Chapter 298: The Dense Forest Frontier

Bai Liu repeats softly, "Fifty years after the war?"

Elena looked down, dropping her wrinkled eyelids to Bai Liu: "Maybe longer, I'm getting too old to remember these dates."

"I just remember that a long, long time ago, when Alex was alive, he and that Guy guy wrote me lots and lots of letters." Elena pulls a stack of old letters out of her dirty bib skirt, "Every time I come to visit their graves, I read the letters they sent me at their graves before I forget them."

Elena sighed wearily, "You know I'm the only old woman who remembers these things now, and if I forget them too, they really won't exist."

Bai Liu looked at the stack of letters and politely asked, "May I see them?"

Elena looks at Bai Liu with surprise: "You're interested? No young people want to hear these old stories anymore."

Bai Liu smiles: "I was a comrade of Alex and Guy and it is my duty to help remember them."

Elena stared at Bai Liu for a long, quiet moment before she suddenly smiled: "Boy, even if you are a lying liar, you did please me with your lies."

She kindly handed Bai Liu the pile of letters, tears hidden in her eyes: "Feel free to join me in remembering these two men."

Bai Liu held up the letter: "Perhaps you don't suggest I open and read it in person?"

Elena laughed and she waved her hand tremulously, "Of course not, I can recite everything on it backwards."

Bai Liu looked down and arranged the letters in chronological order before opening them one by one, as Elena rambled on.

"...... You know, young people, when they're very old and they're not doing well, when they're alone, they remember their past over and over again, wondering what they did wrong to end up in this situation ...... "

Elena's pale voice paused, "Do you know what the scariest thing is in the midst of this process?"

Bai Liu looked up at her, "What is it?"

Elena forced a smile, but tears streamed down from the corners of her eyes, "You did do a lot of things wrong."

Bai Liu lowered his eyes and looked at the first letter in his hand. It was from Elena to Alex.

[In tribute to my dear fiancé.

Your filthy, shameless, lowly male lover wrote to me two days ago asking me to forgive him for his despicable behaviour with you, and shamelessly asking me to bless your love and marriage.

What a disgusting idea!

Could there be any god in the world who would allow two males to be united in his presence?

I even suspect that enemy shells will be raining down on the place where your wedding will take place as punishment for your breach of ethics!

Alex, why would you, as a doctor studying the mechanisms of human life, the greatest profession on the entire planet, allow yourself to hang out with such a ridiculous psychopath and waste time trying to save people's lives?

Don't you feel like your future and aspirations are tainted by shit when you're with him?

At least when I got that letter he sent me, I felt my dignity was tainted by shit.]

Bai Liu opened the next letter and it was addressed to Alex.

[to Elena.

First, allow me to viciously refute the name you have addressed to me; I have never met you and never consented to allow you to take the liberty of becoming my fiancée, and the name you addressed to me at the beginning of your previous letter was entirely false.

Secondly, there will only be one person I love, one wife, one person I will be with for the rest of my life, and that will be Guy, not you who appeared out of nowhere after Guy and I fell in love.

I don't know where your inexplicable affection for me came from, from my parents' unrealistic expectations and descriptions of me, or from the pursuit of the only young man in that narrow town who had achieved a higher degree, or from your own complacency and self-congratulation in your beauty, the ridiculous idea that the most beautiful girl in town would win over the best young man.

Allow me to explain to you for the record, Elena, that I am not an object that you can win and brandish, I am a human being with feelings.

After I gave my love to Guy, I could never have loved any other person until I had loved him.

Elena, you are also an independent person and you don't need to get me to show your worth, you can go and do something more valuable to prove it.

Guy and I had two qualifications for higher education, mine to use up, and Guy said you were a young girl who had more right to enjoy the beauty and knowledge of the world than he did to know if he would come back alive.

If you have any ideas about going to a higher education university, Guy said he could give you his qualification.

Despite all the things you said to Guy that made me feel shit for saying it, Guy forgave you and nobly offered to give you the opportunity to go for further education.

Although I objected strongly to this, Guy was very insistent.

Guy said he could see that you were an aspiring young lady.

He said you liked me because I was a doctor and you thought I was treating people and saving lives and was great, so you cast a kind of girlish pining on me.

Guy let me pass on a message to you, if you like saving people, why not try and do it yourself?

