Chapter 155 Memory Recovery

Jiang Yeyan grew up in an extremely suffocating environment. His parents detested children who were full of themselves or acted overbearingly arrogant. As fate would have it, he had always possessed a perverse personality and used his family’s influence to bully others at school.

At the age of fourteen, his parents used their connections to send him to a place resembling a military academy. However, this was not a place that would transform him; it was a demon's den that dragged him down into the abyss. He was the youngest child in this grade and the one with the most obnoxious personality.

The instructors would bare their fangs and claws, punishing him as they pleased.
And the older boys in his dormitory always took pleasure in tormenting him.

It was only much later that he found out the place his parents had sent him to was not a military academy at all, but a youth thought-correction center. His parents had paid a hefty sum, demanding that they properly straighten out his personality, even if it required using cruel methods.

Jiang Yeyan had once tattooed his first love’s name across his chest. When the instructors and classmates saw that he refused to wash it off, they used fire to burn his chest inch by inch until the flesh became a bloody mess. He struggled desperately; that tattoo wasn't simply the name of a girl—it was his most basic right as an independent human being to govern his own body.

Yet here, he lost his most fundamental human capacities for independent thought and autonomy... He could only scream at the top of his lungs, watching helplessly as his chest was scorched by fire, the agonizing pain piercing straight to his core, burning away all his innocence.

He spent three years in that place.
What he feared most of all was the sight of fire.

And so, they always used fire to bully him. This humiliation, sinking deep into his bones, completely shattered him at an age when his worldview was yet unformed and unpolished. His bones were born proud, but everyone around him, including his parents, was determined to smash that pride to pieces.

On a gloomy, rainy day, he was notified that he was finally graduating and leaving the youth thought-correction center. By all accounts, he should have been overjoyed. Yet, as he looked at the white carnation in his hand—given by the instructors to every student leaving the center—he leaped from the fourth floor, thinking only of truly bringing an end to this absurd existence, even if others called him a coward.

Jiang Yeyan pieced his memories back together in fragments. He must have hit his head at the time, erasing the most agonizing memories.

"Heh, I've remembered a few things..."
"Is there anything about Zhong Huayan?"
Zhong Huayan was quite expectant, hoping to hear some clues.

"I think I finally know why I am so deeply haunted by the memory of Zhong Huayan's fire."
"Why?"
"Because the moment I saw her lying in that fire, it fulfilled my most exact and perfect imagination of life's deepest agony. The me in the depths of my soul had died long ago. The moment I died was just like the moment she died. Scorched by flames, lying there innocently and numbly, the white carnations looked so much like white gardenias. My mother rushed to the scene, looking on with cold-hearted ruthlessness as it all happened. My mother tacitly permitted it all to happen."

Zhong Huayan was completely bewildered, not yet understanding what the young man before her had recalled... She only knew that he had managed to figure something out.

Jiang Yeyan was practically drenched in sweat, desperately trying to rein in the pain in his chest and his wandering focus. He was not a strong person, which was why he relied so heavily on a god, craving for a god to save him...

He was merely a sensitive, fragile, and frantically eccentric individual trapped in the shackles of power, confronting this dazzling, trap-filled world with the most defiant and disdainful attitude. No one could stop it at will; it was all just the mockery of the heavens, the mockery of the gods.

"Brother Jiang, this is the box you asked to be brought up."
A subordinate placed a square box onto the tea table and then withdrew.

"This is that Xiangfei purple-bamboo-ribbed thirteen-fold folding fan with a waxy base. It was also on that day that I found out which dynasty this fan belonged to."
Zhong Huayan looked at the long fan inside the box, featuring a yellow base intertwined with brownish swirls. It was truly a top-tier piece among folding fans.

Seeing her look at it as if she couldn't put it down, Jiang Yeyan suddenly dropped a remark.
"My mother gave me this fan on a whim. She never cares whether I like it or not; anyway, whatever she hands down, I have to take. Who knows... which of my mother's paramours sent this item over—it looks entirely like something a woman would use."

Zhong Huayan raised her head, looking at Jiang Yeyan's androgynous facial features and his shoulder-length short hair.
"Maybe your mother was subtly hinting at you, thinking you look neither like a man nor a woman."
"Li Yanyan, do you think I'm good-looking?"

As expected of someone who played music, the man's voice was exceptionally pleasant and magnetic. His gaze carried an aggressive intrusion, compelling her to submit. As he gently rested his chin in his hand, he looked lazy and bewitching. The touch of red on his chest was like cinnabar piercing the soul, intoxicating without one even realizing it.
"Quite good-looking. Better-looking than any woman."
"Then why don't you like me?"

Zhong Huayan half-closed her eyes, and when the corners of her mouth curved into a smile, it was no longer gentle and magniform, but tinged with an inviolable majesty.
The white moonlight and the cinnabar mole.
"Jiang Yeyan, your fingers will answer that question. I'll be leaving first."
"Where to? To find Fu Yanyan or Fang Wenjin? Do you fancy their ascetic temperament? One burns incense and chants scriptures, while the other is a sickly weakling?"

He looked at his own fingers, the coexistence of the spiritual and the carnal.
He loathed physical contact with women, yet he couldn't stop his penchant for flirting with the romantic winds and moonlit nights; those who practiced art always possessed delicate minds.

A simple sentence was spoken by him with a flavor of grievance and jealousy.
"It has nothing to do with you."

The more aggressive Jiang Yeyan was, the calmer she remained.
The calmer she was, the more he boiled over.
Zhong Huayan simply let out a cold laugh and said,
"You're only twenty; you don't understand love. Liking someone is like a man's desire—once it's vented, it vanishes into thin air."

Jiang Yeyan leaned casually against the chair, pondering her words before taking a sip of tea with a trace of amusement.
He certainly didn't love the woman before him. But he had to admit, his desire for possession, exploration, and victory had been pushed to a certain height; doing it would probably feel amazing, and that was all.

That was how he saw it for the time being. He too had experienced youth, except that his beating heart had already been burned to ashes by a fire, leaving behind only the shell of a walking corpse. He said softly,
"At my age, both love and hate are romantic."
"Life is still long; you shouldn't just confine yourself to romance and love."
"I am already dead. The energetic me is already dead... I simply cannot find any meaning in life; I only want to squander the days away. That's why I envy you so much, for still having a beating heart. You are loved, and people like you who are loved simply don't understand those of us who are starved for it. You have no idea how terrifying it is to be born into such a family! This suppressed atmosphere, this constant demand to keep a low profile, this strict discipline, this perpetual walking on thin eggs... Even your family members are quietly dead and desolate, with two hearts separated by an uncrossable chasm..."

Zhong Huayan actually empathized with him to some extent; every family had its own difficult scriptures to chant.
However, she no longer wished to entangle herself with him. After paying the eight hundred thousand for the fan, she walked out of the courtyard.

Seeing that she gave no answer to his words, he said no more, merely leaning against the second-floor window, watching with unfathomable, murky eyes as she got into her car.
Deep down, Zhong Huayan agreed with some of his views, because she remembered Li Yanyan, Xu Chuyin, Xu Yuan... Although they were young, their love was more deafening than that of any adult.