"The tears of time have torn away my disguise. Do you remember what I looked like when I was young?"
The string of faded silver bells still hung on the eaves of Renji Hall, jingling like weeping in the wind. Zhou Yan pushed open the carved door of the east wing for the last time, and agarwood shavings fell from the cracks in the door, like a snow that was ten years late, and not a single snowflake fell on him.
The bronze mirror on the desk reflected two shadows. One was him kneeling in front of the soul, burning the marriage certificate, and the other was Xu Zhao, curled up in the shadow of the medicine cabinet, swallowing scraps of paper. The young man is as lonely as a crane with broken wings in the dusk, with faded agarwood beads wrapped around his wrist, eighteen beads and eighteen shackles.
The so-called feudal ethics were originally shackles soaked in medicinal fragrance.
When Zhou's mother's withered hands clasped Zhou Yan's wrist and forced him to sign a "father and son" pledge in the morgue, ethics became poisonous silver scissors, twisting love into a shady knot. Those blind date resumes with the annotation "Geng Jin Pairing Ren Shui" and those marriage invitations under the "Biography of the Martyred Girl" are just the ghosts of injustice wandering among the beams and pillars of the ancestral hall, gnawing at the sincerity of the living every night.
But Xu Zhao decided to tear up the fig leaf. He sewed blood-stained dried magnolia flowers into the wedding dress, burned the ashes of "Zhou Xu" in front of the ancestral tablet, and even dared to point at the jade staff of the ninth uncle and laugh: "Do you think the cracks in the ancestral hall floor tiles are incense ash, or the blood of me and Brother Yan?"
This is not resistance at all, this is a sacrifice that will burn with both jade and stone.
He boils his sick bones into lamp oil and insists on carving a hole of mercy in the rotten wood of ethics.
Concept: Chinese love is an undifferentiated emotion, mixed with responsibility, guilt and control.