Chi Cheng was indeed on a platform halfway up the mountain, enthusiastically admiring a leaf covered with a thin layer of ice. “I knew you couldn’t bear to leave me,” he revealed a surprised smile as he observed Xun Xun who had returned after leaving.
Xun Xun was breathing rapidly, making sounds that could have been either crying or laughing.
“Where is Zhou Ruisheng?”
“You came back just to ask about Zhou Ruisheng?” Chi Cheng mocked, “Are you interested in him too?”
Xun Xun hissed, “You’re all too cruel! It wasn’t enough to cheat my mother out of all her money, you even made her mortgage her house. You might as well have taken her life!”
Chi Cheng raised his eyebrows as if he couldn’t understand what she was saying.
“Don’t play dumb with me! Does it give you a sense of achievement to manipulate others? Now that you’re rich, Zhou Ruisheng has become your obedient dog, doing whatever you tell him. If it weren’t for you, with so many foolish women in the world, why did he have to target my mother!”
“What? He cheated your mother out of her money?” The thin ice slid off the leaf as Chi Cheng withdrew his hand, showing surprise and sympathy, “See? I told you he was a bastard, but none of you believed me.”
Xun Xun trembled with anger, “Are you going to say again that my mother deserved to be cheated, that she was asking for it, that our whole family was asking for it? Are you happy now? Are you satisfied?”
Chi Cheng shook the water droplets from his hands and said coldly, “Given your bad mood, I won’t hold this against you. But Zhao Xun Xun, while you can have whatever prejudices against me, you should at least be reasonable before throwing dirt, or at least have evidence. What makes you think I instructed Zhou Ruisheng to cheat your family? Even if he’s my uncle, how would I know he was involved with your mother? Did I set them up? If you insist on blaming me, you’re not innocent either. If you hadn’t gotten involved with me, how would your mother have met Zhou Ruisheng? You dragged your family into this – you’re the real culprit!”
“It’s my fault!” Xun Xun finally couldn’t hold back her tears, “I was wrong to trust you, no, I was wrong to have met you in the first place! You can hate me, but come at me directly. You can leave me with nothing, and ruin my reputation, I’ll accept it all, but why couldn’t you leave my family alone?”
“You’re crying? I thought your body didn’t produce tears.” Chi Cheng looked at her in surprise.
Xun Xun walked toward him step by step, her tears quickly dried by the wind, tightly stretched across her face, “You’re simply a psychopath! I told you before, this only makes me despise you more! Because you’re pitiful, no one loves you, your mother doesn’t care about you at all, your father treats you like an outsider, no one wants to be with you, and you have nothing except money, that’s why you can’t let go of old grievances. If you had even a bit of happiness, you wouldn’t spend so much effort, deliberately plotting revenge against someone who doesn’t even know you. Unfortunately, no matter how much you struggle, you’re still just an unlikeable clown!”
Chi Cheng’s face turned ashen, and Xun Xun could almost hear his teeth grinding. He gripped her wrist, gently pushing down her hand that was almost poking his nose. This version of him inspired fear, but Xun Xun wasn’t afraid of anything now. The erupting anger was about to burn all the blood in her body dry, and she wished this fire would reduce him to ashes too.
“Fine, since you’ve said all that, there’s no point in me denying it. So what if I did instruct Zhou Ruisheng? Go ahead and call the police now, go on, see what happens. Or if you’re brave enough, take one more step forward, and it’ll all be over. If we’re lucky, we’ll die together.” He pulled her hand forcefully, causing Xun Xun to stumble. Her body hit the branches of a low shrub, and last night’s rainwater mixed with ice chips scattered down. Some drops splashed onto her neck, feeling like poisonous ants crawling on her skin. Xun Xun suddenly realized that in her anger, she had completely forgotten about the danger. While confronting Chi Cheng and pointing at him in accusation, she had also walked to the edge of the walkway. They were standing on a relatively open small platform, with flowering plants growing at their feet. The shrubs in front blocked their view, but beyond the shrubs, the mountain dropped off sharply, and one couldn’t know which step might lead to empty air.
