After Transmigrating Into a Book, I Was Played by the Black Lotus – Chapter 40

“Bai Xiying, let’s break up.”

For a moment, the air fell silent.

Jiang Yeye’s body, which had been slumped on the sofa, slowly straightened. Her once-elated heart now thumped anxiously as she watched the silent Lin Xingzhu.

“Cousin… are, are you angry?”

She watched Lin Xingzhu cautiously.

Lin Xingzhu stared at the untouched glass of lukewarm water. “Shouldn’t I be?”

“…”

Jiang Yeye held her breath, a flicker of confusion in her eyes.

But no matter how bewildered she was, she knew Lin Xingzhu was angry.

“Cousin, I’m sorry…” Jiang Yeye said earnestly. “I just wanted to help you.”

Lin Xingzhu didn’t say that good intentions could still lead to bad outcomes.

She simply looked at the crestfallen Jiang Yeye and asked faintly, “Do you know why I didn’t expose your lie right then and there?”

Jiang Yeye fidgeted with her hands, not daring to make a sound in the face of this version of Lin Xingzhu.

“Yes, you were pinching me to keep me from talking,” Lin Xingzhu said. “But that’s not a reason you could have stopped me. In that situation, you were so excited as you told your lie, trying so hard to put on a show. If I had exposed you on the spot, do you think you would have had any face¹ left? Wouldn’t you have felt like I’d made you lose face in front of a stranger, that I’d hurt your pride?”

Lin Xingzhu closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were filled with a clear, complex light.

She said, “Of course, I was also at fault. I wasn’t able to stop you in the first place.”

“Cousin…”

Jiang Yeye’s head shot up, the corners of her eyes a little red.

Lin Xingzhu swallowed but said nothing.

She was also to blame for this. If she had stopped Jiang Yeye with a joke the moment she’d opened her mouth, then she wouldn’t have let her continue with the “joke,” and Bai Xiying wouldn’t have misunderstood.

But it was undeniable that the moment Jiang Yeye spoke, she had subconsciously cast a veiled gaze, mixed with a thread of inexplicable anticipation, upon Bai Xiying.

That momentary trance had cost her the opportunity.

At this thought, Lin Xingzhu’s fingertips tightened, feeling disgraced by that fleeting, despicable thought.

Things shouldn’t be like this.

Lin Xingzhu’s eyes went vacant for a second. So when faced with someone they like, even the most confident person will feel anxious and waver back and forth? Will they also be unable to resist using childish methods to test and to verify?

By the end, when faced with Bai Xiying’s suppressed, utterly calm expression, she no longer had the confidence to handle this absurd mistake perfectly without revealing her own feelings.

In that brief, tangled exchange, Lin Xingzhu understood for the first time that when faced with someone they liked but were unsure about, a person could also feel a sense of inferiority and unease rising from the depths of their heart.

Her lips were pale as she looked seriously at the guilty Jiang Yeye. “Yeye, I know you wanted to help me, but this isn’t how you help someone.”

“You don’t understand my situation, so you just assumed that using goading and provocative methods to test her was the right thing to do. That’s wrong.”

“Besides, the feelings between two people shouldn’t be pushed or probed in this way. True affection is the harmonious adjustment when two people are together, it’s the touching of two hearts. It should be something they seek out and confirm on their own initiative, not pushed by an external force or some random third party.”

Lin Xingzhu said, “I don’t need this kind of method, and neither does she. For you to do this is, without a doubt, to look down on her, and to look down on me.”

As for that last sentence, she could no longer tell if she was saying it to Jiang Yeye or admonishing herself.

It took Jiang Yeye a moment to understand what Lin Xingzhu meant.

She sniffled, suddenly realizing just how unfunny her well-intentioned joke had been.

“I’m sorry, cousin, and to that jiejie too.” Jiang Yeye truly realized she had done something wrong. She looked up, her nose red, and said firmly, “I’ll go apologize to her and explain the situation!”

With that, she stood up and started to walk out.

Lin Xingzhu grabbed her, her knuckles tight. “You sit here. I’ll go.”

Jiang Yeye looked up at her, uneasy.

A faint smile touched Lin Xingzhu’s lips as she ruffled her hair. “It’s good that you know your mistake and want to fix it. I’ll handle the rest.”

Back at the Qin family home, Lin Xingzhu had a good relationship with her boisterous younger female cousin, so she handled Jiang Yeye, who was of a similar age, quite naturally.

Moreover, when it came to today’s misunderstanding, the person who truly deserved to be condemned was, in the end, herself.

If she hadn’t indulged her desires, hadn’t allowed those despicable and absurd thoughts to spread, then what followed would never have happened.

Standing before Bai Xiying’s door, Lin Xingzhu knocked. In the waiting silence, she stared at the doorknob.

The door opened, and Bai Xiying’s expressionless face appeared behind it.

“Why are you here?”

Lin Xingzhu paused, her gaze sweeping over the other woman’s impassive face before she said seriously, “I came to apologize.”

Bai Xiying was in no mood to listen to anything she had to say. Hearing this out-of-context sentence, her brow didn’t even twitch as she said coldly, “I accept. You can go.”

She didn’t even have the desire to look up at the person who had come.

