Song Fuli only wanted to find someone to father a child with.
But when she climbed onto the lean, muscular abdomen of the man beneath her, looking as fragile as a willow in the wind, he simply pulled up her half-exposed outer robe. Looking at her with his cool gray eyes, he spoke in a voice as aloof as a Buddha in a temple: "Miss, you were kind enough to save me despite being blind. Thank you. Please move aside."
Blind and kindhearted?
She wasn't blind, and she wasn't kindhearted either.
That night, he pushed her away five times, each time without the slightest impatience.
But the strict precepts he upheld were actually very easy to break.
He pushed her away five times, and she wore him down five times. Their feelings grew stronger, their desire more intense, until even the Guanyin on the lotus wept like a beauty in the rain.
They went at it all night. The sun rose in the east, a hungry horse galloped to the trough, and the wind passed through the sparse woods.
Song Fuli looked at the man kneeling silently beside the bed, bearing thorn branches as penance. She lightly pressed her foot between his knees. "So you, too, are a man whose words and actions don't match?"
Once they'd tasted the forbidden fruit, the floodgates opened. A gentle embrace could be a knife, and a gentle flower could hide a tender-hearted ghost. They couldn't even make it to nightfall before their desire became impossible to suppress.
But the dream of paradise always comes to an end.
For Qi Mubai, and for Song Fuli too.
The man stood atop the mountain, looking toward the shadows among the stone pillars. "A few nights of passion, a fleeting affair. How could I take it seriously? Someone as reckless and blind as her would never manage in the capital."
And so the idle wanderer abandoned her husband and child and disappeared without a trace, while the lonely stray was left with nowhere to go.
But Song Fuli never imagined that the lonely stray she had casually discarded would eventually become a parasite clinging to her bones, impossible to remove.
Later, not even the red worms could quell his fury or stem his release.
In the dim inner chamber, the phoenix curtains toppled as day and night blurred together. The taciturn man seemed to pour every word he had ever held back into her ears.
[Reader's guide]
1. Both leads are sexually inexperienced, happy ending. A cool-faced, cute, easygoing layabout × a cold, tough guy who says one thing but means another.
2. This is a companion story to the one next door. Characters from that story will make brief appearances, but it can be read on its own.
Theme: How does an idle wanderer raise a lonely stray?
