ALSACW – Chapter 143

To this day, Yun Xuan still couldn’t understand the meaning of it all. Oh, no, he once did. He once believed his purpose was to bring order out of chaos, to return this chaotic and wicked world to its original purity.

His method was to unleash the world’s chaos and wickedness.

It was like treating an illness by drawing out all the toxins and sickness from a person’s body, causing them to develop sores in their mouth and ulcers all over their skin, until all the evil was expelled from the body in the form of pus.

What remained would be a clean body—or perhaps a corpse—but clean, nonetheless.

But why?

He gently caressed his lower abdomen. It had once carried a life, and even now, it bore the marks, as conspicuous as ravines on the earth.

And his own body had endured countless earthquakes. Each time Lucia violated him, a little more of his dignity would vanish through those cracked fissures.

In the end, he had become a wicked mother.

Because he used childbirth to control others.

In this world, he had lived in darkness and died in solitude. The ideals he had tried to impose upon the world had, in fact, descended upon him first.

He was tired.

Besides, he was very hungry now.

Yun Chuji was living well. She had been living well from the very beginning. Everything she did was something that could enhance one’s dignity, requiring no remorse, no shifting of blame.

And he, he was now starving.

It wasn’t that someone was preventing him from eating. He didn’t want to eat. He felt nauseous.

So he starved.

Yun Xuan let out a low laugh, something even deeper lurking in his pitch-black eyes.

He knew. It would be today.

He would die before he fainted from hunger.

By the time Yun Chuji arrived, Yun Xuan was already dead.

Suicide.

The landlord had collected the body.

According to the customs of C-District, the bodies of passersby were to be buried in the ice caves.

The landlord couldn’t open his terminal and didn’t know who his contacts were. The local police came to take a look, but it was just a look. Then, the officer, who had been exiled to the outermost ring for drinking on the job, returned to his office to continue drinking.

And so, Yun Xuan was laid in an ice cave, wrapped entirely in white cloth, then soaked with water and sunk five meters beneath the ground.

This place was the public cemetery for the people of C-District’s outermost ring, far from the residential areas. It was a full three-hour hovercar ride from the outer ring, already close to the arctic circle, where wind and snow raged year-round.

The landlord didn’t know that Yun Xuan was a man born and raised in the south. In his previous life, the farthest he had ever traveled was to the city of Jinling, which was also in the south, a land of singing orioles and green willows.

Now, he was interred forever in the far north. That pale, tormented, and sin-filled body would be eternally frozen in the most and least composed moment of his life.

Perhaps this, too, was a form of punishment, but death itself was already an irreversible despair.

Yun Chuji stood on the layer of ice that covered Yun Xuan. The landlord had already left. He had seen Yun Chuji, and more importantly, Yun Xuan had transferred a considerable sum of money to him, so he had gone to the trouble of leading her to this small patch of ice.

He found it hard to believe that the two were brother and sister. They bore some resemblance in appearance, but their temperaments were as if they had been raised by two different sets of parents.

Recalling the incident where Yun Xuan had killed a man in the street, and then the frowning corpse he had seen upon entering the room, the landlord shook his head before he left.

Perhaps people and things in the world were like houses—they could be both shelter and prison. All things were complex and whole, and that was just the way we lived.

Yun Chuji wanted to see what expression Yun Xuan wore in death, but she couldn’t see what was below. Yun Xuan was obscured by a blurry expanse of blue. Yun Chuji didn’t know if he had returned home after death, but returning home wasn’t a good option either.

This life, in the end, had been too heavy a burden.

All this evil would accompany him, tormenting him for a lifetime.

But what did any of this mean?

She had come here with weapons and assassins. It had been Tang Jianshen’s suggestion; he believed Yun Xuan held a key that could stop the war.

At the very least, something that could make the Empress and the Howards hesitate, make them stop manufacturing false justice with real evil.

Yun Chuji had followed his suggestion. Yun Xuan’s address wasn’t hard to find; after all, they had top-tier hackers on their side, and Yun Xuan had taken no precautions when he made the call.

She thought that this time, perhaps, she would have to be stained with blood. Her brother’s blood.

But she wasn’t. Even in this, she was granted a kindness—her brother had killed himself.

After committing so many evil acts, he had judged himself. And perhaps this was his final act of stubbornness—he was unwilling to entrust his life and dignity to anyone in this world, not even the sister he now acknowledged.

What did any of this mean?

She wondered.

And she could find no answer. They had been pushed to this far northern land by fate. Yun Xuan had already given his answer, but she had not.

She still had to go on living here, to make a home here as a stranger.

Or, eventually, to die.

With a lifetime of pain, regret, and joy.

Yun Chuji burned a stack of paper money on the ice.

Then she continued to stand there, watching, without a word.

Before he died, Yun Xuan hadn’t finished the letter to the Howards. He hadn’t deleted it, either. He left it, along with the permissions to his terminal, to Yun Chuji.

He had left a letter for Yun Chuji.

It was written on paper, in the script of the Great Liang Dynasty.

