Mr. Melancholy Wants To Live A Peaceful Life

CHAPTER 8

Yu Hua stared at his phone for a while. There were no waves in his heart. Like before, he put You Zhengping's tableware in the place where his husband usually sat, as though You Zhengping were there across from him, calmly enjoying this dinner.

After eating his own meal, Yu Hua got up and went to You Zhengping's seat and ate all of his husband's food as well. After eating two people's food on his own, Yu Hua sat in You Zhengping's seat, recalling his long thousands of years of loneliness.

Eating his own food just now, Yu Hua had looked at the empty seat across from him and felt very lonely. He'd come over to You Zhengping's seat wanting to create the illusion that both of them were there, but in the moment he'd sat in that chair, he had felt even more alone, because Yu Hua had found that even his own seat was empty.

He had turned on the TV. The voice of the news anchor and the sound of chopsticks lightly touching the bowl had reverberated inside the room. Under the lively background noise, the room had seemed to be empty. Now the news broadcast ended and the sound of the weather forecast's Fishermen's Song began, following a gurgle of flowing water. Yu Hua calmly washed the dishes.

Yu Hua liked the weather forecast's background music. This tune gave him a kind of feeling of calm contentment. He liked to wash dishes to the sound of the Fishermen's Song, from time to time looking at You Zhengping sprawled on the couch enjoying the memory of dinner. Or he would look out the window at the setting sun. These comfortable, languid scenes made Yu Hua feel that he was truly living.

Yu Hua had lived for thousands of years, striving each day to clear. He had known countless varied and grotesque worlds, experienced unnumbered dangers. He'd once had teammates. These people had either died in cruel survival games, or they had had different ideas from him and had gradually drifted away.

He'd wanted to defeat the System, to possess supreme power. He had walked forward on the great road to freedom, losing countless friends, getting himself battered and bloody. He had looked up at the starry sky, struggling for the sake of one goal. When he had at last succeeded and become the first clearer, able to possess endless life and power, Yu Hua had turned his head, looked at the road he had walked, and found that there was only loneliness at the end of this road.

As soon as he had thought that there would be countless more days like this, that he would have to endure unending loneliness, Yu Hua had been afraid. Strange. When he had been weak and faced undefeatable enemies, he had been able to summon boundless courage. But when he had become so strong that no one could oppose him, Yu Hua had been frightened.

Frightened of the endless life ahead, and frightened of himself, on the point of becoming emotionless. While struggling towards a difficult goal, he had always shirked life, shirked an ordinary person's trivial reality.

So Yu Hua had made his final wish. He wanted to become an ordinary person, going briefly but peacefully and truthfully through one last life. That was the end he had chosen for himself. When the dishes had been washed, the weather forecast ended. Yu Hua turned off the TV. In the quiet room, he picked up his phone once more.

There were two choices before him. Choice one was to listen to the System's command, rescue or kill that leveler, and be controlled by the System from then on, gradually leaving his current life, sooner or later changing back into what he had been at the beginning. Choice two was to ignore the System and let it reveal his identity; when the time came, could he still live a peaceful life with You Zhengping like before? Yu Hua didn't want either of these.

Yu Hua immediately eliminated choice one and considered what method the System would use to publicize his identity after he refused. This was an unopened world. Yu Hua had originally chosen this world because he knew the System had no way to control it entirely. So the System had no way to broadcast information openly in this world; even if it did broadcast the information, it wasn't certain that anyone would believe it.