The Alley Was Always This Long – Chapter 10
by Little PandaThen
“Of course it’s to dump Tao Tianran.”
[In the third year after our breakup, I still dream of you.
I once thought I would have the chance to say these words.]
Cheng Xiang called Qin Ziqiao on the phone. “I used to really not understand how anyone could like studying. Now I get it.”
“Even so,” Qin Ziqiao said, “why exactly are you calling me?”
“Just pretend we’re really close,” Cheng Xiang continued. “Now I really get it. It turns out only people like us who can’t solve the questions hate studying. Those who can solve them get an explosive sense of accomplishment.”
“Who is ‘us’?” Qin Ziqiao retorted. “Who can’t solve questions?”
“You. Just you.” Cheng Xiang rolled over, accompanied by a rustling sound. “Now that I’m doing jewelry design, I feel the thrill of being a straight-A student1.”
Qin Ziqiao asked suspiciously, “What are you eating?”
“Potato chips.” Cheng Xiang let out a small gasp on the other end of the line. “Oh mother, I dropped it on the bedsheets.”
Then came the sound of her jumping up and smacking the blankets.
Qin Ziqiao: …
This Yu Yusheng gave her a very strange feeling. Wearing the face and voice of a wealthy Eldest Miss, yet doing things so excessively down-to-earth, she reminded her of when she used to be with Cheng Xiang.
Qin Ziqiao smiled lightly.
Then, an hour later, she somehow ended up sitting in the bedroom of Cheng Xiang’s luxury mansion.
Arms crossed, face cold.
Cheng Xiang asked her, “Do you want some cherries? 5J2 size, as big as a palm.”
Qin Ziqiao slapped her hand away. “Don’t talk to me.”
“Why?”
“I hate the rich. I’m hating the rich on Xiao Xiang’s behalf too,” Qin Ziqiao said. “Since you have so much money, your personality isn’t allowed to be like Xiao Xiang’s!”
“Who’s like her? What’s so good about being like her.” Cheng Xiang moved a footstool and sat down in front of Qin Ziqiao, blinking up at her from below. “I’m the seductive type. I can make bedroom eyes.”
“Let’s see you try.”
“Ah…” Cheng Xiang lowered her head and rubbed her eyes. “This is because my makeup and styling aren’t complete.”
She sat at the vanity table to draw her eyeliner.
Isn’t this how it was acted out in TV dramas? After a woman blackens3, her eyeliner had to slant upwards.
“Tsk~” Cheng Xiang muttered. “My hand slipped.”
Qin Ziqiao watched Cheng Xiang sit at the vanity table drawing her eyeliner. She walked over and pressed a hand on the edge of the desk. “Hey.”
“Hmm?” Cheng Xiang pulled at her eyelid.
Qin Ziqiao had a hime cut and single eyelids. Her face always bore a stinky expression, making it impossible for anyone to guess her true emotions. She asked in a low voice, “If you really manage to woo Tao Tianran, and make Tao Tianran like you very, very much.”
“Then what?”
Cheng Xiang looked at herself in the mirror.
The upward-slanted eyeliner suited her eye shape perfectly. The small triangle at the outer corner flicked up just a bit, leaving a tiny blank space in the center. The eyeshadow had no color, only starlike, sparkling nude glitter, stepping in to add flair to her smiling, seductive gaze.
She raised a slender fingertip and gently tapped her reflection in the glass.
“Then of course,” she smiled, “it’s to dump Tao Tianran.”
Cheng Xiang asked Zhuwei, “Can I call you Auntie?”
Zhuwei looked at her with a strange expression. “Just how dissatisfied are you with me and your dad?”
Forget it, forget it. Cheng Xiang waved her hand. “Pretend I didn’t say anything.”
It was just that the only real mother in her heart was Director Ma of the Neighborhood Committee; she truly couldn’t bring herself to call anyone else that.
She silently decided in her heart: from now on, she would just get straight to the point and skip the forms of address altogether.
Zhuwei called out to her, “Ask Miss Tao where she is.”
“Why make me ask?” Cheng Xiang picked up a washed apple and took a bite.
“Aren’t you two colleagues?”
“Don’t you know how complicated workplace interpersonal relationships are nowadays? Guard against fire, guard against theft, guard against colleagues.”
Zhuwei glanced at her again. Cheng Xiang felt a sense of realization: the old Yu Yusheng likely rarely spoke to Zhuwei in such a relaxed tone.
It was quite different from her mother-daughter relationship with Director Ma.
Since the conversation couldn’t continue, Cheng Xiang walked alone into the dining room and sat down at the table.
