“You keep saying you’ll compensate me. What could you possibly compensate me with? Can you let me stand onstage again? Can you give back the love I once devoted to you with all my heart?”
With every sentence Xie Wanyin spoke, she took one step closer.
Rain streamed wildly down her pale face, and her eyes were bloodshot.
Zhou Ruotan’s breathing grew hurried, his face deathly pale.
As he looked at the hysterical woman before him, his mind suddenly flashed back to the look in her eyes three years ago, when she had gazed at him from beneath the ruins—a look of despair so profound it had become utterly empty.
It was a terror that pierced straight into his heart.
“Wanyin… stop…” His voice trembled. He wanted to step forward and embrace her, but Xie Wanyin shoved him away without mercy.
“Get lost! Take your cheap pity and handouts and go back to your centuries-old aristocratic family! Even if this leg rots away, even if I spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, I will never accept a single scrap of charity from the Zhou family!”
After shouting those final words, Xie Wanyin’s chest heaved violently.
The overwhelming anger and grief, combined with the waves of excruciating, deathlike pain radiating from her left leg, instantly drained the last of her strength.
The icy rain seemed to steal away all the warmth from her body in an instant.
Xie Wanyin suddenly felt her stomach churn violently. The sound of the rain in her ears grew extremely distant, and the world before her began to spin, shattering into countless black patches.
“Wanyin!”
In the final second before she lost consciousness, all she heard was Zhou Ruotan’s voice, warped by panic and torn with anguish. Then her body went limp and she collapsed, plunging completely into endless darkness.
The pungent smell of disinfectant traveled down her airways and into her lungs.
Xie Wanyin frowned and slowly opened her heavy eyelids.
The drab, deathly white ceiling of a hospital room came into view, while the extremely regular beeping of the instruments sounded beside her.
“You’re awake?”
A gentle female voice, tinged with surprise, came from beside the bed.
Xie Wanyin turned her head sluggishly and saw a young girl in a nurse’s uniform standing at the foot of the bed with a chart in her hands. As soon as she saw Xie Wanyin wake up, she immediately pressed the call button by the head of the bed.
Her memories returned like a tide: the icy rain, the bone-chilling pain, and Zhou Ruotan’s nauseating face…
Xie Wanyin instinctively shrank back. Her left leg was immobilized in thick plaster and bandages, and even the slightest movement caused a dull ache.
“Don’t move around. Your old injury flared up, and the severe exposure to the cold triggered acute osteomyelitis. The doctor just finished treating you.” The nurse hurried over and held her down, a complicated emotion flashing through her eyes.
“How did I get here…” Xie Wanyin’s voice was so hoarse it sounded as though it were full of grit.
“Your husband brought you here.”
As she adjusted the drip rate of the infusion, the nurse could not help sighing emotionally.
“You have no idea how frightening it was. He was soaked through from head to toe. When he carried you into the emergency room, his eyes were so red he looked like he could devour someone, and even his hands were shaking.”
The nurse glanced at Xie Wanyin, hesitated, then continued, “You were unconscious for five whole hours. He stayed here the entire time. The doctor only just told him that you were out of danger, so he went downstairs to pay the bills and get your medicine. He should be back soon. Get some good rest!”
With that, the nurse turned and left.
After hearing this, an expression of intense disgust appeared on Xie Wanyin’s originally pale face.
She closed her eyes, hiding the coldness and resolve in them.
Affection that comes too late is cheaper than grass.
Zhou Ruotan’s display of devotion could only make her feel sick now.
She wearily closed her eyes.
Just then, the hospital-room door was suddenly shoved open from outside.
When Zhou Ruotan saw that Xie Wanyin had already opened her eyes on the bed, wild joy instantly flashed through his dim eyes.
“Wanyin! You’re awake!”
He strode to the bedside and instinctively reached for Xie Wanyin’s hand, which lay outside the blanket.
However, before his fingers could touch her, Xie Wanyin had already dodged away without hesitation, as though avoiding a plague.
Zhou Ruotan’s hand froze in midair.
Looking at the undisguised wariness and disgust in Xie Wanyin’s eyes, he felt as though some blunt weapon had slammed hard into his chest, leaving him in such stifling pain that he could barely breathe.
Yet before he could say those words—“I’m sorry”—Xie Wanyin suddenly pulled out the indwelling needle connected to the infusion tube.
“What are you doing?”
Zhou Ruotan’s pupils contracted sharply, and his voice rose at once.
The sharp needle pulled out a string of beads of blood, which dripped onto the snow-white bedsheet.
But she acted as though she could not feel the pain. She threw off the blanket and tried to get out of bed.
“Xie Wanyin, have you gone crazy?”
Zhou Ruotan panicked completely. He clamped down on her still-bleeding hand and, using the momentum, tried to force her back onto the bed.
“Do you know what condition your leg is in right now? Do you really want to ruin this leg completely and spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair?”
“Let go of me!” Xie Wanyin struggled with all her strength, but she had only just woken from unconsciousness. How could she possibly match the strength of a firefighter who had trained for years?
She was pinned firmly against the bed, her left leg scraping against the sheets and bringing a stabbing pain that pierced straight into her heart.
Looking at her in this state—refusing to listen to reason and practically forcing herself toward death—the panic in Zhou Ruotan’s heart and the exhaustion that had accumulated over this period instantly transformed into an indescribable fury.
He gripped her wrist tightly, his brows drawn into a deep knot, and his tone was filled with disapproving reproach. “Why are you always like this? You’re always acting on impulse, and you never take your own health seriously! I know you were wronged at the clinic today, but they’re my parents! They’re old, set in their ways, and they don’t know about the misunderstandings between us back then. As their junior, can’t you be a little more magnanimous and show some understanding for the feelings of the elderly?”
He drew a deep breath, trying to make his voice sound more reasonable. “As long as you’re willing to lower your head and apologize, their Rejuvenation Acupuncture Technique can save your leg. Is your pride really more important to you than your own body?”
Xie Wanyin stopped struggling.
She fell silent. Yet in her cool eyes, an emptiness and mockery slowly spread.
“Zhou Ruotan. In your eyes, is everyone in the world supposed to understand and tolerate you and your noble family?”
Zhou Ruotan froze, instinctively sensing that something was wrong. “That’s not what I meant…”
“Then what did you mean?”
Xie Wanyin suddenly raised her voice. Staring at the self-righteous man before her, she curved her lips into a bitter, chilling smile.
“Your parents are parents, and their emotions are emotions—but what about my leg? What about my life?! Was it only natural for them to trample them beneath their feet and ravage them as they pleased? Did that mean they weren’t lives anymore?”
“Back then, you abandoned me when I was trapped beneath a load-bearing wall for that sister of yours who isn’t even related to you by blood. And now you want me to beg and wag my tail before the people who humiliated me, all for the sake of your parents’ ridiculous sense of superiority!”
Xie Wanyin laughed aloud, laughing until tears streamed down her face, yet her gaze was filled with utter desolation.
“Zhou Ruotan, which of us is crazy— you or me?”