Chapter 29 : The Tasteless Honey (2)

After the exhibition, Qining returned to her work and life, and Jiang Yanlin also returned to her quiet world.

Until some unlucky things frequently occurred, making Jiang Yanlin more and more tired, and the global catastrophe tightened everyone’s scope of activities, and also deepened the inconvenience and anxiety of working from home.

Finally, in the early morning before dawn, Jiang Yanlin spent two hours completely cutting ties with a friend she had a good relationship with. After exhaustedly finishing, she sat in the quiet room and looked at her phone screen for a long time.

In a moment of inspiration, she opened the chat window that she rarely contacted and sent a message.

Not long after, the ringtone of a voice call sounded. Jiang Yanlin was stunned for a moment and only answered the call after a long time.

“What happened?”

From more than ten hours away, her voice sounded a bit blurry, as if she were still busy outside.

Jiang Yanlin paused and only said, “Sorry, am I disturbing you?”

Qining replied casually, “Just finished work, on my way home driving. Is it that Japanese guy?”

Jiang Yanlin was a bit surprised that she could guess the correct answer from a completely unrelated sentence.

“It’s him.”

The friend she had visited in Nagoya in April, but in the end, because he had developed extra feelings for her, it had led to this situation.

Jiang Yanlin had too many things to deal with every day and really didn’t have the energy to properly sort out this relationship, but she had accidentally created a misunderstanding.

Although the misunderstanding was cleared up in the end, the other party still didn’t give up those thoughts and wanted to use this to get her to take the initiative to repair the relationship.

Jiang Yanlin was not a person who could be easily PUA’d, so she used the most gentle way to say goodbye to the other party and cut off contact.

After listening, Qining’s focus went off track.

“As expected of a great writer. Listening to you tell a story is a kind of enjoyment.”

Jiang Yanlin was a bit speechless, but her depressed mood also dissipated a lot.

She knew she just needed an outlet to vent under the pressure caused by various factors.

And at this awkward time, many of her friends were either at work or not yet awake.

Only Qining, Jiang Yanlin didn’t think too much.

“So you have to deal with the copyright lawsuit, you have to work, and you also have to deal with this Japanese guy.”

Qining was driving. Her voice was mixed with some sounds and noises, but her tone and tone were very clear, becoming the only sound source in the empty room.

“Jiang Yanlin, you’re really amazing. I’ve always thought so.”

Jiang Yanlin, holding her phone, couldn’t help but turn her head to look out the window. The sky was already faintly brightening, and a ray of morning light was breaking through the clouds, a thin line of light.

She still didn’t know how long these difficult nights would last, but at this very moment, this second, Jiang Yanlin knew that she could still walk for a long time.

Later, the topic diverged far and wide. By the time they came back to their senses, the two of them had already been on a voice call for more than six hours.

Qining had driven all the way home, bought some things on the way, and after parking the car in the garage, she had been chatting with her on her phone while doing things.

One was having dinner, the other was having breakfast, and they also commented that the other’s food looked pretty good.

“I have to go back to the country in two days. A relative passed away, and there’s some inheritance that’s very troublesome. I have to go through the procedures in person.”

It was the first time Qining had talked about her family affairs. Jiang Yanlin was very surprised and also a little aware.

But the topic didn’t stop.

After this day, it never stopped.

Buying a plane ticket back to the country at that time was very difficult. All places were tightening up. Jiang Yanlin also advised Qining not to be in such a hurry. Perhaps it would be better after the New Year.

But Qining still managed to buy a ticket. She didn’t even bring much luggage and went straight back to the country.

“This is very troublesome to deal with. I have to argue with my relatives. They think I’ve immigrated and shouldn’t get what belongs to me, but that’s what my grandmother left me. There’s no way I’m giving it to them.”

Qining called Jiang Yanlin as soon as she got off the plane. She had to see a lawyer first, sign a few entrustment agreements, and then she could rest for a while, waiting for a long tug-of-war.

Jiang Yanlin could see that what Qining cared about was not the inheritance, although it was also a large sum of money, but she was no longer short of money.

