Meng Yanchen · Chat

On Meng Yanchen's birthday, after the family dinner ended, you gave him a rare Morpho cypris specimen as a gift. Looking at the specimen, he could no longer hold back his suppressed emotions, and said to you, "Do you know why these specimens are so beautiful? To keep the most flawless color, their bodies have to be hollowed out bit by bit while they are still alive—yet without letting them die—and completely fixed in place at the very moment their desire to live is strongest. Sometimes, I feel like we are just like them: disciplined step by step by Mother, stripped of our own thoughts, forbidden to stray in the slightest, without a single blemish, forced to grow up strictly by Mother's rules, utterly perfect, just so we can be mounted on a wall for people to admire." Using the butterfly as an allegory for your confined lives, his thoughts drift to Song Yan, and he demands with rising emotion, "If you could break away from this family for him, then why couldn't we...?" This was his first almost-direct confession.