Chapter 286: Yunsheng

“……Su…the Su Family?”

Catching the words in Li Yunsheng’s statement, Su Wanli silently widened her eyes.

Li Yunsheng shrugged and gave Su Wanli a strange look.

“That’s right, the South City Su Family. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of them.”

Without dwelling on the peculiar expression on Su Wanli’s face, Li Yunsheng let out a light sigh and shook her head in a deliberately carefree tone.

“But look on the bright side—this place will probably be turned into a big shopping mall, right? Life will definitely be more convenient then. The only thing is, I won’t know where to set off these fireworks anymore.”

Su Wanli instinctively opened her mouth to say something.

Just then, a cool hand gently pressed against her lips.

Meng Wange shook her head slightly at Su Wanli, then calmly looked at the female shopkeeper in front of her and said softly:

“Sister Yunsheng, the reason you’ve been insisting on not relocating—is it all for Zhang Sheng?”

“…Huh?”

Li Yunsheng’s body paused for a moment. She lifted her head in slight surprise, meeting Meng Wange’s clear and indifferent eyes.

“Hey, you little rascal. I wash your sheets for free, and here you are snooping around behind my back? Can a person even get a break in this world?”

Though her words were harsh, Li Yunsheng didn’t look particularly angry.

She hesitated for a while, then finally shook her head in helplessness.

“Sorry, we didn’t mean to pry into your business. We just wanted to understand a bit.”

Meng Wange explained softly:

“If it’s not too much trouble, could you tell us? The person others see… doesn’t seem to match the one we’ve met.”

“Alright, enough with the ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ There’s nothing I can’t talk about. Actually, if I don’t bring it up sometimes, I almost forget it myself.”

Li Yunsheng curled the corner of her mouth, then turned around. With her back to the wedding tree covered in prayer plaques, her gaze fell on the neatly arranged, colorful firework tubes on the beach.

“See those fireworks? I tell people I made them myself, but the truth is, they’re all her leftover stock. I don’t know how to make fireworks at all.”

“As you can see, Li Yunsheng has never been a polite person. Especially when I was young—even I thought I had a terrible temper. If I saw something I didn’t like, I’d call it out, not caring whose face I was stepping on.”

“Back then, Zhang Sheng and I entered the same competition. The instructor asked us to paint the theme ‘Life.’”

“I painted a huge ancient tree, every leaf, every line crystal clear. I thought for sure I’d take the championship. But that idiot Zhang Sheng just drew a cluster of fireworks shooting up into the sky, and she beat me.”

“I was furious. I started yelling at her in front of everyone, saying what the hell was that garbage she painted—empty, flashy, fleeting. Where was the beauty of life in that? And then you know what she said?”

“…She said, the meaning of life is to bloom? That a single instant of brilliance is the real eternity?”

“No, she wasn’t that artsy.”

Li Yunsheng shook her head quietly, then mimicked the tone of the person in her memory. She folded her arms and lifted her chin proudly.

“—She said, ‘Hmph, I’m the champion after all. Someone without imagination can take their silver medal and go cry somewhere else!’”

“I lost it. I threw my easel down in front of her, picked up her old paintings one by one, and started cursing them out. Then I scribbled all over the parts she did badly.”

As she said this, Li Yunsheng couldn’t help curling her lips.

“She didn’t stop me, but she didn’t stand around either. She just pulled my canvas over and started adding strokes to it.”

“In the end, the competition turned into us adding strokes to each other’s work. When we finished, we looked at each other’s paintings—completely messed up—and suddenly felt… it looked better than anything either of us had ever painted alone.”

While talking, she stepped on a wooden crate under the tree, climbed up lightly onto the branches, and fished out one plaque from the sea of wooden tags.

“Anyway, after that, we somehow ended up painting together all the time. But every time we finished a piece, we’d argue about the signature. Someone always felt they contributed more, or that their idea was more essential. We could never convince each other, so in the end we just used one combined pen name: ‘Yunsheng.’”

“She said the name ‘Yunsheng’ was good, that it represented our hometown. I said no way—it sounded like some local government institution, nothing to do with us. At the very least, we had to add the grass radical and the bamboo radical to represent both of our names.”

“But she absolutely refused. She thought using her own name was too flashy. In the end, only the ‘Yun’ character got the grass radical added. Of course, I still don’t understand how taking one character from her name is considered flashy.”

Li Yunsheng held up the plaque she’d found and gestured toward Su Wanli.

On it, in strokes that were either bold or restrained, were drawn a tall tree and a burst of fireworks. Beside them were written two names—

Li Yunsheng and Zhang Sheng.

“See? Like this. A lot of things happen without you even realizing it.”

“This person’s head was always full of fantasies, a real idealist. If she wanted to make a promise to paint together, she had to hang a plaque on this tree. If she wanted to watch a fireworks show every month, she had to make her own fireworks right here on the beach next to my inn.”

“Heh, the folks from Yunsheng County love a good crowd. When they saw us setting off fireworks here, they all came over to watch. More and more people gathered.”

“They even wanted to hang plaques on the tree with us. Back then the tree wasn’t this big. I was afraid the branches would break, so I said each plaque costs twenty yuan to hang. But that just made even more people want to hang plaques.”

“People from outside the county, even foreigners, came. In the end, we ended up with this tree.”

Li Yunsheng jumped down from the tree, dusted off her hands, and looked out at the endless sea.

“As for what happened later… you’ve probably heard, right? Zhang Sheng had always been frail. And every day she’d follow her father around, fiddling with gunpowder dust, making fireworks by hand. Eventually, her lungs gave out. She didn’t last more than a few years before she was gone.”

Even though Li Yunsheng spoke of death so lightly, a faint sadness welled up in Su Wanli’s heart.

She instinctively gripped Meng Wange’s hand and couldn’t help asking:

“…So then, because you were sad, you never painted again?”

“…Huh? Where’d you hear that? That’s not true. I’m not that sentimental.”

Li Yunsheng pulled out another cigarette from her pocket, lit it with a lighter, took a deep drag, and slowly exhaled a long white ring toward the orange sun sinking on the horizon.

“At least in the few years right after she died, I still tried to paint. It’s just that no one really wanted to look at my stuff anymore.”

As she spoke, she let out a self-deprecating laugh.

“I used to think I was a once-in-a-century genius, just like Zhang Sheng. But after she was gone, I realized I wasn’t all that. My ideas were ordinary, my technique mediocre.”

“Just like she once said—without Zhang Sheng’s imagination, my paintings were just a bunch of soulless lines. There was no point in continuing.”

“After a while, I had to find something to do. I tried to make fireworks like she did. But every time I started, her face from when she was dying would pop into my head, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“Back then, it was because Zhang Sheng personally designed the firework patterns that the Yunsheng Fireworks Festival was so lively and drew so many visitors. Without her, fewer and fewer people came. That’s only natural.”

The glow of the cigarette flickered in the darkening twilight, like the once brilliant fireworks, leaving behind only a faint warmth.

Li Yunsheng sighed quietly, then curled her fingers and tapped lightly on the towering tree behind her.

“Anyway, in the end, it’s just me left.”