"I really want you to stay and play with me, but I should wish for you to find your husband first."
At that moment, the wardrobe door radiated white light.
Blindingly bright, impossible to ignore.
I touched my stomach. Where would this door take me?
"Victor, I have to go."
I stood and walked to the wardrobe.
He stared at me blankly: "Where are you going?"
I realized he couldn't see the door at all.
Before I left, I had so much I wanted to tell him—like the fact that Declan's wife was Japanese, that Declan would try to assassinate him, that his brother-in-law was actually a good man, that he shouldn't fight the northern warlords, that he shouldn't hold the wedding on the lawn.
But scenes of the past flashed through my mind, finally settling on that other line from the newspaper—"Everything is the best arrangement."
I smiled: "Goodbye, Victor."
I turned and grasped the wardrobe door handle, my other hand resting on my belly.
"Baby, take Mommy to find Daddy."
I opened the door and stepped quickly into that warm white light.
After a few steps, my pupils adjusted to the colors around me.
This was my apartment.
A man with severe burns on his back lay on the living room floor.
His raw flesh and ruined clothing still smoldered from the heat.
My breath caught.
I called out "Victor" and knelt beside him, helpless.
I tried to lift him, but his body was burning hot. The watch on his wrist was still in its melted state.
I hurriedly grabbed a basin of water and poured it over him.
Then I called 120 and helped remove the excess watch band and scraps of clothing from his body.
His wounds were healing at an extraordinarily slow pace.
This must be the time he was hit by the shoulder-fired rocket while saving Oliver.
His final rebirth.
And my final chance to keep him.
I grabbed my ID, wallet, and phone. The ambulance arrived thirty minutes later and took us to Renji Hospital.
By the time we reached the hospital, his shattered limbs had already regenerated.
After surgery he was moved to the ICU. The cause of injury was listed as a gas explosion.
The ICU didn't allow family to stay. Only one hour of visiting per day.
Ivy rushed over when she received my message. She stayed with me outside the ICU for a full day and night.
Faced with Ivy's barrage of questions, I told her everything that had happened from beginning to end.
She was so shocked she couldn't speak for a long time, then picked the two things she considered most important and repeated them:
"You're saying you got married, and you're having a baby?"
"With all this back-and-forth, the baby..."
My heart was uneasy, so I asked her to keep watch for me while I went to the obstetrics department to check on the baby.
I registered, waited, saw the doctor, took the tests. When I got the ultrasound report—intrauterine singleton, twelve weeks—and heard the doctor say the baby was healthy, my heart finally settled. I returned to the inpatient wing.
7.
Before I even reached the ICU, I saw a tall figure arguing with the medical staff. The moment he spotted me, he froze.
At that same instant, a sedative was injected into him.
His grin of frenzied joy had barely begun to form before it blurred, and his eyes drifted shut.
Ivy, standing nearby, recovered from her shock and stuck out her tongue: "Your man really is impossible to kill."
The doctor, adjusting his disheveled uniform, walked over and asked if I was family.
I nodded. The doctor calmly and objectively informed me that Victor was recovering remarkably well—almost miraculously so—and that he could be transferred to a regular room after one more day of observation.
I kept bowing and apologizing.
When Victor next woke, he was in a regular hospital room.
He held my prenatal checkup report, his still-recovering vocal cords producing a raspy laugh.
After laughing, he looked confused and serious: "How is it twelve weeks?"
Before I could tease him, his eyelids drooped slightly, and he found his own excuse: "The baby's developing so well the doctor must have gotten it wrong."
Then he went back to gazing contentedly at the ultrasound photo with a foolish grin.
I looked into his bright eyes. From the time I drove to the war zone to find him, through the campaign and our leisurely journey back to Shanghai, the wedding preparations—none of those memories remained with him.
But compared to losing him entirely, these absences were trivial.
I dug out the newly purchased "Modern History" book. In its pages, the Nine-Lived General who had dominated the battlefield ultimately died in 1922.
He traced the Song type on the yellowed page.
The passage described the Chesterfield-Sungate war. The Chesterfield Army, which should have won, lost its leader to a surprise assassination—
The Su Army won a great victory.
