Ficorpio
Chapter 1
I was a professional Pana Tarot reader. At a gathering, my husband’s coworker asked me to read her love prospects, but my husband suddenly panicked.
“You’re always saying ridiculous things. You’ll scare her half to death!”
The Pana Tarot deck was already spread across the table. His coworker had turned over several cards herself.
I studied the cards and answered honestly.
“The man is strikingly handsome and a senior executive at his company. But he already has a family.”
The coworker’s eyes drifted toward my husband.
“Then will we ever have a future?”
Ethan’s breath caught.
I deliberately curled my lips into a faint smile.
“No. You won’t. And if you insist on being together, it will end very badly.”
Our relaxed weekend gathering instantly turned tense.
Several of the men looked at me as though I were a fire extinguisher, desperate for me to say something comforting.
“What do you mean, ‘end badly’? Why are you scaring our project team’s lucky charm like that?”
“Mrs. Sterling, this is where you went too far. Everyone knows Pana Tarot cards don’t decide life and death. Say something nice and fix this!”
I ignored them.
Picking up my chopsticks, I served myself a piece of pork rib, tender enough to fall apart beneath its crisp, fragrant crust.
Today was my third wedding anniversary with Ethan.
I had spent the entire afternoon preparing this meal. I had started cooking at one, and even the soup had been simmering for three hours.
A week ago, Ethan had promised he would clear his schedule and spend the day celebrating our anniversary with me.
I had waited for him to come home, full of anticipation.
Then the door opened.
He came in with the members of his project team, all of them laughing and talking over one another.
The anniversary we had planned had become a victory dinner for his team.
When it became clear I had no intention of speaking, his coworkers turned to Ethan for help.
“Boss! You can’t cover for her this time! You have to take a drink for our sister-in-law!”
I glanced at Ethan.
Despite his carefully maintained composure, his eyes drifted toward Vivian in the corner, where she was crying so hard her eyes had gone red and swollen.
When he finally looked back at me, his expression had returned to its usual cool rationality.
“Pana Tarot is merely a Western method of using the stars to predict the weather. It’s nowhere near as accurate as our Four Pillars birth-chart readings. And besides, you can’t go around talking about fate. Once you say it out loud, you ruin it. It won’t work anymore.”
He paused, then continued in that same measured tone.
“Although Claire is my wife, I’ve always been objective and fair. She was clearly in the wrong this time, so I’ll take a drink in her place.”
Ethan had gastritis. I’d made him give up alcohol for six months.
But the moment he saw Vivian’s bloodshot eyes, he tightened his grip around the glass and swallowed the entire drink without hesitation.
Chapter 2
As the liquor slid down his throat, the chill in my heart deepened.
There was clearly no reason to continue this dinner.
But the more Vivian wiped at her tears, the more they fell.
“I have no right to blame Claire,” she said. “I heard she used to be a Pana Tarot livestreamer. She couldn’t possibly have gotten the reading wrong.”
She sniffled, then raised her tear-filled eyes to Ethan.
After what seemed like a painful struggle, she finally made up her mind.
“I’ll listen to her. I’ll cut things off with that man completely.”
After the gathering ended, the table was covered with half-eaten dishes and scraps, an almost perfect reflection of the anniversary someone had forgotten.
Ethan, who usually cleared the table without being asked, seemed to have had a sudden change of heart.
He walked toward me.
As always, his tone was excessively rational.
“I know today is our anniversary.
“If you deliberately picked the weakest person in my team to bully simply because I broke the promise between us, then whatever apology and guilt I felt toward you are gone now.”
When he finished, he lit a cigarette and went out onto the balcony, smoking one after another.
Through the glass door, I saw the message history on his phone.
“She can’t read accurately. You don’t need to listen to her.”
I watched him for a long time—so long that I lost myself in the sight of him.
That face of his…
I had once planned to love it for the rest of my life.
From the moment I was born, my birth mother didn’t want me.
The foster parents who took me in raised me until I was five. Then they had a child of their own—and abandoned me too.
The traffickers who kidnapped me were caught by the police in the second month after they took me, and their hideout was shut down.
After that, I finally managed to manipulate a kindhearted couple into taking me in.
But the old blind fortune-teller they consulted told them, “This child’s fate is too hard. You won’t be able to withstand it.”
They refused to believe him and adopted me anyway. Before six months had passed, the couple divorced, and I had nowhere left to go.
I drifted through the streets, barely alive, until I was twelve.
That was when I noticed a homeless Pana Tarot reader who was frighteningly accurate—and who looked as though his fate was even harder than mine.
I wanted him to adopt me.
So I deliberately took over someone else’s begging spot and was nearly beaten to death on an empty street where no one cared enough to stop.
I got what I wanted. He rescued me.
But he rejected me again.
“Calling me your brother, your uncle, or even your dad won’t change anything! I’m not going to keep raising you. I’m only six years older than you, and I can barely support myself!”
That was what he said.
But I knew he was kind.
Even his refusal was painfully clumsy.
Chapter 3
“I’m warning you! I’m destined to die young and live alone. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have ended up homeless! If you insist on following me, then I’ll teach you Pana Tarot. Once you have a skill to rely on, you’ll leave me and build a life of your own.”
Adrian Sterling always called himself a short-lived loner, but somehow, we became a family and lived together in peace.
I inherited his craft and traveled everywhere, reading Pana Tarot for people.
Because my readings were so accurate, I helped countless young women avoid disastrous choices. I even correctly predicted the direction in which they would find their true partners.
In the end, his words came true.
I really did gain the ability to stand on my own.
During the year livestreaming became popular, I gradually built a steady clientele online through Pana Tarot readings.
When I was eighteen, I bought the ribs we used to consider too expensive to eat and returned to the house we had purchased together with our savings.
Even now, ten years later, I can still clearly remember my heart pounding as the sunset of early summer painted the horizon red. I spent the entire walk thinking about how to confess my feelings to him.
But when I pushed open the door, all I found was a note he had left behind:
[Our bond has run its course. We will never see each other again in this lifetime.
[But I will always protect you.]
In that moment, I knew I was finished.
My life was like that bag of ribs—food my beloved would never get to eat.
From then on, all it could do was slowly rot and stink with the passing of time.
I searched for him obsessively for two years.
The Pana Tarot Deck told me he was already gone. It even revealed the location of his grave.
But I refused to believe Adrian Sterling was dead.
I kept searching while living a loose, unhurried life in Dali. Then, one day, while I was reading Pana Tarot from a stall in the old quarter, I saw a man whose eyes and features were ninety-nine percent identical to Adrian’s.
My heart clenched.
I stared at him, seeing Adrian Sterling as if I had crossed through time itself.
“Hi. You’re a Pana Tarot reader, right? Could you do a reading for me?”
He crouched in front of my stall, his expression open and earnest. For one dizzying moment, it was as though I were looking at my younger self asking Adrian, “Hey, Pana Tarot reader, come on. Read my fortune.”
Past and present collided.
I couldn’t tell whether the man standing before me was the Adrian I had imagined into existence—or whether my memories had somehow deceived me.
How could there be two people in the world who looked exactly alike?
After a few words, he told me his name was Ethan Sterling. He wanted me to find out when his Fortune-Bringing Benefactor would appear.
So I had him draw several cards from my Pana Tarot Deck.
One after another, he drew the Magician, the Six of Cups, the Sun, and the Tower.
The moment I saw the spread, I understood.
I told him the truth.