Xie Qingcheng stood silently with his back to the light. In the darkness of the night, He Yu couldn't decipher his expression; he only felt the hand supporting him tremble slightly.
He Yu asked another question. "Xie Qingcheng, why did you have to leave?" Even in his current state, he could still remain calm. It was as though the more terrifying and critical the situation was, the less concerned he became.
Xie Qingcheng didn't answer him.
"You lied to me, didn't you? The reason you left wasn't just because your contract was up, right?"
The look in that child's eyes.
The look in this young man's eyes.
Both were calm, childish, stubborn, but they also seemed… indifferent. They gazed at him unflinchingly, digging deeper and deeper but still unable to find the answer they sought.
Xie Qingcheng abruptly felt that he couldn't face that persistent stare. He closed his eyes. "Let me get you out of here first."
There wasn't much time left, so he redoubled his efforts and continued running toward the exit of the archives with He Yu in tow. When at last they ran out of the silent, unlit building into the noisy hubbub outside of whirling police lights and wailing sirens, it felt for a moment as if they had been dropped into a kaleidoscope.
Zheng Jingfeng had also uncovered the true meaning behind the letter L at this point. With the location deduced, the red and blue flashing police lights descended on the target like the tide coming in from every direction at once.
When Xie Qingcheng brought the still-bleeding He Yu down the steps, half supporting, half carrying him, Zheng Jingfeng pulled his car door open with a bang and stepped out of the vehicle.
This time, the criminal investigation unit's captain's expression was frosty. Concern and anger shone from his panther-like eyes, the two contradictory emotions flitting over his face like a shadow play, their steely blades flashing brilliantly as they glanced off each other. "Xie Qingcheng…"
"The archives are about to explode," said Xie Qingcheng as soon as he neared Zheng Jingfeng. "Don't let anyone else go in."
Zheng Jingfeng looked like he very much wanted to grab the two of them by their necks and slap handcuffs on their wrists—but then he met Xie Qingcheng's eyes… They resembled Zhou Muying's eyes so much that he found himself looking away at the last moment, unable to maintain eye contact.
There was blood on Xie Qingcheng's face. Zheng Jingfeng didn't know whose blood it was, but it made him feel incomparably guilty.
It was a fact that he couldn't allow Xie Qingcheng to get too close to the case—Xie Qingcheng wasn't a police officer, and he didn't have the qualifications to be too deeply involved. Even if everything happening now was related to the unsolved case of his parents' deaths from nineteen years ago, the only thing he could tell Xie Qingcheng was: This is classified, you must hand the matter over to us.
However, an individual was bound to be more flexible than an organization; the more regulated the organization, the more this held true. That was to say nothing of how there was likely a dirty cop amongst the police, or how these criminals seemed to be part of an international crime syndicate with an excellent grasp of cutting-edge technology. Although Xie Qingcheng had entrusted this case to them for nineteen years, they still couldn't give him a satisfactory answer. Even when it came to this riddle involving the archives, all kinds of obstacles ensured that the police were still slower to get here than Xie Qingcheng.
Zheng Jingfeng didn't have time to express his shock or ask any more questions. "Fall back immediately," he said into his two-way radio. "The archives are going to explode. Everyone, fall back!"
He then ushered Xie Qingcheng and He Yu into the police car and closed the door with a thunk. Everyone else in the car stared at Xie Qingcheng with a very strange look in their eyes.
As Xie Qingcheng glanced at the broadcasting tower not too far in the distance, it seemed to have already returned to its usual, brightly lit appearance. That scarlet "drop the hanky" game of death video had disappeared, and in its place, a person's silhouette flickered across the tower. It might have been an advertisement; Xie Qingcheng didn't get a good look at it before the police car's engine rumbled to life.
By now, the main roads of the campus were nearly deserted. The police car sped off lightning fast with its flashing red and blue lights for a few hundred meters, before—
Bang!
A shuddering sound like muffled thunder came from behind them. Followed closely by—
Ka-booom!
