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Chapter 13.3 – Mysteries that Could Not Be Unraveled (3)
The lotus ponds of late summer seemed always to carry a sense of defeat, of ending.
But, as Shi Yi walked on the meandering stone bridge over the water, she did not feel that this was a scene of deterioration. The wilting away that occurred entering into the autumn season and the thick icy surfaces of winter would eventually, in the coming year when the rivers started to break-up again, burst forth and spread out into vast stretches of lush green.
Summer would fade and fall would come, year after year.
She turned around and walked backwards, looking back at Zhousheng Chen, who was following two or three steps behind her. Regardless of whether it was the “he,” who with a single wave of his hand, could cause one hundred thousand soldiers to drop to their knee in a resounding boom, or the “he” before her eyes now, hands in the pockets of his trousers as he strolled leisurely over the white-stoned bridge, both were irreplaceable to her.
Shi Yi was grinning, and he was also smiling lightly.
“I… really don’t fit in with your family.”
He was not very concerned. “I do not fit in either.”
“Have you always been like this, since you were a child?”
With a laugh, he answered, “As a child, I was much like you, not really fitting in with people.”
She remembered that he knew everything about her, like the back of his hand, and felt slightly uneasy. “What you have… the information on me, how detailed is it, really?”
“How detailed?” Zhousheng Chen recollected briefly. “Detailed down to points like, you like to drink coffee with milk but no sugar.”
Shortly after they had first met, before they had even seen each other for the second time, he had already known all these things.
During those brief times they had connected in Xi’an, she had already been wholly transparent before him and he had been completely knowledgeable about her. But to her, he had always been a mystery. Each period of time that passed, or even each day, would cause her to be aware that everything she had once known about him was a guise.
Gradually, she halted her steps, and Zhousheng Chen naturally stopped as well.
“In the past, you’ve lived in this type of environment, too? Were you comfortable in that?”
Politics, mineral resources, land, gems and jewelry, drugs, and arms trade.
She felt, all these things seemed to go against his values.
“Me?” He seemed to be contemplating how he should word his reply. After a short silence, he answered, “I am not comfortable in it, nor do I like it, but I cannot extricate myself from it. Ties of blood are the only type of relationship that you cannot extricate yourself from. I like… a simple lifestyle.”
She gave an “mm,” and then teased softly, “And you like Venus more than the Earth that you live on.”
He chuckled amusedly at her words. Lowering his voice, he said seriously, “But first, one needs to protect the land beneath one’s own feet. If we are not even able to guard the land under our feet, there will be nothing that our brethren can depend upon, that they can fall back on for survival, right?”
Shi Yi followed the train of thought of his words and thought of many things.
Some time passed before she nodded and said, “Yes, just like… In the past, the reason why the Jews were massacred was because they did not have a homeland to call their own.” She mused, she understood what Zhousheng Chen meant.