Back Then, I Adored You

Gu Yusheng kept staring at the night sky, but after he directed his question to her, his look became extraordinarily solemn. He continued to say in a particularly clear, low, and powerful voice, “I have a patriotic dream.”

He brought the cigarette to his mouth, sucked it very slowly, and blew out a smoke ring, then repeated with a very serious look, “A dream to defend every inch of this land with my flesh and blood.”

After a pause, for he was probably afraid that she could not understand, he changed his explanation. “That is, to safeguard our country with my life.”

When Gu Yusheng asked Qin Zhi’ai if she knew his dream, various kinds of dreams had flashed through her mind.

To study at Harvard, to be a great scientist, or to be the youngest and most promising figure in the business field… but she had never thought that his dream would be to defend every inch of the land with his flesh and blood and to safeguard the country with his life.

Perhaps because he had said three sentences in a row with no response from Qin Zhi’ai, he turned his head to look at her. When he saw her staring at him in a daze, he was astonished and looked back at her for a long time. He suddenly recovered when the cigarette ash dropped on his face, then he wiped his face clumsily, moved his eyes away from her, and cleared his throat, saying, “I want to be a soldier on the frontier, to protect our motherland like the soldiers did in the anti-terrorist documentary we watched at school.”

Qin Zhi’ai had watched the documentary before.

Defusing a time bomb in thirty seconds, fighting dauntlessly with armed terrorists, going on patrols where men were chopped up by criminals and died in the hospital… In the documentary, every word the soldiers said before a mission were their last words, because the people that smiled one second could die the next at any time during their mission.

They really were risking their lives to defend the country.

Gu Yusheng told her a lot about this dream.

He said that he wanted to protect the motherland from the invasions of other countries.

He also said that the peace of the country needed to be paid for, the price was lives, and he was willing to dedicate his life to this land.

At that moment, seeing him talking about his dream that seriously, Qin Zhi’ai felt like the blood all over her body was boiling.

She had never imagined that such a patriotic dream would exist in the heart of a boy who looked so elegant, always said dirty words, and pretended not to care about his father’s domestic violence.