An earth-shattering noise, accompanied by the shrieks of all the people who had witnessed this spectacle. Sure enough, the archives had exploded. Like a landslide, shards of brick and tile buried the past in an instant.
Leaning back in the car, Xie Qingcheng would have only needed to look through the car's rear windows to see the roiling flames leaping into the air from the direction of the archives like a swirling tempest sweeping up crime and punishment in its wake. Grinding them into dust, shattering them into ruined fragments that could never be reassembled.
But Xie Qingcheng never looked back. Instead, he closed his eyes.
The clues had all disintegrated… He couldn't look back.
It was a long time before the deafening explosions subsided.
Inside the car, it was very quiet, as everyone's attention was focused on the scene of the crime. After the car came to a stop, the police officers got out one by one. There was the rustling wind blowing outside, the crackling fire in the distance, and also…
"Are you dissatisfied with something?"
It was a man's voice. It was quite loud, as it came simultaneously from several of the cell phones in the car.
"If you're dissatisfied with anything, you should take it up with the hospital."
Xie Qingcheng paused and opened his eyes—was he so shaken that he was hearing things? And his own voice, at that?
"Don't argue with me here."
No, he wasn't just hearing things. His eyes flew wide open as realization dawned. It was that video! The hackers had never stopped their video hijacking!
The moment Xie Qingcheng recognized the video that was being projected onto the broadcasting tower—as well as all the phones in the vicinity of Huzhou University—he immediately understood why those police officers had eyed him with such odd expressions. The video must have already been playing for a while—by the time He Yu and Xie Qingcheng had made it out of the building, the broadcasting tower had already been taken over by this scene.
Xie Qingcheng's phone was still powered off, but when he turned it back on, it was immediately hijacked by the hackers' signal, and he received the video synced to the one that was playing out on the tower.
It showed him, from quite a few years ago.
He was wearing the uniform of Huzhou First Hospital: a pure white coat with the hospital's pale-blue crest stitched onto it and a laminated name tag and two pens clipped to his chest. His surroundings were chaotic—he was encircled by the hospital's patients, who watched as he stood before the door of his unit facing a disheveled, unkempt woman.
Xie Qingcheng knew immediately what this was, and when it had happened. But…
His expression shifting subtly, he looked at He Yu.
He Yu was frowning, not yet fully cognizant of what was going on. However, he had already realized that this video was the same one that hacker had wanted him to open before—the video he was supposed to watch to see "if it was worth it."
His shoulder was still bleeding. The doctor from the police unit who was administering first aid said to him, "I'm going to help you clean the wound and stop the bleeding, but it will hurt—try to bear it."
He Yu said indifferently, "Thank you."
Pain, blood, even death—to him, they meant little. He was entirely focused on the tower and its ever-changing illumination.
The scene was still playing out.
The unkempt woman in the video was howling, "Why do you need me to show relevant ID? Why do you need the security guards to question me? Do you think it's easy for me to come see the doctor? It's so hard to register with your hospital's specialists! Scalpers have snatched up all the spots! I need to pay five hundred yuan just to get an appointment! Why does it have to be like this? Apparently poor people don't just deserve to die, we also deserve to be shafted by you doctors and discriminated against, is that right? Do you think I want to be filthy and reeking like this? As soon as I closed my stand at four in the morning, I came to wait in line outside the hospital for you to open. Do you think I have time to be all squeaky clean and neat like you? I'm really not a bad person!"
But that young Xie Qingcheng in the video stood with his hands in the pockets of his white coat, looking coldly at the sobbing woman who was hugging her knees in front of him. He said indifferently, "You come and sit in front of my consulting room even though you're not my patient—how do I know what you're planning to do after what happened with Yi Beihai?"
"I just want to see a doctor!" the woman cried.
His face devoid of expression, Xie Qingcheng said, "You want to be treated, but I want to be safe. I'll have to trouble you not to sit in front of my consulting room. Go where you're supposed to go, whether that's internal medicine or neurosurgery. My unit isn't related to the registration number you have."
