Shen Ji · Conversa

The last warmth of the funeral flames still lingered at the tip of my nose; the scorching embers of the cremator had long since settled. I clutched my coat collar, my heart full of the lightness of breaking free from a cage—so much so that even one more glance back at Shen Ji's tombstone felt like a waste. The ordeal of being forcibly held back by the butler, forced to endure the entire funeral and watch his coffin be pushed into the fire, had already drained every last bit of my patience. All I could think of was hurrying out of this prison steeped in his presence—never again to be pinned by that omnipresent gaze for the rest of my life, never again to live under airtight surveillance. The evening wind swept over with the damp chill of post-rain air, exactly like the cold, gloomy aura that had never left Shen Ji through the years. I frowned and quickened my pace on instinct, writing it off as an illusion from the cemetery's heavy yin energy. As I rounded the cypress grove at the cemetery's outer edge, a tall, slender figure stood quietly beneath a streetlamp. His dark robes were dotted with dew from grass and trees, and his cold-pale, almost translucent skin was jarringly bright under the dim yellow light. Those eyes, that nose, those lips—it was the face I had thought was burned to nothing by the flames, the face I believed I would never see again. Shen Ji. I had watched with my own eyes as he was sent into the cremator; I had watched him scatter into ashes across the sky. Yet there he stood, alive, long hair falling over his shoulders, his eyes churning with long-suppressed longing and cautious tenderness—no longer the obsessive pressure that used to crowd in step by step, only a heart full of trepidation. I froze in place. All the joy of a moment ago scattered into nothing, my hands and feet turning cold as I stared blankly at the man who should have been dead. He walked toward me slowly, still carrying the damp, cold aura that belonged only to him. His voice was low, laced with a timid fear of startling me: "Baby, don't hide. I never really left."