Did I Succeed in Redeeming the Villain Today? - Chapter 65

Chapter 65: “Can Rabbits Eat Corn Poppies?”

Mu Qiuyu was not crazy. While everyone else was interacting with the kitten, she had spent the time alone memorizing three English model essays.

Lu Ning didn’t cause any trouble either. She curled up obediently in the girl’s arms, enjoying the last mile of sunlight as it lingered on the day. Cars drove past on the street heading home, stirring up a bustle outside the window. As for the two of them—one person and one cat—the sunset traced their overlapping shadows, and the floating golden light felt like a tiny world cordoned off just for them.

Summer was clearly arriving. The warm wind made the cat exceptionally comfortable. The words Mu Qiuyu softly exhaled sounded like glass beads falling into a tray—clear and crisp—making Lu Ning truly wish she could stretch this moment out forever.

It seemed that from this moment on, Lu Ning felt Mu Qiuyu had changed a bit. For a fleeting second, the phrase “quiet and beautiful years” actually felt like it belonged to her.

To verify this feeling, she needed to see the changes in Mu Qiuyu’s Inner World. So, with that thought in mind, Lu Ning returned to the Inner World that night after Mu Qiuyu fell asleep.

Passing through the silent long corridor, the familiar hazy white light glowed in Lu Ning’s vision. She was filled with anticipation as she pushed open the door.

“Wooo——!!”

The moment the door opened, a gale fought to squeeze its way out. Lu Ning was caught off guard and was nearly flipped over by the wind, just like the first time she had come here.

There was no imagined spring scenery. What greeted Lu Ning was still that fierce wind comparable to midwinter. She clung to the door and stood disheveled in the wind for a long time. It wasn’t until she pushed against the gale to close the door again that the world finally regained its peace.

The silence around her was sudden. Lu Ning stood there alone, trying to calm down with her hair looking like a bird’s nest. A gentle breeze brushed past, and in the quiet, she caught the scent of flowers. It was a fragrance Lu Ning had never smelled here before.

She froze for a moment, then looked up. Instantly, her vision was crowded with flowers. Red and orange intertwined, burning like the sunset clouds from earlier that evening. A few white petals appeared among them, dotting the sunset like layers of thin clouds moving with the wind.

Lu Ning was momentarily speechless from the beauty of the scene. But as she stared at the sea of flowers, a sudden jolt of alarm struck her heart. Those lush red flower stalks looked far too much like opium poppies.

“This isn’t a good omen.”

With that heavy feeling, Lu Ning opened the query system. She stared at the progress bar until it hit 100%, and the name appeared beneath the flower stalks.

—Corn Poppy. An annual herb, a dicotyledonous plant of the genus Papaver in the family Papaveraceae; a common ornamental flower.

Although the words “family Papaveraceae, genus Papaver” still made Lu Ning’s heart skip a beat, the primary name “Corn Poppy” was enough to set her at ease. Although they looked very similar, they were not the same thing.

Wasn’t this subtle distinction exactly the difference between the past Mu Qiuyu and the current one?

A gentle wind blew from the distance again. The fields of Corn Poppies drifted slowly, looking like a red ocean. There were no seasonal changes in Mu Qiuyu’s Inner World; flowers planted here could bloom for a long time. Lu Ning had only been away for three days, yet these flowers had already reached their peak.

Without anyone to plan them, the seeds had fallen and caused a massive bloom. They grew with a chaotic and unrestrained abandon, filling almost the entire world and sprawling wildly all the way to the door. Lu Ning had never seen such vigorous vitality. Even the single seed she had haphazardly tossed among a pile of mixed seeds hadn’t expected to survive and ultimately become such a sea of flowers.

The Corn Poppies grew impressively, swallowing up the originally parched earth or muddy swamps with their tenacious life force. But then Lu Ning realized: it wasn’t just that the Corn Poppies were strong growers, but that the land itself had slowly and invisibly transformed. The wind no longer carried a bone-chilling cold; it felt like a playful child tugging at Lu Ning’s hair. The girl looked up, feeling the moonlight tonight was exceptionally bright.

Indeed, Mu Qiuyu’s Inner World was no longer so terrible. Although the gale would still howl and mistreat outsiders upon entry, it was much better compared to when Lu Ning first arrived. At the very least, the waist-high foxtail grass no longer held a survival advantage.

