Qi Cang

She is the experimental subject chosen by the family She was one of the few sober people in that era "I'll take you away" "Are you leaving? Father added a tracking agent to the potion." "I think we can kiss here" "They say my blood will last forever" Yuqi, I won't let you be taken away by them I believe in you, Yan Clan * When Yan Cang met Yu Qi for the third time, Mei Yu was licking the carved iron door of the pawn shop. She walked across the patio holding her musty mink coat and saw Yuqi curled up on the master's chair, counting the pendulums of the Western clock. The angelica floating in the celadon bowl rises and falls with the breath, casting a fine shadow on the collarbone. "This is the silver bracelet you want." Yan Cang took out a silk handkerchief that was warmed close to his body. There were a few strands of black hair wrapped around the lotus pattern on the bracelet. When Yuqi's fingertips scratched the old frostbite on her palm, the copper bell on the corner suddenly sounded in panic, and the stack of pawn tickets dropped from the Eight Immortals' table. The attic planks groaned secretly in the dusk. Yuqi's brocade cloak was spread on the old account book, and the lace of Yan's coarse cloth apron got entangled in the emerald earrings at some point. When the last ray of skylight escaped from the transom, they discovered in the mixed aroma of angelica and mint that it turned out that the crushed medicinal dregs could also produce an intoxicating sweetness. "Open your mouth." Yan Cang kissed her with rock sugar loquat ointment in his mouth, and the honey-colored concoction flowed into the belly pocket along the red mole on Yu Qi's neck. The late spring wind lifted the curtains of the pawnshop warehouse, and when twenty-eight Western clocks rang simultaneously, Yuqi bit the blood bubble on the tip of his tongue. The place for secret rendezvous changes with the seasons. The medicine plaque in the attic of the Chinese medicine shop has become a hotbed of affair, with tangerine peel and saffron evaporating under the body temperature and evaporating into a psychedelic mist; in the costume box at Paramount backstage, Yan Cang tied Yu Qi's trembling ankles with the glass stockings of the pinup girl; even in the shadow of the stained glass of the Bund church, Yu Qi inserted a diamond hairpin into Yan Cang's braid: "This is collateral..." * Until that year during the Dragon Boat Festival, Yan Cang saw his own wooden hairpin in Yuqi's dowry list. In the golden nanmu box, the clay figurine they bought at the Chenghuang Temple was being strangled by a bright red satin. "Father wants to give me to the director of customs as a gift." The blood Yuqi coughed up stained the mandarin duck's bellyband red, and twenty-six pearls made purple marks on his palm. On the eve of the elopement, Yan Cang pawned the ancestral longevity lock. As the rickshaw passed through the French Concession, she held two ferry tickets to Guangzhou in her arms. In the car lights that suddenly came on at the corner of Xiafei Road, she saw Yu Qi being tied to the sedan chair, with the silk handkerchief in his mouth soaked in brown concoction. The joy of the wedding day echoed in the concession for three days and three nights. Yan Cang huddled in the cellar of the pawn shop, using the pearl necklace left by Yu Qi to carve words on the brick wall. On the morning of the fourth day, when the apprentice found her, she was holding Yuqi's embroidered shoes and muttering: "Look, the cinnabar has soaked into the soles..." * When the letter from Nanjing arrived, the first snow of this winter was falling on the Huangpu River. Yan Ting unfolded the letter tremblingly and saw the word "violent death" dizzy into blood-colored flowers in his tears. Late that night, she used the gold thread from the dowry list to sew the white silk ribbon, and the stitches were exactly the lotus pattern that Yuqi taught her. Twenty-eight Western clocks stopped simultaneously as the beams in the pawnshop's attic groaned under the strain. Under Yan Cang's dangling feet, Yu Qi's embroidered shoes were arranged neatly, as if they were about to get married. The moment the last pearl rolled into the crack in the wall, the artillery fire at the top of Nanjing woke up the morning mist of Suzhou River. Concept: Collision of old and new ideas