Transmigration; Married to My Ex-Fiancé's Uncle

Chapter 475;Lin Shuyin

lay cold.And for the first time—

Lu Yuze did not reach for control.

Did not speak.

Did not command.

Because there was nothing left—

to control.

---

No one expected what he did next.

They expected a funeral. A burial. An ending. Black clothes and bowed heads, incense smoke curling toward a cold sky, words spoken over fresh earth.

Lu Yuze did none of it.

The house had already fallen into mourning—servants moving in hushed silence, curtains drawn against the daylight, meals left untouched—but he refused to let it settle into finality.

"She is not gone."

That was all he said.

Not loudly. Not emotionally. But with a certainty that left no room for argument, no space for the soft reassurances of those who had already accepted loss.

Within days, the lower east wing of the mansion was sealed off.

No servants allowed. No unnecessary entry. Only those he permitted—a handful of trusted staff, the medical team he retained, and himself.

The room was rebuilt.

Not as a bedroom. Not as a memorial.

But as something closer to a preservation chamber.

The temperature was lowered deliberately, controlled to a precise, unnatural cold—not enough to damage, but enough to halt decay, to press pause on the body’s slow surrender. The air was purified, filtered, sealed, scrubbed of dust and pollen and every trace of the living world.

Every inch of the space was designed to resist time itself.

At the center—

rested the coffin.

It was carved from jade. Not decorative jade, not the pale, translucent stone used for trinkets and ornaments. This was rare, dense, ancient—a material with a faint, natural glow when light touched it, the kind of stone that ancient texts had once described as capable of preserving essence, of holding energy, of resisting corruption.

The lid was not fully closed.

Because he refused to seal her away.

Shuyin lay within it.

Dressed simply—white silk, unadorned, elegant in its restraint. Her hands were folded at her sides. Her hair, dark and shining, framed her face. Her expression was peaceful, unchanged, as if she were merely sleeping.

Not a trace of violence. Not a mark of struggle.

Just stillness.

The cold kept her skin unchanged, her features untouched by time.

Her presence... almost there. As though the room itself remembered her.

Lu Yuze stood beside her more often than anyone realized.

Sometimes for minutes. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes through entire nights, the only light the soft glow of the jade and the faint gleam of monitors recording a body that still refused to decay.

"She will return."

He said it once to Qiao. Not as hope. As fact.

Qiao did not argue. Because she had seen too much—in life, in boardrooms, in the quiet spaces between life and death—to dismiss the possibility entirely.

But even she did not fully understand what he was waiting for.

Madam Su could not enter the room for long.

It broke something in her to see her daughter like that—not gone, but not here. The stillness, the cold, the jade—it was too close to a tomb, but without the mercy of closure.

The children were not allowed inside.

Not yet.

They were told—carefully—that their mother was "resting." Waiting.

Tank, Razor, and Blade knew better. They had seen death before. They recognized its shape, its silence, its finality.

But even they did not challenge him.

Because the man standing in that room was not someone to oppose. Not in this.

The twins were kept upstairs.

Alive. Growing. Their small cries echoed through the mansion at odd hours, a reminder that life continued—stubbornly, inexplicably—even in the shadow of stillness.

Their presence was the only contradiction to the cold below.

Sometimes—

when the house was quiet, when the night had deepened and the corridors lay empty—

the air in that cold room would shift.

Barely.

Like something unseen brushing past. Like a breath that didn’t belong to anyone present. Like fingers ghosting across the surface of the jade.

Lu Yuze noticed.

Of course he noticed.

He noticed everything—the way the light fell across her face at different hours, the faint hum of the preservation systems, the subtle changes in air pressure that no one else would have registered.

He never called it imagination.

Never dismissed it.

Never questioned it.

Because he had already decided—

she was not gone.

And until proven otherwise—

he would wait.

The jade coffin remained.

The room remained sealed in cold.

Time moved everywhere else—through the mansion’s halls, through the city’s streets, through the lives of the children who grew taller, the twins who learned to smile, the staff who came and went.

But not there.

Not in that room.

Because in that room—

Lu Yuze had declared war against time itself.

And he did not intend to lose.

---

The room remained sealed.

Cold.

Unchanging.

Beyond the walls of the mansion, time moved forward without hesitation. Days passed. Weeks followed. The world adjusted, as it always did—markets shifted, seasons turned, people forgot.

But not here.

Not in this room.

At the center of the silence, the jade coffin rested.

Untouched. Unmoved. Unaccepted.

Shuyin lay within it, her expression calm, her body preserved as though sleep had simply stretched longer than it should have. No decay. No distortion. No surrender to time.

Lu Yuze stood beside her.

As he had every day.

As he would continue to.

He did not speak. Not anymore. There were no words left that mattered—no prayers, no pleas, no denial. Only presence.

They had told him to let go. Told him she was gone. Told him the body was nothing more than what remained, that holding on would only prolong the pain.

He had listened.

And dismissed every word.

"She will return."

He had said it once, months ago, in a voice that allowed no argument.

He did not repeat it again.

Because belief did not require repetition.

The room held its silence.

The air remained cold—crisp, sterile, untouched by the warmth of the living world above.

The jade remained still, its faint glow steady as a heartbeat.

And yet—

nothing in that space felt empty.

Because absence was not what lingered there.

Something else did.

Not movement. Not breath. Not life—

not yet.

But something that refused to disappear. Something that pressed against the edges of the stillness, waiting for a door to open, waiting for time to bend, waiting for whatever had been paused to resume.

Lu Yuze reached out, his fingers brushing lightly against the edge of the jade.

Not opening it.

Not disturbing it.

Just there.

Just present.

Waiting.

And the room—

silent as it was—

did not feel like an ending.

It felt like something that had paused...

before continuing.

*******END*****