The phrase “wasted away to skin and bone” dealt a heavy blow to Lu Yan, as no one had ever used such a description on him before.
Crouching right before him, Xia Miao kept their distance impossibly close. Lu Yan could clearly see his own reflection in the depths of her eyes—rotted, hideous, and utterly grotesque. The air around them hung heavy with the reek of decay.
He thought to himself that he must be lower than the trash piling up in a landfill.
That was precisely why Lu Yan had been so terrified, desperately trying to fold himself away in hiding so the person he adored wouldn’t have to witness his humiliating state. He had endured the agony through sheer willpower, holding out on the promise that if he just persevered a little longer, he would eventually regain a normal human appearance and could return to her side as a creepy, slinking stalker.
Yet she had gone out of her way to track him down, ripping away his final shred of shame and exposing his most wretched, pathetic self right before her eyes.
Lu Yan had nowhere left to run. A boy who had once stood so tall and lanky—always leaning on his height advantage to mock her for being a shrimp—was now curling his frame inward, desperately trying to shrink himself into a tiny, compact ball. Ideally, he wanted to dissolve into some damp, dark corner as a crawling pest, repulsive enough that anyone who laid eyes on him would feel sick to their stomach and stay far, far away.
Extending a hand, Xia Miao wanted nothing more than to pull him into an embrace, yet she didn’t dare press against his raw, mutilated flesh. Instead, she could only trace the skin of his left forearm with her fingertips, where a patch of healthy tissue had finally managed to regenerate.
“Are you like this because of me?”
Jumping slightly at her touch, Lu Yan’s body trembled.
“No. I just… I accidentally took a tumble and scraped off my skin, that’s all.”
Xia Miao recalled the blurred, hazy scene she had witnessed right before losing consciousness. She had convinced herself it was just a fever dream, but looking at him now, she knew she had genuinely witnessed that horrifying moment when he had “melted.”
Whether it was his ridiculous excuse about thermal expansion or his claim of an accidental fall, all those clumsy, transparent lies were simply meant to shield her from the truth: that he had shattered into this broken, rotting mess entirely because of her.
Plop, plop. Tear after tear tumbled from her eyes, splashing against the hardwood floor to kick up tiny droplets.
Panicking, Lu Yan snapped his head up.
“Miaomiao… don’t cry.”
He desperately wanted to reach out and stroke her cheek, but catching sight of his pinky finger—still reduced to a bare, terrifying skeleton—he yanked his hand back in a panic, only for Xia Miao to catch his wrist and pull it forward first.
Xia Miao was usually so proud, so arrogant, her pretty eyes habitually flashing with condescending mockery. Yet right now, all that haughtiness had been swallowed by a haze of mist and gathering moisture. Water pooled in her gaze like a lingering spring rain that could pour for days on end without a clear end in sight.
“I know it. You turned out like this because of me.” Sniffling, she wore a pitiful, scrunched-up expression on her fair face that blurred the line between heartbreaking and adorable.
The newly formed blood vessels threading through Lu Yan’s raw flesh twitched in sync with her sobs. Especially around his ribcage—where the chest cavity hadn’t fully sealed shut yet—one could still faintly make out the erratic, disorderly thumping of his heart within.
“Hey, stop flattering yourself!” Lu Yan stammered, flailing in a panic as he tried to defend himself. “I didn’t turn into this because of you at all! I told you, I just—I just underwent thermal expansion and had an accidental fall!”
Xia Miao insisted:
“I know for a fact that I’m the one who hurt you!”
“Stop crying, you look so ugly when you cry!” Scrambling closer, Lu Yan awkwardly fumbled to wipe the tears from her cheeks with trembling hands. “I would never mangle myself into a state like this just for some ugly girl!”
“I’m already feeling so guilty… so heartbroken over you, and you’re still calling me ugly!” Squatting right there on the floor, Xia Miao burst into a loud, sobbing wail. “Lu Yan, you’re hurting my feelings!”
Completely at a loss, Lu Yan froze up. Hearing that specific word—heartbroken—fall from Xia Miao’s lips sent a wave of entirely unfamiliar emotions surging through him, rippling outward across his unhealed frame.
