Chapter 150: Ch 150: Labor and Questions

While the other alphas were still tangled in their own mornings, Su Wanyan wiped the sweat from her brow and surveyed what she had done.

An hour, maybe a little more, but during that time, the assigned ground was finished, and not only once... Twice. The extra stretch of tilled earth lay dark and even where her shovel and hoe had passed, rows turned with a rhythm that had stopped feeling like labor somewhere around the midpoint and started feeling like exercise.

Points, here I come! She thought, grinning so hard it reached her ears.

She picked up the hoe, retrieved the shovel she had dropped at the edge of the second plot, and walked back toward the indifferent man who had been watching her the entire time.

The stare did not unsettle her. If their positions had been reversed—standing idle at the edge of a field with only the occasional bird and the slow crawl of morning for company, versus a single figure driving tools into the soil with obvious purpose—she would have watched the worker too. Motion was more interesting than stillness. Curiosity was not the same as threat. She filed his attention under harmless, adjusted her grip on the tools, and kept walking.

At his side she set both tools down with care, handles aligned, blades clear of his feet. Then she held out her hands, palms up, eyes bright with the uncomplicated expectation of someone who had earned what she was about to receive and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

Jingxue looked at her. His face stayed blank and cold, the usual distance held in place like a practiced wall. A full minute of silence stretched between them—an unspoken contest of who would break first, or whether she would lower her hands and make it easier for him. However, Su Wanyan did not lower her hands. The tickets were the point of the morning. She could wait.

Eventually he sighed, the sound short and resigned, and reached into his pocket. He counted the tickets with deliberate fingers and placed them in her open palms.

She received them with a grin that showed too much relief to be purely polite, and bowed.

"That’s forty points in total," he said.

She bowed again, deeper this time. "I see." When she straightened, her voice still carried the bright edge of someone who had turned sweat into something more practical. "Thank you, sir!"

He only nodded. Su Wanyan glanced down at the tickets in her grip—the physical proof of stacked labor—and decided every drop of moisture on her back had been correctly spent. She turned to leave the field, already half-planning what flavor of ice cream she’ll buy later, when—

"Wait."

Jingxue’s hand closed around her wrist.

The contact was unexpected enough that she stopped cleanly. She looked back, head tipping to the side in open confusion, the tickets still secure in her other hand.

"Yes?"

He met her eyes. Seriousness had locked his expression into something tighter than the cold blank he wore for ordinary exchange. His mouth opened, then closed again. The words had approached the threshold and refused to cross, leaving only the visible struggle of a man arguing with himself in real time. Conflict moved through his face in small shifts—jaw, brow, the minute adjustment of someone who wanted a door opened and hated being the one who had to knock.

"No. Never mind."

His grip loosened. For a second she thought that was the end of it. Then his fingers tightened again, the decision reversing on itself before she could step away.

Su Wanyan watched him with a wry, patient smile. Is he about to ask for a favor? The pattern was strange and weirdly familiar—the approach, the retreat, the second approach of someone who needed something and resented the needing. She did not pull her wrist free. She simply waited, head still tilted, giving him the silence he seemed to require in order to finish choosing.

He tugged once, weakly, as if testing whether she would stay, and tried again.

"How long...."

He stopped. Something behind his eyes sharpened—commitment, or the decision that backing out a second time would be worse than speaking. He exhaled, released her wrist entirely, and looked up at her without the shield of half-averted attention.

"How long have you known Xue—"

The name broke. He caught it, cleared his throat, and rebuilt the sentence with careful, public correctness.

"I meant—Mo Xingxue?"

The tone underneath the question was oddly hopeful. Not casual curiosity. Not the idle interest of a villager making conversation with a guest. Hope, thin and poorly hidden, sat under the words like a second voice. But she also caught a faint glint of sadness in his eyes, which was harder to ignore than the cold surface he usually wore.

Su Wanyan studied him more slowly than she had at dawn.