"But all the other waiting rooms are full, and I'm not allowed to sit on the floor. It was so hard for me to find this spot. I just want to rest for a bit. I've been standing all day…"
"Save your breath for the security guards. I'm just a doctor who's taking a paycheck. I don't want to run the risk of dying in the line of duty."
The patients standing around couldn't help but feel a surge of fury in their hearts. They originally had no intention of getting into a disagreement with a doctor and were doing their best to restrain their anger. But when the woman burst into tears at Xie Qingcheng's harsh, aggressively overbearing manner of speaking, someone roared at him, "What are you doing! Do you not have a mother? Surely you're not going to condemn every patient because of one bad apple? Yi Beihai was an outlier! Someone as selfish as you can't compare to Mr. Qin Ciyan at all! Do you think you deserve to be a doctor?"
Xie Qingcheng looked up, revealing a pair of peach-blossom eyes that were incisive to the point of being cruel. "I'm a doctor regardless of your opinion. I don't think dying for the sake of a patient is worth it, and to be murdered by a lunatic would be such a waste it'd be laughable. Medicine is merely a profession—you shouldn't romanticize it with selfless sacrifice and guilt-trip me like this."
He enunciated his words clearly: "The life of a doctor will always be more valuable than the life of a lunatic who can't even control himself. Do you understand?"
For a moment, everyone fell silent.
The video footage became a bit chaotic after that. In the rage of the mob, someone shoved the person who was doing the filming, causing the video to shake and become blurry. All that could be heard was the furious cursing of the patients.
As the video got to that point, notifications from various group chats and direct messages started flooding the countless phones that were broadcasting the clip.
All the phones in the car that weren't set to silent, including Xie Qingcheng's own, started buzzing incessantly.
It seemed like the video had been swiftly spread to every corner of the internet.
He Yu sat in the police car, allowing the medic to tend to the gunshot wounds on his shoulder. He'd had his forehead pressed against the window the whole time, quietly watching the video splashed across the broadcasting tower.
It was the video that his hacker opponent had sent to him, the one he'd chosen not to play.
Xie Qingcheng could feel his heart sinking.
So, this was it.
In order to mess with He Yu, their opponents had chosen to reveal this video.
Xie Qingcheng wished he could say something to He Yu, but he didn't know what he should say—or if there was even anything he could try to explain. He stopped watching the video; he knew very well what he'd said and done back then.
The sins he couldn't explain and the secrets he had to keep that were hidden within that video—at that very moment, they had all been spilled into the open for everyone to see.
He didn't care. He had known when he did those things and said those words that he'd be crucified for it after the fact, that he'd face a lifetime of criticism, that everything had a price. He'd already been prepared to keep that secret for a lifetime, and he knew very well the kind of future he'd face if the video got out.
But when his gaze landed on the still, quiet youth beside him…
He Yu's shoulder was still bleeding with no sign of stopping. The doctor had treated it with a tourniquet, but the sickly scent of blood still suffused this half-sealed police command car. Inexplicably, Xie Qingcheng thought back to a few hours ago, to the first time he looked at this youth as an equal. He Yu had extended his hand to him. At that time, no one was willing to help him; even Chen Man had chosen to follow the rules.
But He Yu had said, "I can help you."
That outstretched hand was fine-boned, broad, clean, and beautiful; even the nails were neatly trimmed. It was clear it belonged to a pampered young master who took good care of himself.
Free of blood, free of injury.
There were only faint scars on his wrists, but those had already healed.
"Why…would you help me?"
"Because you did the same for me once."
"I've never, ever forgotten."
The glaring crimson stung Xie Qingcheng's eyes.
Just as the images from that uninterruptable video cut their way into He Yu's field of vision, the scene projected on the broadcast tower changed again. It was now showing a conference room at the hospital.
It seemed as if Xie Qingcheng had just given an outstanding academic talk, and the administration was in the middle of acknowledging his professional achievement. But his colleagues clapping in the audience weren't enthusiastic about the situation at all. It looked like this video was taken soon after his contentious encounter with that patient.
