Chapter 216:
It should be said that Xie Wanning had never thought Lu Ziyan would die.
In her eyes, Lu Ziyan was the Killing God of this world; even if everyone else died, he would only live well.
Past life and this life, it was always so.
As for dying for love, she also didn’t think Lu Ziyan would die for love for her.
In her past life, after she died, hadn’t he also lived for five years?
In the end, his death was also on the battlefield.
That was an accident.
If not for the accident, he would have lived on for a long, long time.
Even if, as he said, his heart would be as dead as ashes, living on as a walking dead was still living.
Xie Wanning was certain of this.
Apart from the initial panic and fluster, she quickly stabilized her emotions and began implementing her original plan.
Buy a small courtyard, not too big, but not too small either, then buy a few servants to guard the house, tend the courtyard, and serve daily needs.
Best if the courtyard had a pond, so she could admire plum blossoms in winter, lotuses in summer, and withered leaves in autumn desolation, year after year like this, guarding her courtyard, watching clouds roll and unroll, flowers bloom and fall.
That day on the boat, she only took out the jewelry that could expose her identity; the banknotes she could truly use were kept safely close to her body.
These were also the capital deciding the quality of her future life.
Such leisurely life like a hermit, far from the capital city’s turmoil, far from that plundering, coercing, ferocious, and involuntary life, was what Xie Wanning wanted most.
In her past life, her greatest wish was to marry Lu Ziyan; later she got her wish, but regretted it.
Reborn, at first she only wanted to reverse her past life’s mistakes, almost desperately choosing someone to marry hastily, but facts proved those mistakes were not reversed; instead, the situation was like a wild horse breaking free from the reins, galloping crazily toward places she couldn’t control.
Now that she had successfully escaped, Xie Wanning only wanted a life where everything was under her own control.
Days of being manipulated by others, schemed against by her husband, utilized by her own aunt—she didn’t want to live them again.
Harboring such aspirations, she began busying herself in Bianzhou.
This was the place where Lu Ziyan was ordered to suppress bandits, yet brought back Liu Manrou.
Xie Wanning had never thought in two lifetimes that one day she would come here and plan to settle down.
And at the same time, far away in Lu City thousands of miles distant, Lu Ziyan’s situation was really not good.
Dayang Lake had been dredged day and night for nearly a month, corpses fished up from the lake bottom one after another.
Old and young, male and female, corpses new and old, but none were Xie Wanning.
Dayang Lake had a long history; over the years, who knew how many people had died in it.
Fishing for people in there was no better than finding a needle in a haystack.
Warriors proficient in water skills dived into the icy, piercing lake water, but came up saying the bottom mud was extremely deep; not to mention a corpse, even a half-sized boat might be easily swallowed.
Not finding her was normal, but since those above hadn’t called a stop, the dredging of Dayang Lake continued.
As time passed day by day, the eight words “alive, no person seen; dead, no corpse found” had almost become the verdict.
Lu Ziyan simply could not accept such a reality.
He led people to dredge Dayang Lake for over half a month; at first, upon hearing a corpse had been fished up, his vision went black, his hands and feet went weak, yet he forced himself to go identify it.
Every time it was a body full of cold sweat, as if escaping death, feeling fortunate in his heart.
No bad news was good news.
But such relief vanished completely after intercepting all the boats that had passed that day.