Does he know Xuexue? The question diverted her attention elsewhere. She examined the man in front of her with the same deliberate inventory she might have used on a chart that did not match the patient’s history—feature by feature, looking for the line that would make the resemblance stop being a coincidence.

Same phoenix eyes. Same shape of nose. Same brow. The same cool, contained presence that made distance feel like a default setting rather than a mood. Stand them in the same light and the overlap would be difficult to argue away. Almost everything lined up.

But she had known Mo Xingxue long enough to recall the family tree without effort. Birthdays, branch lines, the faces that appeared at formal dinners and the ones that did not. There was no uncle who looked like this.

A secret-father theory collapsed just as quickly. Mo Xingxue already took after her father in clear, documented ways—enough that a second hidden sire would have required rewriting a resemblance that already had an owner.

So what was this man to her?

The question sat sharp behind Su Wanyan’s eyes. She narrowed them for a moment, turning the problem once more, then shook the line of inquiry off before it could turn to a conversation she was not ready to have. Suspicion without a path was only noise. The tickets were here. The work was done. Whatever puzzle he presented could wait for evidence she did not currently own.

She put it aside and assembled a polite smile—the same professional warmth she used when a question deserved an answer and not an interrogation in return.

"Well—I’ve been friends with her since we were kids." She crossed her arms, stance easy, and tipped her head the other way, offering him the same curiosity he had offered her. "Why, sir?"

Jingxue looked at her. Something in his posture eased, a tension releasing so quietly it might have been imagined if she had not been watching for it. A soft breath left him—relief, barely voiced.

"I see."

The murmur was low enough that ordinary hearing might have missed it entirely. Luckily Su Wanyan’s enhanced senses picked it up. She filed the softness of it alongside the almost spoken nickname and the sadness he had not quite hidden, and did not comment on any of the three.

Then he sat down on the village path at the field’s edge, back to the open rows she had finished, and turned his face toward the turned earth as if the soil itself were easier to address than the alpha still standing behind him. After a moment he lifted one hand and patted the packed ground at his side.

"Come here."

The order was plain, unadorned—and delivered in a cadence so close to the way Mo Xingxue sometimes told Su Wanyan to sit that the comparison rose before she could stop it. Same brevity. Same expectation that the request would simply be obeyed.

She shook the thought aside with a small internal flinch, nodded once, and sat. She left a careful span of space between them: close enough to count as compliance, far enough that the conversation would remain on her terms if it turned toward places she was not ready to follow.

They sat in silence, long enough for the finished field to feel like a third presence between them.

Then Jingxue cleared his throat and turned toward her. Su Wanyan looked back, waiting.

"So.. how was Mo Xingxue as a child?"

The question came out steady enough at the start and frayed on the way through. Something in his tone trembled—barely, but enough that she noticed without knowing what to do with it.

She stared at him for a moment, sorting possible answers, measuring how much of a private history she could give to a stranger’s hands. The pause stretched. Jingxue’s composure slipped another degree, as if her silence were already a refusal.

"I’ll give you twenty more points," he said, "if you answer five questions I’ll ask about Mo Xingxue."

Desperation had entered the offer without disguise. He stated the terms like a man placing a final bid on something he could not afford to lose.

Su Wanyan hummed. A sly smile tugged at the corner of her mouth before she could stop it. I was going to answer anyway. The bonus was unexpected—and welcome. Twenty more points meant more margin for the house, for the children, for whatever Mo Xingxue might want. She filed the windfall under good fortune and nodded so quickly the motion looked like a chick pecking grain—eager, unembarrassed, already counting the practical good the extra tickets would do.

Jingxue’s shoulders eased. Relief moved through him in a single visible breath. He waited, hands still against his knees, as if any interruption might scare the answers away.

"How was Xuexue as a child?" Su Wanyan echoed, and the slyness left her face. What replaced it was smaller and warmer—the expression she wore when the past arrived without sharp edges. "Contrary to what people assume—that she was always behaved, always obedient—Xuexue was defiant. Rebellious, even."

