Chapter 421 - 366: Reborn Little Wings (2)
Chapter 421: Chapter 366: Reborn Little Wings (2)
Xiao Man was speechless. ’Don’t tell me there are two of them?’
Zhang Qingwan continued, "The young woman’s name is Wu Xiangyun. She was a nurse at the H Province Provincial Military District Hospital. Shaofeng was wounded in battle and hospitalized, and she was the one who took care of him. That’s how they met. As you can probably tell, Shaofeng is a very cold person. He’s never taken the initiative with any woman or liked them getting close to him, but Wu Xiangyun was an exception. Shaofeng said he liked her from the heart, not just for her looks, which is why he wanted to marry her before he went abroad. But it never happened. Apparently, his family wasn’t satisfied with her background. Shaofeng’s mother was especially vehement. She used her connections to get to Shaofeng’s superiors in the military district and had them block his marriage application. Then she went to Wu Xiangyun. I don’t know what she did exactly, but afterward, the girl just went into hiding. In the limited time Shaofeng had before leaving the country, he couldn’t find her. Before he left, Shaofeng met with me and made me promise something. He asked me to find Wu Xiangyun no matter what, to take good care of her, and to tell her to wait for him. He said they would get married the moment he returned."
"So, did you find her? Where is she?"
"She went back to her hometown. I only found out later that she’d actually gone to the Northeast—I never would have guessed. Her family helped her hide the fact."
Zhang Qingwan said, "After I heard the whole story from Wu Xiangyun’s parents, I felt that Shaofeng’s mother had gone way too far. Wu Xiangyun’s parents are just ordinary low-level employees. They have elders to support and young children to raise. She threatened to have them fired from their jobs and get Wu Xiangyun’s younger siblings kicked out of school. How could the Wu Family dare to take that risk? On top of that, Wu Xiangyun was involved in a ’medical incident,’ forced to leave the military and lose her job. Faced with that, she had no choice but to be pragmatic and give in to Shaofeng’s mother. She accepted her conditions: break up with Gu Shao Feng in exchange for the chance to pursue higher education at a university, with a guaranteed job in a big city afterward. To keep Shaofeng from finding her, his mother immediately sent Wu Xiangyun to Heilongjiang in the Northeast. Wu Xiangyun grew up in the South and had never even left her home province. Suddenly being sent to the North... she couldn’t adapt. In the dead of winter, she was too scared to even step outside. But even then, she had an accident. As the ice and snow began to thaw, her classmates enthusiastically invited her on an outing. Not wanting to seem unsociable or arrogant, she reluctantly went along. In the end, everyone else was fine, but she fell through the ice. If a local farmer hadn’t happened to be passing by and pulled her out, she probably would have died right there! She fell gravely ill because of it and was hospitalized. Her parents rushed to the Northeast, arranged for her to suspend her studies, and brought her home to recover. She was so thin she was unrecognizable. When I saw her, I couldn’t believe that was the same Wu Xiangyun that Gu Shaofeng had told me about!"
Xiao Man was stunned. "When did she fall through the ice? Is she all right now?"
Zhang Qingwan sighed. "I don’t know how to put it. The situation doesn’t look good. She fell into the icy river last March and was in the hospital for two months. She came back to the South in June and was in and out of the hospital for another two or three months, but there was never any real improvement. Her parents grew to distrust Western medicine, saying their daughter only got weaker with the treatments until she couldn’t even get out of bed. After talking it over, they checked her out of the hospital to try traditional Chinese medicine at home. I got word of her as soon as she was back in the South. The money for her treatment has been passing through my hands—it’s the money Shaofeng left for her... I visit her whenever I get leave, but after all this time, she still hasn’t recovered. On her best days, she can go around the courtyard a few times in her wheelchair. She smiled and told me, ’I probably won’t live to see Shaofeng come back. I once made him swear an oath with me: if one of us were to betray the other, they would be struck by lightning, or else fall in a river and drown! I was the one who betrayed him for the sake of my future, so this is my retribution. It would be better to just die. It would be a relief!’"
Zhang Qingwan took a small leather wallet from his right jacket pocket. He flipped it open, revealing a work ID, but tucked away in a plastic sleeve underneath was something else. He carefully slid out a two-inch photo and handed it to Xiao Man. "This is Wu Xiangyun from before. She doesn’t look this good anymore. Now she’s like a withered husk."
Xiao Man took the photo. Wu Xiangyun was quite pretty and likable, with a carefree smile—the very picture of what later generations would call a "sweet, naive beauty."
When Xiao Man kept her hand held out toward him, Zhang Qingwan was baffled. "That’s it. There’s only this one. Shaofeng left it for me specifically because he was afraid I wouldn’t be able to recognize her. He told me I absolutely couldn’t lose it."
"But I clearly saw another one in that sleeve," Xiao Man said.
Zhang Qingwan hesitated. "Ah... you don’t need to see this one. It’s my girlfriend. Or, well, she broke up with me last month and asked for the photo back."