Dishes and drinks were successively brought into the private room. Xie Guan and Huo Mingjun, one holding a wine glass, the other a white porcelain bowl filled with sweet soup, incongruously clinked their "glasses": "Congratulations on wrapping up filming."

"Thank you."

Xie Guan downed half a glass of wine in one go. Huo Mingjun got a headache just seeing him drink like that. However, since the two of them had finally managed to have a meal together, and he noticed that Xie Guan wasn't in a good mood, he didn't want to be a killjoy. He could only urge him to eat a few bites of food first to line his stomach, lest he get drunk and throw a little tantrum.

Huo Mingjun now had almost no temper with Xie Guan. While he was cold and imposing to outsiders, it was difficult for him to even maintain a tenth of that in front of Xie Guan. It was a good thing Xie Guan wasn't the type to act up dramatically; although he could be stubborn at times, he was reasonable most of the time. He never took Huo Mingjun's claims of wanting to coax him to heart, only feeling that he was very good to him, and so he wanted to be a little better to Huo Mingjun in return. Both held the mindset of indulgence and compromise, yet there wasn't the slightest feeling of treating each other with formal respect. On the contrary, they seemed even "stickier" than ordinary friends.

"You were always finding excuses not to see me before. What set you off today?" Huo Mingjun asked.

Xie Guan listlessly raised his eyelids to glance at him. "Nothing. I just wanted to see you, is that not allowed?"

Huo Mingjun used the serving chopsticks to pick up the last shrimp for him. "Of course it is. But you have the words 'I'm worried about something' written all over your forehead. Come on, share it. I can volunteer as your spiritual mentor."

Xie Guan silently ate the shrimp and raised his wine glass. Huo Mingjun understood and tapped it with his small bowl. Xie Guan tilted his head back and drained the full glass of wine.

"Drink less," Huo Mingjun couldn't help but say. "This wine has a strong kick. Be careful, or you'll have a headache tomorrow."

"Huo Mingjun," Xie Guan said, his eyelids lowered as if with a trace of drunkenness, calling him by his full name. "Isn't the way we are now good?"

Huo Mingjun's heart skipped a beat, but the expression on his face was like an unmoving slab of marble, not changing in the slightest. "'The way we are now' is what way?"

Xie Guan said: "The kind of relationship where we occasionally eat together, occasionally meet, occasionally care about each other, and no matter how long it's been, we can still talk and laugh freely when we meet again... Without too many attachments, without needing to share secrets, and not to the point where if the relationship breaks down... well, it would cause serious damage."

The breath Huo Mingjun had been holding was quietly released. He raised a hand to straighten his collar, thought for a moment, and said unhurriedly: "The relationship between most people is like this. But the fact that you're asking me this means you actually know in your heart that we can't be like that."

"You were probably scared by what happened before, afraid of making the same mistake again, and don't want to get too close to people. That's very normal, it's fine. It's also because of this that I need to explain the whole story to you, so you don't hold a grudge in your heart."

Xie Guan was silent. Although he didn't say it outright, his attitude was equivalent to a tacit admission.

Huo Mingjun took a sip of soup to wet his throat and said: "Sometimes, the depth of feelings can't necessarily be measured by the closeness of a relationship, and it might not even be something we can control."

Xie Guan lifted his eyes to look at him.

Huo Mingjun said: "That incident happened ten years ago... no, to be precise, it should be eleven years ago. Back then, someone died in an accident while saving me. Ten years later, I met someone who looked a lot like him, so I used him as a substitute for that person to compensate... Just hearing this, don't you think I had deep feelings and a very good relationship with that person?"

Xie Guan grunted in agreement. "You even got a substitute. How could the feelings not be good?"

"You know his name too. It's Cheng Sheng," a faint smile touched Huo Mingjun's lips, but it was tinged with a bit of bitterness. "He was from Chengjia Village, Pingpo County, H Province."

