The first month had been a hurricane of panic; the second month was a mausoleum of silence.
Time had stopped being a measurement of hours and became a measurement of dust.
In the ICU, the air was heavy, filtered through machines that sang a rhythmic, mechanical lullaby. Bai Qi sat in his usual spot, but he was no longer the man he had been.
The sharp edges of his charisma had been blunted by the relentless grind of grief.
He was meticulously arranging red roses in a crystal vase. They were his beloved, precious flowers—vibrant, blood-red petals that stood in violent contrast to the sterile, white-washed room.
"See? I brought so many today," Bai Qi whispered, his voice a dry rasp.
He looked at Shu Yao. The boy remained a pale statue, his features smoothed out by the long sleep, looking more like an ivory carving than a living soul.
Bai Qi leaned in, his shadow draping over the bed like a protective shroud. He pressed a lingering kiss to Shu Yao's forehead.
His eyes stung, the familiar heat of tears returning. "When you get better, I'll buy you a whole garden. Thousands of them. I'll fill every room you walk into."
He tried to smile, but the expression fractured. He caught his reflection in the window—a hollow-eyed ghost. He grabbed Shu Yao's hand, rubbing the limp fingers with a slow, desperate rhythm.
"I am not angry," he pleaded, his voice breaking. "Please. Just say something. Anything... just so I can feel like you're still here."
Shu Yao did not move. He was a silent anchor in a world that Bai Qi felt himself drifting away from.
"I'm sorry," Bai Qi murmured, the words so worn from repetition they felt like a heartbeat. He had lost count of his apologies weeks ago.
Across the city, the penthouse of Ming Su was no longer a palace.
She sat on her velvet couch, her eyes fixed on the television where her own face—captured by security footage—scrolled across the ticker tape of the morning news.
"How the hell is my footage on the headlines?" she shrieked, throwing a decorative pillow at the screen. "I can't even go outside! The press is camped at the lobby like vultures!"
Shen Haoxuan stood by the window, his back to her. He hadn't moved for an hour. He was a man suspended in the memory of his mother.
"What are you so silent for?" Ming Su snapped, her voice high and jagged.
Shen turned slowly. His face was a mask of cold, calcified resentment. "I never expected her to be so... informative. She had evidence I didn't even know existed."
"Is that all?" Ming Su scoffed, her brow furrowing. "She's just Bai Qi's mother.
Ming Su stiffened. The revelation hung in the air, thick and bitter. "Then which side are you on, Shen? Because right now, you look like a beaten dog mourning a master who kicked him."
Shen's jaw tightened. He walked toward her, his presence suffocating the room. "I am not on that prick's side. I want to destroy Bai Qi more than I want to breathe. I want to make him regret every second of his existence."
He leaned down, his eyes dark with a singular, burning purpose. "I don't care what happens to the company. I don't care what happens to me. As long as he loses everything he loves, I am satisfied."
Monday arrived with a pale, grey sun.
Bai Qi was sitting by the bed, the small, leather-bound diary open on his lap. He had been reading it slowly, savoring every word as if they were drops of water in a desert. Every line was a confession; every paragraph was a love letter written in the ink of silent suffering.
He flipped a page, his fingers trembling, when something small and crinkled caught the light.
Nestled between the pages were several candy wrappers.
Bai Qi froze. He blinked, his vision blurring. He reached out with a shaking hand and took one of the wrappers, smoothing it out against his palm. It was old—faded and worn, the edges frayed from years of being touched.
It was the wrapper of the candies he had given Shu Yao years ago, back when they were children.
A choked, agonizing sob tore from Bai Qi's throat. "You... you still had it?"
He looked at the pile of wrappers. Shu Yao hadn't just remembered the moments; he had preserved them.
While Bai Qi had been building an empire and chasing phantoms, Shu Yao had been guarding the trash of their childhood like it was sacred treasure.
Every deeply written line in the diary was for Bai Qi. Every secret hope, every hidden pain—it was all anchored to the man who had treated him like a servant.
"You kept it for me," Bai Qi whispered, his tears falling onto the open pages, blurring the ink.
Shu Yao remained silent, but the room felt suddenly crowded with the weight of his devotion.
Bai Qi leaned forward, placing his forehead against Shu Yao's. He didn't care about the machines anymore. He didn't care about the doctors. "Shu Yao," he breathed into the stillness. "I hope you can hear me. I hope you know that I finally see you."
He kissed Shu Yao's temple, then his forehead, then his hand. "I love you. Please come back to me."
Then just like that, ICU had ceased to be a place of healing; it had become a cathedral of penance. The air was a thick miasma of antiseptic and the cloying, sweet scent of dying roses.
Bai Qi collapsed his weight against the mattress, his forehead pressed into Shu Yao's limp hand. His tears didn't just fall; they soaked into the boy's skin, a silent, salt-water baptism for a ghost.
"I hurt you every time," Bai Qi whispered, his voice a jagged rasp against the silence.
He looked up, his gaze tracing the features of the boy who lay before him like a frozen masterpiece. Shu Yao was a "sleeping beauty" made of alabaster and sorrow, his chest rising and falling with a terrifyingly peaceful rhythm.
"Will you ever forgive me?"
The question hung in the air, unanswered by the steady beep of the heart monitor. Bai Qi buried his face back into the crook of Shu Yao's wrist, his shoulders heaving with the weight of a month's worth of unexpressed sobs.