The vaulted ceiling was fully two meters high, with a glass roof. Sitting here and looking up, even in winter, one could still see autumn’s withered leaves clinging to the top, as if time had stagnated in this place.
Cheng Xiang suddenly thought: I wonder how that wutong tree4 at my little courtyard house is doing.
Sitting there, she peeled a few pistachios. Truly bored, she unwittingly fell asleep.
When she woke up, she found herself resting her face in the crook of her arm, the corners of her eyes damp.
She lightly wiped them with her fingertip and lifted her head, only to find someone sitting perfectly upright across from her.
Tao Tianran was sitting there—and, she wasn’t playing on her phone.
This… Cheng Xiang spent half a second pondering: was it more embarrassing to be caught by Tao Tianran crying in her sleep, or to be caught by Tao Tianran drooling in her sleep?
And as for this person, Tao Tianran, how to put it—who on earth acted like this?
Finding someone crying in their sleep, her gaze didn’t avoid them at all; she just stared straight at her.
Cheng Xiang coughed lightly. “Why are you here?”
“Your mom asked me to come find you to chat.”
“Where’s Yu Yuce?”
“Stuck in traffic.”
Cheng Xiang let out an ‘oh’ and craned her neck to peer into the kitchen. The housekeeper, Auntie Su, was originally in there simmering soup.
“Auntie said she was missing a seasoning and went out to buy it.”
“Tsaoko5,” Cheng Xiang chimed in.
Having lived in the Yu family home for this period of time, she had already figured out the housekeeper’s seasoning style; her favorite ingredient to use was tsaoko.
Tao Tianran slightly lowered her chin, no longer responding.
Which meant that in this massive dining room, only the two of them were left alone.
Cheng Xiang fiddled with her fingertips under the table.
Tao Tianran was originally a taciturn person, and Cheng Xiang hadn’t expected her to speak up first, but then she heard Tao Tianran ask, “What did you dream about?”
Cheng Xiang lifted her eyelashes.
First she curled her lips into a smile, her tone laced with a hint of teasing. “What, Teacher Tao is interested in me?”
Tao Tianran nodded, not avoiding the question at all. “Yes.”
Now Cheng Xiang really smiled.
She had followed closely behind Tao Tianran for so many years, and she had genuinely never seen Tao Tianran take an active interest in her.
Because of that, she had only ever heard Tao Tianran mention the name “Yu Yusheng” once, yet her subconscious had remembered it for all these years.
The heavens always loved to play jokes, deliberately making her transmigrate into Yu Yusheng.
So much so that as she wore a frivolous smile and reached out to pluck a grape from the freshly washed plate Auntie Su had served, she genuinely didn’t know if this act of getting closer to Tao Tianran was considered drinking poison to quench her thirst6.
Seeing her not answer, Tao Tianran asked again, “So, what did you dream about?”
Cheng Xiang had originally planned to spin a ridiculous lie, like how SpongeBob SquarePants battling Cooking Master Boy7 for three hundred rounds only to finally be subdued and turned into a dishwashing brush was truly a tragedy that would make listeners weep and onlookers mourn.
But, perhaps the atmosphere in the dining room was too tranquil.
Perhaps it was just dusk outside the window.
Perhaps when Cheng Xiang looked up, she recognized that yellowing leaf of the wutong tree among the cluster of withered leaves on the glass roof.
She lowered her eyes to look at Tao Tianran’s delicate, clear features, slowly tracing them once over. “Dreamt of you.”
“Dreamt of me?” Tao Tianran’s brow twitched slightly. “Dreamt of me doing what?”
“Dreamt of you ah…” Cheng Xiang drew out her tone, turning her wrist to pluck off a grape. “Just like this, sitting beside me.”
She pulled out her phone and tapped it a few times.
Tao Tianran had no desire to peek, but sitting face-to-face, it was difficult to avert her gaze entirely. From the corner of her eye, she could glimpse Cheng Xiang setting a memo widget onto her phone’s home screen.
It didn’t say what the timer was for, just a single, bare number: 【778 days.】
Whether Tao Tianran genuinely wasn’t curious, or just out of politeness, she withdrew her gaze and asked nothing.
Only Cheng Xiang stared at that number by herself, and for some unknown reason, lightly rubbed her own wrist.
Of course, Tao Tianran didn’t know.
Cheng Xiang had once set a timer for her breakup with Tao Tianran on her own phone. After transmigrating into Yu Yusheng, she had set it again on Yu Yusheng’s phone.