Xun Xun drew in a sharp breath and quickly stepped backward twice.
“Scared? Coward! You care too much about yourself, there’s nothing in your heart except yourself. Your father is an old con man, and your mother is greedy and status-obsessed, treating marriage like prostitution. You’re the offspring of a charlatan and a legal prostitute! At least they pursued their most basic desires, they were just more direct about it. But you, seeming to want nothing, are the most selfish! I might be an unloved clown, haha, but what are you? You’re just a broken scarecrow, hollow inside, incapable of love! Xie Pingning, that man from the blind date, Sun Yifan, and me – all suitable men were just tools for you to seek stability. Unfortunately, you met me, and what an interesting pair we make – the unloved clown and the hollow scarecrow. The more you try to shrink back into your comfortable little life, the more I won’t let you have your way. You wanted to find a man to spend your life with, didn’t you? You were saving your nothing-to-lose fund, weren’t you? Well, it’s all ruined now.”
“I just want to leave you with nothing, block off every escape route, peel away every layer of your skin, and then see if you have any true feelings at all! You didn’t cry during the divorce, you didn’t cry when I played with you and dumped you, only when you had to dig into your savings to clean up your mother’s mess did you learn to shed tears! You’re the darkest woman I’ve ever met.”
Xun Xun couldn’t bear to listen anymore and raised her free hand to slap him, but he blocked it again.
“Angry because I hit the mark? See how well I understand you. But I just can’t figure out why you women always want to slap people. This is the last time I’ll tell you – even if I like you, even if you satisfied me so well last night, don’t even think about landing that slap.”
As he spoke, he waved the wallet in front of her again, “There’s forty thousand in cash and bank cards in here total, are you sure you don’t need it? No need to be polite, in a few years you might not be worth this much.”
Xun Xun panted silently, thinking in her heart, God, if there is a divine presence, she would trade years of her life to make him disappear right now.
But in this godforsaken place where birds don’t even lay eggs, where there isn’t even a mobile signal, how could divine grace reach here?
“You’ve got backbone, I love you even more for that, but you’d better not regret it.” Chi Cheng stepped backward, making as if to throw the wallet down the mountain in front of Xun Xun. However, no one expected that due to the recent rains, the soil covering the mountain rocks had loosened. His position was already precarious, and the throwing motion shifted his center of gravity. His foot slipped on the wet grass, and the entire patch of loose soil collapsed beneath his feet.
The shrubs behind him broke his fall momentarily, but they couldn’t bear the weight of a grown man. Xun Xun, whose wrist was still in his grip, had no time to react. She felt herself falling forward uncontrollably, then her body suddenly plunged downward. Everything went black and accompanied by the sound of countless pieces of earth and branches falling, she instinctively used her other hand to grab onto anything she could. Just when all hope seemed lost, the descent suddenly halted, as if something had hooked her. Then the hand that was being held suddenly released, and when she steadied herself, she heard a dull thud, and then there was only herself suspended in mid-air, neither up nor down.
In that instant, Xun Xun felt everything had been emptied. Her mind was empty, the hand still hanging downward was empty, and some corners inside her shell were also empty. She couldn’t scream, had no tears, had no time for terror, wasn’t even sad, and couldn’t even feel pain – only the mountain wind carrying ice shards howled as it passed through. Perhaps he was right, she was a hollow scarecrow. Suddenly the most hateful clown had vanished, leaving only the scarecrow hanging in the wilderness, arms open, eternally embracing emptiness.
She had grabbed onto a tree trunk as thick as a bowl, and only then realized that her hiking backpack had caught on the treetops, barely saving her from disaster. Amidst the continuous sound of falling rocks, she held her breath and struggled to adjust her position, managing to change from hanging upside down to a relatively advantageous face-forward climbing position before the tree trunk could give way, breaking out in a cold sweat.
