How To Polish A Pearl

Chapter 94 - Crying (2)

Author's Notes:

This will be an emotional chapter (at least it was for me). Get ready for the true meaning behind the pearls. Heads up for a lot of suicidal and abusive content. Please don't read this if this is something that triggers you.

Song I listened to whilst writing: Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine

⊂ (▀▿▀) つ

A small part of Wen Ke Xing knows that he is dreaming. Or rather, that long erased memories are now surfacing in his mind. It's a conflicting feeling of slicing headache strong enough to shatter his skull, alongside his mind wanting to absorb everything that has been missing for so long. It's ruthlessly inhaling every feeling, every touch, every smell and every sound. His entire being vibrates like it is about break from overload, when a warm and tingling feeling wraps around his heart, embracing him, grounding him.

Since he is not in control of himself, all he can do is observe as his own hands grabs on to the hands that are tied around the man under him, for leverage as he continues to thrust ferociously. The man isn't Zhou Zi Shu. He doesn't even know who it is−not even the 'him' in his memory knows who this is. Staring into those greedy lustful eyes looking back at him pushes him over the edge and opens the floodgates. As the climax hits him in revulsion, so does the memories.

They all roll out, like a long blood-soaked carpet in front of him and as he walks along the center, all his five senses are exploding with memories. Hundreds of different eyes, yet all with the same disgusting gaze, stare up at him, down at him, back at him. Their pants, their moans, their screams. It's all invading him.

Wen Ke Xing can hear his own heavy and intoxicated breathing as he thrusts into each and every one of them. He doesn't want them. But he wants to feel something yet he desperately wants to forget everything. He wants to erase the feeling of despair and hopelessness that has long been rooted in his frozen soul. He hates it. He hates himself. He hates who he has become and most of all−he hates the fact that a small part of him enjoys this.

Wen Ke Xing absorbs all of the memories, day after day, week after week, month after month−they are all the same. Each night, he starts off with a dose of the Water of Lethe only to chase it down with bottle after bottle of alcohol, all whilst surrounded by beautiful men coaxing him, feeding him, touching him. By the end of the night he is so high, the world is swimming around him.

He thrashes and pounds into the men he picks out. Sometimes slow and needy, surrounded by all the things that he thinks that he wants to feel or that he should feel. Sometimes it's rough and bloody, with the man under him gurgling as he dies from his own blood. His only sin having been to look back at the man pounding mercilessly into him.

It goes on for almost a year and the man in his memory is ignoring the fact that he is out of control. Like an addict wanting to inflict or erase the pain in his heart, he starts abusing the Water of Lethe like it is tea or wine. Instead of quenching his thirst, it is numbing his soul and freezing his core.

Wen Ke Xing feels like crying, but the tears just won't fall, like they are frozen along with the rest of him unable to escape the monster that he has become. His heart thumps hard under the embrace of the warm qi that is circling it, holding it tight and holding him together. At the end of the long and hurtful carpet, he stares into nothingness as his mind absorbs one final memory.

He sees himself wake up, his mind blank of what had happened the night before. He looks at the devastation that is the first-class suite at whatever flower house that he and Ah‑Xiang is staying at this week. Men are scattered in piles around the room, most of them naked and tangled in whatever obscene pose they had been paid to fuck in, before they had passed out. I didn't kick them out before I fell asleep?