My Dearest General: It Has Always Been You

He wanted to mend their relationship, but the more he tried, the messier it became. No matter how patient he was, he would also be tired one day. Right now, he was already on the brink of collapse. He couldn't bear another unreasonable tantrum of Guan Xiaoxiao anymore.

Their relationship became strained even when Jiang Jinyan turned five. Guan Xiaoxiao's mental state wasn't improving so Jiang Huocheng tried to invite a psychologist for her but she threw another tantrum and said that she wasn't crazy, that Jiang Huocheng was only doing it to get rid of her.

Jiang Huocheng was afraid that her current violent state would harm Jiang Jinyan, thus he tried to separate them as much as possible. He brought Jiang Jinyan to work and let him play in his office. Fortunately, Jiang Jinyan was a quiet and sensible child. Even at such a young age, he seldom cried for his mother.

The accumulated negativity thickened in their family until one day, it burst out in the point of no return. Jiang Huocheng was on a business trip abroad and he left Jiang Jinyan in the house with the nanny. He repeatedly warned the nanny to keep an eye on the interaction between mother and son and kept Jiang Jinyan away if there's something wrong with Guan Xiaoxiao.

However, he hadn't left for two days when Guan Xiaoxiao called. Her voice was shrill and shaking and it was evident that she wasn't in the right mind. "Huocheng, where are you? Why aren't you coming home?"

Jiang Huocheng paused the meeting and went to the desolate area to answer. "Xiaoxiao, I am on a business trip. Be good. I will come home the day after tomorrow."

In the background, there was the faint sound of Jiang Jinyan crying. Jiang Huocheng's heart jerked and he had an ominous premonition. "Xiaoxiao, what happened? Why is Jinyan crying?" As far as Jiang Huocheng remembered, his son wasn't a crybaby. He wouldn't even cry when he fell and bled, and he would only purse his lips grumpily when his wish wasn't fulfilled.

His son was crying so heartbreakingly and it was getting louder and louder.

"Xiaoxiao!"

Guan Xiaoxiao's voice came through. "Come, Jinyan. Talk to your daddy."

"Daddy…" Jiang Jinyan's milky and childish voice travelled into his ears. "Daddy, I want you…wuwuwu...daddy, it hurts…"

Jiang Huocheng gripped the phone so tight that his knuckles turned white. "Guan Xiaoxiao! What are you doing to Jinyan?! Where is the nanny?!"

Guan Xiaoxiao laughed crazily. "If you don't return, see if you can meet me and your son ever again!" Then, she hung up right there and then.

Jiang Huocheng blacked out and he almost had another bout of heart attack. He dropped everything, even the contact which was on the verge of finalization, and returned to find Guan Xiaoxiao became crazier than he thought.

She locked the nanny in Jiang Jinyan's room and threatened Jiang Jinyan to call him, even to the point of hurting him. When Jiang Huocheng snatched his son from Guan Xiaoxiao, Jiang Jinyan had fainted due to a high fever and blood was flowing nonstop from his arm. In the end, he had to receive ten stitches along his forearms.

Such an ugly scar on the smooth jade skin. Such a huge wound on a kid.

He was only five years old…

Jiang Huocheng felt like he couldn't go on any longer and proposed a divorce. "I can take Jinyan away with me and I will support you. I can even return Guan Empire to you. But Xiaoxiao…I can't." A drop of tear slid down Jiang Huocheng's cheek. "I can't go on any longer…"

It was the first time in Jiang Huocheng's life where he felt so helpless and sad. He buried his face in his palm and cried, his shoulder shaking incessantly. The business mogul, the cold and mighty Jiang Huocheng, at that time, broke down in front of his wife as he wept.

Guan Xiaoxiao went insane, even threatening to kill herself. Jiang Huocheng had no choice but to send her to the psychiatrist ward because her mind truly wasn't normal anymore. The test result came out quickly; she had a few symptoms of schizophrenia and a severe case of paranoia.

His wife's mind wasn't well so Jiang Huocheng couldn't file a divorce. Jiang Huocheng accepted it fairly well and paid the hospital, trying to get them to cure Guan Xiaoxiao. Even at this moment, he still held a sliver of hope that Guan Xiaoxiao could recover to the state she was in before.

In the hospital, Guan Xiaoxiao became more manic. She demanded to see Jiang Huocheng everytime, crying that he didn't want her anymore, that he was already tired of her, that he had never loved her like she loved him.

In this life, there would never be a prince and there wasn't a princess in the ivory tower either. She held too much expectation in fairy tales that in the end, she couldn't accept the slightest bit of stain in reality. The perfect imagination compared to the bitter reality had distorted Guan Xiaoxiao's mind.

Guan Xiaoxiao did everything she could. She stopped eating, creating a huge ruckus, crying hysterically, rejecting everyone and even hurting the medical personnel. Jiang Huocheng visited her almost everyday but slowly, he couldn't bear to see her like this. During the three years that she was treated in the hospital, Jiang Huocheng had already had two heart attacks, one was more dangerous than before.

First was when Guan Xiaoxiao was diagnosed with severe mental illness and the second…was when she committed suicide by banging her head into the wall. Guan Xiaoxiao got into a week-long coma and survived miraculously.

Alas, when she woke up, her mind had regressed and she returned to the sixteen years old Guan Xiaoxiao when they first met. The doctor gave Jiang Huocheng the most reasonable explanation, "The pressure is too hard for her to bear and her mind collapses. So, the brain turned on the self defense mechanism and she reverted into the state when she was the happiest to protect herself."

The happiest…

Jiang Huocheng listened to the doctor with a bitter laugh. The initial happiness had led to a bottomless cliff in the end. Was it really the happiest moment? If…If that year, Guan Xiaoxiao never met him, would she be better?

It wasn't only Guan Xiaoxiao who was sick, but Jiang Huocheng also suffered from a great psychological shadow after the incident. He gradually turned into a cold, weary and hard hearted man. In a few months after Guan Xiaoxiao's suicide, he even suffered from severe insomnia to the point of hallucination.

If he was with Guan Xiaoxiao, he would always remember the look she gave him the last time. It would haunt him everyday, suffocate him so much that he couldn't breathe.

Thus…Jiang Huocheng chose to hide this weakness of his deep inside his heart and locked it with a key that, possibly, could never be opened anymore.

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A/N: so, in the end, whose fault is it? Guan Xiaoxiao, who was so protected by her parents that she became too fragile to bear the difference between expectation and reality? Or Jiang Huocheng, who tried hard to balance work and family but ended up almost sacrificing both? Or...author who created them? (nuu the third isn't a choice lol)

The moral in this chappie was....don't set your expectation too high in every aspect of life QAQ and def not your taste in spouse because you read too much webnovels hehehe.