Chapter 38: Soul (8)

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After several nights of sharing a bed while dreaming different dreams, they finally managed to complete Jian Qingzheng’s coffin-replacement ritual on their last day in Dragon City.

Wen Mingwei had hired someone to arrange the ceremony. The entire process was overseen by a supposedly highly respected and revered local master. Wen Mingwei preferred to keep a low profile and cared nothing for superficial grandeur, but he was meticulous about details. Not a single step could be treated casually, and the ceremony took up most of the day.

Tan Zhao found the whole thing absurd and had no desire to attend. Wen Mingwei insisted that he accompany him. Otherwise, he said, he would lock Tan Zhao in the room and forbid him from going anywhere.

Having accidentally revealed his feelings during their quarrel the previous night, Tan Zhao regretted it profoundly. The moment he woke the next morning, he gathered his emotions and shut himself away completely, refusing even to show anger.

At first glance, it seemed as though he had already let go and no longer cared about anything.

Wen Mingwei wore black, and Tan Zhao was forced to wear black as well. They arrived at the cemetery at dawn and listened to the master chant scriptures until two or three in the afternoon.

Because the old coffin had been damaged and was being replaced, the master was particularly concerned about the cause of the damage. After making inquiries and learning that Tan Zhao had been responsible, he tactfully suggested that Tan Zhao participate personally, bow before the dead, and express remorse and respect. He even gave Tan Zhao a ritual implement of uncertain purpose and told him to open the coffin himself and pray, saying that only then would his sincerity be evident.

Tan Zhao’s brows drew together as he listened. Without the slightest hesitation, he refused on the spot.

Fortunately, Wen Mingwei also had no wish for him to come into close contact with Jian Qingzheng’s coffin. After exchanging a few words with the master, they skipped that part of the ceremony.

They spoke in a Xinzhou dialect. Tan Zhao understood only fragments, but he vaguely guessed what Wen Mingwei was thinking and sneered, “Are you afraid that if I use the ritual implement to open the coffin, the soul inside me will run back into it?”

“…”

Wen Mingwei glanced at him without replying and cooperated with the master in carrying out the next step.

Tan Zhao discovered that Wen Mingwei had a remarkable talent for pretending not to hear. Whenever the contradictions surrounding the word “soul” were brought up and he had no answer, he simply acted as though he had heard nothing. He lived within a world of his own logic, doing whatever he pleased.

And as a believer, he was hardly sincere.

If he were truly devout, he should have followed the master’s instructions. Instead, the master was the one listening to him. Whether a particular rite could be performed was entirely up to Wen Mingwei.

In the end, Wen Mingwei opened the coffin himself.

Tan Zhao stood several paces away and watched as Wen Mingwei pushed back the lid with his eyes closed. His expression was barely calm, while the trembling in his arms was impossible to conceal. When the lid struck the ground with a resounding crash and revealed the bones inside, Wen Mingwei still kept his eyes shut, not daring to look closely at the coffin’s contents for a long time.

The master chanted several words Tan Zhao could not understand, urging Wen Mingwei to continue and transfer the remains into the newly prepared coffin as quickly as possible before burying it.

Wen Mingwei, however, remained motionless for a long while.

He had understood long ago that death was the extinguishing of a lamp. Yet seeing with his own eyes that the body he had carried into the coffin nine years earlier had now become nothing more than a heap of white bones, it felt as though the weight of the past had decayed along with the departed and scattered into an ungraspable handful of ash.

If he had been willing to let go, Wen Mingwei would have done so long ago.

But what came after letting go?

Within his hollow spirit, there was only handful after handful of ash. He had to seize hold of something before he could feel the weight of life.

Wen Mingwei lowered his head in silence. His face went so pale in an instant that Tan Zhao thought he was about to cry.

But he did not.

Calmly, he followed the procedure, using the designated vessels to transfer the bones into the new coffin.

Then they built a new grave and erected a fresh gravestone.

When everything was over, Wen Mingwei returned to the car. The moment he sat down, he embraced Tan Zhao and leaned heavily against his shoulder, inhaling deeply of his scent.

