After My Death, I Became a Heartless Madman - Chapter 10

After leaving the Song family, Song Shizhou headed straight for the high-speed rail station.

She was in a hurry. The street, over a dozen meters wide, was packed with vehicles, yet when she actually needed a taxi, none were available. She tried hailing one while simultaneously booking a ride on her phone.

Finally managing to flag down a cab, her suitcase got caught on a speed bump, scattering items from her handbag. Song Shizhou glanced at them nothing important, it seemed and didn’t bother picking anything up, hopping into the taxi in a flash.

The driver was startled and turned to look at her.

“Miss, you’re practically tumbling in here. Are we being chased or something?”

Song Shizhou chuckled.

“Pretty much the same thing.”

The driver thought she was joking and honked twice.

“Really not picking anything up? If not, I’m driving off?”

Shizhou nodded. The driver laughed heartily.

“Alright then, who’s chasing us?”

Song Shizhou thought to herself, If I told you who’s chasing me, you probably wouldn’t dare take this job.

She waved her hand and flashed a harmless smile.

“I was just kidding.”

This was probably the first time she’d made such a reckless decision. Sitting in the backseat, she rolled down the window. The chilly breeze tousled her hair, and snowflakes landed on her face a vivid, living sensation.

The feeling of being alive.

In the Song household, she had been a cautious shadow, weighing every word and action multiple times: Would Madam Song Lanyi be pleased? Would Song Nianchu cause trouble for her? Would Sister Yu worry? Later, when she met Bai Ruowei, a troublesome lover, she became even more careful with her words and deeds.

Yet, despite her meticulousness, the rose she had nurtured with such care still grew thorns that pricked her. It seemed caution wasn’t always a virtue.

In life, it’s best to follow your heart and seek happiness.

She queued at the ticket counter. It was the off-season for travel, and after the massive quartz clock at the station ticked twice, the clerk asked her destination.

“The next available train.”

The clerk paused. Song Shizhou added,

“Anywhere is fine. I just want the soonest one.”

People say life is about enduring the mundane while dreaming of poetry and distant horizons, but for Song Shizhou, only the first half seemed to apply. In over twenty years of living, she had never really yearned for any particular place.

As long as she could leave the Inner City quickly, anywhere would do.

While waiting, she logged into her social media. Only a few hours had passed since her outburst and severing ties with the Song family, yet her chat interface was flooded, thousands of messages.

Song Shizhou had a small group chat with her Inner City friends. Normally, it bore ridiculous names like “AAA Inner City Rich Ladies’ Wellness Club” or “Today Also Aspires to Be a Woman’s Plaything,” but now it had been renamed “Celebrating Ms. Song Shizhou’s Triumphant Rebellion.”

Song Shizhou cracked up, unable to hold back her laughter.

The Inner City’s top “dom” was Su Ziqing, Song Shizhou’s closest friend there. She sent a meme of someone crawling in the shadows, asking if Shizhou had really run away.

“After all these years of your mom oppressing you, you’re finally rising up?”

“Not bad, Song Shizhou. Acting first, reporting later, aren’t you afraid the Empress Dowager will descend to drag you back?”

“What do you know? Song Shizhou’s already gone. You think Madam Song Lanyi would abandon the family business to chase her across the world?”

After a while, the top alpha of the Inner City sent a private message:

“Why did you leave the banquet early last night?”

“Damn, don’t tell me you really slept with Little White Dragon?”

Little White Dragon was the nickname the Inner City’s second-generation elites had given Bai Ruowei. Because Miss Bai’s presence was overwhelmingly intimidating, she earned the moniker “dinosaur.” But when these people thought about Miss Bai’s god-like, breathtakingly beautiful face, they felt “White Dinosaur” didn’t suit her at all, who calls a beauty a dinosaur? Had society evolved into something so terrifying?

So Su Ziqing slapped her thigh and decided to drop one character, calling Bai Ruowei “White Dragon,” affectionately shortened to “Little White Dragon.”

Song Shizhou replied with three periods. Su Ziqing, who was currently at a bar, drunkenly pondered what three periods could mean.

The beauty beside her took a look and said, “Oh, you still don’t get it?”

“A period means ‘confirmed.’ Three periods mean ‘confirmed three times’, so they did it three times.”

Su Ziqing jumped around in agitation, like some kind of animal in a melon field desperate for gossip but thwarted. She babbled a reply, only to be met with a red exclamation mark.

Song Shizhou had blocked her.

And left the group chat!

Now was not the time for chatting.

Song Shizhou exited the messaging app.

She was still on the run.

She had blocked and deleted everything related to the Song family, swift and decisive. She felt she should have hesitated, at least paused for a few seconds after all, these were people she had lived with for seven or eight years.

Perhaps she had rehearsed this too many times in her subconscious, because Song Shizhou felt no emotional turmoil. Until Feng Yu’s call came in.

She lowered her eyes, silently watching the flashing screen. The ringtone played melodiously before finally ending after a long while.

