Lu Chen drank pork tripe soup for three years.
His wife told him it was love, a miracle cure for his stomach condition.
So he drank it every day, even when his stomach churned, even when in the dead of night he felt like a corpse floating on the surface of the water.
Until he met Su Mu.
She didn’t urge him to drink the soup, find him a specialist, or tell him, “Your wife treats you well enough.”
She simply felt his racing pulse across the cold pool water and said, “The cause of your illness is in your heart.”
She was the first person to truly see him, and the medicinal catalyst who pulled him out of the thick soup called marriage.
But when Lu Chen finally smashed the soup bowl and tried to cling to this lifeline, she smiled and reminded him, “Don’t fall in love with me. I’m only the one who led you to the medicine.”
Later, Lu Chen learned that she had approached him because of another man.
A man who had also spent years drinking soup, who also had a girlfriend who claimed to be “doing it for his own good,” and who also woke at four in the morning.
It took him six years to understand what Su Mu meant when she said, “Sincerity and restraint are a double-edged sword.”