It turned out that the edge of the platform where they had been standing was indeed suspended in air, but it wasn’t the bottomless abyss she had imagined. The vertical drop was only about two or three meters before the mountain slope gentled, similarly covered with dense vegetation, making it impossible for Xun Xun to see exactly where Chi Cheng had fallen.
She called out his name loudly, refusing to believe that someone as despicable as him could be shattered to pieces in an instant.
In movies, villains always retain their last breath to torment others until the final minute. However, no one answered her, only faint echoes reached her ears. The silence was the deepest despair – no matter how much she hated him, it was premised on his being alive, not ending in such a way. This terrified her more than her current predicament, and Xun Xun couldn’t help but feel grief well up inside her.
On the winter mountain, darkness fell early, and the already gloomy sky grew increasingly dark. Days of rain had softened the soil on the rock layers, and even if it was temporarily stable, this was not a place to linger.
Xun Xun didn’t dare hope to be discovered and looked up at the top, judging the possibility of climbing up. She wasn’t too far from the platform above, and although dangerous, it wasn’t an impossible task if she could find points of leverage. She tried to place her foot on a support point above, which was the angle formed by another tree and the mountain face, gradually transferring her body weight. There was another rustle of sound, countless small rocks, loose soil, and broken branches fell like rain, but she had found stable footing.
Just then, Xun Xun suddenly heard several extremely faint groans. She was startled and nearly lost her footing.
“Chi Cheng, is that you?”
The wind howled, and she thought she was hearing things. The hope that had just risen extinguished again. Just as she was about to look for new footholds, the weak voice came again from below her. This time she heard it.
“Wish I’d died in the fall? Try dumping more mud on my face and see what happens.”
Xun Xun was caught between laughing and crying; his voice didn’t sound too far away.
She made her way down using both hands and feet, her movements inevitably drawing occasional curses from him. After several heart-stopping moments, she finally landed awkwardly on a relatively flat spot and scrambled to Chi Cheng’s side.
Chi Cheng was in terrible shape, lying face-down in the grass, half his body covered by overgrown weeds and fallen branches from above, along with plenty of pebbles and soil chunks that Xun Xun had knocked down. She cleared away the debris and carefully turned him over. His face was a horrifying mixture of blood, mud, and grass bits. Xun Xun quickly examined his wounds – the blood seemed to come from several cuts on his face, likely from sharp branches during the fall. Fortunately, his eyes were unharmed, and there were no obvious head injuries, though it looked frightening. She breathed a slight sigh of relief and continued checking him for other injuries.
The fall had been severe, but he’d survived because his feet hit the ground first. The worst injuries were concentrated on his hands and feet, especially the left foot, which Xun Xun didn’t dare touch, unsure of the extent of the injury or if bones were broken. The rest were mostly scrapes and cuts, but enough to make him suffer – even his venomous words came out weak and completely lacking their usual bite.
“I’ve never seen a more vicious woman than you. As soon as you’re safe, all you think about is climbing back up. If I hadn’t seen through your tricks, you…”
A sharp crack rang out as two solid slaps landed squarely on Chi Cheng’s face.
This was the first thing Xun Xun did after confirming he wasn’t in mortal danger, fulfilling a long-held wish.
Chi Cheng froze for a few seconds before exploding: “F*ck your grandfather!”
“My grandfather died long ago. If you want to meet him, let me loosen up your joints first.”
If Zeng Yu knew that three years later, Xun Xun would avenge her under these circumstances, who knows what she would think.
“You f*cking… sh*t, you’re hitting me again!”
Chi Cheng’s face turned to the other side as he tried furiously to retaliate, but the moment he moved, the pain made him break out in sweat and tears, nearly passing out from anger.
Xun Xun said, “Say one more dirty word, and I’ll slap you again. Don’t you hate being slapped in the face the most? I think this is exactly what you’ve been missing!”
