A car crash had broken Fei Chengyu's brain, and he'd lain in bed for over three years, turning into a crab that had been in the fridge too long—his body was whole, but he had wasted away to a hollow shell.
Fan Siyuan had stolen him away; never mind dragging him around from place to place, he'd also nearly turned him into a human bomb, and presumably had been rather inconsiderate towards him during the whole process. The police and EMTs had dug him out of the "underground air-raid shelter," and Fei Chengyu had shown signs of being on his last gasp. He struggled at death's door for a few months before he finally croaked.
At this time, the mighty uproar attracted by the major case during the Spring Festival had gradually left the city residents' social media. Fei Chengyu's last breath was taken in the total ruin of his reputation. Death was too good for him; it couldn't attract anyone's attention. Fei Du took charge, unloading the still useful spare parts of his body and contributing them to modern medical treatment. For all the rest, conforming with the principle of simplicity, he found an out-of-the-way crematorium where there was no need to wait in line and burned him.
Fei Du's wounds had more or less healed, only he temporarily couldn't walk far or do vigorous exercise with his injured foot. But that didn't mean anything; to use Luo Wenzhou's words, the function of his feet had always been just better than nothing; admittedly it wasn't very convenient not to have it, but if you had it…there still wasn't any particular use.
The relatives' waiting room at the crematorium was very simple and crude; the furnishings basically consisted of a table and a few benches. Black smoke came out of the incinerator. By the natural light coming in through the window, Fei Du was fiddling with a watch—Luo Wenzhou's watch buckle had come loose on the way here. There was a spring in it that wouldn't catch. Fei Du had borrowed a thin needle from a staff member and was manually repairing it.
Fei Du was very calm; complicated forms, scattered little parts, ropes tied into impossible knots…all the things that could drive an anxious modern city dweller to collapse ceased to be problems when they came into his hands.
The little spring in Luo Wenzhou's watch buckle was very thin. It was jammed on something. You could only hook it out with the needle by aiming at it for an age; if you didn't hook it into the appropriate position, it would bounce back on its own in a rhythm as though trying to hound an obsessive-compulsive sufferer to death. But after going through the above motions a dozen times, there was not the least change in the rate of Fei Du's breathing. Even the wind blowing over to him would automatically still into ordinary air. If you looked on at him for a while, you would also involuntarily calm down along with him.
"It's kind of magical," thought Luo Wenzhou, watching him with his head propped in his hand.
Fei Du was a mental attack system; if he wanted to make someone indulge in wild fantasies, he could make them indulge in wild fantasies; if he wanted to make them meditate in the middle of the day, he could make them sink into reverie with their eyes wide open.
Once again the little spring bounced back at the last moment. Fei Du didn't seem at all impatient. He only slightly changed his sitting posture, inadvertently meeting Luo Wenzhou's gaze; he gave him a questioning look.
"It's nothing," Luo Wenzhou answered like a lecher, "I'm exercising my eyes."
"…" Fei Du said, "Could we be a little more dignified in the crematorium?"
"You can comment on other people not being dignified?" Luo Wenzhou said in astonishment
Fei Du asked in turn, "Aren't you always saying other people are shameless?"
This logic was flawless; Luo Wenzhou had nothing to say and could only resort to the body—he kicked him under the table.
Fei Du dodged quickly. "Don't fuss, I'd finally gotten it, and you've made me bump it away."
Luo Wenzhou said, "If you can't fix it, then stop messing with it. It's not like I wear a watch every day."
"It's fine, it isn't hard." In the light, Fei Du carefully examined the place where the little spring was jammed. His fingers were long and slender, the joints moderately sized, neither so bulky they stuck out nor so thin as to look boneless; they gave you a very gentle sense of strength, as though anything that fell into those hands would find the most appropriate treatment.
Luo Wenzhou stretched. "How can you have so much patience?"
"I wouldn't call it patience," Fei Du said carelessly, narrowing his eyes. "It's just that time is limited, and you have to separate the important matters from the minor ones. It's no big deal to spend some time on the important things."
Luo Wenzhou didn't understand; how could tinkering with a watch count as an "important thing?"
Just then, Fei Du finally pushed the jammed spring back into its proper place, closing the buckle with a click. He opened and closed it a few times; it worked at smoothly as ever.
"There." Fei Du passed him the watch with a smile that wasn't quite a smile. "Making you happy is the most important thing."
He'd been holding the metal watch face in his hand too long; it was warm, the body heat tainting it all at once wrapping around Luo Wenzhou's wrist. Luo Wenzhou gave a cry, his left hand sinking as though unable to bear the burden.
Fei Du said, "Did you catch the skin?"
"Caught the bone." Luo Wenzhou put on a display of exercising his wrist. Frowning, he said, "It feels like… hss… feels like my wrist bone is a crispy little cookie."
