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Two lifetimes later, he finally admitted it to her…
Under Pei Shang’s gaze, she slowly withdrew her hand from his hair, her expression blank as she stared at him.
This expression was so strange — Pei Shang had never seen Yu Mingyao look at him this way before. Panic rising within him, he forced a smile and asked awkwardly,
“Is there something you feel you can’t say?”
At that moment, all his guilt and helplessness showed plainly on his face.
Yu Mingyao’s chest simmered with fury and frustration. In fact, ever since Cheng Qing had come to confront her that day, all her pent-up displeasure had swelled and converged into one tight knot.
Yet when her eyes met Pei Shang’s dark, clear ones, she could only realize:
Pei Shang was innocent.
From his perspective — one was a friend he had known and cherished for many years, and the other was the beloved woman he hoped to spend the rest of his life with.
Both of them were important to him.
Pei Shang…
Yu Mingyao exhaled deeply. The stubbornness she had just felt seemed to leave her body with that breath.
Pei Shang would never know how deep the entanglement between her and Xie Zhuoguang truly ran.
In this life, she would also never tell Pei Shang that: in my previous life, I was already his wife.
No man could bear the thought of his bride — about to be carried to his home in a grand wedding procession — having already shared seven years of marriage and intimacy with another.
The words Pei Shang had felt too shy or embarrassed to say — someone else had already spoken them.
The experiences he had longed to share with her — someone else had already shared them with her.
While Pei Shang’s face was still tinged with unease, Yu Mingyao shifted her body closer to him again.
Pei Shang rested his head gently against her lower abdomen, tilting his face to observe her expression.
Yu Mingyao did not meet his gaze. Instead, she calmly and slowly combed through his hair with her fingertips.
A long while passed before she finally asked softly,
“You really want me to go?”
As she spoke, without realizing it herself, her expression carried a distant, lofty kind of pity. Though her tone was as gentle as usual, Pei Shang felt a sudden, inexplicable panic rise within him.
It was as if, in that instant, she had become as distant and untouchable as the moon — no longer within his grasp.
Panicking, he gripped the fabric of her dress tightly and pressed his face closer to her.
“…Yes.”
A low hum escaped his throat. Then, as if suddenly remembering something, he hurriedly added,
“But you have to promise me — just look at him once, say a couple of words, and then leave.”
“You’re not allowed to talk to him too much. You can’t touch him, you can’t pity him, and don’t…”
Don’t shed tears for him.
As he said this, Pei Shang’s long eyelashes quivered. In his mind, the memory flashed of the day he had seen Xie Zhuoguang and Yu Mingyao close together — and then Yu Mingyao had run out of the schoolhouse crying.
At the time, he hadn’t known that the ache and tightness in his chest was called heartbreak.
But now, he understood.
And if Yu Mingyao still cried for that man now, Pei Shang thought, his heart would shatter — break into so many pieces it could never be put back together.
From his angle, he could clearly see the gentle curve of Yu Mingyao’s jaw, her delicate, vibrant lips — as vivid as the first blossom of early spring, captivating and impossible to look away from.
Mesmerized, as if under a spell, Pei Shang couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to kiss those soft, upturned lips.
His gaze turned dazed, and his hand lifted hesitantly, wanting to touch but not daring to.
Yu Mingyao, looking down at the young man lying on her lap, felt a complex mix of emotions she couldn’t quite name. A faint ripple of a smile flickered in her eyes.
She bent down and kissed the corner of Pei Shang’s lips.
Pei Shang’s eyes flew wide open in shock. Her soft hands slipped between his fingers and clasped them tightly, intertwining their fingers together.
Then, light and gentle kisses fell one after another on the corners of his lips.
She kissed his nose, his forehead, his eyebrows, and his trembling, faintly pink eyelids.
Finally, she kissed him on the lips.
Pei Shang felt like he was about to die from embarrassment. His heart pounded wildly like a caged rabbit, and heat surged straight to his head.
He felt that in this moment, he wasn’t suave at all, wasn’t dashing in the least — certainly not the kind of man a woman could confidently entrust her life to.
It was humiliating.
He didn’t want her to see him in such a pitiful state.
A soft, choked sound escaped his throat. Then, he buried his face back into the folds of Yu Mingyao’s dress, leaving only the tips of his red ears visible.
Yu Mingyao didn’t say much. She simply stroked his head gently.
Many years later, even when the events of the past had faded and crumpled like a sheet of aged paper, Pei Shang would still remember this day clearly.
He would remember how Yu Mingyao, when she left, turned back to glance at him one last time as she stood at the cabin door.
The light streaming through the window divided the room into bright and dark halves. She stood in the light, he in the shadow. At that moment, the sudden joy had dazed him, and the faint unease in his heart had been subconsciously ignored.
He had even grinned foolishly, failing to notice the complexity in Yu Mingyao’s parting glance.
Afterwards, Pei Shang imagined countless times — if only he could turn back time, if only he had known that this one decision would trigger so many things, would lead to that fated entanglement…
He would have let guilt kill him first!
Even if he had to suffer endless torment, falling into hell every day — he would never have handed over his beloved with his own hands.
To hell with righteousness and virtue!
To hell with morality!
He just wanted his wife.
When Yu Mingyao closed the door of Cabin No. 4, the calm on her face completely disappeared.
Humans sometimes have an inexplicable sense of foreboding about fate.
