……
Shen Sixing had always felt that fate enjoyed tormenting him.
Someone as hesitant, cowardly, and ineffectual as him—yet when the time came to make a choice, the decision still fell to him.
Why did someone like him, someone who had spent his entire life hiding inside his shell, have to be forced to lift the lid and see the bloody truth within?
Shen Sixing didn’t understand. He had never wanted to play the villain, much less harbored any grand ambition to destroy the world.
So all he had to do was what he had always done.
Avoid it selectively, forget everything inside the box, and continue living as he always had.
Night wind poured in through the window. The curtain lifted at one corner, and a chill brushed across the back of Shen Sixing’s neck, leaving him trembling.
Shen Yi sat beside him, watching the pain and struggle spread across his pale face.
She wanted to tell him that it was all right.
It really was all right. Whatever choice he made, it wouldn’t be wrong.
……
Far away outside, scattered lights began to flicker on, their glow spilling into the room one point at a time, like a handful of broken gold tossed carelessly into the darkness.
The light in the room shifted and faded in Shen Sixing’s eyes, like his heart, pulled back and forth in endless conflict.
In the midst of this long, agonizing struggle, he even began to think irrationally.
Why had she come looking for him? Why had she come to his side? Why, after all those twists and turns, had the box been opened by him?
Why did fate always enjoy tormenting him like this?
What was he supposed to do?
Whenever one opposed the so-called male and female protagonists, the result was failure in one form or another—even death without a grave.
He had seen too many supporting characters die horrific deaths in those stories and television dramas.
Crushed by cars, struck dead by flowerpots falling from the sky, burned alive in some inexplicable fire.
Shen Sixing had never possessed much ambition. He didn’t want to die, and even less did he want to become some kind of villain.
He only wanted to live his own life in peace.
Forget everything inside the box.
Forget the evenings when that girl would appear on his way home from work, right on schedule after committing some misdeed, and pretend nothing had happened as she chatted with him.
None of this mattered, did it?
He tried to deceive himself. Things were fine as they were now.
A perfect family was what he had wanted most in this life.
Even Shen Yi, in the end, had only wanted them to be happy, hadn’t she?
He had almost convinced himself.
All he had to do was close his eyes, shove the box deep into a drawer, and pretend he had seen nothing. Then everything could go on as before—
But…
But.
He realized miserably that what he had called a smooth and fortunate life, what he had called happiness, was nothing more than a dreamlike bubble, bursting at the slightest touch.
There had never been some benevolent god, some guardian spirit.
It was only a girl who had died before she even turned sixteen, desperately fighting to create all of this.
She had stayed with them for a very long time.
On snowy streets, she would cup her hands and breathe warmth into them, patiently searching for those who might one day affect their future.
In the early mornings, she followed behind them through the dew, accompanying him through countless missions that blurred day and night.
She spent one New Year after another all by herself. When the clock struck midnight, she would leave presents at their door, then retreat into the shadows where no one could see her.
Or else she would watch them raise their glasses in reunion through a pane of glass.
And from beginning to end, she had always been utterly alone.
The pain, arriving only now, surged up from the depths of his chest and slowly seeped into his lungs.
It drowned him until he could hardly breathe.
This wasn’t even his emotion.
Shen Sixing had always been incapable of empathy—cold, distant, and indifferent. If something had nothing to do with him, he simply kept out of it.
Even if an unrelated stranger died right in front of him, he wouldn’t lower his head to spare the body a second glance.
Yet now, the turmoil in his chest was painfully clear.
Scalding, searing emotions that did not belong to him had been forcibly poured into a vessel never meant to contain them.
They weren’t his.
Shen Sixing was only watching someone familiar play out a role in a story. He couldn’t convince himself that all that suffering belonged to him.
And yet the pain was real.
Two entirely different emotions tore at him from within. One said, “This has nothing to do with you,” while the other was in such agony it felt ready to die.
He was about to be ripped in half.
The voice in his mind asked him again—
So, is this the ending you want?
Forget everything inside the box, let life continue as before. He could go on doing what he liked and ignore fate, the plot, the protagonists, and the villain.
None of it mattered. Even if the sky fell, it would have nothing to do with him.
But was this really what he wanted?
“I think—” He opened his mouth, his Adam’s apple bobbing. His voice was so hoarse it barely sounded like his own. “I think this isn’t the ending I want.”
After saying it, Shen Sixing gave a bitter laugh and covered his face, as though he might cry.
His expression twisted into something almost savage, contorted beneath the weight of pain, yet without a trace of tears. In the end, he was trapped in the gap between two emotions, unable to move in either direction.
He thought he ought to do something.
He needed to do something.