"I was 22 when I met him. Before that, I had never been to Chengjia Village and didn't know Cheng Sheng at all. I spent no more than five days with him, we couldn't even be said to have a relationship, but it was this person who took a bullet for me and was knocked off a cliff by a car himself."

"You..." Xie Guan's pupils contracted slightly. He couldn't help but lower his voice and ask very carefully: "What happened?"

Huo Mingjun looked at his moist, dark eyes, feeling as if he were being watched by some small animal with watery eyes, and his heart inexplicably softened. "That year, I was kidnapped and taken to Chengjia Village."

"The specific reasons involve family scandal, so I won't go into detail. In short, due to various obstructions, the Huo family didn't launch a rescue operation immediately, so I was taken out of B City and hidden in Chengjia Village in the Daxing Mountains."

"The kidnappers locked me in an old house in the village. The courtyard walls were high, and outside was a deserted wilderness, rarely visited by people. At that time, I was in handcuffs and shackles, unable to escape, with no rescue in sight, and I had no idea what the kidnappers wanted to do with me. I was in a terrible mental state. On the third day, when I was on the verge of collapse, a kid suddenly climbed over the courtyard wall from outside."

"He came in to retrieve a ball for someone. He wasn't scared when he saw a living person tied up in the house. He just foolishly clung to the window and watched for a while, then ran off."

Xie Guan chuckled at his description. "Country kids are all brave."

"It's not an exaggeration, Cheng Sheng really was a bit simple," Huo Mingjun pointed a finger at his temple. "Perhaps some kind of developmental delay. He was at least fourteen or fifteen at the time, but his intelligence was clearly lower than other kids his age. His reactions were slow, and it took him a long time to understand things. I discovered this when I talked to him later. That day, after he retrieved the ball and left, I thought he might have been scared, and I held on to a sliver of hope that 'maybe he'll tell his parents.' Who would have thought that after nightfall, he would climb over the wall again. And... he brought me a steamed bun."

Huo Mingjun seemed to smile as he said this, but it was quickly overshadowed by the melancholy in his eyes. "An old blind man used to live in that house, and Cheng Sheng would often sneak food to him, and the old man would tell him stories. After the old man passed away, the house fell into disuse, but he still kept coming here. Until that morning when he saw someone inside, he probably thought of me as the new 'old blind man.'"

"I knew then that I probably couldn't wait for anyone to rescue me. With Cheng Sheng there, I broke things down and explained them to him bit by bit, hoping he would help me escape. We planned this for four days. Cheng Sheng loitered in front of the courtyard every day. The kidnappers saw he was a simple-minded kid and weren't wary of him, often sending him on errands to buy cigarettes and alcohol. On the fifth night, Cheng Sheng brought them a bottle of homemade sorghum wine. The two kidnappers were knocked out by that bottle of wine. Cheng Sheng snuck in, stole the keys for me, and led me in an escape toward the road outside the village."

"I didn't dare trust the villagers and had no wilderness survival experience, so I couldn't hide in the mountains. My only hope was to flag down a car on the road for help. That night, the heaviest rainstorm in over a decade fell. Cheng Sheng and I walked down the mountain along the road, but not a single car would stop. And somehow, the kidnappers back in the village woke up, and after discovering my escape, they drove after us."

Xie Guan listened with his heart in his throat. "Then you..."

Huo Mingjun's long-maintained stable expression finally broke, and a look of intensely suppressed pain slowly surfaced. The recurring nightmares and heart-piercing anguish of many years seemed to weigh more than a thousand jun, yet in the end, it all landed as a soft, light sigh.

"——Nowhere to run."

"I was only thinking about not getting caught by them, but I forgot they still had a gun."

The kidnappers were drunk driving. The first shot was off target, and the sound of the gunshot was covered by the rain. In his extreme fear and panic, Huo Mingjun didn't even notice.

But Cheng Sheng, who had been running ahead of him, heard it.

"Although Cheng Sheng was slow to react when communicating with people, his motor skills were very developed, and he had an almost innate intuition for danger. He suddenly stopped for a moment up ahead. I was still running, so when the second shot came, he had fallen behind me. He lunged over and took that shot for me."