Otherwise, seeing the red bite marks on Lin Xingzhu’s fair, slender neck would make her want to tear her throat apart, to make sure every mark on her neck was one she had inflicted herself.

Lin Xingzhu raised an arm to block the door she was about to close, wedging the tip of her foot in the gap. “I’m sorry, my cousin’s joke offended you. I apologize on her behalf.”

The force on her hand eased slightly. Bai Xiying looked up. “Cousin?”

Lin Xingzhu stared into her eyes. “Yes, the girl in my apartment just now, Jiang Yeye, is my cousin. She’s here visiting and staying with me. She’s always liked to joke around, and her thoughts are a bit all over the place. She doesn’t know about our relationship, so when she saw you come to my place looking for me, she probably thought it was funny and said what she did.”

Feeling the door under her arm no longer pushing so firmly, Lin Xingzhu let out a small sigh of relief.

Bai Xiying’s obsidian-like eyes stared intently into Lin Xingzhu’s sincere ones. After a moment, she retracted her gaze, which swept past the red marks. At the same time, she released her hand from the door and turned to go back inside.

“Our relationship? What relationship do we have?”

Lin Xingzhu came around the door and went inside. “A couple’s relationship.”

Bai Xiying: “That’s a fake relationship that we both know is fake.”

Bai Xiying’s features were cool and detached. Her shirt, which had been neat just a moment ago, was now slightly disheveled.

Lin Xingzhu glanced at it, then looked at her and said, “But to the outside world, it’s real.”

Bai Xiying was silent, not refuting her.

Lin Xingzhu sat on the sofa. “I don’t know if you were angry or not, but in any case… I’m sorry.”

She didn’t specify a subject. This apology was for her own unspeakable baseness and self-loathing.

Lin Xingzhu rubbed her fingertips, which still bore the marks from being pinched, and lowered her eyes to wait for Bai Xiying’s response.

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Bai Xiying said insincerely. “It was just a little girl’s joke. You don’t need to be so tense.”

Lin Xingzhu’s head snapped up to look at her.

“So you’re not angry?”

“A little bit…” Bai Xiying began, again insincerely. In truth, she felt like she had been angry enough to kill someone just now.

“I was just angry about how wary she was of me. It was a bit baffling.”

Lin Xingzhu’s lips parted. “That’s good, then.”

But she had experienced Bai Xiying’s cold, perfunctory attitude just now and knew she wasn’t telling the truth.

It’s fine, she thought. I’m used to it. As long as I know, that’s enough.

For a time, the two of them were silent.

After a while, Bai Xiying suddenly asked, “A biological cousin?”

“…”

Lin Xingzhu said, “Yes, my uncle’s daughter.”

“Oh.”

Lin Xingzhu’s head was bowed. From this angle, Bai Xiying could once again clearly see the bite marks on her neck, identical to Jiang Yeye’s.

She asked again, “Why didn’t you come back to the apartment last night?”

“I went to my family’s home to pick up my cousin,” Lin Xingzhu said.

She didn’t understand why Bai Xiying was asking this.

When she looked up again, she caught Bai Xiying’s gaze before it had fully retreated, and she froze.

She reached back to touch her neck. The wound, covered in ointment, still felt cool, but having seen it in the mirror, Lin Xingzhu knew just how much that patch of skin looked like that kind of mark.

“…” She blinked, a dawning realization under her fluttering lashes.

So, because of the identical bug bites on her and Jiang Yeye, plus Jiang Yeye’s joke, the combination had made the ever-so-clever Bai Xiying misunderstand?

Lin Xingzhu scratched her neck, then lowered her hand and asked naturally, “Does it look that bad? My aunt forgot to turn on the mosquito lamp yesterday, and a lot of them got into my room. It was so itchy when I woke up this morning.”

“…”

After a long moment, Bai Xiying suddenly smiled. “The camellia tree outside your window looks beautiful from inside, but don’t forget to close the window tightly when you sleep. Otherwise, be careful, more bugs might fly in.”

What else was there not to understand?

The tightness in Bai Xiying’s chest loosened, but she felt no sense of relief. Instead, her heart felt even heavier.

It was like a great stone had been dropped into her heart, sinking deeper and deeper, sealing off all outlets for release, just continuing to fall.

Something was screaming from the pitch-black abyss deep inside her.

Bai Xiying shifted her legs and lowered her head. Noticing her clothes, which had been disarrayed from her forceful tugging in the dark room earlier, she raised a hand to straighten them.

During this time, Lin Xingzhu remained silent, as if deep in thought.

Suddenly, her soft, gentle voice sounded in the space.

“Bai Xiying, let’s break up.”

Bai Xiying looked up at her.

Lin Xingzhu’s gentle eyes were fixed on her. “I think it’s time for our fake relationship to go back to what it was.”

Bai Xiying’s lips parted. “Why bring this up all of a sudden?”

Lin Xingzhu said, “I just feel it’s what should be done.”

No destruction, no construction²*. She wanted to start over with Bai Xiying, formally, from the position of being purely friends.

The great stone crashed down completely into her heart, sealing every fissure, leaving the abyss without a glimmer of light.

Bai Xiying heard herself say okay.

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