Meng Huai often said that Meng Yanxi was precociously perceptive.

Meng Yanxi didn’t know what precocious perceptiveness was supposed to look like, but he had indeed learned to read people very early. Humans are innately good at disguise, yet he could always see through, at a glance, the true nature beneath their hypocrisy.

He didn’t think of this as a talent, it was merely a matter of kind.

Human beings, human beings—everyone was of the same kind.

Acting from self-interest, whether kind or vicious, sunny or insidious, harming others or not harming them, were all nothing more than means; the essence was the pursuit of gain.

He didn’t believe there was any distinction of right or wrong in this—achieving the goal was enough.

That year when the Wu family from the east side of the city came to visit, Madam Wu had not yet been replaced. The original wife, a young daughter—three people in the family, a loving father and a filial child. But Meng Yanxi, then only in elementary school, merely cast a glance at Wu Liang’s body language as he stood with his back to everyone in the garden answering a phone call, and knew Wu Nian was finished.

He was born with keen intuition. Sure enough, not long after, Madam Wu passed away, and a delicate new wife entered the household with her son.

Meng Yanxi had an excellent memory—not quite photographic, but anyone he had seen, no matter how many years passed, he could recognize at a glance. He was simply too lazy to show that he remembered.

He saw Wu Nian again in the north of the city. He rode his skateboard past the mouth of an alley; the underage Wu Nian was wearing a camisole and hot pants, her makeup a faded smoky eye, huddled with a group of yellow-haired youths smoking.

A greasy yellow-haired boy’s hand shoved at her full chest. Fear and embarrassment showed in Wu Nian’s eyes, yet on her face hung an ingratiating smile that said she could take it, giggling coquettishly without end.

The skateboard quickly passed the alley, the wind lifting the hem of the boy’s clothes. Meng Yanxi thought expressionlessly: before his sister turned eighteen, he would never let Meng Shixu remarry.

Meng Shixu had recently begun to entertain thoughts of remarriage.

A man’s base nature was like a spark in dry weather—one gust of wind, and it could burn a house down.

The year his mother passed away, he was twelve. His methods were not yet mature. To stop Meng Shixu from remarrying, he used Meng Zhuxi—and accidentally harmed his own sister.

Substitutional psychological trauma; it took three to four years, on and off, to recover.

Meng Shixu lashed his back with a rattan cane. He clenched his teeth in indifference and did not admit fault. Meng Shixu took him for defiant and unrepentant, nearly beating the cane to pieces.

But he simply felt that at such a moment, probing into right or wrong had no meaning.

His sister, for this lifetime, he would raise.

Meng Shixu took him to his mother’s grave and made him kneel before her portrait to reflect. A spider crawled over.

Since childhood he had feared nothing under heaven or earth—except insects, especially spiders. But in that moment, his pitch-black eyes stared at that purplish-red spider, and what he thought was that he had to take care of his sister. Meng Zhuxi was also afraid of spiders; between the two siblings, one of them had to be unafraid.

The spider crawled from his knee onto his fingertips; he only stared at it, not moving an inch.

He wanted to see what the thing he feared most could really do to him.

The spider crawled to the inside of his wrist bone and bit him.

The good news was, it didn’t hurt much—just a fine, dense prick.

The bad news was, the spider was venomous.

By the time Meng Shixu returned, he had already collapsed.

Afterward, a scar was left on the inside of his wrist bone—not big, a tiny spot, dark red; from afar it looked like a mole or a birthmark.

Even a venomous spider couldn’t bite him to death. From then on, Meng Yanxi was utterly fearless.

And after the incident of being bitten by a venomous spider, whenever Meng Shixu saw the scar on the inside of his wrist bone, emotion would ripple in his eyes. Meng Yanxi was adept at striking at the heart; from then on, Meng Shixu could no longer control him at all.

Even when he beat someone, Meng Shixu couldn’t bring himself to say harsh words, and even compromised, stepping back and proactively cutting off contact with the woman.

That was the first time Meng Yanxi discovered Meng Shixu’s ambiguous romantic interest.