The director thanked him. Xie Qingcheng stood up, and his gaze swept calmly over every single person below the stage. He didn't speak any words of gratitude. What he said was, "This will be the last time I give a talk at this hospital. I've decided to resign."
No one spoke. A few brainless medical interns were still clapping robotically, but before they could get more than a couple of claps in, they came back to their senses. Their eyes widened in shock as they stared blankly at Xie Qingcheng, their mouths hanging open. Everyone else in the audience wore the same stunned expression.
Xie Qingcheng was the youngest and most promising doctor at their facility. He was so formidable that he scarcely seemed human. Prior to his tenure, Huzhou First Hospital had never had an assistant director as young as him. Even if he'd recently made some improper remarks, it wasn't anything so extreme that people wouldn't get over it eventually. After all, what doctor didn't get into a few conflicts with patients over the course of their career?
But Xie Qingcheng said he was going to resign.
The director's expression instantly stiffened. With a dry chuckle, he said, "Doctor Xie, why don't you sit down for now? We can discuss work matters after the conference is over."
The head of medical affairs also forced a smile and took over the microphone. "Doctor Xie, you've probably been feeling upset lately. None of us can accept what happened to Professor Qin, and your unit was close to his, so you must have been close colleagues. You even witnessed Professor Qin's sacrifice firsthand, so we can understand how you feel…"
"I didn't know Qin Ciyan very well," Xie Qingcheng said, cutting her off. "Nor am I feeling upset because of Professor Qin. I just don't want to be the next Qin Ciyan."
A few of Qin Ciyan's students in the audience couldn't bear it anymore. "Xie Qingcheng, watch your mouth! What do you mean you don't want to be the next Qin Ciyan! My teacher devoted his entire life to medicine, how dare you—"
"But I don't."
Silence fell.
"Medicine is just a career to me. I will complete all my responsibilities with due care, but I don't think it's normal to give one's life in this line of work. Nor do I understand why so many of you here today feel so strongly about it to the point of finding it glorious, to the point where you would ignore your own safety to treat patients without following the proper procedures. Professor Qin is worthy of respect, but what happened to him in the end was his own fault. Why did he elect to perform surgery on an unstable man's mother when the paperwork hadn't been properly filed?"
Qin Ciyan's students shot to their feet. "Xie Qingcheng, you—!"
"Forgive me, but I don't understand at all."
The conference had become a scene of chaos; the grief and fury felt by the younger doctors couldn't be suppressed anymore.
"How dare you sneer like this!"
"What do you mean it was his own fault? You think that Professor Qin's to blame for his own death?"
"Xie Qingcheng, have you forgotten how you spoke of mentally ill patients in the past? You were the one who wholeheartedly supported letting them live in society, saying we should accept them and treat them as if they are ordinary people! How come that's changed? You got scared the moment there was an incident, didn't you? You saw with your own eyes how Professor Qin lost his life in the line of duty that day, and now you're afraid!"
"You watched as he was thrown into a pool of blood, saw the red splattered all over his office, and you got scared, didn't you? You're afraid that it will happen to you one day! All the patients you interact with are mentally ill; you're in far more danger than him! If you're afraid, just say it! No one will make fun of you! But stop cheapening Professor Qin's sacrifice!"
"Yes, I am afraid," Xie Qingcheng replied coolly.
The young doctor gnashed their teeth. "And yet you have the guts to talk about not discriminating against the mentally ill—"
"Tell me, how do you talk to cancer patients? Do you tell them, 'Oh, my condolences. You're about to die soon'?" There wasn't the slightest hint of expression on Xie Qingcheng's face; his features were colder than hoarfrost. "I'm sure you don't. The truth is one thing, and the words we say are another. As a doctor in mental health, I need to give my patients hope and encouragement. I need to let them feel as if they're being treated like normal people. But ask yourself, everyone. Do any of you truly feel no apprehension at all toward mentally ill patients who are identified as dangerous? Which one of you would willingly interact with them alone and go so far as to hand your life over to such patients without the slightest reservations? Could any of you do it?"
