On How to Bully a Mute

[Worldly, vicious lunatic] vs. [Proud, "mute" obsessive weirdo]

Four-year age gap, two strong-willed leads, both stubborn, love and hate, and a broken mirror that's hard to mend.

1.

From the moment Chen Cheng approached Ling Zheng, all she wanted was her money and to destroy her.

She couldn't fall in love with Ling Zheng, but while her body retreated, her heart kept drawing closer. She would never admit it, though, and still wanted to ruin everything Ling Zheng cared about.

Ling Zheng, meanwhile, thought Chen Cheng had always been a heartless, unfeeling bad woman.

Only after they had been apart for two years, when she arrived in Tukele, did she truly begin to understand Chen Cheng: her nightmares, and the painful past that had driven her to erase herself.

2.

Chen Cheng has always admitted that she is no good.

The mistake she made more than ten years ago has clung to her like a ghost in a swamp, leaving her confused, afraid, sensitive, and suffocating.

For years, she searched for a way out.

At last, one day, she found a way that might free her from it all.

She just needed money, a lot of money.

But she had no education, no skills, no patience, and, more importantly, no time left.

There was often a girl sunbathing on the roof of No. 203 Beilimen Hutong.

Chen Cheng's impression of her was: ordinary-looking, quiet, narrow-eyed, hard to approach, and a carefree capital-city nepo baby.

And, on top of that, not her type.

None of that mattered. As long as she could get something out of the girl to solve her problems and escape the abyss she'd been stuck in for over ten years, that was enough.

So she tried every way she could think of to get close to her, making opportunities where none existed, intending to consume her from body to soul.

3.

Ling Zheng had always been proud and aloof. When she liked someone, she never needed friends.

Her background meant no one dared play mind games with her or pretend to be anything but sincere. She could sit in her high-backed chair and look down on everything.

Too many people had deliberately sought her out, and Chen Cheng was no exception.

But she did the one thing she would regret most: she tried to see everything in Chen Cheng's eyes.

She hated Chen Cheng's materialism and opportunism, her cruelty and violence, her constant fickleness.

None of that mattered. She could teach her, explain how a person ought to behave, reshape her values, and educate her into becoming someone just like herself, so she would stay by her side forever.

But Chen Cheng was not only wild and impossible to tame, refusing to be controlled, she also destroyed everything Ling Zheng had!

She wanted to strangle with her own hands the bad woman who dared destroy everything she had!

But Chen Cheng... left.

Reader's Guide:

1: Told in reverse chronological order, a realistic, slice-of-life story with a somewhat slow pace.

2: Pretends to be a mature woman, but is really a bad woman [bad from beginning to end, bad from childhood on]. One of them has a deeply cherished first love, and the relationship begins on impure terms.

3: Chen Cheng is a lunatic: poorly educated, selfish, so jealous she'll sabotage others, a compulsive liar, and somewhat violent. [Readers may dislike her.]

4. One thinks, "I like you, but I won't admit it. I'll bully you to death instead." The other thinks, "I love you. If you can't return that love in equal measure, then you can die."

Theme: I want your purest love.