“Feifei.”

“Young Mistress Su?”

“Feifei, time to get up.”

Ye Tianxie pinched Su Feifei’s nose, then patted her cheek lightly. Coming out of the game, he had found Young Mistress Su sound asleep on the sofa. Looking at the table spread with dishes of every kind, he felt a certain twinge of guilt — because if he didn’t log off, she would go on waiting until he did before she ate. And now… she had evidently waited herself to sleep.

Su Feifei’s lashes stirred a few times and her eyes finally opened, slowly. Seeing Ye Tianxie through the haze, she blinked in confusion, then sat bolt upright.

“Hey! You… you didn’t do anything to me, did you?” Su Feifei looked faintly flustered and began checking her clothes in a scramble. Ye Tianxie was left without words for a moment, then said flatly, “Young Mistress Su, if I’d wanted to do something to you I wouldn’t have needed to wait until today. And whenever I did it, I don’t imagine you’d be able to resist.”

Su Feifei came out of the reflexive fluster of waking too suddenly, and was immediately embarrassed by her own panicked reaction. She quietly pressed both hands to a skirt that covered only half her thighs and said in a low voice, “Hmph… you’re a great pervert who goes out on the street to take advantage of girls, so naturally I have to be careful around you!”

Ye Tianxie: “……”

Women really were creatures that held grudges; that one touch on the street back then would probably stay with her for life. Come to that… at the time it had been nothing more than a whim out of boredom on Ye Tianxie’s part. He’d never imagined a moment’s whim would land him the daughter of Asia’s richest man.

“Eh? That’s odd, how did I fall asleep?” Su Feifei kept one hand pressed on her skirt to stop Ye Tianxie seeing what he shouldn’t, muttering to herself in puzzlement. She remembered waiting for him to come out of the game so they could eat together… then getting bored of waiting and going to the kitchen to make one more dish… and then…

Had she simply got so bored waiting that she’d fallen asleep without noticing?

There seemed to be a blank in her memory that she couldn’t recall. She thought hard for a while without arriving at an answer, and could only conclude she had drifted off while waiting.

Ye Tianxie’s gaze passed now and then over Su Feifei’s legs in their black stockings. The line of Su Feifei’s legs was an astonishing kind of perfection, full and long, and that lethal beauty stirred in him once again the strong impulse to reach out and touch.

Su Feifei stretched and mumbled, “All right, let’s eat first…” She sat up properly, looked at the table for a moment, then tipped her head back and said with a touch of wheedling in it, “Looks like I forgot the chopsticks… Tianxie, would you go and get them from the kitchen? I’ve only just woken up, I’m all soft and floppy… I can’t even stand.”

Ye Tianxie turned and walked toward the kitchen.

“Hee, good boy. There’ll be a reward tonight.” Su Feifei stuck her tongue out lightly behind his back.

Ye Tianxie: “……”

Whether before Su Feifei came here or after she moved in, the kitchen was the place he set foot in least. Walking into it now, he felt a rather startled unfamiliarity; set against the bare emptiness and three feet of dust of half a month ago, the kitchen now nearly made him think he’d walked into the wrong place. Not only was it spotless and new, every sort of outrageously expensive utensil decorated it into outright luxury.

Ye Tianxie stepped into the kitchen, took two paces in, and then, as though struck by a bolt of heavenly lightning, stopped absolutely still where he stood… and his body suddenly began to shake violently.

Su Feifei, who had been watching him, was puzzled and called out, “Hey, Tianxie, don’t tell me you don’t even know where the chopsticks are?”

Her voice had barely finished when she saw Ye Tianxie come bursting out of the kitchen like a madman and stop dead in the middle of the living room, turning his body around and around, turning his line of sight, his eyes going to every place and every corner of the house.

“Tian… Tianxie, what… what’s wrong…”

Su Feifei’s heartbeat quickened suddenly… because what was on Ye Tianxie’s face was an expression that startled her, that frightened her, one she had never seen before. Shock, loss, panic… His reaction was so violent that from close by Su Feifei could see clearly that his eyes, his hands, his whole body were trembling.

As though he had seen something that shook him nearly out of his own soul.

He didn’t answer her. Instead he went tearing suddenly up the stairs like a man possessed. Su Feifei stood up from the sofa and watched him blankly, at a loss.

The room he never allowed anyone to enter was flung open and Ye Tianxie hurried inside; after a burst of chaotic footsteps he came running out again… He was in too much of a rush even to close the door, and then hurried to his own room… He was so urgent about it that a single second’s delay might have left him regretting it for the rest of his life, and as he ran, that nimble body of his stumbled several times in a row.