He knew. He knew with a sickening certainty that if Shu Yao woke, those gentle, brown eyes would hold no malice. This fragile boy would offer forgiveness as easily as breathing, a fact that only made Bai Qi feel like more of a monster.
The second month bled into the third with a cruel, rhythmic indifference.
The hospital room became Bai Qi's entire universe. He brought fresh roses every morning—blood-red blooms that seemed to mock the pale, bloodless boy on the bed. He read the diary until the pages were soft and the ink was blurred by his own tears.
Every time a floorboard creaked or a monitor shifted pitch, Bai Qi's head snapped up, his heart a frantic bird against his ribs.
Is he waking? Is he back?
But there was nothing. Only the clinical hum of the ward.
By the third month, the tubes were gone. The harsh, mechanical hiss of the ventilator had been replaced by the soft, natural sound of Shu Yao breathing on his own. He looked like someone merely caught in a deep, dreamless slumber, a boy who had decided that reality was too painful to rejoin.
The doctors spoke of "neurological plateaus" and "persistent vegetative states." Bai Qi stopped listening. Their words were hollow. Their science didn't understand the debt he owed.
Bai Qi stood in the hallway, his hoodie pulled low, his sleeves damp where he had been wiping his eyes. The door opened, and a doctor stepped out, his face etched with a practiced, weary pity.
Bai Qi didn't look at him. He didn't want to hear the word "coma" again. It was a pathetic word, a word for people who had given up.
He brushed past the medical team and entered the room, the door clicking shut behind him like a seal. He didn't hesitate. He knelt at the edge of the bed and seized Shu Yao's hand, pressing the unmoving fingers against his cheek.
"Don't worry, Shu Yao," he murmured, his eyes wild and bloodshot. "They're lying. All of them. I know you better than they do."
He looked at the bed. It was a standard hospital cot, wide and clinical, but Shu Yao seemed to vanish within the white sheets. The boy was too small, too light—a splinter of a human being that the world had tried to break.
Bai Qi climbed onto the mattress, moving with a slow, desperate grace. He lay down beside Shu Yao, his large frame dwarfing the boy. He placed his hand over Shu Yao's heart, feeling the faint, steady pulse of a life suspended in amber.
He hid his face in the hollow of Shu Yao's neck, breathing in the scent of hospital soap and the lingering, ghostly trace of jasmine.
You will be alright," Bai Qi whispered into the skin of the boy he had once tried to destroy. "Nothing is going to happen to you. I won't let it."
Slowly The fourth month had arrived, not with a roar, but with a suffocating, velvet silence.
Bai Qi sat anchored to the bedside, his eyes closed. He drew a shuddering breath, synchronized with the rhythmic, fragile rise of Shu Yao's chest. The boy's breathing was shallow—a ghostly echo of life—but it was the only tether keeping Bai Qi's sanity from drifting into the abyss.
The heavy door groaned on its hinges. George Harold stepped into the room, the scent of the cold outside world clinging to his wool coat.
He stopped, his gaze falling upon the scene: the high-seated heir of a global empire, reduced to a hollowed-out shell, resting his forehead against the hand of a boy who looked like he was made of glass.
"Why are you here now?" George's voice was a low, jagged rasp that cut through the clinical hum.
Bai Qi didn't move. He didn't even flicker an eyelid. He remained a statue of penance.
"Are you not the source of this?" George continued, his voice rising with a cold, simmering rage. "Is it not your shadow that extinguished his light?"
Bai Qi's knuckles turned a ghostly white as he clenched his fists, the skin straining over the bone. He offered no retort. There was no defense left in his soul; the truth was a weight he had already accepted.
George bypassed the broken man and looked down at Shu Yao. A bittersweet smile, fragile and fleeting, touched his lips. He looked at the boy—so beautiful, so incandescent even in his stillness—and felt a pang of visceral injustice.
"How can someone so precious be treated this way?" George murmured, his voice softening into a mournful melody.
He completely ignored Bai Qi's presence, treating him as nothing more than a ghost in the room. George reached out, his long, hand descending toward Shu Yao's hair. He began to stroke the boy's head with a tenderness, a silent promise of protection.
Suddenly, the air in the room charged with a violent electricity.
"Don't!" Bai Qi snapped.
In a blur of desperate movement, Bai Qi lunged forward, snapping George's hand away with a frantic strength. George recoiled, startled not by the aggression, but by the raw, jagged panic etched into Bai Qi's features. The heir's face was a mask of territorial agony.
"I won't let anyone touch him," Bai Qi hissed, his voice trembling with a terrifying fragility. He turned his bloodshot eyes toward his uncle. "You should go back. I am fine by myself. You don't need to worry about him... and you certainly don't need to worry about me."
George's expression hardened, his green eyes flashing like a storm over a dark sea.
"I am not here for you, Bai Qi," George said, each word a cold stone dropped into a deep well. "I would never come all this way for the boy who broke him. All I am here for is Shu Yao."
Bai Qi flinched as if struck by a physical blow. His shoulders haunched, his posture collapsing inward as the weight of George's words found their mark.
"I know," Bai Qi whispered, his voice fracturing. "I know I hurt him."
He turned his gaze back to Shu Yao, his eyes swimming with a desperate, pleading light. "But please... let me take care of him. If I leave this room, I'll lose myself. I'll never be able to forgive the monster I was if I'm not here when he wakes."
George stood paralyzed by the sight. He had expected arrogance; he had expected a cold, distant sense of duty. He had not expected to find a man who had already executed his own heart.