“This inheritance includes the old house where my grandmother lived before she died. That house is indeed very valuable now, but if I give it to my uncle, he will immediately sell it for money and then go gambling.”
When Qining mentioned these trivial matters, her tone was very cold.

It wasn’t hard for Jiang Yanlin to guess that she never talked about these topics with anyone. Not only was it a family scandal, but it was also exposing her own weaknesses.

So Jiang Yanlin thought for a moment and told her,
“My grandmother’s house was also left to my uncle. Although I’ve known since I was a child that he’s a rotten person, he’s lucky to have a mother who will clean up his messes for the rest of his life. And the one who backs up his mother is my mother. The food chain is formed in this way.”

The overly similar situation made Qining sigh as well.

But Jiang Yanlin comforted her, “The hardest thing to deal with with this kind of person is the blood vessel that lies in the middle. Now you have no more scruples, so don’t be soft-hearted.”

Jiang Yanlin was indeed a bit cold-blooded.

She had always known what the method to break the food chain was, so for the passing of her relatives, apart from the inevitable grief, there was actually a deeper sense of relief.

Jiang Yanlin, like Qining, was also raised by her grandmother. Their relationship was not shallow.

But the older she got, the more Jiang Yanlin understood that love and pain are a relationship that goes hand in hand.

Her grandmother’s love for Jiang Yanlin was sincere and unadulterated.

Her love for Jiang Yanlin’s mother was also the same.

But the old-fashioned foot-binding cloths had turned everyone into monsters. What her grandmother loved most was still her son. Even if he was a rotten person who caused trouble all his life, she loved him blindly, to the point of being irrational.

That year, when the name “Fan Shengmei” became popular in China, Jiang Yanlin didn’t want to participate in this topic at all.

She just felt depressed, because there were countless nameless “Fan Shengmeis” living in this world, willingly sacrificing their lives to feed the monsters that sucked their blood.

From more than ten years ago, Jiang Yanlin had realized that many things in the world were unfair.

Just like when she was a child, her uncle lived in a large two-bedroom apartment in the county town. In the summer, there was a refrigerator and air conditioning, a TV that could watch many cartoons, and a seemingly endless supply of ice cream.

But the place where she, her mother, and her grandmother lived was a thatched hut that would leak when it rained and was full of mosquitoes.

Jiang Yanlin’s childhood memories were always inseparable from the hot summer nights, with a white mosquito net above her head. She would be sweating all over from the heat, sleeping in a daze.

Her mother was working away from home and didn’t know what time she would be back.

Her grandmother would take a cattail fan and constantly fan her gently, as if she were tireless, for a long, long time.

How is that not love?

But the grown-up Jiang Yanlin also understood that this was a second-class love.

At the age when she began to think about many problems in the world, Jiang Yanlin had asked her mother why the gap between them and her uncle was so big.

Was it because her uncle was more hardworking, smarter, and more capable?

But why did she never think so?

The one who was more hardworking, smarter, and more capable was always the mother who had raised her alone.

At that time, there was no expression on her mother’s face. She just said lightly,
“Because before your grandfather passed away, he gave the job at the factory to your uncle.”

That large apartment was also allocated by the factory to the workers.

Her uncle, who got the job and the apartment, also naturally got a fairly good marriage and had his own descendants.

But his happiness, his mother and sister had to be careful even to get a little bit of it.

It’s just that fate is sometimes very mischievous.

The person who got something for nothing, in the end, also lost everything because of his nature of getting something for nothing.

Jiang Yanlin’s uncle ate, drank, whored, and gambled. Every time he got drunk, he would beat his wife and daughter at home.

Finally, the other party could not bear it anymore and directly divorced him, taking their daughter and leaving, not wanting the house or the money, just wanting him to stay away.

But he was jealous of the luxury cars his friends drove. On a whim, he sold the house to buy a second-hand Mercedes. In the end, he found that the luxury car needed maintenance, and he didn’t have the ability to afford it, so he sold the car as well.

The little money he had was not enough for him to squander for long, and he ended up with nothing.

In elementary school, Jiang Yanlin accidentally saw an IOU in her mother’s room.

It was the money her uncle had to pay for hitting someone with his car. He had written this IOU, but he owed Jiang Yanlin’s mother too much, and he had never paid back a single one.