Into his own room and out again, then into Su Feifei’s room and out again, darting into the next room, doors thrown open one after another with not one of them closed behind him. When he came out of the last room, his already stricken expression had taken on a pain and a desolation that nearly broke Su Feifei’s heart, and even his eyes had gone a dim grey with almost no light left in them.

“Tianxie… what’s wrong? What are you looking for?” Su Feifei went to his side and asked quietly, carefully.

Ye Tianxie stared straight ahead, his body still shaking. Then suddenly he lifted his head and shouted at the empty air above him in a voice trembling beyond measure, “Xian’er… Xian’er… you’ve come back, haven’t you! I know you’ve come back… answer me… Xian’er…”

Su Feifei’s body gave a slight shiver, her beautiful eyes staring blankly at him… at a Ye Tianxie who had lost all control.

Xian’er… was that the “her” he had been waiting for all this time?

“Xian’er… don’t play hide-and-seek with me any more… come out, please, I know you’ve come back… I told you, even without my sense of touch, even without my eyes, I could never mistake you for anyone else… Xian’er!!”

There was no voice answering him. Nothing at all.

He ran forward and yanked the door open… then stood as though stunned, looking out at the emptiness. The blazing sun overhead poured down its scorching brilliance without mercy, and even the faint breeze carried a suffocating dry heat.

“Guess who I am? There’s a penalty if you get it wrong.”

“…My Xian’er, of course.”

“Ugh… you got it right again.”

“Because there are only the two of us in this house. Apart from me there’s only my Xian’er. If I got even that wrong, wouldn’t I be the stupidest person in the world?”

“Then you… get it wrong on purpose, just a little, so I can be happy for once and give you a tiny penalty.”

“Silly Xian’er. Even without my sense of touch, even without my eyes, I could never mistake you for anyone else… because Xian’er carries a scent only Xian’er has.”

“Hee, then tell me — what kind of scent is it?”

“…How do I put it? I don’t know how to describe it either. Because it isn’t a scent you smell with your nose; it’s one you smell with your heart… Because my Xian’er fills my whole heart, and the moment she comes near, my heart tells me…”

The door closed. Ye Tianxie, like a man who had lost his soul, dragged his heavy body back inside with slow steps. When he had walked into the kitchen a moment ago he had caught that scent that haunted his dreams, the one he could never mistake, and in that instant he had heard the mad pounding of his own heart…

After the wild joy came an enormous loss, and an enormous blow. In all the world there was only one person who could move him this violently.

He sat back down heavily on the sofa, body tilted, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling like a man whose soul had been drawn out of him, emptied of strength and consciousness alike.

Su Feifei bit her lip lightly, softened her steps, and went silently to his side, afraid the sound of her walking might disturb a Ye Tianxie whom hope and disappointment had stirred into painful memory.

“Xian’er… is she the person you’ve been waiting for all this time?” Su Feifei sat down beside him and asked it softly. His reaction, and the pain that had come into his expression, hurt her sharply inside… for him, and for herself as well.

Ye Tianxie stared blankly upward and didn’t answer.

“Could you tell me about her?” Su Feifei asked in an even softer voice.

Still no answer.

Su Feifei said nothing more. She shifted over, leaned gently against Ye Tianxie’s shoulder, closed her eyes, and listened silently to his heartbeat.

His reaction told her how deeply carved into his bones his feelings for that woman were… A man like this might feel desire for other girls, but he would never feel love again. Because he had already poured every feeling he had into one girl, and had none left over to divide among anyone else.

What kind of girl could make a man like him behave this way for her sake… Would she have a city-toppling face, the bearing of an immortal, a gentleness like water…

She must have loved Tianxie very much as well… otherwise how could she have earned feelings carved this deep into his bones?

And if she loved him that much, why leave… and hand him a pain that had pressed on his heart ever since.

You were supposed to be the one who made him happy, who brought him joy… weren’t you?

With Tianxie’s temperament… even if you meant to walk to the ends of the earth, so long as he loved you he would have wandered with you without a moment’s hesitation, and however great the hardship he would have faced it beside you with a smile… So why leave…

“Tianxie, shall we eat first?” Su Feifei shook his body gently; at some point her own eyes had gone misty. The look on his face just then had her heart close to breaking. Having never seen this side of him before, Su Feifei understood only in this moment that when one person cares too much about another, that person’s grief brings her the same grief, and several times over.

“I’m… not hungry.” Ye Tianxie closed his eyes and said it lifelessly.

Su Feifei looked up and gazed at him for a long while, then nodded gently, rose, and went back to her own room. The door closed quietly behind her.

(End of Chapter 180)