An Jie paused, his voice a little hoarse. Zui She silently poured him a cup of warm water.
“As for what happened after that, you know the gist of it.” An Jie moistened his lips. His gaze fell onto the table and he said quietly but with measure, “We killed that man, and we thought he died.”
“And then?” Zui She asked. What happened next was what he was most interested in.
“And then?” An Jie chuckled lightly. His face was pale, perhaps from fatigue or perhaps from something else. He looked oddly worn-out. “And then everything should have settled down; the avengers got their wish, the lovers got together, everything was better than good. But one day, I discovered that someone was doing something behind my back.
“After that, I started believing in karma. It wasn’t that what went around didn’t come around, it was just that the time hadn’t been right. That person’s methods were the same as how I had taken down Li – imperceptible penetration, slowly corrupting the newly adjusted like a disease, hiding amidst crowds like a ghost harboring ill will… I really didn’t think- didn’t think…” An Jie’s voice lowered. His fingers grasped onto the edge of the cup, the tips pale and trembling from pressure.
“Why did Du Lang do it?” Zui She finally asked. Even he didn’t know if he was asking An Jie or himself.
An Jie recalled what his investment professor had told him. In this world, there was nothing that was impossible. The events with the smallest possibilities were the real killers.
There was nothing truer, nor more exasperating than that.
“I wanted to know so badly back then too, but the problem wasn’t why it happened, but now that it had happened, what was I to do?” An Jie cleared his throat as if the words had caught there, choking him into a quiet sigh. “If it happened now, I wouldn’t do anything. Don’t you think that all of it back then was extraneous? What was the point in fighting over them? Back then, Mu Lian cried and begged me to take her away from that shoddy place, even if we were to hide ourselves in a distant mountain, or traverse the seas…”
“If you had listened, you wouldn’t be An Yin Hu.” Zui She’s fists tightened before loosening. He almost had the urge to hug this person, even if it would provide little comfort.
“I couldn’t just grin and bear it back then.” An Jie laughed a little, as if in self-mockery. “A woman… You’re always saying I’m doing this and that for a woman. It was only after I realized this little girl who didn’t even like to raise her voice was the one who saw things the clearest out of all of us.”
“She didn’t want to see, and I also didn’t want to see, you and Du Lang – our own brothers – fighting to their deaths.” Zui She paused. “If it wasn’t for Shui Shi…”
“If it wasn’t for Zhai Haidong betraying me at the very last moment,” An Jie completed coldly.
“They promised me they wouldn’t hurt you. Shui Shi said that even when he did wound you at the very end, it would be a small wound less than half a inch using a blade wiped down in anaesthetic, that it wouldn’t have any major side-effects…” Zui She seemed to realize something and paused. He looked at An Jie a little awkwardly. “S-sorry…”
An Jie looked at the cup in his hands; a small ripple blew across the its surface, shattering his blurred reflection. He didn’t react much. In a terrifyingly flat declaration, he continued, “It wasn’t anything major, I only slept about 32 hours. And then Mu Lian was gone.”
The room fell silent. Zui She didn’t know what to say and bore the overwhelming silence. After a long time, he asked softly, “Then… Mu Lian, how did she…”
“I put sleeping pills in her milk but she didn’t touch it. Afterwards, she snuck out to find me. She wanted to stop everything… but the people guarding me didn’t know her and she was caught in friendly fire.” An Jie’s expression was static, as if he was reciting another person’s story. “In the end, I was the one to kill her. It’s no-one else’s fault.”
Everyone talked about crying tears of joy, but then what happened when one felt a sorrow this extreme? Zui She suddenly recalled the back of the man who had carried the girl’s body and walked out, step by step, as if all light had abandoned him. At that moment, that person had been ruined.
Resigned, sorrowful, and hateful hearts were nothing; what could they do to a man? But there was a saying that there was no greater sorrow than a heart that could not rejoice. They thought that someone as rational as An Yin Hu could never feel so strongly. But sometimes, it just happened to be the rational ones who were the most destructive and reckless when they fell.
The extinguishment of one person’s life wasn’t the issue of one person alone.
“No one dared to stop you back then; even Du Lang only watched as you left.” Zui She said suddenly, “Yin Hu, it’s all in the past now.”
“I haven’t finished, what are you getting all excited over?” An Jie looked at him with a smile in his eyes. He suddenly reached out. “Give me a cig.”
Zui She was a little dazed. He reached into his pocket to feel for his cigarette packet as he asked, “I haven’t seen you touch one in a while, didn’t you quit?”
An Jie smiled and didn’t respond. He lit the cigarette and took in a deep breath. But it had been ten years since he had last touched one after all and he ended up choking himself; he coughed his lungs out while water flooded his eyes. He laughed and waved Zui She away when he tried to pat his back. “Cough cough… It’s fine, cough, it doesn’t matter. What kind of crappy cigarette is this, so pungent? Did you buy it to burn a hole in your lungs?”
“And you’re sabotaging yourself at this age because?”
An Jie shook his head. He held the lit cigarette between his fingers and watched as it slowly burnt away. “I haven’t finished yet. What happened after was something you don’t know of. Zui She, let me tell you, there are all sorts of unimaginable things in this world – just look at that Discovery Channel: it keeps finding all these small secrets to dig behind only to be made fun of by the whole nation. All they’re missing is a director with good eyesight and–” He shook his head and paused. “That day, I carried Mu Lian home, placed her on the bed, wiped down her face and body, and tucked her in. I wasn’t in a particularly stable state either and insisted on flattening out the sheets, just in case she was uncomfortable. But there was this one place that just refused to settle down.”
