Chapter 139: Ch 139: After the Storm

"What do you plan after this show?" Su Wanyan asked PD Xu Cui, her voice still thick with congestion. She began combing her fingers through Mo Xingxue’s hair again, the motion slow and absent-minded, as if the simple contact itself was proof that the omega was still here and still safe. She tenderly looked at the sleeping face the way someone looked at a rare, hard-won treasure. "Do you have a new project after this?"

The question was ordinary on the surface, but underneath it lay the knowledge she carried from the novel. After Love House, PD Xu Cui simply never appeared again. No new variety credits, no interviews, no quiet industry mentions. He simply vanished from the narrative as cleanly as if someone had closed his book.

PD Xu Cui looked at the puffy-eyed Su Wanyan, then at the still ethereal Mo Xingxue. The contrast was comically funny—one face swollen from crying, and the other pale but composed even in exhausted sleep. Although he wanted to point it out, he chose not to comment and chose to just let out a soft chuckle.

"Not really," he said after a beat, his usual playful tone present. He crossed his arms, then brought his left hand to his chin, adopting a thoughtfully uncertain expression. "Maybe I’ll take a little break after this?"

Su Wanyan raised an eyebrow and turned toward him fully. "You?"

The skepticism was immediate and well-earned. From everything she had absorbed about him—from the original owner’s memories, the novel’s side references, and articles she read from Weibo—PD Xu Cui did not take breaks. He finished one project and stepped directly into the next.

In one interview he had even explained the logic, "While the audience’s memory of the previous work was still fresh, momentum stayed high and ratings came easier." A man who spoke that way did not casually announce time off.

Hearing the doubt in her voice, PD Xu Cui only laughed. Then, he gave her a sharp chop on the head.

Su Wanyan winced. The sting landed cleaner and sharper than it should have.

What was that? She thought, rubbing the spot. Ever since she took the potion, her endurance for physical pain had improved dramatically. Gu Chengze’s punch earlier had hurt in the moment but it then faded with unnatural speed. PD Xu Cui’s chop, however, refused to fade. It sat bright and precise on her scalp, as if the man had aimed for a nerve on purpose.

"You’re talking to an elder," he said, satisfied with her pained expression. He hadn’t been truly offended. The urge to deliver the chop had simply arrived, and he had obeyed it.

She shot him a mock glare. PD Xu Cui only straightened, chin lifting with theatrical pride.

"Looks like I still have it in me," he said, chuckling, nose practically pointed at the sky as he rubbed more salt on Su Wanyan’s wounds.

Su Wanyan rubbed the injured spot once more, then returned her hand to Mo Xingxue’s hair. "I’m telling this to Mo Xingxue," she said after a beat.

The threat was not random. Su Wanyan’s eyesight might have been poor, but she was not blind. PD Xu Cui’s fear of Mo Xingxue was obvious to anyone who watched him carefully enough—visible in the way his posture changed near her and in the careful edges of his jokes.

The effect was instant. PD Xu Cui’s head snapped toward her. "Eh?!" His eyes widened. "Do you want her to kill me?!" He grabbed Su Wanyan’s shoulder and gave it a short, panicked shake.

Su Wanyan let out a mischievous laugh. "Maybe?" She stuck her tongue out at him, the gesture childish and deliberate.

PD Xu Cui felt his blood pressure climb. He raised his hand again, ready to deliver a second corrective chop—but froze.

Mo Xingxue’s eyes were open. She was looking at him, and at the raised hand, with an expression cold enough to drop the temperature in the clearing. Sleep still clung to the edges of her gaze, but the warning in it was fully awake.

"What are you doing?" she asked. The tone was icy, precise, and only slightly blurred by the residual weight of sleep.

PD Xu Cui looked down at her, then at his still raised hand, then back at her again.

"Ah.. th-this—" he stuttered, the words collapsing under the weight of her gaze. He tried to assemble an excuse and found nothing usable. The silence stretched just long enough to confirm the loss. Slowly, carefully, he retracted his hand and set it on his lap.

He adopted a docile expression at once, the kind of careful stillness reserved for situations that could turn dangerous without warning. It was not that Mo Xingxue had a bad temper, or that she was cruel.

Her gaze simply carried a particular coldness that reached backward through the years and set him, unhelpfully, in front of his old man again—who corrected mistakes with an open palm and an unimpressed silence.

PD Xu Cui had met colder people in the industry he left behind. He had even met people who smiled while they ruined careers. However, none of them had ever reproduced that specific childhood dread until Mo Xingxue looked at him the way she was looking at him now.