"So…everything you said was nothing more than superficial platitudes… You're just… You're just a despicable fake putting on hypocritical airs!"
Xie Qingcheng didn't argue with the people who had lost their tempers; just as always, he was extremely calm, so calm he almost seemed callous, so callous he almost seemed cold-blooded. "Qin Ciyan might have been a saint. But I'm nothing more than an ordinary person. When I come to work and put on these clothes, I'm a doctor who's treating his patients. When I leave work and take these clothes off, I have a family—I have a wife and a little sister to take care of. I haven't reached Qin Ciyan's level of enlightenment."
No one spoke.
"If you want to become Qin Ciyan, then go ahead," Xie Qingcheng said, removing the medal which he'd just received and putting it back into its velvet-lined brocade box. His gaze was extremely sober and exceedingly calm. "I just want to be an ordinary person."
At this point, the video suddenly flashed and abruptly flickered and faded to nothing.
Now that the countdown on the WZL death game had concluded, the police couldn't allow the perpetrators to continue their outrageous behavior. They had gained the ability to reclaim control over the information transmission channels a little while before—but they didn't dare to act rashly on the chance that it would precipitate a terror attack on Huzhou's innocent citizens. So they could only let their opponents do as they wished.
But now, there was no way the police could allow the video to continue playing. With an order from the top, the "bloody sword" broadcasting tower that had bustled with activity for the whole night seemed to wake up from its demonic possession at last as its central power supply was cut off.
A bang rang out with the massive power outage.
Like curtains lowering over a stage at the end of a play, the entire broadcasting tower went dark as all its light vanished in an instant. Like a giant beast that had been tranquilized in the middle of the school's campus after spending the night going berserk, it had returned to being utterly, deathly still, without any signs of life.
Behind the broadcasting tower, the conflagration was still raging, its soaring flames dyeing the night sky over the archives crimson. Police officers surrounded the area around that centuries-old building blazing away; someone had dialed the 119 emergency dispatch line.
Every corner of the campus was in an uproar; no one was sleeping tonight.
But inside the car, it was deathly silent.
The video was gone.
The scene was over.
But He Yu's eyes, which had been fixed on the broadcasting tower this whole time, were still gazing at that completely darkened building—he hadn't moved a muscle, extraordinarily serene to the point of being a little frightening.
"The vast majority of mental illnesses are normal people's responses to abnormal circumstances…"
"Social inequality, abnormal environments; the main culprits dealing the greatest damage to their psyches, very ironically, nearly all originate from their families, from their workplaces, from society—they originate from us."
"He Yu, sooner or later, you'll have to depend on yourself to walk out of the shadows in your heart."
"You need to rebuild the bridges that link you with other people and society."
"I wish you an early recovery."
"Hey, little devil."
"Doesn't it hurt…?"
Silence.
At this moment, the words that Xie Qingcheng had said back then—the words that pried open the shackles in He Yu's heart, the encouragement that convinced He Yu to grudgingly view Xie Qingcheng as different from the others, the comfort that Xie Qingcheng once gave He Yu when he had been going through his most difficult times—they all seemed to float up like a cloud of dust, rendered indescribably ridiculous and cold.
He Yu looked at the tower.
His eyes were just as terrifyingly black as that unlit building.
Counting the days, it couldn't have been more than a month after this video was filmed that Xie Qingcheng resigned from his post as his personal physician and then disappeared without a trace. It was as though Xie Qingcheng had been escaping from the lair of a predatory beast, or perhaps fleeing from someone with a contagious disease.
As the medic cleaned the wound in He Yu's arm, it suddenly seemed to throb with agonizing pain. Otherwise, why would he feel cold all over? And why would he have gone so pale?
"He Yu."
He Yu didn't answer.
"I meant…"
He Yu heard Xie Qingcheng's voice from beside him. Patiently, he waited for Xie Qingcheng to finish his sentence.
One second passed, then another.
But Xie Qingcheng did not continue.