I'm sorry for the blind assurances my parents gave you, but if you make any more inappropriate remarks about Guy, I will still reprimand you severely.

Bai Liu continued and the next letter was from Elena, but this time it was not addressed to Alex, but to Guy.

[Tribute to Guy.

I apologise for those inappropriate and for the personal and emotional insults that were used.

I have put all the money I have saved from all the work I have done in the three years from the age of eleven to now in this envelope as compensation for my personal export misconduct.

I won't take the qualification you gave me, I still think you are wasting Alex's time, he could have had more, he invented a potion to delay human death, how many soldiers died in the war could that have saved?

Everyone in town says he, Alex, could be the next war hero!

But after he met you, all he can think about now is falling in love!

I still want you to stay away from him, maybe you can find another male lover who is true to you, but that person should not be Alex.

The next letter is from Guy to Elena.

[For the lovely little girl, Elena.

Hey, little girl, guess what? I think you're right.

Alex does have a pretty bright future ahead of him, he's a very talented guy and the experimental process for the potion is moving along quickly, his superiors have given him the go-ahead to experiment on wounded soldiers with remarkable results.

I don't deserve him, Alex is good, so I still want to be selfish and possess him for a while and have the best memories with him.

Elena, I've seen your picture, you're beautiful, but you're so young, only fourteen, you can't tell the difference between love and yearning.

I have to admit that Alex is a great guy, but it will be at least four years before you and he can talk about love - and believe me, with your beauty, determination and perseverance, you will most likely have met another great guy by then who will be more desirable to you.

Of course, it could be a good girl, I am not stuck on that.

After the war is over, a romantic, slow-paced romance in a time of peace is what you and Alex deserve, not a rush to sacrifice your youth to marry a war hero of their imagination, held hostage by the town's war-mongering residents and Alex's parents.

It's not fair to either you or Alex.

I want you to be happy because you deserve it and I want me to be happy.

But unfortunately, there is no God willing to bless the happiness I want.

Hey, Alex told me you're good at making wedding dresses, can you make one for me? I'd like to marry Alex in it?

The last letter Elena writes to Guy is so messy, with so many tear stains, that it looks like fourteen-year-old Elena is bawling her eyes out as she writes.

But her tone in the letter was a very different and cold one.

[to Guy.

I don't know where you heard those rumours that I was forced to marry Alex, there is no such thing, I did it of my own free will.

I won't make the wedding dress, I won't allow anyone to marry Alex before me, so die!

Bai Liu looked at the wedding dress Elena had placed on Guy's tombstone and asked with a raised eyebrow, "Can I know why you made Guy's wedding dress again in the end?"

Elena smiled wistfully, but it was as if there was a lot of unspeakable sadness hidden in the smile of joy, and the corners of her mouth couldn't stop going down.

"...... was too young to know anything at the time and the town said they were going to choose a pretty girl to marry the town's war hero and the winner would get a sum of money from Alex's parents and my parents let me go."

"I was the prettiest of all the girls." Elena's eyes grew distant, "It was easy to be chosen, it was so young that I wasn't even allowed by law to marry, so Alex's parents said I was to keep Alex back and not be allowed to have contact or fall in love with anyone until Alex came back."

"At that time my whole life was about being married to Alex, the hero, and when someone took him away, I panicked and I hated Guy." Elena's eyes were red and her tone hateful, "Guy was a very smooth talker and loved to write letters to tease me, I was Buming how a man in war could have so much time on his hands and still be smiling every day."

" Guy was different to all the men I met, he respected me, encouraged me and said that sooner or later I would do no less than Alex, he even got me enrolled and told me to go straight to school when the time came."

Elena's tears spilled from her wrinkles: "The night I wrote this letter to Guy in tears, I secretly made a wedding dress overnight and rushed to the post office to send it to him."

She said, turning to Bai Liu in a daze: "But when I got to the post office, it informed me that a new letter had arrived and asked me to pick it up, and I opened it and it was still Guy's letter."

Elena burst into tears: "- it was Guy's obituary and a suicide note."

" Guy was killed on the spot after rebelling in the early hours of the morning during a sneak attack, he knew this was going to happen and left me a note in advance telling me to take care of myself and help him look after Alex."

"I wanted to give him his wedding dress, an apology, and a thank you ......" Elena choked out, her mouth quivering, "all before he got to hear it."