When he kissed me, it was quieter than snow, but when he dug out my heart, it burned harder than fire.
In Shanghai in 1931, Shen Linyu was the poisoner Yi Xiaoran dug out of the sand at the dock.
She gave him a Sichuan brocade gown to wrap around his frayed waist from carrying rice bags, but what he gave in return was a rumor in the city. Everyone said that the daughter of the Yi family melted the ancestral rice warehouse key into a wedding ring as a coolie.
The tip of her tongue against her earlobe was not feeding arsenic, but poisonous candy from South Asia, just as she would never admit that when he came to collect grain on behalf of the Japanese Military Chamber of Commerce, her hand holding the gun was lusting after the rose-shaped gunshot wound under his suit.
"How come Miss Yi's hatred is hotter than love?"
Shen Linyu tore open his shirt in front of the burned rice warehouse, grabbed her hand and pressed it against the bullet mark on her heart: "It's time to pay back the bullet I took for you back then."
It was only when she pulled the trigger that she saw clearly that the inside of the jade ring he was holding was engraved with: Shen Linyu's beloved Yi Xiaoran.
A few years later, he faced her and swallowed the poison he had prepared with a smile: "Yi Xiaoran, it would be great if we met earlier. There would be no enmity or hatred. Wouldn't our ending be more happy than now..."