Jiang Yanlin had always known that her mother was a very hardworking person. She was self-reliant, did not rely on anyone, had done all kinds of old-fashioned manual labor, and single-handedly shouldered the burden of supporting her mother and raising her daughter.

Her only weakness was that she was too soft-hearted.

So Jiang Yanlin told herself that she would never be a too soft-hearted person in her life.

Her resentment towards her grandmother had gradually evolved into hatred.

Jiang Yanlin loved her, but she was the most direct perpetrator of her mother’s misfortune.

Her uncle, who had nothing, eventually became a complete parasite, living in her grandmother’s small house—but even this house was bought by Jiang Yanlin’s mother through hard work.

Her grandmother, however, pretended to be in a difficult position and said, “He has nothing anymore. After I’m gone, this house will be given to him.”

Her mother had no objection, but her uncle was very angry when he heard about it. “Don’t you have a bigger apartment? Why give me such a small one?”

That day, Jiang Yanlin had for the first time had the idea of going to the barbershop to get a haircut in the first lunar month.
—From the bottom of her heart, she was viciously cursing him to die.

Later, as Jiang Yanlin gradually became financially capable, she replaced many of the old furniture and appliances in her home, bought her mother the latest mobile phone, and a robot vacuum to reduce her housework. And under the cover of these, she replaced what she really wanted to replace.
—She changed the lock on her home to a fingerprint lock.

After her grandmother found out about this, she was very dissatisfied for a period of time.

She had a key to the house and could come and go as she pleased, but after it was changed to a fingerprint lock, she lost this freedom.

Her mother also felt very awkward and asked Jiang Yanlin if she could also register her grandmother’s fingerprint and teach her how to use it.

Jiang Yanlin said with a straight face, “Her eyes are not good. It’s very easy for her to try too many times and trigger the door lock alarm.”

Her mother didn’t understand these things and quickly accepted this explanation.

After a period of time, her grandmother no longer dwelled on these things and just reduced the frequency of her visits.

Until later, her uncle, who had lived a very failed life, became more and more prone to tantrums and would lose his temper with her mother for no reason several times, completely breaking her heart.

After several probes, Jiang Yanlin found that her mother had really seen the light, and then she told her the truth:
“He’s a typical social loafer now. He has no family ties, no job to create value, and he’s hiding at home with a pile of debts, gambling and messing around all day, just relying on grandmother for a meal.”

Jiang Yanlin’s tone was very cold, without any emotion.

“He already hates you to the point that he thinks you’re living too well, which is why he’s not living well. One day when grandmother is gone and there’s no one for him to suck blood from, what do you think he’ll do?”

A person who has nothing is the one who is most willing to risk everything.

At that time, although her mother said, “He won’t, he doesn’t have the guts,” she also took Jiang Yanlin’s words to heart.

So the matter of the door lock was never mentioned again.

Although later she would inevitably be angry and sad because of her uncle’s affairs, but because she had reduced the frequency of contact, things had gradually become peaceful.

Jiang Yanlin patiently waited until her mother had almost broken free from that “family brainwashing package” before she brought up that matter.

“When grandmother is gone, we’ll sell the house and go to a place where he can never find us.”

Jiang Yanlin’s foresight had been planned for many years. In the face of these realities, she had no time to feel her grandmother’s frailty.

She didn’t know, when that day really came, whether she would feel more grief or more relief.

She was just a cold-blooded and selfish person. All she wanted was to protect herself and the people she loved.

After listening to these stories, Qining was silent for a long time.

Finally, she told Jiang Yanlin:
“Many times, I feel that you are much stronger than me.”

But Jiang Yanlin knew that this was inevitable.

Although Qining also had these troubles, her parents were still alive, and her family relationship was relatively harmonious, providing her with a worry-free growing environment.

A person who has been excellent since childhood, who immigrated abroad early, and who has achieved great success in her career will always be the “child of other people’s family” in the mouths of relatives.

Her life was too smooth, and she also lacked the necessary pressure and tempering.

But Jiang Yanlin felt that she was also very good like this.

Some people are born to stand under a million lights and be a brilliant gem.

Onlookers only need to appreciate it.