Although he felt very sorry for causing his sister to develop a psychological illness, it was also thanks to those three or four years that Meng Shixu quieted down during the prime period for remarriage, and he himself grew up quite a bit. But as Meng Zhuxi recovered, Meng Shixu once again began to stir restlessly.

Meng Yanxi gradually took action and dealt with several of his peach blossoms.

To others, those methods might seem despicable, but he believed himself to be very noble.

There was nothing more noble in this world than devoting oneself wholeheartedly to protecting oneself and one’s closest kin.

As for the means—that lay outside his scope of consideration. He had always looked only at results. So much so that in those years, when he later recalled the outrageous things he had done at twelve, he didn’t feel they were all that outrageous after all.

If it happened again, he would still do the same.

As for whether it was right or wrong to harm the one you protect in order to protect her—that was even more of a philosophical question, one that required a conscience to weigh. Unfortunately, Meng Yanxi didn’t feel he had a conscience, so he didn’t weigh it.

He didn’t know whether Meng Shixu noticed that his nerve was growing larger and larger, but his grandfather Meng Huai certainly did. One day he spoke earnestly to him: “Yanxi, youthful sharpness is a good thing, but you’re walking farther and farther off course on this path.”

Meng Yanxi pretended not to understand.

Meng Huai then quietly began to intervene to block him, while also unobtrusively restraining Meng Shixu. Meng Yanxi accepted his goodwill, and afterward restrained himself quite a bit.

Meng Shixu’s most troublesome peach blossom bloomed when Meng Yanxi was sixteen. The other party was a small-time celebrity, young and beautiful, at an age like a flower, who pursued Meng Shixu with great fanfare for two years.

The small celebrity seemed genuinely sincere, and sincerity was the first opponent Meng Yanxi had ever encountered.

But she was only sincere toward Meng Shixu; she would never be sincere toward him or his sister. —Regarding this, Meng Zhuxi once naively asked him why. Meng Yanxi looked at his own biological sister and couldn’t bring himself to call her stupid.

Two people whose interests were inherently opposed—if there were sincerity, it would only be sincere calculation and confrontation.

On this point, no matter what Meng Shixu said, he had never wavered.

But this time, Meng Yanxi didn’t really do anything. At most, on Meng Shixu’s birthday, he gave him five boxes of condoms to make his stance clear. He even, together with his sister, put on a somewhat aggrieved, accommodating front toward this relationship.

This time, he used smothering with praise.

The effect was very good—once someone is smothered with praise, their head easily turns to mush. The small celebrity actually wanted to probe further, to test whether she or he weighed more in Meng Shixu’s heart. She deliberately chose his birthday to call Meng Shixu to a neighboring city, and even took the initiative to ask for a diamond ring.

Whether Meng Shixu truly intended to propose, he didn’t know. In any case, his patience had run out.

Using methods that were obvious and yet not obvious, he threw himself into the hospital, then pinned it on the small celebrity’s younger brother, making them quarrel. Meng Yanxi didn’t think this was despicable, and evidently neither did Meng Shixu. The difference was that he sincerely believed this, while Meng Shixu didn’t believe he could be that despicable.

Perhaps he had put on an act too well in ordinary times.

Add to that his fanning the flames, and the two of them quarreled until their heads were hot, saying words of breaking up right there in the hospital room.

Meng Yanxi seized the chance to sweep over the money meant for buying the diamond ring as well, and casually made an investment, leaving himself a way out.

But since it was the most troublesome peach blossom, how could they possibly separate so easily?

That way out wasn’t left to avoid being scolded after Meng Shixu came to his senses, but to completely tear them apart.

He made five million from futures, and used the money to painstakingly select an excellent actor.

He wasn’t as wealthy as Meng Shixu, but he was likewise from a wealthy family—a second-generation rich heir. Most importantly, he was about the same age as the female celebrity, and there was one less troublemaking son.

Meng Yanxi had always believed that so-called “it has to be him” was nothing but a prettified lie; at its core, it was simply a matter of not having met someone with better conditions.

Now, he spent money and found that person for her.

But even so, the female celebrity and Meng Shixu continued to be entangled, which made Meng Yanxi somewhat irritated.

