“Mm… Big brother, thank you… for protecting my sister… and me.” Chenxue’s fine brows curved a little, and she answered in a voice very faint, and tender, and unearthly.

Her face was pale — frighteningly pale — but her eyes were exceptionally pure and bright, exactly like her sister’s. She had been looking at Ye Tianxie the whole time, as if she meant to fix the sight of him in her memory. She was smiling, and it was a smile even Chenxin had almost never seen… one of gladness, with no pain in it any more, no worry… and no struggling either.

That smile, on a girl who might have walked out of a painting, worked on him, and Ye Tianxie found something inside him going soft without his leave. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and just as he was about to speak to her, his face changed… In front of him, Chenxue’s eyes were slowly closing. The smile was still there, but her body was going over, slowly, from sitting to falling.

“Xue’er!” At Chenxin’s cry of alarm, Ye Tianxie moved fast and caught her, letting her rest against his shoulder… But she plainly could not hear her sister calling. She lay quietly against Ye Tianxie and made no sound at all.

Her body was so pliant and so soft… so light, like a wad of cotton wool, with almost no bone to be felt in it. Even through his hands Ye Tianxie could tell how weak this body was… truly too frail to stand up to a breeze. One thin breath of wind would be enough to blow this frail body over.

“Xue’er! Xue’er… what’s wrong? Don’t frighten your sister.”

Chenxin had only just come out of one enormous fright, and now she went into another and a worse one. Chenxue spent the great majority of every day asleep, but every time before she went under she would say it first: Sister, I’m so sleepy… This time she had plainly lost consciousness in a way that was not normal.

From the things Chenxin had told him over time, Ye Tianxie knew she had a sister who was gravely ill. But now he could feel the barely detectable life in the girl resting against him, and he understood how grave “gravely ill” was. Signs of life this frail are not enough to keep a person alive at all. They belong on some small flower or blade of grass that is already dying.

“Chenxin, don’t panic. We’re leaving here first… Come on, we’re going to the best hospital in Huaxia. You have to believe it — Chenxue will get better too.”

Perhaps it was because she was Ran Qingsheng’s daughter, or perhaps because her eyes had conquered him, but what rose in Ye Tianxie at that moment was urgency, and something like alarm. He found that he was afraid — afraid this girl he had met and known for a matter of minutes would be taken from him in front of his eyes by the demon of her illness. He lifted her up — so light, so very light, a bundle of cotton wool — took Ran Chenxin by the hand, and ran out of the little house the two of them had lived in for so very long.

“Pojun, Qiushui, we’re going! To the best hospital there is!”

With the unconscious Chenxue in one arm and Chenxin’s hand in the other, his brows drawn tight, he shouted it as he went, walking fast for the helicopter and unable to wait a moment. Zuo Pojun took one look at the girl in Ye Tianxie’s arms, nodded, and got aboard with Murong Qiushui at a quick walk. Not long after, the helicopter lifted away at speed and was gone into the distance.

Only when the helicopter had gone far enough to be out of sight did a dozen-odd figures put their heads timidly out of their doorways… A girl seized, a helicopter, men killed… This quiet slum had met a truly terrible day.

Not long after that, a black shape that seemed to appear out of nowhere came down on the roof of the little house where Chenxin and Chenxue lived. The figure swept its eyes over the scene, took out a miniature communicator, and said in a low voice, “Send a few people. There’s cleaning to do here.”

“Pojun. Faster.”

He could feel the life draining out of the girl in his arms and her breathing growing weaker and weaker, and the urgency in him was several degrees stronger than it had been on the way out.

“Second Brother… don’t worry, we’ll be there any minute.” Zuo Pojun’s head was covered in sweat. A helicopter’s speed does not come near a jet’s, let alone a nuclear aircraft’s. This one was already at its limit, and at that speed the airframe had begun to shudder, as if it might come apart at any moment.

“Thank you, Big Brother Xietian.” She could feel an urgency in him not one bit weaker than her own, and that thing called being moved welled up in her heart again. She watched him hold Chenxue so carefully, and what she felt was too complicated to put into words. All this time it had always been her alone taking care of her sister, holding up the “home” and the world that belonged to the two of them. And today this man, who had come into her real life the way something comes into a dream, had brought her the feeling of having found something to lean on. How much that feeling moved her, only she knew.

“What are you thanking me for? Don’t forget — we’re friends.” Ye Tianxie gave her a light smile as he said it.

Ran Chenxin nodded hard. She had an impulse to lean against him the way her sister was doing, and rest her weight on him.

