Transmigration; A Mother's Redemption and a perfect Wife.-Chapter 360; Reading scripts 2

Jiang Yan spoke little. He worked in a study that always smelled faintly of ink and old rain. But he watched her. At dinner... At dusk.... Sometimes in reflection....

He watched her. Not with desire, at least not only that. With something else. Recognition, maybe. Or dread. Or hope.

Once, she caught him sketching something on old parchment, her silhouette standing by the window.

"Do you always draw your guests?" she asked softly.

He didn’t look up. "You’re not a guest."

Her breath caught. "Then what am I?"

He finally raised his gaze. "Someone who hasn’t left yet."

"Oh," Tang Fei breathed, her heart clenching. Someone who hasn’t left yet. Not someone who would stay. Not someone permanent. Just someone who was still there, temporarily solid, soon to become another outline in the garden. Another ghost to haunt these halls.

One night, unable to sleep, Lin Ruo followed the faint sound of a piano. The melody was low and trembling, like a heartbeat struggling to continue.

(Like a heartbeat struggling to continue...) Tang Fei unconsciously pressed her hand to her chest, feeling the steady rhythm there. This writer understood, truly understood, what it meant to feel life slipping away, to hear your own mortality in every sound.

She traced it down the corridor to a locked glass door leading to the garden. The key hung beside it.

Of course, the key was there. The door was locked, but not to keep her out. Only to keep the past in. To maintain the illusion that closed doors could contain grief.

The moment she turned it, the hinges moaned softly, and cold air rushed past her face.

Moonlight touched the flowers, pale and ghostly. The garden was alive in a way that felt wrong, too vibrant, too restless.

Too alive. In a house of the dying and the dead, the garden refused to fade. It thrived on neglect, grew wild on grief.

In the center stood a single stone bench. On it, a small, forgotten music box.

When she opened it, the same piano tune spilled out, soft, aching.

Then a whisper brushed her ear.

"You shouldn’t be here."

Tang Fei’s skin prickled with goosebumps.

She turned sharply, and Jiang Yan stood behind her, his expression unreadable.

"You’re shaking," he said quietly, stepping closer. "This place... it doesn’t like to be disturbed."

Her voice trembled. "Why did you lock it?"

He met her gaze. "Because she’s still here."

The revelation came gently, inevitably, like dawn after a long night. The first bride. The lake beyond the garden wall.

The drowning, whether accident or choice, is left beautifully ambiguous. A woman who planted roses and then chose water instead.

"You think she’s still here?" Lin Ruo asked softly.

"I don’t think," he murmured. "I know."

"Then why bring me here?"

He didn’t answer right away. Then, slowly, "Because when I saw you, I thought... maybe she sent you back."

Tang Fei’s eyes stung with the beginning of tears. Maybe she sent you back. As if the dead could reach across that impossible divide and offer him one more chance. One more woman to love and lose.

Or perhaps, perhaps this time, to save.

The middle section unfolded like a fever dream, Lin Ruo and Jiang Yan circling each other, growing closer not through passion but through shared understanding. Two people living in borrowed time, tending a garden that belonged to a ghost, learning to breathe in a house that had forgotten how.

Sometimes he would join her, quietly kneeling beside her as they pulled weeds together.

"Do you ever want to leave here?" she asked once.

He smiled faintly. "There’s nowhere else for me to go."

Tang Fei understood that too well. When you’ve built your entire life around loss, when grief has become your home’s foundation, where could you possibly go? What other life could you build?

One dawn, she wandered beyond the garden wall to the lake. The surface was perfectly still, reflecting her pale face, but then, another face appeared beside hers.

A woman with her eyes. Her smile.

Tang Fei leaned forward unconsciously, her breath shallow. The merging. Lin Ruo becomes the ghost, or the ghost becomes Lin Ruo. Boundaries dissolve like mist in morning light.

The image rippled away when Jiang Yan’s hand touched her shoulder.

"You shouldn’t look too long," he whispered. "The lake remembers faces."

"Whose does it remember more, hers or mine?" Lin Ruo asked.

He didn’t answer. His hand lingered a second too long.

The ending approached, and Tang Fei felt tears building behind her eyes, hot and insistent.

Her illness had worsened. The doctor who visited from town said she had only weeks to live. She didn’t cry. She only asked Jiang Yan for one thing, to open the garden completely.

He hesitated. "Why?"

"Because I want to see everything bloom once before I go."

To see everything bloom once before I go. Tang Fei’s vision blurred as tears finally spilled over.

That night, the two of them worked in silence, unlocking every gate, cutting every vine that held the garden shut.

By dawn, it was open. A soft breeze ran through it like breathing after years underwater.

"You did it," she whispered. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

We did, he wanted to say, but the words caught in his throat.

A week later, he found her on the bench, the music box still turning faintly beside her hand. Her eyes were closed, her lips curved in a peaceful line.

The roses around her were in full bloom.

Tang Fei’s tears fell freely now, dripping onto her laptop keyboard, but she didn’t care. Didn’t even notice.

He knelt beside her, his voice trembling for the first time. "You came to set her free, didn’t you?"

The music box wound down, and the garden fell silent.

Not just Lin Ruo’s death... Liberation. For the first bride, trapped in the garden’s memory. For Jiang Yan, trapped in his guilt and grief. For Lin Ruo herself, trapped in a dying body that had never felt like home.