After that, the Su Army's warlord colluded with the Japanese and became a traitor, eventually executed.
As for the Chesterfield Army's fate—as the losing side, the records were sparse.
I watched him tensely, afraid he'd be dissatisfied, afraid he'd feel cheated.
But his gaze dropped back to the ultrasound.
"Rose, it seems this is how my story ends."
He sounded calm, at peace.
I decided not to tell him about his return to reunify Chesterfield and Sungate after being blown up.
I only told him that our child had brought me to find him when I was in despair.
"I'm completely satisfied with this ending. I'm selfish—all I need is for you to be well, for you to be with me, and I'm happy."
I held him, nuzzling gently against his chest.
"You can finally be with me, living a peaceful, ordinary life."
If I hadn't loved him enough, I probably would have stayed in that era as a wealthy widow with regrets.
But fortunately, I was stubborn.
My tears rolled silently down his chest.
Utterly extinguishing any lingering resentment in his heart.
"Rose, this is a good thing—you mustn't be unhappy. There's a little ancestor in your belly now. Don't exhaust yourself again. If your health suffers and the ancestor gets unhappy, who knows where the two of you might end up—how would I ever find you?"
I burst out laughing.
All my worries dissolved.
The doctor came over, pressing me to provide Victor's identification for the paperwork.
I quietly told them: "Don't be fooled by his appearance—he's actually a fool I picked up from the mountains. He doesn't have any ID. I'll take him to get his identity card once he's recovered, and I'll definitely come back to complete the paperwork."
The doctor looked at Victor as if he were a fool, and looked at me as if I were some kind of deviant.
Two days later, he was discharged.
I took him to get his ID card, then made another trip to the hospital to fill out the admission paperwork he'd missed.
He held the ID card with a stern expression:
"This card is quite well-made."
"This card can get you on planes and high-speed trains. I'm going to show you the world." I hugged him. "It's a good world. You definitely won't regret it."
Though the present was a peaceful era, everything was unfamiliar to him.
This unfamiliarity was different from my unfamiliarity with his time.
I could learn about his era from books. He had never encountered mine.
My world might be dangerous for him too.
But he had me. I would protect him in my world, just as he had protected me in his.
He turned the ID card over in his hand, eyes lowered, lost in thought.
Perhaps because of the pregnancy, and because everything was finally settled, my nerves relaxed and I grew drowsy.
"Victor, when I wake up, let's go to Lele Pig Tea Restaurant and have lunch with Ivy..."
I mumbled the words, heard his low acknowledgment, and fell soundly asleep.
When I woke, Victor wasn't at home.
My heart plummeted.
Where had he gone?
I'd taught him how to use a phone, so my first instinct was to call him.
His ringtone came from outside the door.
The next moment, he was back.
I ran barefoot across the cold floor and threw myself into his arms.
"Victor, I thought you'd left. I was so scared."
His steady heartbeat was right beside my ear. He picked me up in his arms with care.
"No matter how anxious you are, you can't go without shoes."
He carried me back to bed.
"Where did you go?"
"I went to get our money."
He'd previously set up a trust fund for me in Switzerland—originally out of fear that if he fell in battle, I'd suffer.
Now that we were both in the future, that money had snowballed and weathered inflation.
"I'm a man. Since I'm staying in this world, I need to establish myself."
He held me, stroking the ends of my hair: "Consider this money a loan from you, all right?"
My emotions had been a roller coaster. Now that I'd calmed down, I found it almost funny:
"This was your money to begin with."
His grip tightened, as if my hair between his fingers was the fate that had oppressed him.
"That time, you said you'd finally gotten your heart treated, that you were afraid of death. I regretted it so much. I thought you must hate me—how innocent you were, trading a peaceful life for a precarious existence beside me. But then you said you liked me. Rose, you're so contradictory, and so endearingly contradictory."
"So from that day onward, you set up a widow fund for me?"
I looked up at him, my feelings tangled.
"Do you know how infuriating that was? Every time I thought about you using my money with some other man, I just—" He didn't finish.
"But you still left that money. Good thing you did—you have expensive tastes. I was worried I couldn't afford to keep you."
"You want to keep me?" He laughed. "I suppose that's not impossible."