Chapter 287: [Unswerving Devotion] Putting On the Earrings
Lady Li was so unsettled by that single glance that she proved utterly incapable of uttering another word.
Yet Xu Taotao said nothing; wiping her tears away with fierce resolve, she lifted her skirt and departed.
Biyun parted her lips, looking at Lady Li, then at Xu Taotao, before finally falling into step behind her.
Xu Taotao walked all the way back to her own room.
Biyun cautiously inquired whether she wished to wash up and change.
Xu Taotao shook her head, saying, “Step outside. Unless I call for you, do not come in—I wish to be alone in quiet.”
Left with no choice, Biyun nodded helplessly, shutting the door behind her.
Xu Taotao sat at the edge of the bed, lost in a daze for quite some time.
Then, just as she intended to climb into bed and sleep, she suddenly felt a sticky, clammy sensation in her palm; looking down, she realized she had been clutching that earring all along.
She had kept her hand clutched tightly in a fist all along, yet perhaps owing to her emotional breakdown earlier, she had nearly forgotten an object rested inside her hand.
During the conflict with Lady Li, because she had exerted considerable force, the silver ear hook had been squeezed out of shape by her grip.
Xu Taotao pinched it carefully a couple of times, discovering that she held zero means to bend it back into its original shape, which bred a wave of inexplicable irritability in her heart.
It felt as though she could accomplish nothing properly.
No, she hadn’t set out to accomplish anything to begin with.
Yes, that stifling sensation originated precisely from this.
She held zero power to do anything; throughout the upbringing instilled in her since childhood, she was merely required to grow up properly, learn how to become someone else’s daughter-in-law, and then marry and bear children.
A life seen straight to its end at a single glance was so utterly devoid of flavor.
Yet she remained deeply unwilling to accept it all the same.
Even though every person across the entire world seemed to operate this way—those maidens outside were just like her, expected to marry upon reaching the age, and bear children upon reaching the age.
Nor was it limited to maidens; those men operated in the exact same manner.
No matter how exceptionally one performed in the imperial examinations, one still had to marry and produce offspring; otherwise, it counted as unfilial, leaving one’s spine poked and criticized by the public.
Yet they differed from her and her peers nonetheless.
At the very least, they possessed something to occupy themselves with.
Xu Taotao was in deep agony.
She felt she ought to do something, yet no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t conceive what she wanted to do. She simply didn’t want to marry, didn’t want to be ordered about, and didn’t want to bear children; she didn’t want this, and she didn’t want that—so what did she want?
She didn’t know.
Lowering her head to stare at the earring in her hand, tears fell down uncontrollably.
She felt as though she were much like the silver hook atop this earring—arbitrarily molded into all manner of shapes by others.
A day would come when she too would hold zero means to recover, yet would still have to press forward with life regardless.
A life like that—thinking about it alone was enough to drive one mad.
Suddenly, her vision focused onto the pearl.
Connected to the silver hook, the pearl bore faint signs of wear and tear atop its surface.
As if it had fallen to the floor, been stepped on by a foot, and slid across the ground briefly.
Her earring was brand-new; how could it bear such wear and tear?
Thereupon, she unfastened her other earring to compare the two.
For reasons unknown, Xu Taotao’s heart beat slightly fast.
“Biyun, come inside,” she spoke, her voice still laced with weeping that had yet to dissipate.
Biyun walked inside.
“Miss, what orders do you have in calling for me?”
“Did you step on this earring?” Xu Taotao presented the earring for Biyun to see.
Her family’s financial circumstances were fairly comfortable, and this earring wasn’t particularly valuable to begin with—it was primarily that the red agate ran relatively pure.
Removing the red agate allowed it to be remade into other jewelry as well, so wear and tear mattered little.
However, natural wear and tear versus being stepped on by someone were two completely different matters, naturally.
“No… I naturally did not step on it… could it be that you stepped on it yourself when it dropped over there?”
Biyun shook her head in a hurry.
“If I had stepped on it myself, would I not know my own earring had dropped? Forget it, go over there and ask Zhu-yun once more.”
Biyun nodded, stepping outside.
Xu Taotao watched the door shut once more, gently stroking the earring in her hand.
Zhu-yun shouldn’t have stepped on it either, in truth, because she hadn’t stepped inside at all.
And she felt exceedingly certain that she hadn’t stepped on the earring herself back then.
In that case… had an invisible person stepped on it?
Xu Taotao abruptly walked to the dressing table and sat down, carefully fastening both earrings back onto her ears.
The waterdrop-shaped agates swayed gently.
Xu Taotao witnessed a subtle transformation seem to occur to her reflection in the mirror before her.
After Bai Cha knocked on the door, it swung open, as if pushed open by someone from the inside.
Frigid wind poured into the room from behind her back, swirling into an eddy before blowing back out, the interior exuding an odor of decay.
Standing there motionless, she inspected the interior with serious precision.
Abruptly, a teacup materialized before her, shattering onto the floor.
Bai Cha thereupon walked over.
Yet by the time she stepped close to cast light over it with her lantern, the teacup vanished once more.
The room was kept fairly clean, with nothing out of the ordinary visible.
Bai Cha walked toward the bedside once more, whereupon she caught sight of a person on the bed with a contorted, twisted face out of the blue, casting a lopsided, glare at her.
This looked far more terrifying than those expressionless faces earlier, almost as if capable of devouring people alive.
Sweeping a calm glance across the area, Bai Cha found zero leads, so she simply departed.
Upon stepping out of the courtyard gate, Biyun came over.
“Miss, so you are here! I have been searching for you all this time. Fearing you might catch a cold in the dead of night, I brought a cloak for you.”
Holding a bright red rabbit-fur cloak in her hands, she stepped forward to drape it over Bai Cha as she spoke.
Bai Cha looked at her thoughtfully.
“What is it, Miss?”
“How did you know I was here?” Bai Cha’s voice was cold and distant.
Biyun paused, then said, “I figured you might miss Master and Madam quite deeply as well, so I naturally walked over this way to take a look.”
“Is that so…”
Would this maid truly prove so thoughtful?
Capable of serving her leftover meals, she was hardly a loyal servant.
Yet she made a special trip over to deliver a cloak to her?
She didn’t believe that simply because she had thrown a fit, the other party had magically transformed her personality.
After all, she hadn’t displayed any real means or methods; an ordinary person would merely assume she was engaging in incompetent rage—given that Xu Taotao’s personality had always been weak and fragile, after all.
“Miss, do you wish to continue looking? How about we head back to rest? It is getting late.”
Bai Cha nodded, refraining from refusing her this time, appearing to have reverted to that easygoing, agreeable demeanor once more.
It was primarily that after taking a full loop, she hadn’t uncovered overly much anyway.
However, regarding this point about re-enacting scenes, in tandem with the figure inside the mirror earlier and that slightly newer earring she had picked up…
Could the person named Xu Taotao truly exist in reality?
If Xu Taotao existed, then the characters played by the other players ought to exist as well.
In that case, this game shouldn’t revolve around the rules presented on the surface.
Though following the surface rules could allow one to clear the game as well.
Thus, under her current circumstances, she held zero shortage of methods to clear the run either.
Bai Cha returned to her room.
She washed her face and dismissed Biyun.
She sat before the mirror.
Dim candle flames flickered, the light cast upward from below bestowing a rather ghostly, uncanny hue upon her reflection in the mirror.
And then, the person inside the mirror moved.
She picked up the earrings, fastening them onto her own ears.
The red waterdrop agates swayed gently.
Yet Bai Cha hadn’t moved at all.