In those years, in order to constantly remind Meng Shixu, every Spring Festival he would make Meng Shixu go to Jinjue Temple to perform three days of rites for their mother. That year, as Meng Shixu knelt before the Buddha participating in the ritual, he stood to the side watching coldly, thinking about how to break him apart from the woman he couldn’t let go of.

Right there before the Buddha, method after method of insidious schemes ran through his mind; he was fearless and unafraid.

So much so that when the lamp tower in the main hall suddenly collapsed toward him, he didn’t come back to himself. The lamp tower had nine tiers in total, pyramid-shaped, each tier lit with lamps; scalding flames and lamp oil splashed toward his face.

He stared at Meng Shixu, and Meng Shixu suddenly turned around.

He didn’t know how Meng Shixu managed to be so fast. He had only ever heard that a mother protecting her child could unleash all her potential; seeing the same in Meng Shixu—who had been bent on remarrying—was rare indeed. —In that instant, Meng Shixu was so fast he seemed like a blurred shadow, lunging at him and using his back to block the falling lamp tower.

The sharp lamp tower crashed onto Meng Shixu’s back; flames and lamp oil swept across the skin of the back of his neck.

Thankfully, the people around them reacted in time. In the end, Meng Shixu only ruined a coat, suffered some superficial injuries on his back, and had a patch of reddened skin on his neck—nothing serious.

“What were you thinking just now, standing there dazed? The fire almost burned your face and you didn’t even know to dodge!” Meng Shixu rubbed the back of his neck where it burned and scolded him irritably, pointing at him.

At that moment, a phantom-like warmth appeared at the corners of Meng Yanxi’s eyes.

He was thinking about how to deal with the man before him who was willing to use his flesh and blood to protect him.

Conscience—Meng Yanxi had always thought he didn’t have such a thing. In truth, over the years Meng Shixu had been extremely caring toward him, even doting in a soft-hearted, stubborn-mouthed way. But because of those never-ending peach blossoms, Meng Yanxi had regarded him as an enemy.

Yet at the moment Meng Shixu shielded him, his conscience seemed to appear, like a fleeting epiphyllum bloom.

That feeling wasn’t pleasant; it even tore at him, leaving him faintly in pain.

He had never seen a purely good person; Meng Shixu clearly wasn’t one either—perhaps his sister barely counted.

At that moment, he suddenly felt that his sister was very fortunate, able to be a clean, untainted good person.

When the ritual ended, the abbot led them out from the inner hall. As they passed the front of the main hall, he suddenly heard the sound of a temple chime.

Meng Yanxi couldn’t help but stop and turn his head.

That day was the first of the lunar month. There were many worshippers burning incense at Jinjue Temple, packed shoulder to shoulder. His gaze passed through the crowd, and at a glance he saw Jin Zhao.

The sixteen-year-old girl knelt devoutly on a prayer cushion, hands pressed together, eyes closed, her fair face lifted toward the Buddha. The sun had come out; the golden body of the Buddha reflected a ray of light that fell upon her clean, unblemished face.

They soon encountered each other again—on that very day, after only an afternoon had passed. Because Meng Zhuxi wanted to eat mushrooms, he went into the mountains to gather them.

Of course, he didn’t recognize mushrooms at all. He tried to give money to the local villagers and have them take him into the mountains to pick mushrooms, but strangely, not a single person accepted his money, and they even told him there were no mushrooms now.

He had always been a person with heavy thoughts; he insisted on asking for the route. In the end, he didn’t find any mushrooms, but in the mountains he encountered a girl dancing.

The land beneath her feet was barren and desolate; in winter there were only a few bare tree branches. Behind her ran a river, its water muddy, no different from a stretch of ruins.

A girl upon the ruins, in a goose-yellow off-the-shoulder hooded sweater and a snow-white long skirt, her long hair tied up into a bun.

The evening clouds on the horizon were bright and resplendent; golden light fell upon her spotless face.

He thought of the compassionate deity in the Buddhist hall.

“Bang—”

The straw behind him suddenly exploded, and at the same time, a sentence flashed through his mind—

Some rot amid blossoms and brocade; some dance atop barren ruins.