The correction came without bitterness. Only accuracy, and a private fondness that made the accuracy softer.

Memory opened without effort. Rivers they had been told, repeatedly, to stay away from. Trees whose lowest branches had been declared off-limits by every adult within shouting distance. The spark that used to light in a younger Mo Xingxue’s eyes when a rule was presented as absolute—less pure mischief than a need to test where the world would actually hold.

"We were always playing by the water and scrambling up into the branches," Su Wanyan went on, an awkward smile surfacing as one incident in particular rose clear. "Even when everyone told us not to. There was this huge tree on the Mo grounds—tallest one in the residence. She went up first, of course. I tried to reach the same height she had and nearly fell off. She laughed at me for a full minute before she helped me find a better hold."

She kept going, listing the small stories of a shared childhood with the ease of someone who had carried them for years: scraped knees treated with ointment stolen from a household cabinet. Contests that ended with both of them soaked and muddy and receiving the same lecture over and over again.

The way Mo Xingxue’s stubbornness had always pointed somewhere even when it looked, to outsiders, like simple trouble. Afternoons when the two of them had returned to the main house looking like disasters and had still somehow considered the day a success.

Jingxue listened without interrupting. Small nods marked the places that landed. When the stories tipped into foolishness—the near-falls, the ridiculous contests, the days they had returned home looking like disasters—his cold mask broke. A short laugh escaped him. A real smile, brief and unguarded, altered his whole face.

Su Wanyan noticed the change and did not comment on it. She simply finished the thread she was on, dusted her palms lightly against her knees as if closing a book, and offered him a bright, open smile.

"And that’s about it. For the first answer, that is," she said as she gave him a bright, open smile.

Jingxue nodded. Behind his eyes the warmer image held—a small, chaotic Xuexue received entirely secondhand, built from the alpha’s unpolished stories and the sound of river water that no longer existed in his own memory. It lasted until the warmth curdled. Sadness returned to the set of his mouth with the speed of a tide that had only been briefly held back. His hands curled against his thighs until the knuckles stood out.

If only I had been there to see it myself.

The thought carried the full weight of years he could not recover. Every laugh Su Wanyan had described became another absence. Every scraped knee marked another moment when Xuexue had fallen, and he had not been there to see it. He wanted, absurdly and with sudden violence, to strike himself for the failure that sat under every story he had not witnessed—for the role he had not played, for the title he had not earned the right to claim—

A hand settled on his shoulder.

The contact was firm enough to cut the spiral. He looked up. Su Wanyan was watching him with open concern, the shift from his brief laughter to this sudden hollow having registered too clearly to ignore.

"Are you okay?"

Jingxue pressed his lips together and nodded once. "Yeah. I’m okay." The admission that followed was quieter and more honest than the nod. "I just remembered something unpleasant."

Su Wanyan accepted the boundary without digging. She withdrew her hand, gave him a second of clean space, and then—as if the silence that followed needed a bridge before it could become heavy—rebuilt her bright expression on purpose.

"Well—what are your other questions? I’ll answer them as best as I can." She patted her own chest once, a small reassuring thump, the gesture of someone offering competence as comfort. No pressure. No prying. Only the open door of the remaining four questions and the twenty points still waiting on the other side of them.

Jingxue’s mouth curved, only slightly. The sadness did not fully leave his eyes, but something in his posture ordered itself again. He nodded.

Around them the field held its turned rows. Forty points already rested in her hands; twenty more hung in the air, uncollected until the rest of the bargain was kept. And on the path at the field’s edge, a man who had missed a childhood and an woman who had lived through every reckless hour of it sat with the next question not yet spoken—one of them ready to give what she could without demanding the cost of his grief, the other still learning how to ask for a past he had lost the right to know firsthand.

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Redundant af but I wrote this in a hurry ’cause my aunt confiscating me gadgets! (I’M A FULL-GROWN ADULT, BTW!)