An 80s female translator was spoiled rotten by a rough and jealous man.

Chapter 336 Chasing Men (Part 2)
The light in the first-floor storage room broke down sometime ago; I guess no one noticed and therefore no one came to fix it.

The room wasn't well-positioned, with only a small window. At this hour, the sun was shining from the opposite direction, so the light filtering in was sparse and dim, making the room generally dark. Meng Youyou turned on her phone's built-in flashlight and rummaged through boxes and cabinets, searching for what she wanted.

After searching for a while without finding the curtain, Meng Youyou slammed the cabinet door shut with a thud. The metal clattered against the metal, and her temper flared up all at once. She cursed, "You dog of a man! You bastard! You have time to sit and chat with a beautiful woman for an hour, but no time to reply to my messages!"

"You wait! I'm going to report you for handling personal matters during work hours!"

"Can't you tell I'm angry? You bastard!"

Cursing at thin air wasn't enough to vent her anger. Meng Youyou snorted and typed furiously on her phone screen: "Huo Qingshan, you bastard!"

Staring at the successfully sent green bubble for a long time, the girl suddenly fell into an eerie silence. She casually pulled up a chair nearby and sat down, completely unaware that the chair was covered with a thick layer of dust.

"Meng Youyou, what's there to be angry about?" another voice said to herself in her heart.

You were the one who decided not to tell him about your past, but now you can't switch roles or adjust your mindset—you can't accept his distant attitude; you can't stand that he's right next to you, always in your sight, yet you're like a dull, lifeless tree; Meng Youyou dislikes the still, watery eyes he looks at her.

Why do people always want both?
What a contradiction.

...

The document lay open on the desk. More than ten minutes passed, and the man hadn't turned a single page. He couldn't read a single word of the dense text on the paper. He tried several times to concentrate and not let his mind wander, but all his efforts were in vain.

Huo Qingshan realized acutely that if he didn't do something, he would have no chance of concentrating on his work in the coming days. He sighed inwardly, turned and opened a drawer, took out his phone, unlocked it, and opened WeChat. The last message displayed in the chat was from her sent early last night: "Someone isn't replying to my messages, I'm so sad!"

The man stared at the sentence for a few seconds, and the girl's look at him before she left the elevator hall immediately came to mind.

A surge of agitation rose within him, and his fingers, before he could think, touched the keyboard and began typing: "It's not what you think about her, don't misunderstand, I..."

Huo Qingshan didn't know why he was explaining these things to the other person. If he hadn't explained, a problem that had been troubling him might have simply disappeared after today, finally resolved once and for all. He should have felt relieved, but that wasn't the case.

Reason reminded him that his current actions were essentially creating unnecessary complications. He couldn't understand it, couldn't make sense of it, and couldn't find a reasonable justification for this superfluous behavior, but he was still doing it and hadn't stopped.

How weird!
After he finally managed to edit a complete text, the man looked at it again and again, seemingly feeling that something was wrong, so he deleted it, retyped it, and went on and on, not knowing what to send.

The first phone call Qin Yuan made to him was on the fifth day after Huo Qingshan woke up, and it was a transoceanic call.

On the phone, she spoke at length, first expressing her joy and excitement at hearing of his awakening, then circling back to many other things, her words carrying a hidden meaning, yet her true intention remained unclear. Huo Qingshan, bewildered, interrupted her helplessly, saying, "Excuse me, I have amnesia. May I ask who you are?"

There was a full half-minute of silence on the other end of the phone before the woman spoke again: "Qingshan, you're blaming me, aren't you?"

The man frowned upon hearing this, and the other person seemed not to believe what he was saying, so Huo Qingshan had no choice but to emphasize again: "I really have amnesia."

After hanging up the phone, Huo Qingshan asked Xiao Li, who had come to deliver the food, "Do you know someone named Qin Yuan?"

Xiao Li scratched his head and thought for a long time, "This name sounds familiar, but I can't remember who it is for the time being."

A week later, the man was exercising in the hospital's small square when a girl suddenly appeared and hugged him. Huo Qingshan briefly suspected that the girl in his arms might be Qin Yuan. However, this connection only lasted for a short while before she spoke; the two distinctly different voices immediately dispelled any such speculation.

Until one day, when the regimental commander and his wife came to visit him in the hospital, Huo Qingshan heard the name again from the regimental commander's wife.

In the ward, the previous topic had just ended when the regimental commander gave his wife a look. The regimental commander's wife spoke up somewhat embarrassedly: "Qingshan, I've always felt bad about what happened between you and Qin Yuan. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to you."

Qin Yuan was the daughter of a friend of the regimental commander's wife. Once, when the mother and daughter visited, they happened to see the regimental commander leading "Huo Qingshan" into the house for a meal. The handsome man and beautiful woman had met briefly at the dinner table, and from then on, Qin Yuan had a crush on him. She asked her mother to ask her old friend to introduce them.

Under pressure from his wife, the regimental commander repeatedly urged Huo Qingshan to go on blind dates, criticizing him for being too old and not spending all his time in the barracks doing work; it was time for him to devote some energy to settling down. Thus, the two initially went on a few dates arranged by their superiors and elders, and reportedly got along well. Of course, Huo Qingshan couldn't grasp the specific meaning behind such a vague and broad term as "getting along well" from others' descriptions.

