A mocking curve tugged at the corner of Xie Wanyin’s lips. Her gaze was clear and cold.
“With a family ethos like the Zhou family’s—unable to distinguish right from wrong, constantly spouting benevolence and morality while rotten to the core—even if you knelt down and begged me today, I would still think your needles were too filthy to touch my leg.”
“You—! You ungrateful wretch!” Father Zhou’s face turned livid with rage. He pointed at her nose, his whole body trembling.
Xie Wanyin did not spare them even another superfluous glance.
She turned and left.
Although her left leg had already begun to go numb and ache faintly from standing for so long, causing her to limp slightly as she walked, every step she took was exceptionally firm and resolute.
Amid the contemptuous, mocking, and gleeful gazes of the crowd, she walked out of the clinic without looking back.
Zhou Ruotan stood frozen in place. A sharp, twisting pain suddenly seized his chest without warning.
As he watched Xie Wanyin’s resolutely departing back and the appointment-slip fragments scattered across the floor, an immense panic abruptly clutched at his heart.
Xie Wanyin had only just walked out of the traditional Chinese medicine clinic when she realized that, at some point, it had started raining outside.
But all she wanted now was to leave this place!
Without caring about anything else, she rushed straight into the downpour.
The icy rain instantly drenched Xie Wanyin from head to toe.
Almost at the same moment, a sharp stabbing pain shot through her left knee.
It felt as though countless ice spikes covered in barbs had viciously pierced through the gaps in the bones around her old injury, then cruelly twisted inside them.
Xie Wanyin sucked in a breath of cold air, her face turning as pale as paper.
She bit down hard on her lower lip and braced herself against the cold trunk of a roadside plane tree, trying to steady her swaying body.
The pain that reached deep into her marrow, combined with the overwhelming humiliation she had suffered in the clinic moments ago, mercilessly devoured her reason like a wild beast.
With trembling hands, she fumbled her phone out of her rain-soaked bag.
The droplets sliding down the screen made even unlocking it incredibly difficult.
After much effort, she finally got through to her best friend, Qiao Yu. The moment the call connected, Xie Wanyin’s voice was already broken beyond recognition.
“A-Yu… come get me… my leg…”
Before she could finish, her left leg suddenly went into a violent spasm, completely losing the strength to support her.
Xie Wanyin’s vision went black. Her whole body lost its balance and she crashed heavily into a puddle filled with muddy water.
Her phone was flung away, flashing twice in the rain before its screen went completely black.
The rough asphalt tore open her palms, while icy, muddy water splashed all over her, grinding the pride and dignity she had once possessed as a principal dancer into the filthy mire.
Xie Wanyin curled up in the floodwater, clutching her left leg tightly. Rainwater ran wildly down her pale cheeks, impossible to distinguish from tears.
Just then, a hurried and frantic set of footsteps broke through the curtain of rain.
“Wanyin!”
The rain above her head was suddenly blocked by a black umbrella. Zhou Ruotan came rushing over, panting heavily, his dark eyes filled with panic that even he himself had failed to notice.
He grabbed Xie Wanyin’s arm, which was covered in muddy water, and tried to pull her up from the ground.
“Are you insane? It’s raining this hard, and you’re here trying to act tough all by yourself? Come back with me!”
His tone was tinged with anxiety, but to Xie Wanyin’s ears, it still carried that accustomed, lofty, commanding air.
Xie Wanyin’s entire body stiffened. A surge of rejection swept through her like an electric shock.
“Don’t touch me!” She did not know where she found the strength, but she violently shook off Zhou Ruotan’s hand.
Because she had used too much force, she fell back into the puddle.
Zhou Ruotan’s hand froze in midair. Watching her resolute refusal to let him touch her, even as she struggled in the muddy water, he furrowed his brows into a tight knot.
“Xie Wanyin, are you done making a scene?”
Zhou Ruotan’s voice sounded especially cold and hard in the rain.
“I know you were wronged at the clinic just now. I apologize to you on behalf of my parents! They’re old, their thinking is traditional, and they don’t know what really happened back then. Why did you have to oppose them at every turn?”
He drew a deep breath and softened his tone, but his eyes held a kind of condescending tolerance, as if he were granting her a favor.
“Your leg can’t be put off any longer. Western medicine can’t cure it. Only my father’s Rejuvenation Acupuncture Technique can save you. Stop being willful. Come back with me, humble yourself and apologize to them. I promise I’ll beg my father. He definitely won’t stand by and watch you die. I’ll pay the medical expenses. I’ll make it up to you, all right?”
Humble herself? Apologize? Make it up to her?
Xie Wanyin felt as though she had just heard the funniest joke in the world.
She raised her head and looked at the man before her, the man she had once loved down to her very bones. Suddenly, he seemed terrifyingly unfamiliar.
Bracing herself against the tree trunk beside her, she endured the tearing pain in her left leg and slowly, with great difficulty, forced herself upright.
Amid the violent wind and rain, her slender body swayed precariously.
Her cool eyes fixed themselves on Zhou Ruotan.
“Zhou Ruotan, you have no heart!”
The roar pierced through layer upon layer of rain and struck Zhou Ruotan’s eardrums.
The hand holding his umbrella suddenly trembled.
“You want me to apologize to the people who humiliated me?” Xie Wanyin let out a bitter laugh. Her nails dug deeply into the wounds in her palms, using the pain to keep herself conscious.
“Do you think that without your Zhou family’s charity, I, Xie Wanyin, wouldn’t be able to survive? Do you think that now you’ve returned to your ancestral family and become a rich man, you can take this lofty attitude and pity me?”
“That’s not what I meant!” Zhou Ruotan instinctively refuted her, a nameless panic suddenly rising in his chest.
“I just want to heal your leg! About what happened during the earthquake back then… I already explained it. Yuan Qian was closer to the exit. I was a firefighter. I had to make the most rational choice! Why are you still clinging to it even now, and even taking your anger out on my parents?”
“The rational choice…” Xie Wanyin savored those words, her eyes filled with mockery and desolation.
“Yes, how rational of you. You were so rational that you watched your wife trapped beneath a load-bearing wall, then turned around and picked up Yuan Qian, who had only suffered a superficial scrape! You were so rational that when I lost my left leg, lost our…”
She paused, but in the end, she still did not tell him about the child she had lost back then.
It seemed to have become a pain she could not speak of.
Every time she thought of it, her heart would ache unbearably.
She took a deep breath and reorganized her words.
“You were so rational that while I lay in the intensive care unit, wishing I were dead, you were still at that good little sister’s bedside, comforting her after she had been frightened!”
Xie Wanyin’s whole body trembled. It was fury, grievance, and the resentment that had accumulated in her flesh and bones through countless days and nights over the past three years.
“Do you think I went to the clinic today to pester you? Zhou Ruotan, stop flattering yourself! If I had known before registering that it was an industry belonging to your Zhou family, I would have found it disgusting. I wouldn’t even have stepped through the door!”