Many days passed in the blink of an eye. Fu Xiuyuan looked at the clear sky outside the window, then turned his gaze to the person beside him and asked softly, "Would you like to go see my mother with me today?"
Gu Nian'an paused briefly, then remembered his earlier promise to him and immediately nodded in agreement.
The driver soon drove them to a mountain, where a thin mist shrouded the slopes like a mysterious veil.
The trees and grass on the mountain swayed gently in the breeze, giving off the delicate fragrance of vegetation. Looking closely, they could see a cemetery nestled among the slopes.
Fu Xiuyuan led him by the hand through the cemetery. Fresh flowers and offerings sat beside many of the headstones, along with scattered ashes of burned joss paper, as though speaking of the living's endless longing for the dead.
At last, they stopped before a headstone. Beside it lay a large bouquet of red pansies that had already begun to wilt, along with a few blue roses.
Fu Xiuyuan frowned slightly at the bouquet. Someone brought these flowers every year, but there were no surveillance cameras on the mountain, so he did not know who had left them.
Gu Nian'an raised his eyes to Shang Zelan on the headstone, momentarily dazed.
The woman's picture on the headstone was a black-and-white photograph that seemed marked by the passage of time. She had a lovely face, her hair resting lightly on either side of her shoulders like soft silk.
She wore a gorgeous, dignified dress and looked both elegant and poised, her eyes revealing tenderness and happiness.
Her gaze was deep and warm, a smile lighting up her face as though recounting a happy moment in her life.
Looking at the woman's happy smile in