Later on, their private contact became increasingly close. Although they didn't make a big fuss and not many people around them knew about it, since there was still no conclusion, it was generally going smoothly and steadily developing in the direction they both knew in their hearts.

If nothing unexpected happened, it was only a matter of time before the two of them got together. But reality was not so kind. Huo Qingshan had an accident during a mission and fell into a coma, becoming a vegetable. He lay in the hospital for a year and a half without showing any signs of waking up.

Two months into Huo Qingshan's post-operative coma, Qin Yuan's department issued a notice to select staff for overseas training, a rare opportunity, and Qin Yuan submitted her application. Whether there were any difficult moments during the entire process from application to the final selection list, only she knows; others have no way of knowing, only seeing the result.

As a result, in the third month after Huo Qingshan fell into a coma, Qin Yuan boarded a plane to Germany.

There's really nothing to blame them for. Neither of them is married, so strictly speaking, they're not even a couple. It's perfectly normal for one of them to choose to pursue a bright future.

However... today, when Qin Yuan came to see him, she talked about a lot of random things as usual, recounting the little things from their past dates, and saying that the gift he gave her was taken to Germany and placed on the bedside table in the bedroom, keeping her company day and night.

It's not hard to guess the woman's intention: she wants to rekindle their relationship, but she's unwilling to say it directly, perhaps out of pride. She mostly conveys the message with affectionate eyes, hesitant to speak her mind.

Huo Qingshan listened patiently throughout, without offering any opinions rashly. Initially, he couldn't judge how that man would choose in the same situation—would he forgive and accept? Cripple out? Or something else… Therefore, Huo Qingshan was particularly cautious about this, subconsciously believing that this wasn't something he could decide alone. In fact, regarding the choice in this relationship, he was more like an "outsider."

But as he listened, the man gradually formed a judgment in his mind. The instant the woman's slender fingers suddenly reached out to him, he withdrew his hand without hesitation. Huo Qingshan asked her indifferently, "Miss Qin, do you really love him?"

Before the other person could answer, or even give them time to react to why he used "he" as a pronoun, he continued, "I really don't remember what happened in the past, and to be honest, I'm not really qualified to talk about topics related to love, but..." He paused, then stated in a low voice, "I can't see a single bit of pure love in your eyes."

Qin Yuan's eyes were too insincere. Huo Qingshan vaguely felt that loving someone shouldn't be like this. The corresponding reasoning process was rather vague, intricate, and illogical, but the conclusion was clear enough. So, he simply spoke frankly.

Huo Qingshan wouldn't dare claim to understand love; in fact, he had virtually no knowledge of it, let alone any right to speak on the subject. He also lacked the logical reasoning to explain why he viewed the woman before him in this way.
But this realization just popped into her head out of nowhere—that Qin Yuan didn't love "him." Maybe there was some affection involved, after all, her gentle and tender demeanor was so deceptive that Huo Qingshan couldn't discern how much genuine feeling and how much artifice was in the first half hour after sitting down. But this affection was mixed with too many objective factors and preconditions, which she could control with ease.

The man stood up from the sofa: "So, Miss Qin, please leave." With that, Huo Qingshan strode out of the lounge area.

As the sun gradually moved westward, its light slowly sank, and a long, narrow golden ribbon cut diagonally into the office through the glass window, moving slowly along the desk.

The man sat at the table, head down, his backlit profile drawing out a sharp, undulating line, like a geometric cut. His high nose was illuminated, and the shadow of his brow bone pressed against his eye sockets, making his eyes appear even darker.

"Don't overthink it, she and I are just..." After typing this, the man pressed and held down the delete key, deleting the entire text box.

It seemed that no matter how he explained, it would only fuel more speculation, and he feared that he would only make things worse. Just as he was hesitating, a new message suddenly popped up on the left side of the screen: "Huo Qingshan, you bastard!"

Immediately afterwards, another message popped up: "I hate you!"

The man's heart tightened instantly, and his fingers flew across the keyboard. Only when he clicked send did Huo Qingshan truly see what he had hastily typed: "I don't like her."

Why did he say such a thing to her? The die was cast, and Huo Qingshan had no intention of taking it back; he only belatedly asked himself this question.

This sounded more like a hasty, unthinking remark from the bottom of his heart, perhaps the very thing he truly wanted to say. It was the epitome of "truth"—so real that Huo Qingshan dared not delve into its deeper meaning.

The moment the message was sent, a feeling of complete comfort welled up inside me. It was hard to describe, like a bloated mass of stale air in my chest that had finally been partially expelled. It was a temporary fix, but the immediate and intense sensory experience of comfort was so direct and strong that it naturally made me yearn for it.

This reminded the man of the frustration he felt when he woke up in the morning, turned on his phone, and saw several unread messages from her. After reading them all, Huo Qingshan calmly chose to ignore them, not respond, or reply. This feeling was in stark contrast to his current state.

People often feel depressed and unhappy when they do things against their will. Regardless of whether she sent him a message saying "I hate him," from the moment he took his phone out of his desk drawer in a fit of rage and opened the chat window, he would send her a message explaining that this was bound to happen.

If it wasn't this sentence, it would be something else. Is there a difference? Perhaps. But is the difference significant? Not really, the essence is the same: he doesn't want her to be unhappy, and he cares that she dislikes him. Huo Qingshan couldn't deny it.