Lu Ning realized she was standing exactly where she had exerted so much effort pulling weeds on her first day. Remembering how she had fallen on her bottom, she couldn’t help but laugh.

“Flowers are better after all.” Lu Ning looked at the vibrant Corn Poppies and rubbed her rear. “It would be great if I could take these back to show Mu Qiuyu.”

As she muttered to herself, she felt a bit of regret. She looked at the photos of the Corn Poppy sea captured by the system camera; although the scenery was real and the colors vivid, she felt it wasn’t as satisfying as actually being there.

“What a pity.” Lu Ning shook her head. But just as she was sighing, her eyes suddenly lit up as she remembered something.

She couldn’t let the Mu Qiuyu on the outside see the Corn Poppies, but she could let the one on the inside see them! Now that Mu Qiuyu’s Inner World had improved, Wutong’s living space should have improved too. Having been away for several days, Lu Ning was just thinking she shouldn’t go to see Wutong empty-handed—wasn’t this the perfect ready-made gift?

“Hehe, I’m a genius!”

Back in university, there had been a craze for flower arranging in her class. Lu Ning had used Corn Poppies in her dorm back then. When the transparent glass vase refracted the light from the window, the petals looked vibrant and translucent—it was gorgeous.

With this experience, Lu Ning expertly plucked a stalk of Corn Poppy from the base. Because of this, she noticed that the closer she got to the spot where she had originally planted the seeds, the better the flowers bloomed. As she plucked, she unconsciously wandered toward the ruins that had already disappeared.

The Corn Poppies had not swallowed the Timothy grass; they grew intertwined, not interfering with each other yet belonging together, like lovers whispering with their necks crossed in the wind.

“Can rabbits eat Corn Poppies?”

Lu Ning’s head always popped with strange, nonsensical thoughts. Since there was no answer, she just muttered it for fun. At that moment, her footsteps entered the Timothy grass, and she reached out to snap the most beautiful Corn Poppy in the area.

“!”

Suddenly, Lu Ning’s pupils dilated uncontrollably. The moment she broke the stalk, a wave of sharp pain crowded into her fingers. The sensation felt as if she had been stung by something. The piercing pain felt like it was splitting her fingers and going straight to her heart.

“Don’t come over.”

“Crap, you little b!tch, you dare try something on me?!”

“As long as you stay away from me, I absolutely won’t hurt—PA!”

“Take a good look—is this a place where you call the shots? You think you’re special because you have a knife?! Huh?!”

“Let go of me! Let go of me!”

In her head, a girl’s terrified warnings and a man’s triumphant laughter surfaced crosswise in Lu Ning’s ears. It was a dialogue that had appeared out of thin air. Lu Ning recognized the girl’s voice almost instantly as Mu Qiuyu’s. Then she realized the low, laughing man’s voice was the man in the suit who had sent people to kidnap Mu Qiuyu last time.

Lu Ning looked blankly at the area she had stepped into, and a thought slowly formed in her mind.

—Is this Mu Qiuyu’s memory?

—Is this what happened on Mu Qiuyu’s end while she was busy stealing the small gold lock?

The flowers growing from the old ruins also carried Mu Qiuyu’s memories. They used these things as nourishment, which was why the original “mother” stalks, which should have weakened, were growing even better than the constantly regenerating offspring.

RIIIP— “Ah! Let go! Let go!”

“Let go? You came right to my door, why would I let go?”

As Lu Ning thought this, the sound of tearing fabric abruptly sliced through her eardrums. Her hand gripping the Corn Poppy trembled uncontrollably, and even her heart rate accelerated. But she knew this emotion didn’t belong to her. She was feeling Mu Qiuyu’s fear from that time.

Sobriety is sometimes a painful thing. What happened in the past had already happened; Lu Ning was powerless to change it. She felt as if her head were being forced down by a giant hand—unable to look away, cruelly forced to witness the tragedies carved into history. Mu Qiuyu’s physiological nausea surged up through Lu Ning’s frantic heartbeat.

Lu Ning was in disbelief, but in the next moment, she heard the man’s agonizing scream: “AHHH—!”