“…” Tan Zhao instinctively wanted to pat him, but then remembered that Wen Mingwei had just had his heart broken over Jian Qingzheng and had come to this substitute for comfort. A wave of disgust rose in him, and he withdrew his hand.

Expressionless, Tan Zhao let him hold him. After a while, he said, “We should be heading back to West Capital, shouldn’t we?”

“We’ll leave tonight.”

Wen Mingwei was listless, his voice low. His lips rested motionless against Tan Zhao’s neck, as though engaged in an unending kiss. So long did it last that Tan Zhao felt the patch of skin was about to burn, yet Wen Mingwei still did not pull away.

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He remained in that position for more than ten minutes.

Eventually, the pressure left half of Tan Zhao’s body numb, forcing him to shift his position. Wen Mingwei moved with him, nestling more comfortably into his arms. He closed his eyes, then suddenly said after a while, “I’m taking you somewhere.”

“Where?”

“You’ll know when we get there.”

If they had been a normal couple, Tan Zhao would have wandered properly through Wen Mingwei’s hometown, seeing the place where the person he loved had grown up.

But there was no such sentiment between them, and Wen Mingwei did not consider Dragon City a hometown worth remembering.

There was only one place he missed: the river he had once treated as his secret base.

More than twenty years ago, Wen Mingwei had thought the grass by the river grew immensely tall, tall enough to swallow him whole. Whenever he lay in the desolate grass, he always felt that he would die and disappear there, unnoticed by anyone. The river itself had seemed broad as well. Several times he had wanted to swim across to the opposite bank, but he had never been able to summon the courage.

Yet when he returned today, his memories seemed to have gone wrong.

The grass was short, and the river was not wide.

It was merely a small river—perhaps it should be called a stream. He did not know where it began or where it would eventually flow. Wen Mingwei saw only a section of its long course, just as it had accompanied him through only a section of his long life: little more than ten years, with the beginning and end cut away.

Wen Mingwei brought Tan Zhao to the riverbank and got out of the car to feel the breeze.

Compared to earlier, he seemed much better. He always recovered quickly, and for a moment Tan Zhao could not tell whether he had truly regained his composure or was merely pretending to be calm.

Wen Mingwei had never mentioned the river before. Perplexed, Tan Zhao asked, “What is this place?”

“My secret base when I was a child.” Wen Mingwei pointed toward the woods across the river. “There used to be a lot of birds’ nests in those trees. They seem to be gone now.”

Tan Zhao followed his gaze and surveyed the area. There was nothing remarkable about it: ordinary river water, ordinary grass, ordinary trees, the kind of plainness found everywhere. It could hardly even be called a landscape.

Its only virtue was its solitude.

The Wen family’s old residence was not in the city center. There were several stretches of natural scenery in the surrounding area, and this river was one of them.

Tan Zhao knew that Wen Mingwei’s childhood had been difficult. The moment he heard the words “secret base,” he understood what they meant. But every instinctive word of comfort turned sour whenever he thought of Jian Qingzheng, so he coldly spat at Wen Mingwei, “Your secret base, or his too?”

“Mine. He was only a guest.”

“Am I a guest too?”

“Yes. You are too.”

It was after four in the afternoon, with plenty of time before sunset. Remembering the sunsets that had once filled this meadow, Wen Mingwei said to Tan Zhao, “Stay with me for a while. Let’s leave after we watch the sunset.”

He found a clean place to sit and clasped his knees with both arms, gazing distantly toward the opposite bank. His expression was relaxed.

“Today I remembered some things from the past. I want to tell you about them.”

“I don’t want to listen,” Tan Zhao said, refusing to cooperate.

Without even looking up, Wen Mingwei pointed beside himself. “Come here. Sit down.”

“…”

The gesture was exactly like calling a dog. Anger shot to Tan Zhao’s head, and he nearly broke the seal he had placed on himself only the previous night. He drew a deep breath, restrained himself, and sat down with a dark expression.

“Fine. Tell me.”

Tan Zhao was not merely a pet. He was also expected to serve as a confidant.

