My Queen, My Rules - 96
Extra: Cen Sen’s Perspective
Cen Sen remembered the day he arrived at Nanqiao Hutong. A fine drizzle had been falling, raindrops striking the puddles on the ground and scattering into little blossoms of spray. The sky was a murky gray, as though dirty water from a rinsed-out rag had been unevenly smeared across it.
It was not only that day. For a long time after returning to Nanqiao Hutong, he seemed to see that same dim, gloomy sky everywhere he went.
Cold and overcast, bleak and devoid of life, stretching toward an end he could not see. Yet it possesses a strange, oppressive force, drawing everything into its shadow until even the briefest flashes of brightness were stained gray.
That awkward stretch between childhood and adolescence seemed to have been shrouded in that same veil of gray.
He had sunk himself into a past that had long since grown distant from him, shutting himself off from every kindness the outside world tried to offer.
Many years later, his and Ji Mingshu’s daughter, Cen Zhuo, slowly grew up, becoming more and more like a quiet, miniature version of Ji Mingshu.
Whenever Cen Sen looked at her, he would sometimes wonder: if, all those years ago, he had accepted the little Ji Mingshu’s brave gesture when she reached out her hand to him, would all those dark years he later walked through alone have been bright instead?
In Cen Sen’s memory, Ji Mingshu had always been a beautiful, noisy girl. Spoiled and willful, brazen and unrestrained, she seemed capable of turning herself the center of the universe wherever she went, while naturally demanding that every asteroid revolve around her.
When Cen Sen was in his third year of junior high, Ji Mingshu had just entered her first. Throughout that entire year, he heard the name "Ji Mingshu" more often than he heard his homeroom teacher’s.
Once he entered high school, the academic pressure increased sharply, and his classmates’ appetite for gossip during their breaks and after school diminished somewhat. But the middle and high school divisions of the affiliated school were not separated, so Ji Mingshu remained at the center of all kinds of school gossip.
"That Ji Mingshu from second year is getting pretty close to the class monitor from the next class."
...
"Hey, did you hear? The track team captain is pursuing Ji Mingshu."
...
"Someone brought flowers to the second-year classroom during class yesterday. We’ll probably get a school-wide reprimand at the class meeting later. Old Yang definitely won’t make us do practice papers after that. What a lucky break!”
...
Rumors like these drifted past Cen Sen’s ears day after day. He never made any effort to remember it, yet somehow, a few fragments lodged themselves in his mind.
Back then, after evening study ended, Cen Sen usually went to the library and stayed for another hour or two before returning to the dormitory. The dorm was no less noisy than Ji Mingshu, and once he went back, concentrating on his studies became nearly impossible.
Of course, that did not mean delaying his return by an hour or two spared him the torture of pointless conversation.
Once the dorm lights went out, no matter what topic the boys started with, their late-night conversations somehow always found their way back to the girls at school.
One night, his roommates were discussing:
"Hey, wasn’t I late this morning because I overslept? I ran into Li Wenyin and Ji Mingshu at the school gate. They were arguing with the school over Ji Mingshu getting her uniform skirt shortened and losing conduct points. I’m telling you, Ji Mingshu is seriously gorgeous. She puts on that short skirt, and those legs are so white and straight. It’s ridiculous. I’m not even exaggerating. I swear I didn’t want to blink when I saw her.”
"Li Wenyin’s pretty too. The girls in their year are really something. Nothing like ours. Tch, you could probably count the good-looking ones in our year on one hand."
"Li Wenyin looks good on her own, but put her next to Ji Mingshu and she’s still miles behind. She’s a little too plain."
Teenage boys were bound to be restless, and conversations about female classmates were inevitable. Whenever someone tossed out an opening, everyone’s enthusiasm for contributing seemed to multiply in an instant. In the entire dorm, the only two people who showed no interest whatsoever in these discussions were probably Cen Sen and Jiang Che.
At the time, Jiang Che was competing in information competitions. Every night, he seemed determined to keep writing code even in his dreams, and anyone who disturbed him was usually met with an impatient retort.
Cen Sen, however, was quiet and mild-mannered. Though there was always a faint sense of distance about him, he maintained good relationships with most of his classmates and was still the de facto leader of the dorm. So when the conversation had nearly run its course, it would usually circle back to him.
