Chapter 151: Ch 151: Reassured and Morning Greetings

"And that’s about it," Su Wanyan concluded.

The last of the five questions had been spent. The bargain was complete. She said it the way she closed a checkup—cleanly, without dragging the ending into something heavier than it needed to be.

Jingxue smiled and nodded, satisfied in the narrow way a man could be when the information he wanted had finally been placed in his hands. He knew more about Mo Xingxue now than he had an hour ago: the defiance, the scraped knees, the dinners, the laugh that had once lived in a child’s throat without calculation. He also knew, with a clarity that refused to soften, that it was too late to have been present for any of it. Nor to be a part of it now that she had already grown.

Somewhere along that growth she had learned to call another woman mother—the wife of the man who had stood in the space Jingxue had emptied—and that knowledge sat in his mouth like something bitter and sour he could not spit out.

He did not want to admit the shape of what he felt. Jealousy was an ugly word for an uglier failure. His thoughts snagged anyway. One hand rose, almost without permission, and rested against his flat stomach. Regret moved through his eyes again, quiet and uninvited. He lowered the hand after a moment, sighed once under his breath, and let the thought remain unfinished even inside his own head.

Then he shook the spiral off as best he could and looked at the alpha still sitting beside him.

Then, he reached into his pocket, drew out the tickets, and turned toward her.

Su Wanyan had been waiting with visible patience—the kind that hummed peacefully rather than fidgeted in excitement. The moment the tickets appeared, though, her whole face lit. If she had possessed a tail it would have been beating a rhythm against the packed earth. She held up both hands at once, excitement running so openly through her posture that it left no room for dignity, and waited for the wages she had earned.

Jingxue looked at that brightness. Some of the sadness in him loosened against his will. How cute, he thought, the observation arriving swiftly, then he set the tickets carefully into her open palms.

She accepted them in a rush, fingers closing as if the paper might vanish, and bowed from the waist in thanks before the moment could cool.

Sixty points. The number arranged itself in her head with immediate practical joy. I secured sixty points for them today. The imaginary tail, if it existed, only wagged harder. She could already see herself presenting the earnings—could already hear, in a private and possibly inaccurate fantasy, Mo Xingxue’s quiet praise for the morning’s work. However, that fantasy alone was enough fuel. Home suddenly felt very close and very necessary.

She snapped back into the present, hastily stood up, then offered him a bow again, but more properly this time.

"Thank you, sir." Gratitude and sincerity sat plain in her voice. There was no performance in it—only the straightforward thanks of someone who had traded labor and memory for something she could carry back to the people she loved.

Jingxue waved the formality off. "It’s nothing. I didn’t even do anything." The words were blunt, true to his usual behavior—but the cold in them had thinned by a degree. Not enough that a stranger would have named the change. Enough that the way he looked at her, just then, carried a faint echo of the way a much younger Mo Xingxue had once looked at Su Wanyan in the early days: wary distance giving way, slowly, to the beginning of warmth.

Su Wanyan smiled, bowed a final time, and straightened with her vigor undimmed.

"Bye, sir!"

He waved her off. She turned on her heel and started back along the path toward their home, steps light, pace climbing as the thought of Mo Xingxue’s and Shen Guoxing’s faces pulled her forward. The grin she wore was unashamed and untamed. I can’t wait! She thought, before breaking into a full sprint home.

Jingxue watched her go.

A small smile formed and stayed. He tracked the bright, retreating figure until the path began to take her out of easy view, and the conclusion that rose in him was quieter than jealousy and heavier than relief.

If she’s the alpha my.... Xuexue would end up with—

He paused on the unfinished claim of kinship, then let the rest through. He remembered the way Su Wanyan’s whole attention had caught fire when she spoke about the child who climbed trees, laughed at near-falls, sneaked under dinner tables—eyes so full of uncomplicated love that even a man drowning in his own history could not mistake it. A broader, softer smile altered his mouth.

"Then I’ll be assured," he said aloud, to the empty margin of the field.

He turned back to the open ground. The rows she had finished still held their shape. Peace lived in the view the way it lived in any well-kept stretch of earth at the start of a day—simple, ordinary, and complete without him. He felt none of that peace himself. Bitterness and regret flowed back in as soon as the alpha’s brightness was no longer there to push against them.

Even if I wasn’t there.. it’s reassuring to know that someone loved her more than what I could have offered.

The thought did not comfort him as much as it looked. He sighed and lifted his gaze toward a sky that still held the last stubborn dark at its edges.

I wonder if I hadn’t left....

He did not finish it. He did not need to. After all, it was already too late.

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A few minutes later, Su Wanyan reached the borrowed house.

She opened the door by degrees—hand on the latch, weight distributed so the wood would not complain—and slipped inside without a creak. The care was excessive and entirely sincere. She moved through the entry the way a person moved when they had been gone longer than they meant to and preferred not to announce the fact: steps placed with criminal precision, shoulders slightly drawn in, the whole performance of someone sneaking home after a misdeed.