“Big Brother Xietian, why did you all come here? Were you… just passing by?” In the end she could not hold back the thing she was most curious about. It was as if heaven had truly heard her prayer, set the man she wanted most in front of her, and pulled her back once again from the edge of despair and disaster.

Why had he appeared here? Ye Tianxie drew the quiet girl in his arms in a little closer and said with a smile, “All I can say is… it was the guidance of fate.”

“The guidance of fate…” Ran Chenxin repeated it softly. Her eyes went dim and unfocused, and something in her quietly sped up.

Fate had let them meet, had given them a place where their lives crossed — and then, at the moment she needed him most, they had met in the real world too. All of it truly seemed like something heaven had arranged and led them to on purpose.

“Chenxin. Your surname is Ran, isn’t it?” Ye Tianxie asked suddenly.

The question plainly startled her. Then she nodded faintly, her eyes still resting on him, a little dazed. She did not know how he could know her surname… That surname was one she never wanted to bring up again, if it could be avoided.

“How old are you this year, then? I’d guess… eighteen, or nineteen. Am I right?” Ye Tianxie touched the hair of the girl in his arms lightly and smiled at Ran Chenxin.

“Nineteen,” Ran Chenxin answered in a small voice.

“Nineteen.” Ye Tianxie tipped his head back and looked up at the sky, as if he were remembering something. “Do you remember? I told you once that the year I was five and a half, on a day of snow, I passed out in the snow from the cold and the hunger… The snow was heavy that day and it came down a long time, and I was buried in it for a full day and a night… If an old man out clearing snow had not saved me, there would be no such person as me in this world now.”

“I remember. I remember every word Big Brother Xietian has said to me.”

“Then do you remember this — the year you were four, your father once brought home a boy in ragged clothes who had lost consciousness… And you hid behind the door and stole a look at him when he had just woken up, and his fierce eyes frightened you away…” He lowered his head and looked into Ran Chenxin’s eyes as he said it.

Ran Chenxin was struck dumb. She stared at him blankly for a long while, one hand going to her lips without her knowing it, and it was a long time before she got out a sound with a tremor running through it. “Big Brother Xietian… are you saying that that boy was… was…”

“The man who lifted me out of the snow that year took me back to his home, rubbed my body with snow to get the blood moving in me again, then boiled a very bitter medicine himself and fed it to me a spoonful at a time… I was only five and a half, and my whole body had gone blue-black with the cold. There was nothing much to tell me apart from a dead child. In an age with selfishness and indifference showing through everywhere in it, anyone at all who found me in that state would have taken me for a corpse and kept well away… He not only lifted me out, he refused to give up the sliver of hope that lifting me out gave him. And in the end, on the morning of the second day, I woke up, like a miracle…”

“…When I woke, the old man’s face had a look of relief on it, and I can still remember that smile perfectly clearly today. Only, back then there was too much resentment and hate in me, and even more rejection and wariness toward every outsider, so even knowing perfectly well that he had saved me, I never said one word of thanks. What I did instead was keep a cold face turned toward him, and he did not mind it in the least. He went on facing me with that same laughing warmth… I remember I ate three meals at the old man’s house that day… Those three meals were the most delicious of my childhood and the fullest I ever ate, and the taste of every one of them is still perfectly clear to me now. And I remember that just after I woke, a little girl with her hair in pigtails put her head around the door and stole a look at me… and then I turned a hard, wary stare on her, and the little girl was frightened off and never dared look at me again…”

Ran Chenxin pressed a hand over her lips to keep any sound from coming out of her, but there was no holding down a heart whose rhythm had all but gone out of control.

Ye Tianxie shook his head and let out a sigh of regret. “Only, the way I was then, I did not dare trust anybody. So that night, with my body still not fully recovered, I slipped away… Before I left, I had learned the old man’s name, and I swore that when the day came that I had the power, I would give everything I had to repay him, because I owed him my life, all of it. That old man’s name was… Ran Qingsheng. Chenxin — is that name familiar to you?” He came back out of the memory, looked at Ran Chenxin, and smiled as he said it.

The first time he saw her he had been drawn by something with no shape to it, and his feet had carried him toward her almost outside his own control… Now, at last, he understood. What had caught hold of him all at once was not the suffering in her eyes. It was that in those eyes there was not only the same grief he had carried himself, but something far off and faint and familiar.

The little girl who had stolen a look at him that year. He remembered her for a very long time afterward, because her eyes were so pure — pure as a drop of water that has only just fallen out of the sky… Fifteen years and more have gone by, and she has grown into a woman of surpassing beauty, and a great deal about her has changed completely. What has not changed are those eyes, still as pure as they were.

(End of Chapter 273)