Unrequited Love

My ex-boyfriend turned my ashes into a necklace and hung it around his son’s neck for eighteen years.

For those eighteen years, my soul remained trapped by the boy’s side.

Then one day, out of the blue, the boy told me something.

He said he wanted to marry me.

The day my interview results came out, I came across a post: “How lethal can a white moonlight really be?”

The top-voted answer had only been posted a little while ago.

“I’ll tell my own story. He had a crush on me in high school, and we ran into each other a few days ago while I was job hunting.”

“Even if I’m not as capable as the others, he’ll still make me the one-in-ten-thousand choice.”

Attached was a graduation photo of them at eighteen.

The girl wore a white dress, her slim back quiet and well-behaved.

The boy had his head turned, looking at her intently, his profile clean and… familiar.

My phone trembled faintly. It was the message rejecting me after the interview.

Only then did I understand. She was Xie Qingyue’s white moonlight-and what she had killed was my future.

I would rather be a tree waiting for spring than a bird that turns back.

I could allow my feelings to fall apart completely.

But my future, my freedom, my life-none of them could afford the slightest mistake.

I’ve read so many novels about the “crematorium” trope-where the husband has to crawl back and beg for forgiveness-but I never expected to find myself starring in one.

Except there’s no chasing, only the crematorium.

Because I’m actually dead.

I’ve become a ghost, watching the man who betrayed me. Seven days after my death, he finally seems crushed by a delayed sense of grief. In the home I can never return to, he howls in agony, acting as if life is no longer worth living.

You want to know how I feel?

I just stand there blankly, carefully admiring every inch of pain etched onto his face.

I listen intently to his desperate wails, triggered by my departure.

Beyond the desolation and heartache in my soul, a massive wave of schadenfreude suddenly wells up within me.

A joyful, blissful sense of schadenfreude.

It’s a sensation so sharp it borders on thrill. I cover my mouth and begin to laugh.

Ten years after graduation, at a class reunion in Beijing, I saw him again.

Among a group of male classmates nearing thirty and starting to put on a bit of weight, he still looked as young and handsome as ever.

We sat far apart at the table and didn’t exchange a single word.

When the reunion ended, a light rain began to fall, and I hurried to leave.

To my surprise, he stopped my car.

“Xiao Shan.” His eyes were just as clear and transparent as they had always been.

Perhaps it was because of the rain, but there seemed to be a faint hint of urgency in his voice.

“Could you… give me a lift?”

Three years after Lin Wan’s death, I found the record of her seven years of love for me tucked away in an old cardboard box.

The last page still carried the smell of medicine, where she asked if, in the next life, I could be the one to love her first. That night, I finally understood that the cruelest thing I had ever done was to let someone waste away to death without ever once looking back at her.

Zhou Xingzhi was disfigured while saving the woman he truly loved. In the hospital, I cried my heart out, my sobs echoing through the halls.

I kept pestering the doctor, asking over and over if his face could be fixed.

Everyone thought I was hopelessly in love with him.

Only Zhou Xingzhi’s younger brother handed me a tissue, a smirk playing on his lips. “Sister-in-law, my brother’s face is beyond saving.” “You might as well choose me instead. After all, my face looks much more like Wei Qiao’s now than my brother’s does.”

The Seventh Prince became an outcast.

For four years, I followed him as his servant, never leaving his side through thick and thin.

Later, he ascended to the highest position in the land.

Everyone thought my days of suffering were finally over and my rewards were at hand.

But then, the New Emperor took the Chancellor’s Only Daughter as his Empress.

Some sighed with pity; others watched for the drama to unfold.

Yet, not a single ripple of emotion stirred in my heart.

Because the one I love was never him to begin with.

It was the fifth year of our engagement, and Meng Cijun still refused to marry me.

The first time he turned me down, he said the King was placing great importance on him, so how could he indulge in the trivialities of love?

That made sense, so I nodded and waited another two years.

The second time he turned me down, he said that since the King had yet to choose a Queen, how could a mere subject like him marry first?

That made me angry. I felt the King was being completely unreasonable-I had waited so long that I was practically an old maid, yet he still wouldn’t allow Meng Cijun to marry me?

Meng Cijun and I had a fight. In a fit of pique, I left home, only to rescue a palace official who was trying to end his life by the river.

One of the girls selected for the draft had run away, and Wang Shiguan was so distressed he was ready to jump into the water.

“If I enter the palace, will I be able to see the King?”

Wang Shiguan looked at my hair, which was not yet pinned up in the style of a married woman, and my youthful face. He nodded with delight.

“Of course! If you find favor, you’ll see the King every single night!”

“Alright then,” I said, nodding as I gathered my skirts and stepped into the carriage.

Once I saw that King, I intended to ask him exactly why he wouldn’t let Meng Cijun marry me.

“Miss, if you leave, how am I supposed to explain this to Master Meng?” Xiao Tao asked, panicked.

I thought about it for a moment, then pulled back the curtain and waved a hand.

“Just tell Meng Cijun that Ah Wu is still mad at him and won’t be coming home for dinner tonight!”

My fiancé returned from the front, and with him he brought a woman.

She wore a long crimson robe, a curved saber fastened at her waist. She rode in through the city gates on horseback, bold and dazzling, like the wild azaleas that set the mountains ablaze in spring.

“So this is the kind of girl Ning Zhen likes.” She folded her arms and looked me over, one brow lifting. There was no telling from her tone whether she was pleased or displeased.

Ning Zhen only glanced at her helplessly. “A childhood promise can hardly be taken seriously.”

What a fine thing to say-a childhood promise could hardly be taken seriously.

I had waited three years for him, only to be given those words.

We had been together for three years, yet my girlfriend still couldn’t forget her first love.

There was a locked room in her house-a promise she had kept for him.

As long as he returned, there would always be a place for him in her home.

For his sake, she abandoned me time and time again.

The final time, I left nothing but a single breakup text and vanished without a trace.

Yet, she acted as if she had gone mad, searching the entire world for me.

Eventually, in a cemetery, she finally discovered the truth behind everything.

With bloodshot eyes, she pointed at the person in the black-and-white photograph-someone who bore an eighty percent resemblance to her-and interrogated me.

“Shen Yu, tell me-” “Every time you looked at me, who exactly were you thinking of?”