"Hey, Sen-ge, between Ji Mingshu and Li Wenyin, which type do you prefer?"
"Why even ask? Obviously Li Wenyin. That’s practically a free point." One of his roommates answered for him with a teasing laugh.
Like Ji Mingshu, Cen Sen himself was also one of the school’s prominent figures, and fresh rumors about him surfaced from time to time. One of the more widely circulated ones claimed that he and Li Wenyin had grown up together and shared an ambiguous relationship.
Cen Sen had heard the rumor once or twice, but he never paid much attention to it. Li Wenyin had lived at the Ji family residence when they were children. If that alone qualified them as childhood sweethearts, then there seemed to be no reason he and Ji Mingshu could not count as such either.
Usually, once someone interrupted a conversation, the subject would simply die out. But that night, after the brief interruption, his roommate chased after him again. "Hey, Sen-ge, you still haven’t answered. What kind do you actually like?"
Cen Sen lay flat on his bed, gazing at the ceiling in the sparse moonlight filtering through the window. In the same casual tone one might use to answer any ordinary question, he said, “Probably Li Wenyin's type.”
His roommates responded with a long, knowing "Ohhh," followed immediately by the expected laughter and teasing.
Yet as Cen Sen answered with Li Wenyin’s name, his mind inexplicably brought up Ji Mingshu instead. The way Ji Mingshu passing in front of him, chin tilted slightly upward, blowing a bubble with her chewing gum, sometimes even secretly rolling her eyes.
That little girl Ji Mingshu often had a habit of not walking properly. Whenever she was happy, she liked to clasp her hands behind her back, bouncing lightly along on her toes.
But the pair of legs beneath her pleated skirt really were just as his roommate had described, fair and luminous, long and straight.
The thought that flashed through his mind that night was fleeting. He had little reason to pay attention to someone who had nothing to do with him, and with his studies keeping him constantly busy, he remained occupied all the way through his final year of high school.
When Li Wenyin confessed her feelings to him, he had just received a recommendation letter from the principal and suddenly found himself with a rare stretch of free time.
He was old enough to date. He had the time. Someone had confessed to him, and she happened to be the type of girl he admired at the time. So he decided to give it a try.
To the Cen Sen of that time, it seemed much like receiving a competition problem he had never attempted before and deciding to work through it simply because he could. It was straightforward, and hardly required any deep consideration. Even when he later decided they were not suited to each other and ended the relationship amicably, he followed the same logic.
When it came to love, Cen Sen considered himself a refined egoist. He had never imagined that one day he would give a woman his unconditional devotion.
After his amicable breakup with Li Wenyin, he went abroad to study. During those years, his schedule was packed from morning to night, while his romantic life remained a complete blank.
After returning to China, he attended a class reunion where he and Ji Mingshu, after a great deal of hesitation and half-hearted resistance, ended up sleeping together. Then, driven by the interests of both their families, their marriage followed almost naturally. Yet for a long time after marrying Ji Mingshu, Cen Sen did not feel that marriage had changed his life all that much.
Things began to change sometime after he returned from Australia.
He did not know why, but he found himself paying more and more attention to every move his ornamental wife made.
Even as an adult, Ji Mingshu was still as spoiled, willful, and brazen as she always been, as though the entire earth itself ought to revolve around her alone for everything to be considered perfect. Yet there was something more vivid within that spoiled nature now, something he had never understood before. It was not irritating in the slightest. If anything, it made people inexplicably want to indulge her.
By his own rational definition, this had originally been nothing more than an insignificant marriage. Once the Ji family’s value to him diminished, ending the marriage would hardly have mattered. Yet when Ji Mingshu first asked him for a divorce, he felt no sense of relief. Instead, he felt an unpleasant loss of control.
After that, his emotions seemed to be constantly pulled around by Ji Mingshu, changing without his permission. No matter how busy he was, whenever he finally had a moment to himself, some part of his mind was always occupied by her.
He probably truly recognized his feelings during the period when Ji Mingshu misunderstood that he and Li Wenyin had rekindled their old relationship and left home.
One night, he went to a bar with Jiang Che and happened to overhear someone making filthy remarks about Ji Mingshu. For the first time in his life, he got into a fight without thinking, without stopping to consider the consequences.
The irony was that, before then, he had always believed using violence to solve a problem was one of the stupidest things a person could do.
