Chapter 406 - 206: Shen Yuan, You Really Deserve to Die
Chapter 406: Chapter 206: Shen Yuan, You Really Deserve to Die
—Dumbass.
Shen Yuan scoffed lightly.
The light dissipated, and the scene before his eyes changed again.
On an office desk, a laptop screen glowed faintly, illuminating Li Zhi’s slightly weary face.
Shen Yuan was viewing the scene from the side this time, a scene he had never witnessed before. It was his first glimpse into Li Zhi’s professional life after college.
Li Zhi was looking at her phone, her finger resting on the screen. She hesitated for a moment before typing a reply, then put the phone down.
Li Zhi’s gaze returned to the computer in front of her.
Shen Yuan felt as if time sped up slightly. After finishing her work, Li Zhi stretched, her back arching in a stunning curve.
A moment later, she took out her phone. She gazed at the screen before opening her photo album, where she unerringly located a specific picture from among a sea of photos.
Shen Yuan looked at the picture. It seemed to be... a photo of two people?
In the photo were two figures, one tall and one short, with a height difference of about half a head.
’What a coincidence. That’s about the same height difference between me and Li Zhi.’
Li Zhi rested her finger on the photo, tapping it gently. Her expression softened for an instant before she collected herself, her eyes tinged with a hint of helpless self-deprecation.
Then, Shen Yuan saw Li Zhi stand up, preparing to leave.
The moment she turned, Shen Yuan saw the hairpin fastened at the back of her head.
The scene shifted, and Shen Yuan found himself in the underground parking garage he had seen before.
Li Zhi parked her car and, looking slightly weary, walked into the elevator.
Back home, she dropped her bag in the dimly lit foyer.
She didn’t turn on the main lights, just walked to the living room sofa and sat down, alone, with her head tilted slightly back.
Shen Yuan sat beside her, looking at the face upon which time had left only the faintest of traces.
This time, it was as if Shen Yuan was allowed to "read" her heart.
What emanated from the memory was not the weariness of work, but a deeper, more profound sense of emptiness.
She subconsciously raised a hand and gently removed the pearl hairpin from her hair.
The hairpin’s design, of course, needed no description.
In the dimness, she held the hairpin up to her eyes, her fingertips tracing its outline with a slow, cherished motion.
It was as if...
She was performing a Silent Reading.
She was performing a Silent Reading of the memories the hairpin carried.
In her quiet solitude, through this small hairpin, she silently and repeatedly revisited those memories—scenes that belonged only to Shen Yuan, trivial yet seared into her heart, settled and refined by the passage of years.
In this moment, there was only a loneliness and longing that had become second nature.
She clutched the hairpin tightly in her palm, feeling the coldness of the metal, as if it were the only tangible token connecting her to a warm moment in the past.
This silent "reading" permeated the quiet of her solitary home.
The fragments of memory gradually faded to a blur.
The high-speed train continued its smooth journey, the scenery outside flashing past in a blur.
Shen Yuan was violently pulled from the memory illusion. His heart felt as if it had been seized by an icy hand, only to erupt in a searing ache.
"Let’s just call the book *Silent Reading*."
"Yeah, Silent Reading."
"Isn’t that what a secret crush is like?"
"You’re always watching, always guessing."
"You take their every smile and frown, every single move, and hold it in your heart, performing a Silent Reading of it countless times."
"You don’t dare to speak up, don’t dare to disturb them."
"It’s like silently reciting a voiceless poem, chewing over every word again and again, only in your own heart..."
"Right?"
The one who sat alone at a desk in the third row by the window in the Zhejiang University Library and carved "Dumbass" into it...
The one who, during a weary break from work, opened a photo album, her fingertip stopping on the blurry outline of a boy...
The one who, in her empty, cold home, had caressed a small hairpin thousands upon thousands of times...
All those definitions Li Zhi had once given for "Silent Reading" now took on a heavy, suffocatingly real form.
That so-called "Silent Reading," the one that had been playing out silently over so many long years—how could it possibly have been about Ah Jie’s speculations about Zhuo Peipei!
It was her.
It was Li Zhi!
She...
The person she had been "silently reading" all this time...
...was me!
Those points of intersection he thought never existed, those moments he thought had long since faded into their separate lives—it turned out that, on her end, they had never been forgotten.
She had taken the fragments of his past.
Those pieces he never knew about, pieces he himself might have carelessly discarded.
As if they were the most precious of treasures, she had silently and secretly revisited, caressed, and savored them in a corner unknown to anyone.
Over and over again.
This realization seared his heart like a red-hot branding iron.
Regret and a pang of tenderness pierced through Shen Yuan in an instant.
Shen Yuan’s heart skipped a beat.
He held his breath, slowly tearing his gaze away from the light and shadows rushing backward outside the window, letting it fall upon the figure beside him.
The young woman was still quietly looking out the window at the changing scenery, the lines of her slender neck taut. She seemed lost in the reverie of the journey, completely unaware of the world around her.
She had no idea that a heavy corner of her future self’s most hidden secret had just been revealed to him.
’No, perhaps...’
’...it’s just that I haven’t seen the fragments from the past yet.’
Shen Yuan looked at Li Zhi. He could clearly see the delicate shadows cast by her thick lashes, the fine, straight line of her nose, and her pale pink lips, pressed lightly together.
She was so close to him, yet it felt as if they were separated by all the lonely years she had spent in a silent "Silent Reading."
A stinging sensation rushed to the tip of Shen Yuan’s nose and welled up in his eyes. His throat felt as if it were blocked by something scalding hot.
’So...’
’The one who had been performing a Silent Reading through all those long years...’
’...it was always you, Li Zhi.’
At this realization, another thought surfaced in Shen Yuan’s mind.