Author: 长洱 / Chang’er

Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/

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Chapter 300

That was an ordinary early morning.

Patients who got up early were walking in the hospital garden, white smoke was rising from the cafeteria chimney, and nurses were pushing carts, distributing medicine to each ward.

Lin Chen walked into Shen Lian’s ward, carrying a small bunch of daisies.

The only patient in the ward had her eyes tightly closed, seemingly unconscious.

But the monitor indicated that she was now in a state of conscious awareness.

Lin Chen placed his folder on the bedside table, picked up a vase, filled it with a bit of water from the faucet, and inserted the tender yellow daisies one by one into the vase, then placed it on the bedside cabinet.

Shen Lian’s eyelashes trembled lightly, and her eyes slowly opened.

She was covered with a heavy white gauze around her neck, and her hands and feet were tied to the bed, weak to the point of fragility. She shifted her eyes to look at the flowers under the bedside sunlight.

Just from that brief glance, Lin Chen knew that Shen Lian’s soul was as cold and strong as ever.

“You don’t have to worry too much,” Lin Chen said. “This isn’t a persistent attempt to please you, and these flowers are not for you. You can consider them a remembrance of a friend whom I only met once.”

Lin Chen sat down by the bed.

He no longer needed to observe Shen Lian’s expression, and he had no intention of further interaction with her. He looked at the flowers and the sky outside the window, as if he were talking to some long-lost friends.

“Over the past year or so, I’ve been extremely restless.”

“I’ve met a young girl seeking justice for her father, a younger schoolmate willing to commit suicide, a terrible rapist, and a victim of sexual assault who stubbornly wanted to take the blame for her idol. I’ve been kidnapped, traveled abroad, been to the most brutal places in the world, and seen the simplest and most beautiful souls. I’ve encountered the love of my life and almost lost my life. I’ve successfully brought criminals to justice, but I couldn’t save the one person I most wanted to…”

“These experiences made me extremely desperate when I was most confused and lost. Too many tragic stories seem to say that the world is irrational and unfair. Any struggle seems like a drop in the ocean against fate, so giving up striving, rejecting hope, and acknowledging the harsh reality that only coldness and ruthlessness can better survive seems to be the ultimate future of human spiritual evolution, and this is the belief you uphold.”

“But in this short year, I’ve seen a smart and beautiful girl and a tough and persistent young man. The most awe-inspiring moments were when she put down her gun and when he ended his own life. This tells me that there must be something that can overcome hatred, that is above life and death, and that transcends the psychological techniques I trust. I think there must be something like this.”

“It took root deeply when our ancestors first opened their eyes to the beautiful starry sky and vast wilderness hundreds of thousands of years ago, growing stronger through generations. It’s not just morality, but a higher standard that transcends human morality.”

“I didn’t understand before where this standard came from. I don’t believe it’s just to maintain social stability. If that were the case, humans wouldn’t need to constantly explore the ultimate nature of the physical world, cry for the beauty of art, or strive to be a better person.”

“But my experiences over the past year, up until recently, have made me understand what that is.”

“Wanting to do better, wanting to become better, wanting to influence the world to make it better, is a very common pursuit of many ordinary and mundane people. These pursuits for ‘better’ are often worn down by the hardships of life, but they never disappear.”

“After all, when our ancestors first opened their eyes, they must have seen the vast starry sky in the dark night, and what they longed for was an even more expansive world.”

“So we come to this world, and while we suffer hardships, we also come to see how beautiful it can be. And what you can see depends on your pursuit.”

When Lin Chen finished, the woman lying in the hospital bed finally looked as if she couldn’t stand it anymore and made a vomiting expression. Lin Chen finally turned his gaze from the distance to Shen Lian’s face.

He wasn’t angry. He just calmly and succinctly said to Shen Lian, “Do you still want to say that people like ‘me’ who are ‘sick in the head’ can’t feel what I’m talking about?”

Shen Lian didn’t respond.

“What if I tell you that the problem with your brain is just an excuse for you to escape, and that you can feel everything I said?”

Lin Chen picked up the document bag beside the vase, pulled out a sheet, and began speaking quietly. “Many years ago, Duan Wanshan and his students conducted a brain research on Tourette’s*. To fill the control group with the number of normal brain images, the brains of all his students were scanned.”

*A common neurodevelopmental disorder that begins in childhood or adolescence. It is characterized by multiple movement (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic. Common tics are blinking, coughing, throat clearing, sniffing, and facial movements.

“After this experiment, Duan Wanshan must have had a serious talk with you. I don’t know what he said exactly, but with his straightforward personality, he probably told you ‘You’re sick in the head’, ‘You need to control yourself’… At that time, you might have been fond of him, but after the conversation, you felt your secret was exposed, and you were deeply humiliated, turning love into hatred.”

“But in fact, you shouldn’t hate him.”

“Because no matter what he said to you, he spoke sincerely, and he never stood in a position of looking down on you. Actually, he didn’t tell you that the brain scans of the teachers were also included.”

“He knew better than anyone who he really was.”

Lin Chen spread out the brain scan so that Shen Lian could see it clearly. Neither family, nor brain, nor genes could define a person…

The brain scan was patchy, showing defects in the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and other areas. This brain belonged to most psychopathic killers, and also to Duan Wanshan.

It belonged to the person who had the most beautiful soul in the world.

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The author has something to say:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

—Shakespeare

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Kinky Thoughts:

For those who forgot, this was the hymn Duan Wanshan was mumbling as he died.

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