me, I couldn’t escape. I couldn’t wait for a rescue and didn’t know what the kidnappers intended to do to me. My mental state was very poor. When I was on the verge of collapse on the third day, a child suddenly climbed over the courtyard wall from the outside.”
“He came in to retrieve a ball and wasn’t afraid when he saw a big live person tied up in the room. He curiously peeked through the window for a while and then ran away.”
Xie Guan chuckled at his choice of words, “Rural kids, they’re all bold.”
“I’m not exaggerating. Cheng Sheng was really a bit naive,” Huo Mingjun pointed to his temple, “Probably due to some kind of developmental delay. He must have been around fourteen or fifteen at that time. His intelligence was clearly lower than kids his age, with slow reaction time, and it took him a long time to understand things. I found out later when I talked to him. That day, after he picked up the ball and left, I thought he might have been scared and clung to a faint hope that ‘maybe he will tell the adults at home.’ Who would have known that after nightfall, he actually climbed over the courtyard wall again. And… brought me a steamed bun.”
Huo Mingjun seemed to smile at this point, but it quickly turned into a melancholic expression. “There used to be a blind old man living in that room, and Cheng Sheng often secretly brought him food, and the old man would tell him stories. Later, he passed away, and the house was abandoned. But Cheng Sheng still came here, until one morning he saw someone inside, probably mistaking me for the new ‘blind old man.'”
“I knew at that time that I probably couldn’t wait for someone else to come and rescue me. Cheng Sheng happened to be by my side, so I explained the situation to him bit by bit, hoping he could help me escape. We planned this for four days. Cheng Sheng would loiter around the front yard every day. The kidnappers saw him as a not-so-bright kid and didn’t pay much attention to him. They often sent him to run errands to buy cigarettes and alcohol. On the fifth night, Cheng Sheng brought them a bottle of homemade Kaoliang liquor. The two kidnappers were knocked out by that bottle, and Cheng Sheng snuck in to steal the keys and then helped me escape towards the highway outside the village.”
“I didn’t trust the people in the village, and I don’t have any experience surviving in the wild. We couldn’t hide in the mountains, so my only hope was to stop cars on the highway for help. That night, the largest rainstorm in over a decade hit the area. Cheng Sheng and I walked down the road along the highway, but not a single car would stop. Meanwhile, the kidnappers somehow woke up, realized I escaped, and drove after us.”
Xie Guan listened anxiously, “What happened then?”
Huo Mingjun’s calm expression finally couldn’t be maintained. A hint of deeply suppressed pain slowly emerged on his face. The nightmares of countless nights and the piercing agony from all those years seemed to weigh heavily on him, but in the end, it dissipated into a light and fleeting sigh.
“—I was desperate.”
“I just wanted to escape from those people, but I forgot they had guns.”
The kidnappers were all drunk. The first shot missed, and the sound of the gunshots was drowned out by the rain. In extreme fear and panic, Huo Mingjun didn’t notice.
But Cheng Sheng, who was running ahead of him, did.
“Although Cheng Sheng reacted slowly when communicating with others, his motor nerves were well-developed, and he had an almost innate intuition for danger. He suddenly stopped in front of me. I was still running, so the second shot hit him from behind me. He threw himself in front of me to take the bullet.”
“With that, he pushed me back a few steps, and the third shot pierced through my right lung lobe. If I were still standing in my previous position… that shot was originally aimed at my heart.”
“The road was slippery because of the rain, and that section happened to be a sharp turn. The kidnappers couldn’t control the car, and they came crashing towards us. Everything happened very quickly that night, and many details I haven’t completely figured out to this day. I didn’t know where Cheng Sheng was hit, how he sensed the danger, and the last scene in my memory was him pushing me towards the inner side of the mountain road. Then, right in front of my eyes, he was hit by the out-of-control car and flew off the cliff together with it.”
Xie Guan was profoundly shocked. He opened his mouth but couldn’t find any words. He remained stunned for a long while before suddenly lifting his head and downing the contents of his cup, whispering, “I’m sorry.”
He suddenly realized that in the face of life and death, all the grudges, conflicts, misunderstandings, and arguments that seemed as vast as the sky and deep as the sea all appeared so ordinary and insignificant.
Being alive itself was a stroke of luck.
Huo Mingjun shook his head, indicating it was okay. “When I woke up, I was already in the provincial hospital. At that time, my second uncle took care of the aftermath. The police found the car that fell off the cliff, damaged and burned, with three charred bodies nearby – two adults and a teenager around fifteen.”
“That’s basically the entire process of that incident.”
Huo Mingjun picked up the small bowl on the table and took a sip of the now cold soup. “For the past ten years, I’ve been thinking about why people form emotional connections, why they are willing to sacrifice for each other. It could be blood ties, interests, or even hormones. But why did Cheng Sheng sacrifice his life to save me without knowing who I was?”
“Even the most unbreakable blood relationship might not reach such a level. Yet, a child who didn’t understand my identity did it.”
“Maybe it’s not as complicated as you think,” Xie Guan said. “Don’t measure children with the standards of adults. Perhaps he just liked you and wanted to play with you, so he tried so hard to protect you.”
“Not measured by interests, but based on individual feelings, right?” Huo Mingjun said, “The question you asked earlier, this is my answer to you.”
“The extent to which our relationship is maintained, the closeness or distance, the depth of our friendship, cannot be measured with beakers and test tubes. My initial contact with you did have an ulterior motive, but what happened later has little to do with it. Now, I just hope you live a better life.”
Xie Guan muttered, “What you said isn’t exactly ‘solely based on individual feelings,’ it should be ”doing whatever you feel like.'”
Huo Mingjun choked on his words unexpectedly, almost losing his breath. Yet strangely, with Xie Guan’s remark, much of the shadow in his heart dissipated.
“I’m telling you all this not to whitewash my actions. I was wrong to hide it from you and deceive your feelings. So now, I’m explaining the ‘ulterior motive’ to you again, hoping for your forgiveness.”
“I… I don’t really want to know,” Xie Guan said.
“I didn’t spend much time with Cheng Sheng, only a few days. I knew nothing about his background, family, or even who he was as a person. When I received news of his death, I was in the hospital and didn’t see the body personally.”
“In other words, I only heard about it but didn’t witness Cheng Sheng’s death.”
“Wait a minute,” Xie Guan sensed something amiss in his words. “What do you mean?”
Huo Mingjun didn’t answer his question and continued, “I only remember his appearance, but he was still young at that time, and his features weren’t fully developed. As he grew older, there might have been some changes. That’s why I felt a sense of familiarity when I saw you but couldn’t be completely sure. My understanding of Cheng Sheng was limited to a few characteristics I observed. You may have noticed, not only in appearance, but in certain aspects, you and he coincidentally resemble each other.”
“Most importantly, your head injury and Cheng Sheng’s accident happened in the same year and month.”
Xie Guan was completely shocked by the implications in his words.
Huo Mingjun said, “Approaching you wasn’t about considering you a replacement, but—”
He looked deeply into Xie Guan’s eyes.
“We suspected that you might be Cheng Sheng.”
I still don’t know wheter Cheng Sheng and Xie Guan are the same person and I don’t know what to believe. Thank you for the chapter!
💖💖💖💐
The truth has been revealed to Xie Guan! Looking forward to seeing his reaction now. But this should give him a bit more understanding of the entire situation, to say the least.
Hence the plot thickens! Maybe he is cheng sheng, but maybe he’s not. Can’t wait to find out ><