"That push sent me a few steps away. The third shot pierced my right lung. If I had still been standing in my original position... that shot was originally aimed at my heart."

"The road was slippery from the rain, and that section happened to be a sharp turn. The kidnappers' car was completely out of control, and it barreled straight towards us. Everything happened very quickly that night. There are many details I still haven't completely figured out even now. I don't know where Cheng Sheng was hit, or how he sensed the danger. The last scene in all my memories is of him pushing me hard toward the inner side of the mountain road, and then right before my eyes, he was sent flying by the out-of-control car and fell off the cliff with it."

Xie Guan was completely shaken. He opened his mouth but couldn't say anything. He was stunned for a long while, then suddenly tilted his head back and drained the wine in his glass, saying in a low voice, "I'm sorry."

He suddenly realized that in the face of a life-and-death calamity, all the grudges and conflicts, misunderstandings and arguments that seemed higher than the sky and deeper than the sea, now seemed so ordinary, so insignificant.

Being alive itself is a kind of fortune.

Huo Mingjun shook his head, indicating it was fine. "When I woke up, I was already in the provincial capital's hospital. My second uncle handled the aftermath. The police found the wrecked car that had fallen off the cliff, and nearby were three charred bodies: two adults, and a teenager of about fifteen."

"That's basically the entire story of what happened back then."

Huo Mingjun picked up the small bowl from the table and took a sip of the now completely cold soup. "For the past ten years, I've been thinking, for people to form an emotional connection and be willing to sacrifice for each other, there must be a reason. It could be blood ties, benefits, or even hormones. But how much affection could Cheng Sheng have had for me? Why would he sacrifice his own life to save me?"

"Even the most unbreakable blood ties might not lead to such an act, yet a child who didn't even know who I was did it."

"Maybe it's not as complicated as you think," Xie Guan said. "Don't judge a child by adult standards. Maybe he just liked you, wanted to play with you, and that's why he tried so hard to protect you."

"Not measured by benefits, but purely based on one's own feelings, right?" Huo Mingjun said. "That question you asked earlier, this is my answer to you."

"The level our relationship is maintained at, how close or distant we are, the depth of our connection—it's not something that can be measured with beakers and test tubes. When I first approached you, I did have ulterior motives, but what happened later has little to do with that anymore. I just hope you can live a little better."

Xie Guan said sullenly, "I wouldn't call what you did 'based on your feelings.' It should be called 'doing whatever you want.'"

Huo Mingjun was caught off guard by his retort, nearly choking. However, with Xie Guan's words, the gloom in his heart strangely dissipated by a large measure.

"I'm telling you all this not to whitewash myself. It was indeed my fault for hiding things from you and deceiving your feelings before," Huo Mingjun said. "So now, let me explain the 'ulterior motives' again, and hopefully get a lighter sentence."

Xie Guan: "...Actually, I don't really want to know."

"I didn't spend much time with Cheng Sheng, only a few short days. I knew nothing about his life, his family background, or even him as a person. And when I received the news of his death, I was in the hospital and couldn't see the body myself."

"In other words, I only heard about it but never personally confirmed Cheng Sheng's death."

"Wait a minute," Xie Guan caught a strange undertone in his words. "What do you mean?"

Huo Mingjun didn't answer him, continuing on his own: "I only remember what he looked like, but he was still young then, and his features hadn't set. They could have changed as he grew older. This is why I found you familiar when I saw you, but I didn't dare to be completely sure. And my understanding of Cheng Sheng was limited to a few characteristics I observed. You should have already noticed that it's not just your looks; you are also coincidentally similar in certain aspects."

"Most importantly, the time you hit your head and lost your memory and the time of Cheng Sheng's incident were in the exact same year and month."

Xie Guan was completely stunned by the sheer amount of information contained in his words.

Huo Mingjun said: "I approached you not because I saw you as a substitute, but because—"

He gave Xie Guan a deep look.

"We suspected at the time that you might be Cheng Sheng."