She had always resisted the notion of “fate,” and hated even more the idea of reliving her past life exactly as before.
Her feelings for Xie Zhuoguang had long since vanished into the river of time.
Those seven years had drained all her love and desire dry. In this life, all she wanted was a peaceful existence.
Pei Shang was a fine husband — gentle, handsome, and considerate. Even if there were some minor troubles in the Pei family, it didn’t matter.
Loving someone meant accepting both their good and their bad.
Life was never perfectly smooth.
But she truly didn’t want to get entangled with Xie Zhuoguang again. She didn’t want to have anything more to do with him.
When he was good, he always disrupted her peace.
Now that he was not, he still shattered her tranquil life.
She was exhausted.
Yu Mingyao dragged her feet slowly toward Cabin No. 5. For a moment, she sincerely wished she could break her promise and simply ignore all the torment.
Then she wouldn’t have to face the hopeful, star-bright gaze in Pei Shang’s eyes again.
He was still young and didn’t yet understand that once a man and woman shared physical intimacy, even a saint couldn’t easily watch his woman marry someone else.
But she had no choice — she could only do as Pei Shang had asked.
In this, she and Pei Shang were the same kind of people.
They valued promises and were always bound by duty and obligation, unable to selfishly and shamelessly be “the bad guy.”
Outside Cabin No. 5, it was deathly silent.
Before Yu Mingyao could make her decision, the cabin door creaked open.
When Cheng Qing saw her, his previously drooping expression instantly brightened.
“Miss Yu, you’ve come! Please, come in.”
He was all smiles and energy. Yu Mingyao’s legs, however, felt like they were weighed down with lead.
Once Cheng Qing left, the small cabin — barely four or five feet across — suddenly felt empty, with just the two of them inside.
She had no desire whatsoever to move closer, remaining rooted at the center of the room.
Her mind had gone blank. No memories surfaced.
After a long, long time, she sighed.
At the very moment her sigh fell, another voice, tinged with bitterness and mockery, echoed in the room.
“So, Sixth Young Master puts Miss Yao in such a difficult position?”
Xie Zhuoguang, at some point, had propped himself up on the bed and was watching her.
His expression was gentle — something rare in both her past and present lives.
In the past, he had always been tightly wound, always cold-faced like a thousand-year block of ice that no one could warm.
Yu Mingyao lifted her gaze. Not a trace of a smile appeared on her face.
“Why don’t you just go die?” she said flatly.
As the words fell, Xie Zhuoguang’s gentle expression instantly froze, deep sorrow flashing across his face.
But the Xie Zhuoguang of seventeen would have stubbornly argued back, masking his desolation.
The Xie Zhuoguang of twenty-four or twenty-five merely smiled faintly, letting the emotion pass through him without leaving a trace.
He could still appear calm and unruffled.
“Can we just talk calmly, Mingyao?” he asked softly, his usually stern face relaxed and slackened.
Yu Mingyao, however, pulled up the corners of her mouth into a sneer, her expression full of disdain.
“Talk? With you? What is there to say? I’m now a wife of the Pei family, not a member of the Xie family. If you’re full of schemes and determined to die, go ahead and die. Don’t drag others into it.”
“Just looking at you disgusts me.”
Her gaze was as sharp as the glint of snow on a blade.
It was then that Xie Zhuoguang stopped trying to smile and instead studied her face carefully. His eyes traced every detail — her hair, her brows, her jawline.
He searched for a long time but found no trace of what he wanted to see.
His own wife — had not a shred of affection left for him.
It was as if she had crossed the river and left him stranded on the other shore.
She had truly, thoroughly given her heart to Pei Shang.
She no longer loved him at all.
Exhaustion spread through his limbs.
For a brief moment, he genuinely wanted to let the young couple be together.
But this poison of love — he had been infected with it since his last life. It had seeped deep into his bones; he couldn’t sever it.
Even if it couldn’t be undone, it had worked once before. Why couldn’t the same script be played out again?
Lowering his voice, he softly asked,
“Are you really willing to let me marry someone else?”
Honestly, when he said that, it stirred up all of Yu Mingyao’s long-festering disgust.
For a moment, she forgot all decorum and cursed him outright.
“Who do you think you are? Why would I care?”
“If it weren’t for that cup of tea, I never would have married you in my past life.”
“You want me to go through it all over again? Dream on!”
At last, they had spoken about the “tea.”
In her past life, because Yu Mingyao had been weighed down by guilt, she had never dared bring it up in front of Xie Zhuoguang.
Even though they had eventually developed deep feelings for each other, by then, the other problems surrounding them had always seemed more pressing than the matter of the tea.
Neither of them had the energy to discuss it.
Xie Zhuoguang lowered his gaze, speaking calmly.
“I drank that tea willingly. I never regretted it. If I hadn’t, I would have had to watch you hand that cup to Pei Shang.”
“When you were in his household, he couldn’t even protect you. He let you be so humiliated and defiled.”
“I only wanted to protect the woman I loved. How is that wrong?”
Two lifetimes later, he had finally admitted his feelings to her face.
But Yu Mingyao only felt drained and weary. There was no joy in her heart — not even a trace of relief.
A missed chance is a mistake.
She already had Pei Shang.
Being a blissful couple with him was far better than living a lifetime of resentment with this shameless man.
She curled her lips and said nothing.