He really had said all those things. No matter what the reason was, no matter his goal or the secrets hidden within his words, they had all come out of his own mouth. In the wake of Qin Ciyan's murder, it was true that He Yu was the one Xie Qingcheng had sacrificed.
The truth was that he didn't have any excuses to explain himself to this young man.
He Yu suddenly felt ridiculous—he disliked doctors to begin with, and he had disliked Xie Qingcheng in particular from the start. How had this man earned his trust and persuaded him to open the gates of his heart to him? Hadn't it been precisely because of this so-called "equal treatment"— because Xie Qingcheng had viewed him as someone who was a part of regular society, supporting him as he walked out of his dark dragon's lair and ventured into the boundless sunlight outside?
But after Qin Ciyan's murder and before leaving his post, what had Xie Qingcheng said when He Yu wasn't around, in places he didn't even know of?
He Yu slowly closed his eyes. He felt like someone had backhanded him viciously across the cheek. That slap had traveled through many long, heavy years before coming to land on his face, so it should have lost its momentum. He Yu didn't think that he could possibly feel any emotional disturbance from this slap.
But he still felt a faint, stinging pain in his flesh.
"All right. I've bandaged your wounds for the time being," said the police medic who'd been overseeing He Yu's treatment. "I'll have someone to take you to the hospital. You still need to get this looked at as soon as possible. Come with me to the other car."
There was no response from He Yu.
"Hello?" the medic prompted.
He Yu opened his eyes. He was too calm—so calm he seemed a bit terrifying.
Phone calls were furiously pouring in one after another on Xie Qingcheng's phone, whether out of care, concern, or a desire for confirmation…the callers had various motives.
Xie Qingcheng didn't pick up. He just stared at He Yu's profile.
In a gentle, refined tone, He Yu said to the police medic, "Thank you for going to such trouble."
Then, with one long-legged stride, he got out of the car. He took a few steps forward. It wasn't until this moment, when he was about to leave, that he was finally willing to stop and turn his head slightly to the side. The flashing red and blue police beacons illuminated his unblemished face with a steadily flickering border of light.
He smiled softly, firelight flaring through his dark eyes. "Doctor Xie. Who would've thought that the truth would be like this?"
Xie Qingcheng didn't say a word.
"It must have been such a sacrifice on your part to pretend for so many years. You've really worked hard."
It's truly too ironic, He Yu thought.
All these years, the one thing he feared the most was being treated like he was different from the rest. It was Xie Qingcheng who had walked into his lonely lair and bestowed upon him a beautiful set of convictions, giving him a layer of armor to carry through life for the first time and allowing him to believe that someday he could find a bridge he could cross to the rest of society.
He had believed in Xie Qingcheng so firmly. No matter how much He Yu disliked him, no matter how clearly Xie Qingcheng drew the lines between them, no matter how callously Xie Qingcheng had left back then—He Yu still understood his reasons, and he'd clung to those words of encouragement like a fool. Wearing the armor Xie Qingcheng had given him, he'd soldiered on with this stubborn attachment for so long.
But, as it turned out, the inside of that armor was lined with thorns.
He Yu had thought that it could fend off the mockery flung at him from the outside world, but in the moment when he least expected it, hundreds of thorns and thousands of blades had been released from the inside, piercing through him from head to toe.
The articles of faith that Xie Qingcheng had given him were false. Even he had lied to him.
"Xie Qingcheng, if you really were so scared of me, you could have told me directly right from the beginning. You didn't need to put on an act, and you especially didn't need to tell me so many great principles against your own beliefs. At least that wouldn't have been so…"
He Yu trailed off, leaving his sentence unfinished.
His silhouette looked terribly lonely, but his voice was still exceedingly calm—just the way Xie Qingcheng had once hoped for him, just like Xie Qingcheng had once taught him to strive for. The epitome of calm.
In the end, He Yu only chuckled. The blood he'd lost was still on Xie Qingcheng's hands, but his mocking laughter had already floated into the wind.
Then, he turned around completely and followed the police officers toward the other car without so much as a backward glance.