“I…”
This time, before Xun Xun’s hand could fall, Chi Cheng wisely swallowed his next word, along with his rage and indignation. He knew she was serious – whatever he said, she would slap, and in his helpless state, acting tough would only bring more suffering.
He fell silent, glaring coldly at Xun Xun.
Two more sharp slaps rang out.
Chi Cheng completely lost it, “You’re hitting me even when I’m not talking? What do you want?”
“These aren’t for cursing, they’re because you’re so despicable. Compared to what you’ve done, this isn’t nearly enough.”
“Then just beat me to death, that’ll make everyone happy.” Chi Cheng turned his head and spat out a bloody mouthful.
His wish was quickly granted.
“…You’re hitting me? F*ck, you’re ruthless… try that again… okay, stop, please, it hurts so much!”
Chi Cheng finally lost his temper, his chest heaving rapidly, the menace gone from his eyes, his face burning. His speech was unclear as he pathetically kept gesturing with his chin for her to examine his injuries.
Xun Xun finally looked at her own hands, also covered in blood, but not from Chi Cheng’s face. She’d hurt her hand when she fell with him, and in her rush to climb down, thorns from the bushes had pierced her palms. She hadn’t noticed at the time but now felt the piercing pain.
She stood up and limped away.
“Hey, where are you going?” Chi Cheng panicked.
Xun Xun ignored him, searching the area until she found a sturdy long branch. She went to the cliff face and managed to retrieve her backpack that was caught in the branches.
If she’d had any chance of climbing up before, that possibility was now completely gone. Getting down was easy, but climbing up was difficult. The moment her feet touched the ground, she knew she’d probably made a very wrong decision. Whether Chi Cheng was dead or alive, however badly injured, the wisest course would have been to get herself to safety first and then seek help. She had planned to do that, but at some moment, she suddenly felt afraid – when she returned with rescuers, would he still be able to speak his vile words? She feared he might die while she was seeking help, and then even her wish to slap him would remain forever unfulfilled.
Their position was on a relatively flat area below the cliff. Looking around, climbing up seemed impossible, but there was a slope they could try descending, perhaps leading to another walkway or nearby village. However, the primary requirement was having the use of both feet. Chi Cheng couldn’t walk at all right now, and Xun Xun’s foot was also slightly injured – carrying him forward was impossible. They were off the walkway, completely in the wilderness where probably no one had walked for years. The terrain was extremely complex, sometimes offering climbing opportunities, sometimes bare and extremely steep. Most critically, darkness was falling completely, and in some places the grass grew taller than a person, making it impossible to see the ground. One wrong step and they’d be finished.
Xun Xun searched Chi Cheng’s body, and he couldn’t help being crude: “Even at a time like this, you won’t leave me alone?”
Finally, Xun Xun found his phone, which like hers had no signal. She sighed, went to where Chi Cheng’s head was pointing, and dragged him by both hands. When she touched his injuries, Chi Cheng grimaced in pain, but didn’t dare provoke her again, only asking, “Are you dragging me off to bury me?”
Xun Xun was breathing heavily and couldn’t spare the breath to answer until she’d moved him to a satisfactory position.
“How’s the feng shui here?” Chi Cheng leaned against the backpack she’d placed behind him, the soft comfort feeling even better than a five-star hotel bed.
She used wet wipes from the bag to carefully clean his facial wounds, and after a while replied, “If you die, since you’ll have no descendants anyway, it doesn’t matter where you’re buried. But for a living person, this spot is sheltered from the wind, so it won’t be as cold at night, and you won’t get hit by falling rocks from above… though if there’s a flash flood, that’s another story.”
“Can’t you say something nice?” As she cleaned the deepest cut on his cheek, he kept hissing in pain, then suddenly noticed something wrong with her words. “What? Are you saying we might be here all night? You’re joking, right? Won’t people notice we’re missing and organize a search party right away?”
Xun Xun looked at him with sympathy.