But soon, a second call came. Then a third.

Song Shizhou sighed.

She wasn’t afraid of Bai Ruowei’s pursuit, so she neither disguised herself nor meticulously planned an escape route. She knew that if Bai Ruowei wanted to find her, she would, no matter what.

All she could do was gamble bet that Bai Ruowei wouldn’t remember, or even if she did, wouldn’t come looking. So what she needed now wasn’t to flee, but to sever ties with the Song family.

And that, of course, included Feng Yu.

The best way to treat a festering wound is to dig it out entirely, cutting away all the rotten tissue in one go, then applying medicine and bandaging it carefully. It hurts, but it’s clean and effective.

Hesitation only allows the rot to spread, eventually consuming the whole body.

What she needed now was resolve.

The waiting area announced the imminent departure of the train. Song Shizhou tightened her grip on her suitcase and, after some thought, sent Feng Yu a text.

“Sister Yu, I’m feeling down. Going out of town for a few days to clear my head. Don’t worry.”

She hesitated over whether to include “don’t forget,” but after several edits, she deleted those two words.

Once aboard the train, Shizhou’s mood improved significantly.

She rarely had such leisurely moments for travel. As a child, she had always loved riding trains because on a train, you didn’t have to think or do anything. You just had to wait.

When she was little, she liked the feeling of waiting because waiting meant she didn’t have to do anything, no piles of chores or crates of vegetables to haul. The Lu Family Couple had a small stall in the market, and half the work of moving goods was left to hired hands, the other half to Song Shizhou.

But as she grew older and met Miss Bai, she stopped liking waiting, because waiting never led to anything good. She waited for Miss Bai to accept her proposal, only to be met with endless delays. She waited for Bai Ruowei to return to the Inner City and talk things out, only to receive news of Miss Bai’s engagement.

She practically developed PTSD from all that waiting.

Why was she thinking about Bai Ruowei again?

Song Shizhou laughed at herself mockingly.

Could she really not live without her?

People came and went on the train. Sitting beside Song Shizhou was a little girl, quiet and well-behaved, who had fallen asleep as soon as she boarded and was probably deep into several dreams by now.

Song Shizhou lowered the tray table, opened her laptop, and logged into her Weibo account.

It was her first time falling in love, and Miss Bai’s first time too. Neither had much experience in relationships. Song Shizhou was prone to nervousness and liked to write about her life, so she turned their little moments into a love diary, pages upon pages of rambling, saccharine prose.

Her Weibo had few followers, so she kept writing these self-indulgent love diaries day after day. Unexpectedly, her clumsy efforts backfired, and she ended up gaining a loyal fanbase.

At the time, “trophy wife literature” was trending, and Song Shizhou grew anxious. Watching her follower count skyrocket and the comments pour in by the thousands, she worried that her childish romantic anecdotes would be ridiculed or worse, that someone might dig up Miss Bai’s identity and cause her unnecessary trouble. She stewed in unease for days, to the point where even Bai Ruowei noticed something was off.

But none of those fears came to pass. The comment section remained peaceful, even shipping her and Miss Bai as a couple.

Looking back now, Song Shizhou still couldn’t figure out what was so appealing about those rambling snippets.

For a long time, she hadn’t had the chance to update her Weibo, and the demands for new posts grew louder, with fans begging and pleading for updates.

But she wouldn’t be writing any more.

Song Shizhou smiled faintly.

Because they had broken up.

Her fingers tapped the keyboard as she forced a lighthearted tone:

“In the end, they did make it to the wedding altar except one was the bride, and the other was the officiant. dog emoji**dog emoji”

Song Shizhou chuckled. At least she hadn’t been miserable enough to officiate Bai Ruowei and Miss Zhao’s wedding.

What had started as a joking thought somehow made her nose sting.

She was the most generous, forgiving person yet she still couldn’t get over Bai Ruowei.

The post went up quickly, the count jumping from 0 to 1.

0?

She froze.

How could it be 0? She had posted so many before so many that even Weibo’s automated assistant had taken notice, labeling her a “high-quality creator” and nominating her for “Most Talkative Account of the Year.”

It really should have been 0.

Song Shizhou paused.

She had forgotten.

She had been reborn. This time, she hadn’t recklessly confessed to Miss Bai. The two of them had never gotten together. She hadn’t been fooled and led around by the nose, so of course there were no laughably foolish love diaries and no crowd eagerly awaiting updates on their relationship.

Not that there was anything worth waiting for anyway.

She really wasn’t in the mood for that whole heartbreak melodrama. Besides, this couldn’t even be considered a breakup – she had been unilaterally abandoned by Bai Ruowei, and now she was unilaterally leaving Bai Ruowei. One time each, perhaps that was fair.

She just suddenly felt a bit regretful, that’s all.

As the train passed through the deep tunnel, Shizhou smiled faintly in the darkness.

“Goodbye, Miss Bai.”

After all, those little moments, those words, all the happy memories.

Had completely vanished without a trace.

Support