Chapter 744

Jiang Song never avoided talking about his hometown, and she knew it was just as poor and remote as her own. In fact, it was even more cut off from the outside world, separated by a major river.

She’d finally made it out of the mountains and into city life—why on earth would she want to go back to some dirt-poor backwater?

She was also afraid that if she left Jiang Song, he’d just go off and find someone else to marry.

What if the next one wasn’t afraid of drama? What if she wasn’t afraid of being stalked or pestered? Jiang Song had been getting increasingly impatient with her over the past couple of years—especially after she made him break up with his girlfriend. He spiraled for a while after that, even losing motivation for his career.

She didn’t understand any of that. Like a dodder vine latching onto a tree, she clung to him for dear life, draining his strength and support.

Jiang Song wasn’t dumb. In fact, he was very smart. Deep down, he looked down on Xu Zhaodi. He saw her as just another dance-hall girl who smiled and drank for tips. All that so-called “niceness” he showed her wasn’t love—it was just a basic decency toward a woman who stuck close to him. It was how he was raised.

But what he didn’t expect was that such a small act of kindness—something he thought was just common courtesy—would be seen by Xu Zhaodi, who had never received any real love in her life, as genuine affection. She fell hard. And once she fell, she couldn’t pull herself out.

It made Jiang Song feel both sweet and suffocated.

After watching The Duke of Mount Deer, he felt like Xu Zhaodi was his Shuang’er. He wasn’t entirely opposed to the fantasy of having multiple women, but reality was what it was—real women with ambition and dignity weren’t about to tolerate a man with a wandering heart.

Of course, there were exceptions. Once he got into construction, Jiang Song met a lot of wealthy businessmen—plenty of whom had mistresses outside the home. But they all kept it discreet and made sure the wives never found out.

Being surrounded by that kind of chaos eventually took a toll on Jiang Song’s worldview. Bit by bit, his moral compass started to tilt, and Xu Xuedie’s presence didn’t seem quite so unacceptable anymore.

Still, Xu Xuedie was never on equal footing with him.

By 2003, after having experienced a bit more of the world, Xu Xuedie  suddenly returned to her hometown, changed her name to Xu Xuedie, and forbade anyone from ever calling her by her old name again. She was just like one of the heroines in those dreamy fantasy romance novels she loved—reinvented with a beautiful, ethereal name: Xuedie, or Snow Butterfly.

Her style changed too—from leather pants, short skirts, and cropped tops of her dance-hall days, to increasingly innocent, modest outfits.

She was naturally good-looking. Once rough and dark-skinned from hardship, she never suffered much again after getting with Jiang Song. Whenever she pestered him too much and he lost patience, he’d give her money to make her go away. Over time, she learned how to get money from him without asking outright, and she began to look more delicate and refined with each passing year.

In front of Jiang Song, she was meek and submissive. But in front of his friends—especially the laborers who worked under him—she acted high and mighty, like a boss’s wife. She didn’t like how Jiang Song treated those men like brothers or lent them money so casually. She often gave them attitude, speaking to them with open disdain. Even though Jiang Song didn’t really listen to her, her words still had an impact. His workers started growing resentful—but Jiang Song never noticed.

Not until he was betrayed by one of his own, when most of his laborers got poached and his construction projects were stolen out from under him. That was when it hit him like a thunderclap.

But he still didn’t understand the root cause. He thought it was just his former buddies chasing profit and turning their backs on him. Over the years, although he’d had his fair share of party-and-drinking friends, few had been truly loyal. Still, Jiang Song had always treated people with sincerity—and some had definitely seen that. He wasn’t without real friends. The relationships he built over the years weren’t all for nothing.

Even the bosses who gave him construction contracts preferred giving them to the honorable, loyal Jiang Song—not the backstabber who’d betrayed him.

Before long, Jiang Song pulled together his few remaining brothers and, with the help of genuine friends, started over again.

During that time, he dated two more women. One of them was a female project manager on a job he took on. She saw potential in him, didn’t mind the mistakes of his youth, and didn’t see Xu Xuedie as any kind of threat. She pushed Xuedie so far she didn’t even have a place to stand. But even she, after two years, got tired of Jiang Song’s emotional indecisiveness and finally walked away, exhausted.

They all eventually realized—being Jiang Song’s friend was far more fulfilling than being his girlfriend or wife.

And during all of this, Jiang Song never once brought any of them back to his hometown.

It wasn’t that he felt ashamed of his background—he never had. But he knew just how poor and underdeveloped his hometown was.

In Jiang Song’s memory, home was always that impoverished little mountain village. Every woman he dated—regardless of looks, temperament, ability, or family background—was objectively better than him. He knew they liked who he had become now. If he brought them home too early, showed them the poverty and backwardness of his roots, they might lose interest entirely.

So aside from Xu Xuedie, even with the girlfriends he genuinely liked, he never hid his origins—but he only ever spoke of how simple and beautiful his hometown was.

The people of Jiang Village seemed to have silently accepted Jiang Song’s disappearance—maybe he really was gone for good. When they spoke of the Jiang family now, they only mentioned Jiang Bai and Jiang Ning.

After Jiang Bai completed his graduate studies, his advisor brought him into a classified unit. What exactly he was working on, no one knew. They just knew that he hadn’t returned to the village in two years. These days, only Jiang Ning came back during the New Year.

Still, no one gossiped behind Father Jiang’s back about how neither of his sons came home for the holidays. Instead, they just said he was lucky—because he had a capable daughter. It was said that his daughter had passed the civil service exam in the capital and now worked under the Imperial City, living off state rations. That was an iron rice bowl job. Every New Year when she returned, she’d always show up alongside the village chief, Jiang Guotai, and Jiang Guoding—making her one of the most talked-about figures in the village.

Even though no one really understood what Jiang Ning actually did, or what her position entailed—it didn’t sound all that special—but when someone like Jiang Guotai, with so much local clout, and Jiang Guoding, now a county magistrate, both spoke so highly of her, no one else dared say a word.

Even Mother Jiang had stopped saying anything.

Each year, the village divided tea fields. They waited, day by day. From the hopeful early days of believing her sons would come home, that there would be tea fields, grandchildren, and a peaceful old age… to the silence that grew heavier with each passing year, to the weariness that settled deeper. 

The spirit she had in her youth seemed to fade with Jiang Song’s disappearance and Jiang Bai’s absence. Back when she was over forty, she still carried herself with strength and energy, looking nowhere near her age. But one day when Jiang Ning returned, she realized her once-strong mother didn’t seem quite as powerful anymore.

There were white hairs on her head, wrinkles on her face, and even her height didn’t feel as tall as it used to. She no longer had that intimidating presence.

After years of searching without results—no word, no phone calls—Mother Jiang finally gave up hope of ever finding her eldest son. Her will to keep pushing forward also faded.