Heartbroken?
He had never experienced such a sensation in his life. In all his memories, going hungry or suffering injuries were things that had always been woven into the fabric of his routine existence. To him, his world had been a tiny cage from the very beginning. Even as he grew older and the board state shifted, this fog-shrouded academy was, in the end, nothing more than a slightly larger cage.
Drawing even closer to him, Xia Miao hovered her hands helplessly, unsure of where she could safely touch him without causing further harm. Her sobs grew louder and more frantic.
“Lu Yan, does it hurt? It must be agonizing, what are we going to do? I’m so useless—apart from money, I don’t have any other skills to help you!”
“Lu Yan, you’re not going to die from this, right?!”
“I don’t want you to die, I still want to marry you!”
Her crying grew increasingly dramatic; to put it bluntly, it was starting to sound less like sorrow and more like a full-blown funeral lament.
When she had first laid eyes on Lu Yan’s ruined, mutilated state, she had somehow managed to maintain the nerve to joke around with him. In truth, she had been terrified out of her mind, petrified that every last shred of flesh would drop from his body until nothing was left behind except a bare skeleton.
A skeleton… just how bitterly uncomfortable would that be to hug?
Lu Yan had never been particularly sharp, and lacking any natural eloquence, he had no idea what soothing words to say to calm Xia Miao down. Bizarrely enough, watching Xia Miao shake and sob like a battered branch in the wind, and listening to her howling wails, his own eyes gradually grew red-rimmed. Hitching his breath in sympathy, he ended up bursting into tears right along with her.
“Miaomiao, I’m going to be fine! I want to marry you too!”
The rate at which his flesh regenerated suddenly accelerated, swiftly wrapping around the bones that had been exposed to the air. The moment fresh skin began to sprout across his frame, he pulled Xia Miao tightly into his embrace, filling out the hollow, empty spaces beneath his bandages.
Bare-skinned, the boy pressed himself as closely as possible against the girl in his arms. Clinging tightly to one another, the two of them buried their faces against each other and wept bitter tears.
Outside the door, three figures pressed their ears flat against the wooden panels to eavesdrop on the commotion inside.
The conjoined older brother whispered:
“What on earth is going on in there?”
The conjoined younger brother guessed:
“I hear a woman crying. Do you think she’s being eaten?”
The conjoined older brother speculated:
“But there’s a guy crying in there too. Could they be beating each other up?”
Clutching the head she had just recently recovered in her arms, the headless woman bobbed the skull up and down in agreement with the older brother’s theory.
Grabbing the conjoined twins by the scruff of their necks with one hand and hauling the headless woman along with the other, the old gardener dragged them backward down the hall.
“Alright, alright, that’s enough out of you lot. Stop meddling in young lovers’ business.”
The young, clumsy couple spent quite a while longer howling and crying in each other’s arms until they both ran out of steam, their tear-choked bawling finally tapering off into silence. Red-eyed and damp-faced, they stared miserably at one another like a pair of tragic melodrama leads.
Xia Miao finally mustered the courage to reach out and touch his body.
Even though his flesh was reassembling itself, it could only restore him to the physical state he had possessed during his lifetime. Across his pale chest, surgical scars crisscrossed in a chaotic web. From his abdomen down to his limbs, jagged, centipede-like keloid scars crawled everywhere, large and small, creating a shocking, horrifying sight.
Feeling profoundly self-conscious, Lu Yan tried to shrink away, catching her hand before it could linger against his chest.
“Miaomiao, don’t look. I’m hideous.”
Feeling fresh tears prick her eyes once more, Xia Miao threw her arms around his neck, burying her face straight into the curve of his shoulder. Inhaling the familiar scent radiating from his skin, she muffled her voice against his collarbone:
“One hundred bonus points.”
Stunned, Lu Yan froze, lowering his gaze in sheer disbelief to stare down at the back of her fuzzy head.
“O—One hundred points?”
“Mhm. You’ve hit the maximum score. Congratulations, your court has succeeded.” Lifting her face, Xia Miao’s tear-streaked, rain-kissed visage looked exquisite and dazzlingly bright. “Lu Yan, come eat me.”