In the dark of night, the young man's pitiful voice resonated inside the room.
"Don't do this, Ranran..."
"This is insane! I can't take it anymore!"
"Sob sob, Ranran. You're so mean..."
Finally, the girl let out a voice that belied her impatience. "THAT'S ENOUGH, SHEN WU!"
Shen Wu stopped acting after being yelled at. He seemed to have been scared out of his wits as he looked at Wen Ran with a dazed expression. He might have been crying earlier, but on closer inspection, his eyes had not even turned red.
Wen Ran looked at him coldly. With a swish, she took out a bag of unripened fruits from his storage jade pendant and threw it mercilessly out the window.
"Sob..."
"Shut up," Wen Ran warned.
He closed his mouth and stared straight ahead.
Wen Ran could not stand the way Shen Wu cherished those worthless little things. When his insignificant stuff was thrown out, he acted as if his life was being sucked out of him. To make things worse, he just had to make those weird sounds that would only cause other people to get the wrong idea!
Wen Ran held the jade pendant in his hand as if he was holding the Imperial Jade Seal of the kingdom. Shen Wu felt so intimidated by her that he did not dare to move.
She took out another bag of steamed buns and threw it out of the window without hesitation.
Shen Wu's gaze followed the trajectory of the buns, and he pursed his lips into a thin line when he heard a plop in the water.
Wen Ran knew that Shen Wu was good at bluffing, and he would have definitely ignored her words if she did not personally watch over him.
Besides, he had been gathering all that stuff for God-knows-how-long, and a deep cleaning was long overdue!
In the end, Wen Ran walked to the window in front of Shen Wu, and extended her hand with the jade pendant before giving a little shake.
Everything was poured out in one go and was accompanied by the endless plopping sound.
Shen Wu suffered such a huge blow that his figure swayed as he looked at Wen Ran in disbelief. His face became so ashen that one would have thought he had lost all hope in life.
His pitiful and helpless look reminded one of when the White-Haired Girl was bullied by Huang Shiren, with Wen Ran playing the role of Huang Shiren. [1]
There was nothing else to throw, so Wen Ran put the jade pendant in his hand.
His hand trembled when she placed the jade pendant in it.
Wen Ran had seen all sides of him, from his demeanor in front of outsiders to his madman-like tendency when fighting. However, it was the first time he had seen him look so fragile, almost as if he would fall with a gust of wind.
However, her heart still did not soften.
Wen Ran placed her hands on her hips and warned him seriously, "You will have to throw away all your food if you store any broken limbs with them."
He sniffed and pursed his lips. "But why?"
"Why? Because it's unclean! Don't you have any common sense?"
Shen Wu had only one sentence, "Anything that isn't poisonous can be eaten."
Wen Ran marveled at how he managed to develop such a strange concept of food.
Wen Ran asked, "Didn't anyone teach you that you can't eat things that are unclean?"
He shook his head. "No."
Wen Ran could not figure out if he was telling the truth, but that was not the point. She crossed her arms again and said sternly, "Then I'll teach you. You need to be more careful in the future and not eat any unclean things."
Shen Wu's pitch-black eyes stared straight at her. "You shouldn't like me that much, Ranran."
Wen Ran was speechless.
"I know you don't want me to eat all this because you don't want me to get sick."
"What did you just say?"
Shen Wu then conjured a book out of nowhere, and it happened to be the same book he had picked up in the pear forest. He then pretended to flip through it, perused the notes jotted down on the paper, and said with a sudden look of realization, "That's what it means by 'feeling agony when the other person is hurt'."
Shen Wu sighed and said, "Your concern for me makes me feel so embarrassed."
The teenager was clearly expressing words of distress, but the pride that was practically overflowing from his bright eyes hardly looked like someone in distress.
"Alas, I am but a kind person who can never bring himself to reject a girl's request," he said helplessly.
Wen Ran watched in silence as he performed his act, after which she grabbed the book from his hand and smashed it on his face.
"Keep dreaming!"
Shen Wu caught the book that was thrown at him and he tilted his head slightly. "Are you shy?"
"As if!"
Wen Ran was so incensed by him that she stormed back to her room.
She was unsure if Shen Wu really had those dreams at night, but in any case, she was awoken by a nightmare in the middle of the night.
In her dream, everyone was telling her that Shen Wu was a good man who treated her very well. They insisted she would stand to gain a lot if she married him. Shen Wu even spoke to her with a deeply-affectionate expression, "Our love for each other runs deep, Ranran. There is no time like the present to consummate our marriage."
Wen Ran was startled awake by that.
'No, no, no! Am I somehow affected by that madman Shen Wu and came under the illusion that I liked him?'
She sat on the bed and slapped her face hard to wake herself up. Once she was finally awake, she recalled what had happened in her dream and felt a twinge of pain in her abdomen.
She wanted to continue sleeping, but the plopping noise from outside was disturbing her sleep. Unable to endure it any longer, Wen Ran got off the bed, pushed open the window, and yelled at him, "Don't you dare try fishing it up again, Shen Wu!"
The young man who was squatting on the shore could not care less about his image as a cultivator and held a simple self-made tool in his hand to try and fish something from the bottom of the water.
He stopped when he heard Wen Ran's voice.
After a long while, he slapped his neck and killed a mosquito. He then looked at the fierce girl through the window. "Ranran," he said softly, "I'm hungry."
'What kind of freak is he!' Wen Ran was appalled.
She regarded herself as a big eater, but not to his extent.
Wen Ran wanted nothing more than to hug her head and scream her anger. She gritted her teeth and thought to herself that she would not have been able to sleep well if she did not deal with his hunger.
"Come here!"
Shen Wu carried the simple bamboo tools he made and walked up to her in a few strides.
Wen Ran stuffed a packet of dried meat into his hand through the window. "Here! Don't eat anything that's unclean."
That was the last bag of dried meat she had brought out from the Immortal Ascension Mansion and she could feel her heart ache when she handed it to him.
Shen Wu's eyes sparkled. "It looks like you really do like me, Ranran..."
Wen Ran mercilessly slammed the window shut.
The next day, one of the disciples that came to deliver breakfast looked curiously at the little red dot on Shen Wu's neck. "What happened to your neck, Senior Brother Shen?"
Shen Wu touched his neck that was still a little itchy. "I stayed up too late to play with my junior sister."
The young disciple seemed to have understood something and his face turned red.
Wen Ran, who had just pushed the door open, had blue veins popping out on her forehead.
TN:
[1] The White-Haired Girl (白毛女) is the titular character from an opera of the same name who was abused by her landlord Huang Shiren (黄世仁). Huang Shiren had earlier forced the white-haired girl's father into selling her in order to repay the debt owed to him.