Yet when people poured out their hearts to a confidant, they generally spoke of sorrowful matters. The first thing Wen Mingwei said was, “I remembered the first time I killed someone.”

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“…” Tan Zhao choked.

Wen Mingwei said, “My first killing wasn’t a mission. It was an accident I had not been mentally prepared for.”

More precisely, it was not an accident at all, but a deliberate kidnapping.

Wen Mingwei had been the one abducted.

He had been twelve or thirteen that year. The local underworld in Xinzhou was crowded with gangs. The Wen family was powerful, and it had no shortage of rivals. Clashes broke out often.

Wen Mingwei was the Wen family’s youngest son, but he held little importance within the family, making him the most suitable hostage to sacrifice. Wen Mingzhe, by comparison, was far more exalted. Ordinary people would not dare lay a hand on him.

That night, Wen Mingwei was bound inside an abandoned warehouse.

The two men guarding him drank and chatted about what their superiors intended to do with him. If Old Master Wen refused to sacrifice the deal, they said, the young master would not live to see the next day.

Wen Mingwei listened in terror, cold sweat pouring down his body. He knew the Wen family elders would not sacrifice anything for his sake. If they were forced to make a sacrifice, it would only be because he bore the Wen name, and his dying pointlessly outside would bring disgrace upon the family. It had nothing to do with him personally.

Even setting that aside, if someone came to rescue him, he could not afford to be seriously injured. His records were forged, and he dared not go to a hospital—especially because he feared a blood transfusion. His blood type did not match the one listed in his documents.

In an attempt to save himself, Wen Mingwei waited until the two thugs were drunk, then desperately worked his wrists free of the knots. He circled behind them and stole a gun.

One of the men was bleary with drink. The other was awake.

The sober one noticed him at once and turned around. At that critical instant, when it was kill or be killed, Wen Mingwei’s mind went blank. His finger had already pulled the trigger.

The deafening gunshot rang out. A bloody hole appeared in the man’s forehead, and he collapsed where he stood, like a non-player character in a game with no ability to fight back, shot dead by Wen Mingwei with absurd ease.

Wen Mingwei did not truly comprehend that he had killed someone. There was no time to think. The gunshot jolted the other man awake. His eyes opened, but before he could recover from his daze, Wen Mingwei fired a second shot and killed him as well.

Two living men became corpses in an instant. Even in video games, Wen Mingwei had never achieved such an impressive score.

He even suspected that they were not dead, that they were deliberately playing with him and would sit bolt upright the next second and put a bullet through his head.

To prevent any such surprise, he felt around on one of the bodies and found a knife. He pointed it at their throats and slit each of them once.

“I no longer remember what they looked like, but I remember the sensation of the blade severing the carotid artery.”

Wen Mingwei spoke with remarkable composure. “If you have ever killed someone, you’ll understand. People are fragile. They die very easily.”

“…”

The way he said, “If you have ever killed someone,” sounded as though he were exchanging advice about studying, the unspoken meaning being, “You can try it if you ever get the chance.”

Tan Zhao felt his scalp tighten.

“It only takes one stroke.” Wen Mingwei turned toward him and leaned in, pressing a finger shaped like a blade against his carotid artery. “No matter how powerful you are, no matter how wealthy you are, no matter how sweet the love you share or how fiercely you hate someone… Once this knife falls, it all ends. Everything that came before becomes meaningless.”

“Can you feel it?” Wen Mingwei suddenly kissed him and asked, coaxing him toward an answer.

Tan Zhao hesitated. “Feel what?”

“Meaninglessness.”

Wen Mingwei gave only that one answer and did not elaborate. He simply watched Tan Zhao, seemingly waiting for him to nod and say, “Yes. I can feel it.”

Tan Zhao understood the words, but he could not feel what they described.

What he could feel was Wen Mingwei’s expectation. It was not a good thing. It was like an addict tempting him to fall together, asking him to experience the void between life and death at his side.

And yet Wen Mingwei deliberately refused to state it plainly, leaving Tan Zhao to comprehend him for himself through a few vague, fragmentary words—or to give him the opposite answer.