Her gaze really is icy, he thought, and the imagined temperature drop was vivid enough that his shoulders gave a small, involuntary shiver. Like being thrown into the Arctic.

Mo Xingxue held his eyes a moment longer, then sighed. The sound was quiet, more tired than annoyed. She turned her attention to Su Wanyan.

Immediately, the frost left her face as if it had never been there. What replaced it was immediate and unmistakable tenderness.

"Yanyan," she called, soft enough that the name barely disturbed the air between them.

Su Wanyan smiled as she looked down at her. "I’m here," she said as her hand resumed its slow, careful path through the strands without her needing to think about it.

Mo Xingxue’s smile answered hers. "Thank you for staying." The words arrived grateful and slightly choked, as though they had been waiting behind her teeth for a long time and had only now found a safe place to land.

Su Wanyan’s expression turned gentle further. "I will never leave again, Xuexue." She leaned down and pressed a careful kiss to Mo Xingxue’s forehead. The contact was brief, deliberate, and free of performance.

For a second they simply looked at each other. Then both of them let out a soft chuckle—one shaped by the relief of being stayed for, the other by the quieter happiness of being allowed to stay.

Meanwhile, PD Xu Cui looked at the two of them wrapped in their own private atmosphere and could not help shaking his head in disbelief. Wow. They really just forgot about me, he thought.

The realization landed with the particular agony of someone being subjected to an excessive amount of affection that had absolutely nothing to do with him. He felt, quite sincerely, that if the moment continued much longer he might actually gag.

After a moment of silent suffering he cleared his throat.

Both women snapped out of the quiet circle they had built. They turned toward him at the same time—Su Wanyan with immediate, guilty awareness, Mo Xingxue with something sharper.

Su Wanyan offered an awkward laugh. "Sorry about that, PD." The apology was genuine. She had, in fact, completely erased him from the clearing for several uninterrupted seconds.

Mo Xingxue’s reaction was different. She fixed PD Xu Cui with a mock glare, the look pointed and faintly accusatory, as if his interruption itself required explanation.

PD Xu Cui stared back, face full of silent question marks. Why is she mad again? He had only cleared his throat. He had not chopped anyone nor had he raised his voice. The rules of Mo Xingxue remained, as ever, difficult to predict.

Mo Xingxue playfully rolled her eyes at him and sighed. Then she sat up slowly, testing the stiffness in her shoulders and the residual tremor that still lived somewhere under her ribs. She stretched her upper body once, then turned back to PD Xu Cui with her usual composure already settling into place.

"I’m done resting," she said. The fear that had colored her voice earlier was gone. What remained was the familiar, controlled calm she wore in public. "Let’s go back to the village."

She stood and stretched again, rolling the last of the tension from her spine.

Su Wanyan watched her, a soft, proud smile bloomed at her face. The composure after a major breakdown was not the same thing as being unhurt. Su Wanyan knew the trauma was still there, layered and unmended. What she was smiling at was the strength it took to gather that much of herself back together so soon—and to choose, out loud, to keep moving.

In her past life and in this one, she had known very few people who could do that without either collapsing again or pretending the collapse had never happened.

She stood as well. "Let’s go," she said, offering her hand.

Mo Xingxue looked at the open palm, then up at Su Wanyan’s face. The eyes waiting for her held nothing complicated—no calculation, no judgement, only a clear and steady affection. Something in Mo Xingxue’s chest loosened another fraction. The weight that had sat there for months shifted, not gone, but no longer entirely hers to carry alone.

"Un."

She took the hand. Their fingers closed around each other with the same quiet certainty as the promise spoken minutes earlier. Together they started out of the clearing, steps unhurried but decided.

"Hey! Wait up!" PD Xu Cui scrambled to his feet and hurried after them. "Damn, I’m really getting treated as air," he lamented aloud.

The complaint earned him laughter from both women—Su Wanyan’s still slightly congested, Mo Xingxue’s quieter but real. The sound followed them as the three of them left the forest behind and turned toward the village path.

The path that waited beyond the trees was still uncertain—full of unfinished confrontations, village tensions, an injured man who had not yet paid enough and a quiet figure who had recognized a name and then hidden behind a trunk... None of that had been resolved yet.

But the path was no longer one any of them had to walk alone. Not anymore.

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Y’all, I was sleepy as hell when I was writing this Chapter and I was also making a mentoring plan while writing this. So if y’all notice a mistake, please point it out TvT! Thank you!

Oh and finally! FINALLY I’M DONE WITH THIS LITTLE SEGMENT! THE REAL SHI BEGINS!!