Fei Du grabbed the hand groping towards his leg under the table. "So what's this, then?"
Luo Wenzhou calmly answered, "A crispy pig's hand."
A faint smile spread at the corners of Fei Du's eyes. Just then, there came the sound of footsteps. The two of them rapidly terminated the little game under the table, each leaning back, sitting up solemnly. Two of the crematorium's staff members walked in one after another, one carrying ashes wrapped in red silk, the other holding a box for ashes.
Alive, Fei Chengyu had stirred up trouble, but it turned out that when he was dead it didn't take him any longer to burn than other people. Now, during his sojourn into the narrow box, he was a gray and white pile, like burnt up inferior-grade coal; you couldn't see whether he'd been loyal or treacherous, good or evil.
A staff member asked, "Do the relatives want to put something the deceased liked in life inside?"
Fei Du took a pair of rings from his pocket. They weren't even wrapped. He threw them directly into the silk bag carrying the ashes.
People put all kinds of things into boxes of ashes; the staff member had seen it all before. Seeing at once that this was a pair of wedding rings, and seeing Fei Du's attitude, he could make a rough guess—the individual in the box hadn't treated his wife and child well in life, and after his death, his son had made the decision to throw the wedding rings into the box of ashes, as though cutting off the ill-fated conjugal relationship.
The staff member was very quick. He opened his mouth, and, swallowing back the usual "the dead are departed, please restrain your grief," he changed his wording at the last minute: "Yin and Yang are separate worlds, old scores are settled. From now on, the one walking the bridge walks the bridge, and the one walking the road walks the road, not obstructing each other any longer."
Fei Du: "…"
Why was this crematorium's memorial speech so original and refined?
The staff member also took the opportunity to make a sale. "We have a promotion right now, a long-term storage service, only 1,998 for one year, and for a one-time payment of 50,000 yuan, you can keep it here all the time, take it away whenever convenient. Think about it, the cheapest graves in the suburbs cost over 150,000 and the property rights only last twenty years. It's nowhere near as cost-effective as leaving it here with us, right?"
And so Fei Chengyu attained a very "cost-effective" little corner in this out-of-the-way little crematorium, hanging his contemptible life on the wall.
The crematorium was in a remote district, the incinerator halfway up a mountain. To leave, you had to go through a section of mountain road that wasn't very easy to walk. Luo Wenzhou was afraid Fei Du would twist his ankle and kept a hand lightly curled behind him, suddenly saying hesitantly, "When your mom…I think she wasn't wearing that ring."
"She'd taken it off herself," Fei Du said, "and tossed it into a pen container in my bedroom. Fei Chengyu didn't find it. I only discovered it after a good few days."
Fei Du's mother hadn't been a weak and insane woman from birth; the only thing she'd done wrong in her life had been to mistakenly trust Fei Chengyu.
There had been a rainstorm a few days ago, and the ground was somewhat muddy and slippery. Fei Du's foot slipped. His ankle couldn't handle the weight yet. Before he could reach out, Luo Wenzhou was holding him. "Can you talk to me about it?"
He'd learned from Fan Siyuan all that had happened in that basement; it had only been a few words, but they had already been appalling.
Fei Du sighed. "You've wanted to ask for a long time, haven't you?"
Luo Wenzhou's arms tightened.
"There's nothing I can't say." Fei Du patted his arm and spoke in a very flat voice. "When he was young, Fei Chengyu was pretty good-looking. His background wasn't very good, but I figure that to outsiders, he looked like an encouraging example, and he was very good at talking, naturally knowing how to make people lose their minds about him."
There was no need to doubt this point—while Luo Wenzhou didn't especially want to admit it, Fei Du really did look more like Fei Chengyu; if his tendencies hadn't been unsuited for it, relying solely on that face would have been enough to make him undefeated in the arena of love, whether aiming at men or women.
Never mind also being venomous and sly, incessantly scheming.
"No doubt there were some good times right after she was married, good enough to turn her head, until my grandfather passed away and Fei Chengyu became his legal heir. He'd gotten everything he'd wanted, so of course he revealed his true intentions." Fei Du paused. "None of it had anything to do with love. From beginning to end, it was all a hoax and a retaliation. Fei Chengyu's brain wasn't set up to be able to feel sentiment."
"Retaliation?"
"My grandfather paid for him to attend university. Later, he thought there was a problem with his moral character and suspended his funding. A bit of good creates gratitude, a lot of good creates an enemy. In the end, he was the person Fei Chengyu hated most. Later he regarded my mom as the representative of this person who'd 'set himself above the masses and looked down on him,' so he wanted to do everything he could to abuse her."
Luo Wenzhou quietly asked, "What about you?"
