Kill The Marriage Chapter 14

Chapter 14: Flesh and Blood

“Because you, too, want to kill this damn marriage.”

After grinding out that sentence through clenched teeth, Zhang Qingyuan completely abandoned all his reservations.

“Captain Ren, from the first time I saw your speech, I knew you were one of us.”

His lips twisted into a painful, distorted smile. “We want to attack this idiotic big data compulsory matching system and make all these forced marriages crumble to dust.”

“Are you insane?”

Even Ren Zhong couldn’t hide the shock on his face.

“Insane?” Zhang Qingyuan actually laughed out loud, his body trembling with the effort. “Being forced into marriage with our heads pushed down, how could we not go insane?”

He threw caution to the wind, his face flushing bright red. “Captain, ask yourself: do you want to get married? Being matched to a complete stranger by some inexplicable system, doomed to be a slave to a family for the rest of your life—do you want that?”

Ren Zhong didn’t reply.

“If you don’t want it, do you think others do?” Zhang Qingyuan demanded. “Every Omega over the age of sixteen is forced to undergo matching and marriage as soon as their glands mature. Sixteen! They are only sixteen! How is this any different from the feudal era?”

Ren Zhong’s attitude remained cold. “You are an Alpha, a beneficiary of this system. What do you have to be dissatisfied about? As someone born with privilege and favored by the rules, you have no reason to give up the benefits you receive.”

He still heavily suspected that the man in front of him was mostly just putting on an act.

“I am an Alpha, but I am also human!”

Zhang Qingyuan was trembling, whether from the pain or his intense emotions.

“In middle school and high school, I had an Omega friend I was very close to. He was a figure skater. To overcome the physical changes of puberty, he trained incredibly hard, pouring his blood, sweat, and tears into it. He said he wanted to win glory for our country; he wanted to stand on the highest podium.”

Zhang Qingyuan’s eyes grew red. “But, just when he had finally stabilized his condition and successfully mastered highly difficult technical moves, what greeted him wasn’t the glory of the competition arena, but a compulsory marriage notice. He never stepped onto the ice again.”

“Take a guess, what was he like when I saw him next?” Zhang Qingyuan’s eyes looked somewhat hollow. “He collapsed on the way to the hospital, his pants soaked in blood. Because he had to go to the hospital for surgery and couldn’t look after the kids, his Alpha husband was verbally abusing him over the phone.”

The reason he needed medical attention was that his husband had shoved a foreign object into his reproductive cavity and shattered it inside. The sharp shards slashed his insides, causing unstoppable bleeding, forcing him to undergo surgery to extract the debris and repair the cavity.

“Every step he took toward the hospital left a trail of blood.”

Zhang Qingyuan’s lips quivered.

“Not a single taxi driver was willing to take him, afraid his blood would ruin their seats. His husband didn’t give him any money, and he didn’t dare call an ambulance, so he had to walk, step by step. If I hadn’t given him a ride, he wouldn’t have even made it.”

The high-spirited, light-footed, and powerfully muscled genius athlete from Zhang Qingyuan’s memories had ceased to exist. In three years, he had given birth twice, the second time to twins. The frequent pregnancies and nursing had entirely drained his spirit and his life force.

So much so that when Zhang Qingyuan helped him into the car, he hadn’t even recognized him.

“He wasn’t allowed to have sexual relations for thirty days post-surgery. The hospital issued a medical certificate, and even the Marriage Monitoring Center approved his leave of absence. But the animal he was matched with raped him again just three days after the operation!”

The resulting infection of his surgical wounds caused him to permanently lose his reproductive cavity and a portion of his intestines.

Zhang Qingyuan tightly clenched his throbbing hands. “I have flesh and blood, and I have a heart too!”

“What if it were you? Captain.”

He raised his tear-glistening eyes and stared straight at Ren Zhong.

“If you hadn’t been admitted to the military academy at fifteen, if you hadn’t joined the special forces at eighteen, if you hadn’t participated in special border missions at twenty… If none of these things that allowed you to apply for a marriage delay had happened, where would you be right now?”

Ren Zhong lowered his eyes.

He was thinking.

Striking while the iron was hot, Zhang Qingyuan added, “Aren’t all the efforts you’ve made, Captain, just an attempt to delay this shackle—this chain that destroys every possibility in your future—from locking around your neck for just a little bit longer?”

After a long silence, Ren Zhong finally spoke.

“I understand everything you’re saying, but I do not agree with your methods.”

He backed his wheelchair up slightly, easing his looming presence over Zhang Qingyuan. “You can use more legal, rational means to achieve your goals, rather than…”

“That would be too late!” Zhang Qingyuan practically roared.

With that furious shout, he tried to prop his body up, but the searing pain forced him to collapse back into the corner. He choked on his own breath and began coughing violently.

“Over the past twenty years, the compulsory matching policies have been amended and changed time and time again, and every single time it just gets worse! Despite massive public opposition, the Marriage Monitoring Center was still established, and getting a divorce became even harder. Starting this year, even getting an abortion is considered illegal!”

Zhang Qingyuan coughed twice before forcibly suppressing the rest of the spasms in his lungs.

“How long are you supposed to wait? Wait until you’ve given birth to three or four kids for your matched partner, lost your health, lost your rank, and lost the prime years of your career development—and then the compulsory marriage policy is finally abolished by a vote? What use would that be to you then?!”

Trying to dismantle compulsory matching through “righteous” channels meant doing nothing but waiting.

Waiting for public outrage to peak, waiting for endless layers of bureaucratic approvals, waiting for arguments presented at national conferences, waiting through the despair of repeated failures.

“It’s exactly like that writer said. If you say this room is too dark and you want to open a window, they will never agree. It’s only when you threaten to tear off the roof, making them panic and fear, that they’ll be forced to let you open a window.”

Zhang Qingyuan had exhausted all his strength, leaning weakly against the wall.

“I refuse to be part of a generation doomed to be sacrificed. I refuse.”

He tilted his head back and closed his eyes.

“Captain Ren, I know a soldier’s bounden duty is to obey orders; you are the violent enforcement machine of the state. You have always stood on the side of the military to protect the country. But what about you? What about your will as the independent individual ‘Ren Zhong’?”

He asked, “Ren Zhong, have you truly never, not even for a single moment in your life, wanted to fight for yourself?”

“How could I not have?” Ren Zhong raised his voice. “From the moment my glands matured at sixteen, everything I’ve done has been a rebellion against this f*cked-up marriage system.”

Zhang Qingyuan scoffed, “But you still ended up forced to marry me, didn’t you? You still ended up choosing someone you had never even met to be your husband, and you still had to perform how much you enjoyed being topped by me in front of an Artificial Idiot’s camera, didn’t you?”

Thud!

Ren Zhong’s wheelchair surged forward. He grabbed Zhang Qingyuan by the collar, hauled him up, and slammed him heavily against the wall. “Zhang Qingyuan, you’re a smart man. You should know that provoking me serves absolutely no purpose for you.”

“How does it serve no purpose?”

Zhang Qingyuan narrowed his eyes, staring at Ren Zhong’s arm, where muscles and veins bulged with power. “Your strength comes from your anger. The more furious you are, the more you want to smash the rules and cages binding you, the more you want to beat down the people trying to tell you what to do. Isn’t that right?”

He looked at Ren Zhong and said flatly, gently, “Even a cornered rabbit will bite. You, Ren Zhong, are a man of iron will. How could you possibly lack the strength to kill a single matched marriage?”