Flicking the ash off his cigarette, An Jie’s voice was like a thread on the verge of snapping. “And I thought: say, I can’t deal with He Jingming, I can’t kill Zhai Haidong, if I can’t even flatten some bedsheet, what’s the point in me living?”
“Yin Hu…”
Yin Hu waved his hand and as he spoke, he started laughing a little. “You don’t know how funny it was. That bedsheet refused to be flattened, so I pressed down on it again and again and if one hand didn’t work, then I’d use two hands, and then finally… After this little exercise continued for the entire afternoon, that crack in my brain miraculously healed itself. I lifted the sheet off the bed and found that there was a diary underneath. Locked.”
“Mu Lian’s?”
“How did you know?” An Jie blinked and shook his head. “I was going a tad haywire and didn’t figure the stupid thing could be opened with just a pen filling so I took out the toolbox from under the bed, grabbed an axe, and forced it open. Guess what was written in it.”
Zui She had never heard of this part of the story before, but he had no time to consider it; the way An Jie comfortably made fun of himself made him more and more uneasy.
“Mu Lian wasn’t actually from the Cui family. Apparently, her parents didn’t have the money to raise her when she was young, and passed her on to a distant relative. That was the Cui family.” An Jie pinched the end of the burning cigarette, took the cup of water, and gulped it down. “I only found out then that her surname was He.”
Zui She’s expression froze.
An Jie continued, “And it turned out she had an older brother of the same blood named He Jingming. Don’t you think that’s funny? The final words she wrote were to beg me to not kill that He bastard… If I noticed how suspicious He Jingming had been just a few nights later, if I turned against him just a few nights later, she would have told me. Sometimes I even get carried away in my own thoughts and wonder why hadn’t Zhai Haidong killed me with that stab? Wouldn’t life be much easier if he had?”
Zui She wanted to say something but his brain was a pile of mush and not a word could come out of his mouth. An Jie sat quietly to the side, waiting for him to process everything. This joke was so absurd, the cliche greater than Niagara falls, hitting him head on and whirling him away to the ocean without a chance to breathe.
“So you fell sick, then left without saying a word?”
An Jie raised two fingers. “No, I really didn’t. I swear on the Chairman himself, I didn’t plan on leaving without a word; He Jingming illegally detained me in a small attic and held me there for three years.”
Zui She stood up suddenly. “What did you say?!”
“Exactly what you heard,” An Jie sighed, drawling carelessly. He reached out to gesture. “It was fairly creative. You’ve never seen an attic made out of iron, right? It looked quite like a bird cage. I was only allowed to be on the top floor and the entrance was beneath me: a metal door locked behind six locks. Oh yes, and the most creative thing was that thing was shrouded in something that kept out all light, making it completely dark inside – what do you think was going through He Jingming’s head?”
“He shut you… in darkness for three years?”
“Isn’t that so refreshing? …Do you have common sense? Complete darkness for three years would leave me blind. He Jingming was pretty humane: he allowed me some time in the light everyday; personally though, I preferred the dark. There was also a special sort of anaesthetic in the food that allowed me to move around, but kept me extremely weak so I couldn’t harm him. He was the only one I was allowed to see for that entire time.”
“What… what do you mean?”
An Jie shrugged, looking a little disgusted. “Nothing much, just that every time I got food, every time I drank water, went to the bathroom, showered, changed, He Jingming would give me light just so I could move about easier, then take a full tour. The most disgusting thing was that this perv kept muttering next to my ear just how long he had been thirsting after me for, how much his heart ached when he saw Mu Lian, how much he had to go through. I couldn’t hear anything else for the entire day, and it kept going on and on until even I started to believe I was just a heartless Chen Shimei1.”
“He Jingming he… he….” Zui She lost his ability for words.
An Jie shook his head. “Wouldn’t you agree that I would age much faster after being tormented by him like that for three years? Afterwards, thanks to him, I gained two skills: one is that I can now see in the dark, the other is that I’m now basically immune to your normal anaesthetics. But I also ended up with an issue: claustrophobia. Once, I went out and got trapped by a landslide. The phobia acted up then and I almost went out gloriously there, just like that. When I got out, I went to go find a hypnotist and was finally able to push it down a bit, but now I’m addicted to travelling around too. If I don’t get to go on a trip every once in a while, I get uncomfortable all over.”
Zui She looked at him in shock. “You… Why didn’t you tell me earlier? Why didn’t you…”
An Jie stood up and slung his jacket over his shoulder. Hearing that, he smiled a little. “But I told you just then. It was something I was planning on keeping a secret for my entire life… Black Frames found Mo Jin today; Li’s getting impatient. I’m guessing the time for a gathering of old friends is here, so you should be prepared for all those little awkward moments that are going to happen; you’re my only remaining friend, I don’t want these petty things of the past to hurt you.”
He suddenly reached out and ruffled Zui She’s head. “What? You’re like a bear that just lost its father. I’m leaving… It’s been so many years already, it’s fine now. If I had known that just spilling everything would make me feel better, I would’ve gone to some anonymous hotline. To think I let that half-assed psychiatrist scam me.”
Saying that, An Jie waved his hands and left, leaving Zui She standing dazed on the spot, topped with his ridiculous hairstyle.
After a while, a secret side door opened with a creak. Mo Cong walked out silently.
Author’s Notes: I’m about to be late to class, ciao.
1Chen Shimei is a Chinese opera character and a byword in China for a heartless and unfaithful man. He was married to Qin Xianglian, but Chen Shimei betrayed her by marrying another woman, and then tried to kill her to cover up his past.
Vera & Luci Translations 