Starlight Descends - 21
Rust
The silence was heavy.
Qi Yao's head buzzed. Without willing it, she was back to the days of writing those letters.
A teenage girl full to the brim with restless feelings, chattering away on paper.
She wrote about how the boy behind her always smoked in class, how she hated it. How she would definitely, definitely hate people who smoked when she grew up.
She wrote about her first trip into the city center to buy a book, how the bus had swayed so much she'd felt nauseous, how she absolutely had to sit by the window.
She wrote that the activity was ending now that they were in their final year of middle school, but she didn't want it to.
The person on the other end just asked bluntly: What do you want to do about it, then?
It had made her so mad she could've spat blood. When she turned the paper over, however, she found he had left his full school address and postal code.
But no name.
Through a twist of fate, they had missed the best moment to properly introduce themselves. After that, any time the subject came up, it felt strange to ask.
Which was how, that one time Qi Yao finally asked his name, he had given her an oblique reply: Have you read "Ode to the Orange Tree"?
On that trip to the city, she had carefully carried a copy of the Songs of Chu from the bookstore. She read it over and over, front to back, but couldn't make sense of it. So she decided to give him the code name "S."
At the time she had thought the letter suited the little chubby boy in the photo quite well. Both were pleasingly round.
Who could have known?
"Where did this mole go?"
A decade later, the person in question was sitting on the sofa, asking this one quiet question.
Qi Yao looked down, staring at that tiny black dot his pen had left on the photograph. She was silent for a moment.
"The entertainment industry is pretty superstitious about feng shui. My boss also thought the mole's placement was unlucky. It's usually covered with makeup."
She had given this exact explanation once before.
Yu Jiashu pulled the corner of his mouth flat. He leaned back lazily against the sofa, a touch of coldness settling into him.
"And what did I tell you back then?"
He's angry.
Qi Yao was dimly aware of this. She looked up at him, a little lost. Meeting those eyes, they were no different from the ones he had as a boy.
Time reversed once more, flowing back to the tip of a young girl's pen.
"Say. Are some people just born destined to be ants crawling on the mud?"
Fifteen-year-old Qi Yao sat in her usual window seat in the dilapidated old classroom. The muffled sound of weeping stirred something in her, and without much outward reaction, she traced back through the fragments of her life up to that moment.
Abandoned at birth, left at the gate of an orphanage. No surname, no given name, no address. Nothing was known.
Her surname had been drawn from a slip of paper. Her given name ‘Yao’ was chosen by the grandmother who ran the welfare home, meant to signify fine jade.
But later, when she looked it up properly, she found the character truly only meant "a stone that resembles jade.”
Even the best hopes were no match for reality. How fitting, she thought, for a life like hers.
Conditions at the welfare home weren’t good. More than a dozen children were packed into a single room, bunk beds stacked tightly one above another.
Some were healthy, others had disabilities. At night, they would cry out one after another, each wail setting off the next, until no one could sleep.
Qi Yao learned obedience very early on. Under the moonlight, she would climb barefoot out of bed and, following Auntie Ren’s example, try to soothe the younger children as they cried.
When she was seven or eight, a family came to the welfare home looking to adopt a little girl the same age as their deceased daughter. Out of all the children there, they carefully chose her.
She'd been so happy, believing she was finally about to have a family.
She climbed into the car with cautious excitement, and stepped into a home that had never truly belonged to her. Looking at the pink curtains swaying in the breeze, the bedside was crowded with adorable teddy bears and dolls, feeling shy and joyful all at once.
The cruelest thing in the world, perhaps, is to give someone what they have longed for most—only to take it away again without a second thought.
Not long after, the couple who adopted her fell out of love. They divorced, amicably, and sent the little girl back.
Qi Yao stood alone at the gates of the welfare home, watching the car drive away without once stopping. She couldn’t quite explain what she felt.
Was she sad?
No, she didn't think so.
She only knew, from then on, that she would never allow herself hope for anything again.
She felt like the old rust stains on the iron gate. Like the withered, drooping branches of the ivy. Like the smudged pencil marks in a workbook that can never be fully erased. Grey, faded, silent.
Step by step, she walked the path laid out for her. The head grandmother took her in as her own and sent her to school. She lowered her expectations for everything, and strangely, everything began to feel easier.
