The Reply

Back at the apartment building, Su Die had finished the romance novel she'd been writing for the past while. Now, its final chapters complete, she was deep in planning her new work: Silentium.

In that romance's ending, the heroine Xiao Chen and the hero Xiao Guang got married. They drove off down the open road, humming along, a husky and the Pupu kitten riding with them, bound for a place of freedom even the gods could not touch.

Wishing you happiness as a bride:

The walls of this prison are terribly cold, but I am not sad. It is not because my dream of kingship was buried here—it is because I can finally stop, and finally have time to think about all the things that happened between us.

Chenchen, I don't believe I ever hurt you—because hurting was simply how I expressed love. I still disagree with everything you hold to be true, and I still despise the man who can make you happy.

Was I wrong, or was the world wrong, to let the two of you win the throne I spent my whole life pursuing?

You truly are kind—and truly naive. I could never agree with you, and yet I fell in love with you. Is that the greatest curse of my life?

I have stopped to think about why you beat me. They all say it was luck. But I think it is because I never truly understood you. Perhaps the real you is crueler, and more capable, than I ever was—I who stopped at nothing.

I cannot work out how someone as naive as you won the help and support of everyone—while the people who crowded around me scattered the moment the game was lost.

What use is saying all this? To the victor go the spoils; the loser is branded a villain. Chenchen, you did win. I accept only the result of this war—not you, and not that man I despise.

Why do the two of you get to be happy, while I lose everything?

I will never see you in a wedding dress. Because you will marry him—and I hate him. I hate how much you love him.

You are both naive. You have never seen how vicious and cruel reality truly is. The brightness you chase—it doesn't exist.

And yet I still lost. I can feel everything I believed in collapsing around me.

Chenchen, may I see you one more time? And yet I would rather never let you see me again.

The moment you put on that wedding dress, my love held its funeral.

Please forget me. My mother was right—we were never meant to meet.

Please forget me. The tarot reader was right: because of you I lost my mother's family, lost S Group, lost my mother and everything I was proud of. I lost it all. I have nothing.

This is the price of my love. Wishing you happiness as a bride.

The Reply:

Writing you a letter was a decision I thought over for a long time.

You are trapped in a prison. I was trapped in the wounds you made.

But it is time—time for both of us to walk out.

In prison, you will have years to repent what you did, to think about what a real life is, about what love really means.

A person cannot give what they do not have. So I don't hate you now. Instead, I find myself asking what in my own behavior once gave you the chance to hurt me.

I am not some sweet, naive little girl out of a storybook. That was never the real me. You never saw the real me—not because I was a hypocrite, but because you only ever believed I was a shattered work of art, the heroine of a romance novel.

But this world is not a romance novel. You could never be an eternal king, still less an ageless, deathless god. You are, of all things, a man who worships reality—so why could you not understand that no king on earth lives forever? Death and decay are every king's final fate.

Someday, when you leave prison, go look at the street sweepers doing their work in earnest, the delivery riders braving danger for a single order, the shopkeepers crying their wares, so alive with ordinary life. Then you will understand why you failed. You didn't lose to me alone. You lost to them, too.

You'll say I'm preaching—that these are empty words—and try to mock me with your cruel values. None of that matters anymore. The whole world was never against me. You lost to me; that is fact. And now, just as you once were, I believe only facts.

And last: what you cannot accept is not necessarily wrong. I could accept your cruel games, your twisted view of life, your endless pursuit of fame, power, money, status—and you could not accept my talent, my ability, my kindness. That is why you lost, and why you were always going to lose. You were never built to survive in business. The foundation of capitalism is the exchange of value—and it is people, not beasts, who bring that exchange to the table. A man with no humanity, only animal instinct, violates the basic logic of capital itself.

Even if the world had never contained a Xiao Chen, you would have ended here all the same. That is the law of nature.

You may refuse to respect me. You may not refuse to respect nature and the universe—because nature and the universe do not recognize dreams of everlasting kingship.

I have written so much that I am tired now. The things you cannot work out—time will answer them for me.

And finally—wishing me happiness as a bride. And thank you, for teaching me what love really is. Even after a trial like you, love remained at my side.

And for the final ending, Su Die wrote: To romance-novel hero Xiao Guang, and romance-novel heroine Xiao Chen—congratulations on your wedding!

Su Die knew her new life was finally about to begin—now that the last book had ended.