"I…" When Fei Du had just said one word, he felt Luo Wenzhou's arms tighten around him again, the tense muscles in his forearms almost trembling. Focusing his attention on the gentle and level slope in front of him, his throat moved lightly, and he swallowed back the "I was fine" that he'd nearly blurted out.
"He wasn't very satisfied with me. Fei Chengyu thought I was a shoddy product, with my mom's blood flowing in my veins, weak and stupid. He hoped to correct these congenital deficiencies. Starting with easy small animals, because ordinary children go through a phase of personifying some small animals. During that period, that sort of training would be about the same mental experience as killing a person." Fei Du looked down at his own hands. "There were little cats and dogs, rabbits, little birds…everything. If the legal provisions looked on killing animals the same as killing humans, I could probably get a few dozen death penalties."
Luo Wenzhou said heavily, "When did it start?"
Fei Du quietly recalled for a moment and shook his head. "I can't remember clearly… My mom made me remember, but I still can't remember clearly."
Luo Wenzhou was surprised. "Your mom made you remember what?"
"They all died with their necks gripped, unable to breathe, in a slow and hopeless struggle. She made me remember the feeling of suffocation, remember that they all died in my place."
She had been deepening his pain. Worried that, like Fei Chengyu hoped, he would grow numb calluses over the wounds, she had used a sharper knife to constantly deepen his pain, passing through flesh, carving it into his bones, cutting the bone to cure the poison.
"But I probably wasn't like what my mom had hoped for either," Fei Du said. "I was weaker than she imagined. I didn't acknowledge Fei Chengyu, but I didn't dare to disobey him either…"
"Fei Du," Luo Wenzhou suddenly interrupted him, "think carefully for me. Take an ordinary young woman and abuse her to the point of going crazy. She can't get away, she can't hide, she isn't allowed to resist. What can she do? The only freedom she has is death. But she spent fourteen years like that. Never mind other people, I'm sure I wouldn't be able to take it. But she did it. Do you know why she endured for so many years?"
Fei Du stared.
"Because when you were fourteen, you already knew how to protect yourself in front of Fei Chengyu, and because when you'd passed the age of fourteen, you were no longer an incompetent who wouldn't receive criminal penalties no matter what you did. As long as Fei Chengyu didn't want to run the risk of his only son going to prison, he'd do his best to avoid you personally doing anything that couldn't be taken back. That day in the basement with the metal ring around her neck, you think she was afraid of death?" Luo Wenzhou grabbed Fei Du's shoulders and forced him to turn around. "You're so smart. Do you really not understand that death was the end she thirsted for most? She wasn't afraid of death at all, she was only afraid of dying like that at your hands. She was afraid you'd never be able to wash your hands clean—"
Fei Du struggled subconsciously.
"She loved you. I love you, too."
Fei Du said, "Wenzhou…"
Luo Wenzhou didn't give him a chance to speak. "On New Year's Eve, on the way to Binhai, I've never been so scared in my life, so scared I still don't dare to think closely about it. My hands start shaking as soon as I remember it. I wasn't afraid you couldn't defeat some…some pieces of trash like Zhang Chunling and Fan Siyuan. You could cook both of them put together in the same pot. I was afraid you didn't know to value your own life, that you'd take my heart and feed it to the dogs!"
These words had been suppressed in Luo Wenzhou's mind like a time bomb for a long time. Suddenly blurting them out like this, his chest ignited, blowing away the stones silted up there for so long, letting the mud-scented breeze blow through the emptiness.
Fei Du's pupils contracted slightly. The glib-tongued person was suddenly mute.
The mountain was full of stately old scholar trees, the soughing of the wind through the pines like rage, and the whispering of the breeze.
After a long time, Fei Du moved gently. Raising his stiff-jointed hands, he pressed them to Luo Wenzhou's chest.
"I'm sorry, I…" For an age he couldn't get anything out after that "I," as though he'd run out of words. He only gently closed his eyes, hands full of Luo Wenzhou's chaotic and rapid heartbeat.
Luo Wenzhou froze, fragmentary anger dispersing with a rumble, because in Fei Du's plump lower eyelids, faintly visible even when he wasn't smiling, and in the slender corners of his eyes, he'd seen a trace of redness, though it was only a bit, like a shallow watercolor halo.
"…I'm sorry," Fei Du repeated.
Luo Wenzhou didn't answer. Receiving this belated apology, he silently took his hand and led him down the mountain.
"I wasn't lying to you."
"Weren't lying about what?"
"In the crematorium waiting room, when I said, 'Making you happy is the most important thing.'"
"…"
"That was sincere, not sweet-talk."
The allotted time began now.
"…Yeah."
I'll trust you again, even though you have such an unreliable record, and if you hurt me again…
It seems I still won't be able not to love you.
He really had fallen into this asshole's hands.