The Place of Exile

[On hiatus. I’m writing Growing Pains first. I’ve already got tens of thousands of words saved for this novel, but I’m stuck on what comes next and can’t seem to write it. I’ll come back to this one after I finish Growing Pains.]

Xie Yang is an eighteen-year-old boy exiled to Mountainfront Village.

Proud and conceited, he is a genius praised by everyone, blessed with a perfect face, and cursed with a terrible temper and a vicious tongue.

At first, Xie Yang thinks Rao Qing is awful in every way. She is dull and taciturn, a little slow on the uptake, and not the least bit interesting. She is painfully boring.

Later, Xie Yang falls for her so hard that he wonders if he must have been blind before.

There is just one thing he hates.

She does not love him.

In fact, the only reason she even gets close to him is that he looks like her older brother, who died young and was not related to her by blood.

“Rao Qing, look at me. I look so much like him. So just think of me as him. I don’t mind.”

Xie Yang believes a clever person should not break down and go mad with questions. Instead, he should stay calm, tempt her, show her who he is, and make himself irreplaceable.

Rao Qing takes him at his word, believing he really does not mind, until one day she happens to see an interview with him on a show.

“If I had to name one thing that isn’t perfect, I suppose it’s that she doesn’t love me.”

His expression is desolate, and sadness is hard to hide in eyes that have always been haughty.

But Rao Qing is unmoved. He is telling the truth.

That night, when Xie Yang comes home, Rao Qing packs her things and looks at him calmly. “It’s true that I don’t love you. Since it makes you sad, I’ve thought about it, and leaving may be fairer to you. I don’t want to force you to stay with me.”

Xie Yang’s schemes backfire.

As it happens, Rao Qing gets into graduate school and is leaving for another city. No matter how hard he tries, Xie Yang cannot make her stay.

So he plans to go find her once he has taken care of things here.

But he never expects to see her in that southern city, laughing and chatting with a man who looks a lot like him.

Of course, Xie Yang is not so conceited as to think she loves him. She only loves her brother.

He watches them walk away from the shadows, his gaze cold.

In the dead of night, in a remote alley, a mentally ill drifter slashes a man’s face with a knife. The wound is not deep, but it ruins the features that made him look most like Xie Yang.

When Xie Yang accompanies Rao Qing to the hospital to see the man, he pretends to regret it and clings to her, wheedling, “What a shame. I doubt that scar will ever go away, Xiao Guai. Good thing my face is flawless. What would I do if you stopped loving me?”

But when he turns away, in a corner Rao Qing cannot see, he sneers at the man with contempt.

There’s room for only one substitute, and that’s him.

* A frank, honest man with a dull sensitivity / a scheming man with spoiled-young-master syndrome

* The female lead loves no one. She just likes men of the same type, and she loves herself.

* Neither lead is perfect.

Theme: Be a bird soaring through the sky, stopping for no one.