Sharing One Life with My Nemesis - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I nearly drove the blade in.

“How dare you bring up the Jiang Family Case?”

Xie Huaiyan lifted his eyes.

“If I had truly wanted the Jiang Family wiped out, I wouldn’t have let you live until after autumn in our last life.”

My breath caught in my chest.

The moment the words “our last life” left his mouth, all the blood in my body turned cold.

“You were reborn too?”

Xie Huaiyan did not answer.

He only raised his wrist, revealing an old scar beneath the iron chain.

The scar was deep, as if a thin thread had cut all the way into the bone.

“On the third day after you died, I died as well.”

The hand I held the knife with began to tremble.

“Who killed you?”

“Myself.”

His voice was calm.

“The old files in the Ministry of Justice were burned, and the Jiang Family’s final testimony was cut off. When I slit my wrist, I found a Gu Thread in my blood.”

My head buzzed.

In our last life, I died on the execution ground. Three days later, he took his own life.

In this life, we had been reborn at the same time, and then bound together by the Soulbound Gu.

This did not feel like fate.

It felt as if someone had taken two broken lifelines and knotted them into a dead knot.

I asked, “Why did you have the Jiang Family testimony?”

Xie Huaiyan stared at me for a long time.

“Because before your father died, he gave me the real military report Draft Manuscript.”

I slapped him across the face.

The crisp crack rang especially loud in the death cell.

Xie Huaiyan’s face turned to the side.

My face stung with pain too.

Me: “…”

The Soulbound Gu counted even this?

Holding his cheek, Xie Huaiyan actually let out a faint laugh.

“Feel better?”

I said expressionlessly, “No.”

“Then don’t hit me again. It’s not worth it.”

I was so angry that my shoulder started hurting again.

Xie Huaiyan stopped smiling and drew a copper plate from his sleeve.

A condemned prisoner should not have had such a thing on him.

But this man had always been the best at hiding things.

Carved onto the copper plate was half of a tiger tally pattern.

“Your father discovered that the Northern Frontier Military Report had been swapped. The secret letter wasn’t found in the Jiang Mansion. It was taken from the Northern Pacification Army’s Old Archive and later planted in your father’s study.”

“Who swapped it?”

Xie Huaiyan said, “Dingguo Duke Mansion. Lu Xingzhou.”

I froze.

Lu Xingzhou was my fiancé.

Not long ago, he had knelt outside the gates of the Jiang Mansion, begging my father to betroth me to him.

After the Jiang Family’s downfall, he was also the one who personally came to the prison to see me.

He said, “Tingyun, I can’t save you.”

With tears in his eyes, he handed me a calming pill.

At the time, I had thought that even if all of the capital had abandoned me, at least he had cried for me.

Seeing my expression, Xie Huaiyan’s voice chilled.

“You took the medicine he gave you?”

I said nothing.

I had.

After taking it, I slept very deeply on the night before my execution.

So deeply that I never woke to look at the blood letter my mother had asked a jailer to deliver to me.

Xie Huaiyan closed his eyes briefly.

“Jiang Tingyun, you really are…”

I raised the knife.

“You dare curse at me?”

He swallowed the second half of the sentence.

“Too quick to trust people.”

I sneered.

“I wasn’t exactly slow to trust you either.”

As soon as the words fell, the prison went quiet for a moment.

We both remembered many years ago.

Back then, my father had not yet met with disaster, and Xie Huaiyan was still only the thin, taciturn student living at the Jiang Mansion.

I had climbed the wall to sneak a look at him practicing calligraphy, only to fall and crash straight into his arms.

He grunted from the impact, yet the first thing he asked me was, “Does it hurt?”

I said it did not.

He looked at the scraped skin on my palm and said softly, “Liar.”

Later, he became the one who lied most cruelly of all.

The watchman’s clapper suddenly sounded outside the prison.

It was the second watch.

Xie Huaiyan rose and pressed the copper plate into my hand.

“Leave the city now. Go to the ruined temple north of the city and find a little beggar named Ah Man. She has the lower half of the Jiang Family Military Report Draft.”

I asked, “What about you?”

“At noon tomorrow, I go to the execution ground.”

He said, “If you find the account book, don’t worry about me.”

I stared at him.

“If you die, I’ll die too.”

Xie Huaiyan paused.

I tugged at the corner of my mouth.

“Remember that now?”

He lifted a hand and pressed it to his brow.

“Then you’ll raid the execution ground tomorrow?”

“No.”

I put away the copper plate.

“I’m breaking you out first.”