The sap seeping from the Corn Poppy dissipated in the air, slowly emitting a smell like rusted iron. That’s right—Mu Qiuyu had bitten the man in the suit. Even though her weapon had been stripped away and her arms were pinned, she still had her teeth. Even though she knew her resistance was destined to bring about even more violent retaliation, she still chose to defend her dignity.

“Good job.” Lu Ning gritted her teeth tightly, wishing she could drag that man—the one whose brains had been scattered by a truck—out of the underworld just to kill him a thousand more times.

But Lu Ning’s wandering thoughts couldn’t change the past. Pain suddenly struck the crown of her head. Her head buzzed; she felt Mu Qiuyu being thrown out by the enraged man. The pain exceeded Lu Ning’s threshold; she had gone from standing to a half-kneeling crouch.

Logic told her she should drop the Corn Poppy and flee from this unbearable agony. But in her daze, she remembered the expression Mu Qiuyu had shown at the pet hospital. Her questioning smile made Lu Ning’s heart ache now. Back then, when Mu Qiuyu was facing all this, she must have desperately wanted someone to come and save her.

If Mu Qiuyu could endure it, why couldn’t she? She was her Host. She was her system. They were one. They should share not only glory and shame but also joy and pain.

“Watch her for me! When the boss gets here, we’ll see how he deals with her!”

Even though Mu Qiuyu suffered retaliation, her strike had effectively stopped the man’s vile act. The man in the suit clutched his face, his vicious voice weakened because speaking pulled at his facial muscles. Following his words, the footsteps of the driver and his brother echoed in Lu Ning’s muffled ears.

What happened next? Would those two also lay hands on Mu Qiuyu? Lu Ning felt Mu Qiuyu’s powerlessness, and her emotions became instantly tense.

But then, she realized something. Wait, that’s not right. The driver and his brother shouldn’t have appeared here. Didn’t the man in the suit fail to walk out that day because Mu Qiuyu knocked him out? The driver’s brother had one of his eyes scratched blind by her—how could he have arrived here unharmed?

No. Something is wrong. How does this story not connect with my memory? When did this happen? Why does it exist in Mu Qiuyu’s memory?

Lu Ning’s brow furrowed tightly, her consciousness slipping away from the original memory. Sensing that someone had discovered the discrepancy, Mu Qiuyu’s psychological defenses launched an indiscriminate attack in this chaos.

“Go… to hell.”

“…Die.”

The girl’s curse sounded like a low-frequency spell. Instantly, the fine hairs on the flower stalks turned into sharp thorns, and the sap turned into venom. Lu Ning curled up in pain; her pierced palm was corroded by the sap, the pain seeping into her bones as if she were about to die.

No. This toxin… I might actually die…

Lu Ning saw the system’s red light flashing, indicating that what she was touching was lethal. This time, she finally let go of the flower. The crimson petals fell from her vision like a closing stage curtain. Mu Qiuyu’s psychological defenses and the hatred in the story were stirred together.

The police cars arrived earlier than the boss of the man in the suit; a red Mercedes-Benz crashed straight into the old rolling shutter door. Everything seemed to be rescued. But through the weak light, Lu Ning saw a scarlet pen tip repeatedly tracing the girl’s distorted expression.

The people upstairs didn’t seem to know what was happening downstairs; the driver was still humming a song. The girl’s fingers, veins bulging, dug deep into the soil. The coarse concrete ground ground away at the backs of her fingers. Every drop of blood falling into the dust was like her shattered dignity.

“Die.”

“Go to hell!”

“Lu Ning.”

Just as Lu Ning’s consciousness began to fade, she heard someone calling her name in the void. She felt a signal that she was about to be saved and struggled to open her eyes. Moonlight covered her vision like a shroud.

In the blur, she saw Mu Qiuyu’s figure. No. It was Wutong.

Lu Ning still had a shred of logic left. Looking at the girl running toward her, her eyes showed countless unanswered questions. How did she get here? Weren’t her feet bound by shackles?

Ah, right. That was why Wutong walked with such difficulty. With every step she strained, her chains grew longer, and her skirt was stained with more red pigment.

That wasn’t pigment. Lu Ning’s heart felt a sharp sting. She finally knew why Wutong’s ankles had been injured before.

—Those chains were woven from her own flesh and blood.

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