An Unfinished Portrait of the Wild King

Mutual healing through their work | Unfinished regrets

Lin Shutong, a socially anxious illustrator, takes a commission from a game company to draw an esports player in order to cover her father's huge medical bills. While staying up late studying match footage of Jiang Yibai from the "Deep Forest" team, her stomach condition flares up. She goes to a late-night food stall downstairs for a wrap to tide her over, only to be caught by Jiang Yibai, who's just finished training.

At first sight, Jiang Yibai is drawn to the version of himself in her art: "proud, yet lonely." The two go from late-night drawing sessions and midnight snacks together to gradually falling in love. But then Lin Shutong's stomach condition worsens after years of staying up late to draw, and she needs to be hospitalized. Jiang Yibai develops tenosynovitis in his right hand from intense training and has to go abroad for treatment.

In the end, Jiang Yibai is forced to retire because of his hand injury, while Lin Shutong falls unconscious in the hospital from a gastric hemorrhage. At the moment they love each other most, they leave behind an unfinished portrait.

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The unfinished portrait of the jungler still lies open on my drawing table. I've only sketched half a stroke of Li Bai's sword tassel, and I've drawn Jiang Yibai's eyes nine times. The first were too cold, the second too bright. On the ninth try, he suddenly holds down my trembling hand. "Tangtang, is your stomach hurting again?"

I hide the blood I've spat into a tissue. He hides the retirement notice his team doctor handed him.

We tacitly avoid every dangerous topic. We count stars at the late-night food stall, listen to the rain in the studio, and secretly write "It'll be all right" on each other's medical charts.

Until the day he slips his championship ring onto my paintbrush, and I switch my stomach medicine for vitamins.

He says, "When the portrait is finished, we'll go..."

"To your grandpa's old house to see the osmanthus." I finish for him.

But the portrait remains forever frozen at the moment the "jungler" lays down his sword. His right hand can no longer grip a mouse, and my stomach can no longer hold the pumpkin porridge he bought me.

Later, someone asks me, "What's the biggest regret about that unfinished painting?"

I touch the words he secretly wrote on the back of the paper, "I do," and say softly, "That we both heard our hearts beating, yet each thought the other didn't dare."

Theme: You need food to live, and Mom says it's time to eat!