Back when the hundreds digit of the 【7】 was still lingering at 【3】, when Cheng Xiang’s own phone memo had read 【Day 378 of the Breakup with TTR】, she had a dream. When she woke up, she looped a black hair tie around her wrist.
It even drew a lecture from Director Ma: “Why are you putting a hair tie around your wrist? You have short hair, don’t you?”
She hadn’t spoken of it to anyone. Not to Director Ma, and not to Qin Ziqiao.
During her afternoon nap that day, she had a dream.
She dreamt of Tao Tianran, sitting beside her exactly like this.
Not speaking, not smiling, just sitting beside her.
After waking up, she fished out a black hair tie from who knows where and looped it around her wrist. Giving it a snap brought a sharp, teeth-baring pain.
But what use was it?
She thought in sheer despair: maybe on the 578th day, and again on the 778th day, by the third year of her and Tao Tianran’s breakup, she would still dream of Tao Tianran like this.
She began to carefully recall whether she had made a wish to the Fourth Prince at Yonghe Temple8 to let her forget Tao Tianran when she went to pray with Director Ma one day.
Well then, the Fourth Prince’s way of doing things was certainly ruthless—he just poked her to death with one pole.
Tao Tianran remained silent for a long time.
When she looked toward Cheng Xiang again, Cheng Xiang happened to be staring blankly back at her, as if pondering something from a long time ago.
“I’m truly sorry.” Accompanied by a steady male voice, some faintly taut string in the air, unable to withstand any plucking, snapped.
Yu Yuce walked in, not even having had the time to take off his suit jacket. “Traffic was really terrible today.”
Cheng Xiang pressed a hand against the dining chair and swung her leg, her smile returning to its careless state.
Standing up, she said, “I’ll go see how the soup is doing.”
Arriving at work on Monday, Cheng Xiang was caught by her female colleagues in the pantry.
“I heard the big boss played matchmaker so your brother could meet Teacher Tao, and your brother is currently pursuing her. Is it true?”
Actually, Cheng Xiang could feel it; for an Eldest Miss like Yu Yusheng to leave her family business uninherited and come work at the company always carried a sense of her just playing around.
Even though she was charming, outgoing, and good at chatting and laughing, her colleagues actually maintained a layer of distance from her.
If you had to name the two people in the company with the strongest sense of distance, the first was Tao Tianran, and the second was her.
Right now, they really couldn’t hold back their desire for gossip, and asking her was still better than asking Tao Tianran.
While waiting for her coffee, Cheng Xiang lazily twirled the ends of her hair with one hand. “They just had a few meals, that’s all.”
“Wow, then what’s Teacher Tao’s reaction? Does she feel anything?”
“As for whether she feels anything or not”—Cheng Xiang curled her lip—”it’s better to ask Teacher Tao herself directly.”
“Who dares to go ask Teacher Tao…”
Before the words faded, they saw Cheng Xiang holding her coffee cup and walking straight toward Tao Tianran’s office.
The author has something to say:
Some little angels in the comments asked, since Xiao Xiang is in Yu Yusheng’s body, how can they have a HE9, wouldn’t that be a bit weird.
Don’t panic, just keep reading on~ Wishing everyone a happy weekend in advance~
Footnotes
- Chinese internet slang (xuébà) for a top student or academic overachiever, literally a 'study tyrant' or 'study lord.'
- A commercial sizing system used for imported cherries in China; 'J' stands for Jumbo. A 5J cherry is exceptionally large, typically over 34 millimeters in diameter.
- A popular online fiction and anime trope (hēihuà) meaning to 'blacken' or turn villainous, often accompanied by a dramatic change in makeup or clothing.
- The Chinese parasol tree (Firmiana simplex), frequently referenced in classical poetry and modern literature as a symbol of melancholy or autumn.
- Also known as black cardamom, a dried fruit used as a spice in traditional Chinese cooking to flavor braised dishes and soups.
- A Chinese idiom (yǐnzhènzhǐkě) meaning to seek temporary relief that results in disaster; literally 'to drink poison to quench one's thirst.'
- A mashup of two popular animated series: the American cartoon 'SpongeBob SquarePants' and the Japanese culinary anime 'Cooking Master Boy' (Chūka Ichiban!), used here as a deliberately absurd, nonsensical scenario.
- Yonghe Temple is a famous Tibetan Buddhist temple in Beijing, originally the residence of the Yongzheng Emperor before he ascended the throne (when he was still the Fourth Prince, or 'Si Ye'). It is a popular site for locals to pray for good fortune and grant wishes.
- An abbreviation for 'Happy Ending,' a standard term in Chinese web fiction fandoms.
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