Sharing One Life with My Nemesis - Chapter 5

Chapter 5

The hidden passage led to a mass grave outside the city.

By the time we emerged, the sky was already bright.

The drug still had not worn off Xie Huaiyan. He was half leaning against a dead tree, his expression so ugly he looked like he wanted to kill someone.

“Next time you feed me medicine, could you at least warn me first?”

I tore off a strip from my hem to bandage him.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You’d dodge.”

He choked on that.

I wound the cloth tight around his wound.

He gave a muffled groan, and pain shot through my own shoulder as well.

I couldn’t help kicking him.

“Hurt less loudly.”

Xie Huaiyan: “…”

He looked at me and suddenly said in a low voice, “In this life, you’re fiercer than you were in the last one.”

My hands paused.

“I wasn’t fierce in the last life?”

“You were.”

He lowered his eyes.

“But most of the time, you were enduring.”

I fell silent.

After the Jiang Family got into trouble in my last life, I kept thinking I couldn’t make a scene.

My father said the innocent would be proven innocent. I believed him.

Lu Xingzhou told me to wait while he worked things out. I believed him.

Xie Huaiyan told me not to ask. I hated him, but in the end, I stopped asking.

I endured until the very end, until I became a head rolling onto the execution ground.

In this life, I didn’t want to endure anymore.

Crows cried in the distance.

Xie Huaiyan took a torn map from inside his robe.

“Ah Man was captured, so the Draft Manuscript most likely fell into Lu Xingzhou’s hands. But he won’t keep it on him.”

I asked, “Where would he hide it?”

“The dungeon of Dingguo Duke Mansion.”

“How do you know?”

“In the last life, I was locked up there for three days.”

I looked up at him.

His tone was too calm, as if he were talking about going to someone else’s house and drinking a cup of cold tea.

“Why were you locked up?”

Xie Huaiyan spread out the torn map.

“I submitted a second memorial to the emperor, saying there were doubts in the Jiang Family Case.”

I froze.

In the last life, before I died?

“When?”

“Three days before your execution.”

Which meant now.

I stared at him.

“Then why did no one know?”

Xie Huaiyan gave a faint smile.

“The memorial never reached the throne. Lu Xingzhou intercepted it first.”

He tapped a finger against the torn map.

“He locked me in the Dingguo Duke Mansion dungeon and interrogated me about the whereabouts of the Draft Manuscript. Later, I escaped. By the time I rushed to the execution ground, you had already…”

He could not continue.

Wind swept across the mass grave, stirring up the ash of joss paper.

I suddenly remembered that final moment before my death.

Before the blade fell, it had seemed like someone in the crowd was shouting my name.

Back then, I thought it was a hallucination.

So it wasn’t.

Xie Huaiyan said softly, “I’m sorry.”

Those three words came far too late.

So late that an entire lifetime lay between us.

I should have kept hating him.

But the Soulbound Gu linked me to his heartbeat, and to the pain in my shoulder.

I could feel the tremor in his chest, the one he could barely hold down as he said those words.

I took the torn map from him.

“Save your apology until after the case is overturned.”

He raised his eyes to me.

“What do we do now?”

“Steal the Draft Manuscript.”

“Dingguo Duke Mansion is heavily guarded.”

“And?”

I looked toward the far end of the mass grave.

A broken-down funeral cart was parked there.

“We pretend to be corpses and get carried in.”

Xie Huaiyan was silent for a moment.

“You really weren’t this fierce in your last life.”

I tossed the white cloth at him.

“Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Dead people who talk too much are unlucky.”