The only problem with the image was the absence of any misdeed. She had been tilling soil and collecting points. The stealth was pure consideration for the sleepers she had left behind.

However, it failed the moment she reached the living room.

Mo Xingxue was already awake.

Their eyes met across the short distance between the doorway and the makeshift bed. Su Wanyan froze so completely that thought itself seemed to cut short. Mo Xingxue, for her part, blinked in rapid sequence, chasing the last of sleep from her vision, hair still disordered from the jacket-pillow arrangement, expression soft and unguarded in the way only the first minutes after waking allowed.

"Where did you go?"

The question arrived lazy, husky, and still thoroughly laced with sleep—less accusation than simple orientation, as if the empty space beside her had been the first fact her mind had catalogued upon opening her eyes.

Su Wanyan’s soul snapped back into her body. The smile she produced was so strained it edged toward the territory of a grimace. She crossed the floor at once, lowered herself onto the layered blankets, and pulled Mo Xingxue into a hug before any sharper version of the question could form.

"Good morning."

Appeasement first. Facts second. It was a strategy that had served her unevenly for years and that she reached for anyway.

Mo Xingxue accepted the embrace and, after a beat, returned it. "Hm." A soft hum against Su Wanyan’s shoulder. "Good morning to you too."

For one hopeful second Su Wanyan believed the matter settled. Then a pinch found the muscle beside her spine—precise, unimpressed, and entirely aware that the hug had been a diversion.

"Ouch—ouch—" The protest stayed quiet out of respect for the two children still asleep in the room. Theatrical pain had its volume limits when babies were present.

Mo Xingxue, who had long since learned to distinguish real injury from performance, only shook her head.

"Where were you?" she repeated, the sleep thinning from her voice without leaving it entirely.

Su Wanyan offered a sheepish smile and, instead of answering with words, worked the tickets free with the hand that was not locked around Mo Xingxue’s waist. She held the small stack up between them without fully releasing the hug—bright, expectant, the posture of someone presenting a trophy and waiting for the verdict.

"Here."

Mo Xingxue pulled back just enough to see. Her eyes widened at the thickness of the bundle.

"You already finished the task?" Impressed. Proud, even—though the work had not been hers. Still, the pride sat in her voice without embarrassment.

Su Wanyan nodded, the sheepishness replaced at once by open satisfaction. "Yeah. And I asked the indifferent man if I could double the work and earn double too. He said yes." She tightened the hug a fraction, excitement bleeding into the hold. "So I did."

Mo Xingxue’s smile remained, but worry threaded under it almost immediately. "Is that so? Then that means you overworked yourself again." The words trailed as the concern took a clearer shape—extra labor at dawn, on top of a night spent on floorboards, offered as if it cost nothing.

Su Wanyan laughed, soft and bright, and shook her head against the accusation. "Overworked?" She made the word sound foreign. "I wasn’t even tired." The declaration landed with pure conviction. "Why would I be? When all I have to do is think that the most beautiful woman and the most adorable babies are waiting for me—forget tired. I was energized."

She said it the way she said most true things: without examining the shape of it from the outside. She did not see, in the moment of speaking, how completely the sentence arranged them into a single household. She only felt the logic of it in her own body—the way the thought of this room, this woman, these children had turned the weight of the hoe into something lighter than it had any right to be.

Meanwhile, Mo Xingxue felt her face heat.

Isn’t this exactly how a married partner talks?

The question arrived unbidden and refused to leave. Pink climbed her cheeks and deepened toward red the longer the words sat between them, unanswered by anything except the continued fact of Su Wanyan’s arms and the quiet breathing of the children a few distance away. She did not pull back. She did not say anything. She only stayed where she was, held, while the alpha who had snuck in like a criminal and paid for the privilege in early sweat remained cheerfully unaware of the effect she had caused.

They stayed like that on the makeshift bed—tickets somewhere in the blankets now, morning still early, the house around them empty of proper furniture and somehow full enough. Two people safely closed into each other’s arms, one of them already planning what the sixty points would become, the other still warm from a sentence that had sounded, whether Su Wanyan knew it or not, exactly like coming home.

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I’M SO SORRY FOR NOT UPLOADING FREQUENTLY Y’ALL! SOME SHI KEPT HAPPENING TO ME, AND I COULDN’T FIND THE ENERGY TO WRITE! AND JUST RECENTLY, SOME UNFORTUNATE SHI HAPPENED TO ME.. like passing out in the middle of the road—literally... COUGH! BUT YEAH! I WAS ON A BREAK BECAUSE OF THAT! BUT I WOULD TRY TO FIX MY UPLOADING SCHEDULE AGAIN SOON! THANKS FOR UNDERSTANDING Y’ALL!