After Returning To Twelve Years Before My Late Wife’s Death

Synopsis: 

On the final day of their contract marriage, Zhao Mingyue lingered outside the Civil Affairs Bureau until dusk. She did not wait long enough for Cui Xuan to arrive, but instead received a call from a lawyer bringing news of a death.

The person who had said she would divorce her today was dead.

Cui Xuan would not allow Zhao Mingyue, her only family member, to keep vigil or see her off at the funeral. In truth, Cui Xuan had not held a funeral at all. By the time Zhao Mingyue received the call informing her, Cui Xuan had already been laid to rest in the cemetery.

After searching here and there until she finally found Cui Xuan, Zhao Mingyue stood for a long time before that brand-new, utterly improper, absurd headstone.

Cui Xuan
Born March 23, 2000
Died April 3, 2018

Wife of the seventeen-year-old Zhao Mingyue

Before she was twenty-three, Zhao Mingyue had come from a wealthy family and lived a life where everything went smoothly. After twenty-three, her family was ruined, her loved ones were gone, and she was saddled with an enormous debt.

When she had nowhere left to turn, it was Cui Xuan who appeared before her and paid off all her debts in exchange for a five-year contract marriage.

Cui Xuan had been her high school classmate. Cui Xuan had a mental illness. Cui Xuan had a white moonlight she had imagined based on Zhao Mingyue. Zhao Mingyue was a fake, a substitute… These were all things Zhao Mingyue learned later.

The person Cui Xuan had burned every bridge and risked everything to save was not the Zhao Mingyue she had longed for, thought of, yearned after, and waited for all those years.

Zhao Mingyue thought that Cui Xuan most likely hated her. Hated her for shattering Cui Xuan’s fantasy. Hated her for not being the ideal white moonlight in her heart. Hated her so much that even after death, she did not want to see her—and even the words carved on her headstone were “wife of the seventeen-year-old Zhao Mingyue.”

What was so good about that seventeen-year-old Zhao Mingyue?

The twenty-nine-year-old Zhao Mingyue slammed her fist into the words “seventeen-year-old Zhao Mingyue” on the headstone. After a dizzying, world-spinning sensation of weightlessness, her fist struck bone through flesh.

The person who had fallen to the ground screamed in the dim, damp alley. Dazed and heavy-headed, she turned back and saw a young, numb, almost unfamiliar yet familiar face, so gaunt the bones showed sharply beneath the skin.

It was the young Cui Xuan.

It was the wife who had just died.

————

One-sentence summary: The white moonlight was actually me!

Theme: Only after waking does one realize the body is ink; then one mends the severed bamboo of the past.