The Magpie Is Not Alone

[A story about a rebellious heroine turning the tables on a feudal playboy with a rebellious streak of his own]

*

Seeing the clingy pest getting more and more persistent, Zhao Fudi prepares a few earth-shattering questions that will overturn his worldview and make him back down.

Zhao Fudi: "Can you promise to choose only one cup from the three thousand weak waters, spend your whole life with me alone, and never look at anyone else?" She is full of confidence, thinking this one question alone will be enough to make him give up.

Xie Xun nods. "Of course."

Zhao Fudi: "? Then can you promise to be honest and open with me for the rest of our lives, never brushing me off or deceiving me, and never using your status or power to force me to cater to you?" She panics and immediately drops another bomb.

Xie Xun looks puzzled. "What's so difficult about that?"

Zhao Fudi: "!? Then... I've always been afraid of marriage and childbirth. I probably wouldn't be willing to walk through the gates of hell for a man, and I never planned to have children. Can you accept that, too? Even in modern times, few people are willing to remain childless, let alone in a feudal society where it would be seen as a curse condemning one's family line to end. She's laying all her cards on the table.

Xie Xun's lips curl into a smile. "That's even better."

Zhao Fudi: "...Let me think about it some more."

Xie Xun orders his subordinate, "Ask Mr. Xun to prepare a bowl of contraceptive medicine. Tell him it's for me to drink."

Zhao Fudi: "???"

Xie Xun waits at his leisure. "Anything else?"

Zhao Fudi: "...I'm thinking, I'm thinking."

*

At first, Zhao Fudi only wanted to live out her life in silence in this unfamiliar era.

She understood clearly that the rules governing the worlds of the two eras were fundamentally different. She stubbornly believed that her views on many things came from a simple sense of morality and nothing else. She had neither an all-knowing perspective nor any extraordinary abilities. All she had was a clear, distant gaze with which she observed an era that did not belong to her.

Her insight and her sense of not belonging confirmed that she was different. The small sense of intellectual superiority made her secretly pleased.

Later, she watched white waves reach the sky as corpses floated down the river, covering its surface. She watched the levees suddenly collapse and floodwaters sweep in one after another. She watched fields, houses, and homes all get washed away. Then came defiant government orders and cries that shook the heavens. She could not bear to think back on it.

It was both a natural disaster and a man-made one.

She was no longer a bystander. She had long since become part of it all.

Disaster strips away people's complexity and leaves them with innocence. Zhao Fudi draws a line around herself and calmly awaits her own inevitable ruin.

"Don't ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for you and me."

Theme: Shooting stars each have their own destination. Respect everyone's choices