In truth, the calm on Chu Luyao's face was merely a hollow mask; her heart was a graveyard, devoid of the tranquility she projected.
She was dead inside.
Every fiber of her being screamed to leap from that hospital bed, to fly across the world and chase even the faintest shadow of Zhou Du. But reality was a cruel master—she could no longer even stand.
Chu Luyao stared blankly at her legs, now nothing more than useless weight. With trembling hands, she pulled out a pair of nail clippers she had hidden beneath her pillow.
She severed her artery. A violent gush of crimson sprayed out, staining the sheets—and her soul.
Her second attempt was a silent one; she swallowed a month's worth of hoarded sleeping pills in a single, desperate gulp.
The third time, she waited for the dead of night when the world was asleep, attempting to strangle the life out of herself with her own IV tubing.
...
After countless failed attempts to follow him into the grave, Chu Luyao stopped.
A sudden, chilling awakening took hold of her. From the inside out, she transformed into a stranger. She handed her law firm over to her former assistant and shouldered the crushing weight of Yaodu.
She became a mirror of the man she had lost, modeling her every move after Zhou Du as she struggled to keep the company afloat. The Chu Luyao of the following years was nothing more than a machine. Aside from mandatory hospital check-ups, she practically lived within the glass walls of the office.
Under her cold, ruthless leadership, Yaodu began to breathe again.
The tragic love story that had once been the talk of the nation faded into a whisper, eventually vanishing into the shadows of time—just like Zhou Du.
Yet, she never took off her wedding ring. Whenever a suitor attempted to win her heart, she would smile with a haunting, blissful serenity.
"My relationship with Ah Du is perfect," she would say. "I love him deeply, and he's at home, waiting for me."
In truth, she never stepped foot in their old villa again. The pain of his absence was a ghost she couldn't face. Instead, she bought the house directly next to it. Every day, she would watch the villa from her window, keeping their precious memories locked inside that empty house like a sacred tomb.
Twenty years passed.
After selecting a worthy successor for Yaodu and entrusting the company to them, Chu Luyao finally boarded a plane to Tanzania.
She had heard that Zhou Du spent his final sunrises there.
He had stayed for a month, finally witnessing the Great Wildebeest Migration under the vast African sky. But the month of wandering, paired with a body ravaged by illness, eventually brought him to his knees.
Sensing the end, he reached out to the family he had once abandoned in his blind pursuit of love.
In his final days in that local hospital, whenever he found the strength to speak, he would regale his family with tales of his journey. He spoke of the pristine slopes of Chamonix, the shimmering white sands of the Whitsunday Islands, and the thundering hooves of Tanzania.
When Zhou Du spoke of these wonders, his eyes sparkled with a life that defied his terminal diagnosis. He didn't look like a man dying of cancer; he looked like a man who had finally found his soul.
Suppressing their grief, his family finally asked the question that hung in the air:
"What about the woman you loved? Should we notify her of the funeral?"
Zhou Du smiled—a gentle, liberated expression—and slowly shook his head.
"No," he whispered. "She should have her own life. Her own path."
Zhou Du drew his last breath in Tanzania. His family chose a quiet, unassuming small town in Country A for his resting place. There was no grand ceremony. As per his final wish, a single bouquet of flowers was all that graced the earth above him.
Chu Luyao spent the twilight of her life tracing the map of Zhou Du's travels, a nomad with no home.
By a strange twist of the universe, she eventually found herself in that very same small town.
Guided by the invisible threads of fate and a series of inexplicable coincidences, she chose to settle there. She opened a modest oil painting shop, offering free portraits to the young couples who passed through.
In those final years, she saw and painted a thousand versions of what beautiful, untainted love looked like.
Every day, without fail, she would buy a fresh bouquet of flowers and place it before a nameless tombstone in the local cemetery. She would sit there for hours, lost in the silence.
She didn't know who rested beneath the stone. She didn't know their story. She only felt a magnetic, soul-deep pull to that spot.
In her youth, when she begged for his forgiveness, she had cursed the cruelty of fate for keeping them apart.
But as the sun set on her own journey, she finally understood.
Fate... is precisely like this.
(The End)