After the fight that night, he drove to the building where Ji Mingshu lived and sat outside in the cold wind for a very long time.
It was probably that night when he finally knew, with absolute clarity, that he had fallen.
Once he admitted the truth to himself, his emotions were surprisingly simple. For one brief moment, he even felt relieved, and a smile appeared on his lips before he realized it.
So he had fallen. So be it.
A person only lived once. Surely, somewhere along the way, everyone was destined to encounter the one person who would be their undoing.
Cen Sen and Ji Mingshu officially fell in love in the third year of their marriage. In their fifth year, they had their first baby. In their twelfth year, they welcomed their second.
Ji Mingshu was thirty-four when she gave birth to their second child, Zhuobao. Yet she still looked like a girl barely in her twenties, with a youthful innocence that seemed almost too young for her age.
Perhaps that was because she had been protected too well. Their family had grown from two people to three, then to four, but in Cen Sen’s heart, the first place had always belonged to Ji Mingshu, his forever-young little golden canary.
In their fifteenth year of marriage, that eternally lively little golden canary fell ill. The kind of illness that required surgery.
It began with physical discomfort that prompted a hospital examination, after which a shadow was discovered.
Ji Mingshu usually bared her claws at the world, but in truth, she was terribly timid. She also had a tendency of letting her imagination run wild. Even when she once fainted from starving herself while dieting, she had managed to imagine an entire incurable disease. Waiting for the results was undoubtedly a long, torturous ordeal for her.
For Cen Sen, it was an ordeal too.
Ji Mingshu did not show the slightest sign of anything being wrong in front of the children. Even with him, she pretended to be relaxed, constantly saying things like, “We have so much money. What illness could we possibly not cure?” But one night, he discovered that Ji Mingshu had gotten out of bed and was hiding on the balcony, quietly crying.
He walked over slowly and wrapped his arms around her from behind.
Ji Mingshu cried even harder. Her voice broke between sobs. "Do you think I might have cancer? I... I’m really scared. I’m really scared of dying. I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to leave the babies. I really don’t want to..."
He gently stroked Ji Mingshu’s head, his warm breath lingering beside her ear, yet he could not find a single word that might comfort her.
It was perhaps the most helpless moment of his entire life up to that point.
During that period, both Cen Sen and Ji Mingshu lost a great deal of weight. When the test results finally came back, they learned that it was a benign tumor and that she needed surgery to remove it.
Cen Sen put all his work aside and stayed by her side throughout the entire process.
The surgery itself was relatively simple and went smoothly, but surgery was still surgery. Ji Mingshu spent a long time recuperating afterward before she gradually returned to her lively, spirited self.
Yet somewhere in that process, Cen Sen suddenly realized that they were no longer as young as they had been in their teens and twenties.
When Ji Mingshu was ill, he had prepared himself for the worst. If she were ever to leave this world before him, he would take on the responsibilities of both mother and father, raise Cen Yan and Cen Zhuo to adulthood, watch them build their own families and careers, and then, once he had nothing left to worry about, go find her.
He had been lonely all his life. Because of Ji Mingshu, he had stolen so many years of warmth and happiness from fate. He could not bear to make this timid girl wait alone for too long.
He remembered meeting an investor surnamed Chang many years ago for the Nanwan project. Mr. Chang was famous for being devoted to his family, and he would always say that you can’t ever finish making money, so whenever you had the time, you should spend it with your family.
Back then, Cen Sen had not thought much of it. Now, however, he felt that no matter how much he gained, if Ji Mingshu was not there to share it with him, none of it seemed to have any meaning.
He drastically reduced his workload, handing many responsibilities over to the younger generation of the Cen family whom he had spent years cultivating.
He planned balanced, healthy meals for Ji Mingshu, accompanied her shopping and to various events, traveled with her, and even began planning far ahead for the day Cen Yan would eventually take full control of the Cen Corporation, leaving the two of them free to spend their retirement years traveling and living a life meant for just the two of them.
While they were traveling in Morocco, Ji Mingshu chattered excitedly about sending postcards to her good friends Gu Kaiyang and Jiang Chun.
Cen Sen sent one too, with Ji Mingshu as the recipient.
In elegant semi-cursive handwriting, he wrote a single sentence:
"Baby, whether this life is long or short, I’ll be the one who walks with you all the way to the end. Thank you for bursting into my life without warning.”
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