School? The community middle school near home would do. Even if her grades were good, this was the ceiling. All the books she read were donated to the orphanage by society, some new, some old. She read them over and over.
She wrote: “If it weren't for you, I probably wouldn't be this stubborn about continuing my studies. Maybe I would've thought becoming an ordinary working girl out here in the suburbs wasn't so bad.”
Reaching this point in the letter, the girl gave a mocking smile.
"That couple, they argued late into the night almost every night. The wife felt their daughter was gone and that was that. The husband felt that since they had adopted me, he had a responsibility toward me."
"They fought more and more fiercely. In the end, they divorced so peacefully. Everyone decided I had no reason to exist there anymore. And so they sent me back."
"Do you know what reason they gave?"
"They said nothing about their own careless decisions. Instead, they told grandma it was because of the mole below the corner of my right eye."
"They said people born with that mark are ill-fated, destined for a bad life. That suffering would never spare me."
Qi Yao had stood in a corner at the time, thinking, How could people be so cruel?
Grandma had driven them out with a broom and later gone through the formalities to take her in. But those words still burrowed inescapably into her heart.
Like a poisonous weed, its thorny vine armed with terrible barbs, sinking deep into the tender, living flesh of her heart.
Every time life hit a rough patch, those words would stir somewhere deep inside her in the small hours of the night and drive its thorns back into her heart, as if watered by her own blood, the pain so sharp it stole her voice.
Sometimes Qi Yao would wonder: maybe it was true?
Did the couple divorce because they adopted me?
Did Grandma's health keep deteriorating because she had to pay for my schooling?
Auntie Ren argued with her family every day over her work, until things at home eventually fell apart and she moved into the welfare home herself. Was that because of me, too?
Fear and pressure, immense as a mountain, bore down on her until she could barely breathe.
But up until now, she had never spoken a word of it.
Outside the classroom window, the weeping was uncontainable, the choked sob pulled her back from the past.
The girl had fallen silent. She crossed out everything she'd just written.
Someone was already crying. She didn't want to add her own grief to the noise.
The person on the other end had already given her so much emotional shelter. She didn't want to burden him with everything.
No one is obligated to be anyone else's dumping ground for negativity. Most of what a person feels, they have to learn to process on their own.
But those crossed-out words, those surging emotions she had prepared to swallow on her own—they received a reply in the next mailbox.
The 1.2-yuan stamp was affixed with meticulous neatness. The addressee read, “Seventy-One.” Qi Yao tore the envelope open. The handwriting was bold and free, the first line as concise as ever: one word.
"Bullshit."
The strokes were careless, yet still carried their sharp edges. She could almost see him tossing off those two words without a second thought.
"A tear mole is beautiful. High sensitivity is a gift."
The boy's drawing skills were poor. With effort you could make out a hand, sketched in a few lines, yet somehow he'd managed to capture the distinct shape of long knuckles. At the base of the right middle finger, on the inside, he had drawn a single dot.
"A fortune teller once said a mole there meant I'd die young. And yet, here I am, still writing to you."
"Have you ever heard the saying: 'The ocean presses the bamboo low, but it lifts again, the wind lashes the mountain dim, but it brightens once more'?"
What had he said after that?
The boy's writing, sharp and clear, surfaced before her eyes. A decade later, Qi Yao's lashes trembled. She felt the vast torrent of time surge through her body, her heart prickling and afloat. Softly she spoke, as if her voice were layered over his from all those years ago:
“If luck isn't on your side, then try courage."
Courage.
That word had walked with her through every exam of her student years. It had stood beside her the first time she faced a camera and a stage, accompanied her down red carpets and up to award podiums.
No one is born with good luck.
Heaven is silent. Gods and buddhas offer only distant pity. Only you yourself can look down upon your life with sober clarity.
"I ran three blocks through the old town to find that fortune teller back then. Here I thought you'd forgotten all about it."
Yu Jiashu lifted his chin slightly. That trace of coldness receded. His expression eased, and he steered the conversation back with studied nonchalance.
Then he straightened, looking at her with a deliberate gaze, and said, one word at a time.
"You're the one who got the direct pass to the final round. Did you know that?”
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