After Su Zhinian put Song Qingchun into bed, he sat on the bedside, staring at her sleeping features. His hand seemed to have a mind of its own as it moved toward her beautiful face.
However, it suddenly stopped when his finger was one centimeter away from her face. As if afraid of touching her, the tip of his finger shivered slightly. After a long hesitation, he touched her chin tenderly.
The aloofness and iciness fell from his face and his gaze on her face were incredibly gentle. The colors at the bottom of his eyes turned slowly from serenity to immense passion, to deep and powerful emotions. The force of his emotions was magnificent, like the sea under a swath of glittering stars; its beauty and its indiscernible undercurrent of sadness were like a force that could not be stopped.
Only when he was alone would he dare to manifest the real depth of his love, passion, fear, and sadness toward her. Song Qingchun, do you know… how much I love you?
Su Zhinian traced tiny circles on the girl's soft skin, and his memory was slowly drawn back into the past.
…
He was seven years old when he realized he was different from everyone else. He could hear the voices others could not, and his world was uncannily noisy. Even deep in the night, he would be kept awake by the noises around him.
It was perhaps then that he was taught the harsh reality of life. There were many things that were not as pretty as they seemed.
For example, the loving couple staying above them spent their nights fighting. They always put up a smile before others but would use the dirtiest language to insult each other when no one was looking.
Little did he know that was merely the appetizer, because when he found out he could read other people's thoughts through touch, the real lesson began. Compared to what he heard, he understood true ugliness was born in the human heart.
Initially, he found out about his family's dark secrets.
He knew it was his aunt who stole his mother's salary, he knew his uncle had been trying his hardest to chase him and his mother out of his grandfather's house, and he knew his late grandmother, who preferred boys to girls, left his uncle 500,000 RMB inheritance…
After that, he found the secrets of the people living in the neighborhood.
He knew the man in Room 502 was a drug addict, he knew the man on first floor was interested in his mother, and he also knew Auntie Sun, who was supposed to be his mother's best friend, had been badmouthing her all over the neighborhood…
At the time, he was still young and thus did not understand the concept of self-preservation. When he read these thoughts, he blurted them out directly.
However, adults were always more cunning than he was. Even though they were exposed, they could find reasons to cover up for themselves, while deep down, these people knew he was right on the money.
Perhaps they were curious about how he managed to read their thoughts, but more than that, they feared and despised him. They started to figure out ways to extricate him from their world.
Initially, they attempted to isolate him, calling him a monster. Later, he had no idea who started calling him an insane person, but the rest of them who feared him followed suit.
Words and opinions might be invisible, but they were incredibly powerful. The collective opinion reached such a point where even his own mother, who initially shielded him, saw his occasional outpouring of secrets as a sign of mental illness. So, she took him to the doctors to try to cure him; she even took the advice of one doctor and sent him to the sanitarium for three months.
He knew she did all this for his own good; she really thought he was sick.