The letter didn’t contain anything of great importance. He had simply recorded his insights from years of study. It was strange; though he hadn’t read a single line of the Four Books and Five Classics in years, once he put pen to paper, he produced a small booklet.

At the very end of the letter, Yun Xuan wrote: “I was unwilling to save myself, and so I descended into madness. The masses are unwilling to save themselves, and so they descend into folly. The world today bears the sin of my madness, as well as the fault of the masses’ folly. Everything was merely guiding the situation along its natural course. What is right is right, and what is wicked is wicked. However, my current circumstances are of my own making. To seek the straight path through crooked means is the way of a gentleman, but I am no longer a gentleman.”

Tang Jianxi stood behind her. After a moment, she stepped forward and took her hand.

They didn’t speak. The wind from the far north still blew tirelessly, whipping up layers of snow-mist. The sunlight refracted off the ice, creating a blinding glare. Everything before them was so clean it was reassuring.

Yun Chuji turned and gently embraced Tang Jianxi.

She said, “Let’s have a child.”

Tang Jianxi stroked her hair and said softly, “Okay,” then left a warm kiss on the corner of her lips with her own petal-like ones.

This was perhaps the only warmth in this entire land of the far north.

Yun Chuji sent the files from Yun Xuan’s terminal to Chu Meng. She didn’t know what Chu Meng discussed with the Empress using that information.

In any case, the war on Qinglan Star, which had lasted for half a year, ended in less than half a month.

And the starship agreement between omegas and betas was nullified.

Everything returned to the way it was, but with one difference: the hatred between ABOs had grown sharper.

This hatred was like water in the air. During the wet season, it would always fall as rain, only to depart again in a dry season.

It was just that when it rained, it was always very, very cold.

That was the nature of the rainy season. Outside the shelter of a house, romance was merely wind, frost, rain, and snow.

After finishing her graduate studies, Yun Chuji did not pursue further education. Tang Jianxi had a study built for her at home, filled with books, all paper copies. When Tang Jianxi was out for work, these books kept her company.

She placed the notebook Yun Xuan had given her on the bookshelf as well. She only ever flipped through it once before putting it on a high shelf, where it remained until years later, when her child found it and asked her what it was. She said, “It’s a book.”

“Who’s the author?”

“Someone who didn’t want to leave their name behind.”

“Wow, so mysterious!”

Yun Chuji gave the book to her.

In the time that followed, everything became simple and repetitive. She still traveled between the outermost and inner rings, still worked hard to spread A-Virtue.

She established academies in the outermost ring. Tang Jianshen, a man born to wealth, poured a lot of money into them. Eventually, the outermost ring became the most gender-equal place in the entire Empire.

People forgot why this place had been deliberately neglected in the first place, but they found themselves unconsciously drawn to its prosperity and its new wave of thought.

The academies taught a great deal of knowledge that could give people strength and dignity, but that wasn’t the reason for their reputation. What set them apart from other places, and even from the entire era, was that they tried to teach people to care for one another.

And this course had no textbook. If one had to name a textbook, it would be Yun Chuji herself.

She never looked down on or scorned anyone. Someone once asked her how she managed it.

She said it was because those things bring lessons of blood and the cold of ice.

However, for Yun Chuji herself, amidst all the controversies and rumors, the only truth was that Tang Jianxi was always by her side.

A year after the war ended, they welcomed their first child, an omega.

A girl.

Both of them traveled often for work. She went to the outermost ring to teach, while Tang Jianxi went to various protests and rallies.

So the child was left in Yun Chuji’s care, since there were no enraged omegas swearing at the top of their lungs while she was teaching.

Occasionally, Yun Chuji would accompany Tang Jianxi. She would watch Tang Jianxi walk at the very front of the crowd. She was as beautiful as ever, though it was no longer purely the beauty of a celestial fairy; now, it was imbued with the spirit of a warrior.

She led the omegas, neither servile nor overbearing, toward the destination of freedom and fairness, just as she had in her past, and just as she would in her future.

Upon seeing Yun Chuji holding their child, Tang Jianxi would always give her a wink—even while maintaining a serious expression.

And Yun Chuji, standing outside the crowd, would smile back at her and make a gesture of encouragement, or lift their daughter high above her head to let her see her formidable mother, hoping that her mother’s powerful presence might convince her to eat a few less cakes today and slightly salvage her chubby figure and the bleak future of her teeth.

At night, the child would be left with Tang Jianxi’s companions and friends, who would usually be unable to resist the little one’s sweet talk and would foolishly give her a pile of unhealthy but delicious snacks.

But that was no longer a concern for Yun Chuji and Tang Jianxi.

They would go on dates, walking hand in hand down unfamiliar streets, chatting, or saying nothing at all, or saying everything. Whether in silence or in clamor, everything made them feel a happiness that came from the heart.

Afterward, they would part for a time, awaiting their next reunion and planning for longer ones.

During the days they were apart, they used the strength their reunions gave them to sow the seeds of happiness for more people.

Yun Chuji finally found the answer to the question she had asked at Yun Xuan’s grave: Evil is itself a form of suffering, and kindness is a beautiful mother.