Xie Qingcheng left the hospital and returned to his dormitory the next day. He was accompanied by Chen Man, who was rather quiet and seemed somewhat off-kilter.
As they parted ways on the first floor of Xie Qingcheng's dormitory, Chen Man hesitantly called out, "Xie-ge…" But when he was met with Xie Qingcheng's sharp gaze, he just ended up mumbling, "You…you should get some rest. If anything comes up, you can come to me anytime."
Xie Qingcheng found Chen Man's behavior extremely peculiar, but he didn't consider the horrifying prospect that Chen Man might have a secret crush on him. Instead, he assumed Chen Man simply couldn't accept the idea that Xie Qingcheng had had a one-night stand. It was indeed a terrible excuse, but Xie Qingcheng really couldn't think of a more reasonable explanation to mollify his younger friend.
Xie Qingcheng was a grown man; there was no way he could admit that he had been fucked by a boy thirteen years his junior. He felt like a mute person eating bitter melon, forced to suffer in silence.
After a brief pause, Xie Qingcheng said, "You should go. Thank you." He turned to head upstairs.
Standing dazedly in the rain beneath his umbrella, Chen Man called out again. "Xie-ge…"
Xie Qingcheng looked back.
"N-never mind. Take care."
"…What exactly do you want to say?"
Biting his lip, Chen Man did his best to resist the urge to ask, but in the end, he still blurted out, "Are you still in touch with that girl?"
Xie Qingcheng paused. "Would you stay in contact with a one-night stand?"
"I…I don't do things like that…" said Chen Man. As soon as the words left his mouth, he realized it sounded like he was criticizing Xie Qingcheng for failing to uphold masculine virtues, so he hastily waved his hands. "Sorry, that's not what I meant."
"You're right. You shouldn't do things like that," Xie Qingcheng said tonelessly. "Right now, I'm also regretting that momentary impulse."
Chen Man stared at him.
"It won't happen again. I find it disgusting." With that, Xie Qingcheng turned to head upstairs.
Only then did Chen Man's lingering pallor regain a hint of color.
It took a whole week for Xie Qingcheng to completely recover from his malaise, and even after so long, the evidence left on his body had still not fully faded. When he was giving lectures or writing on the blackboard at the university, he had to be extra careful that his sleeves were properly fastened because his wrists were still covered in faint rope marks. These marks bore witness to the fact that his hands had been bound when he was wantonly defiled.
Xie Qingcheng didn't contact He Yu again. He Yu had blocked him, while he had straight up deleted He Yu from his contacts. The medical school and Huzhou University were both centuries-old institutions with sprawling campuses that took a long time to circle even by car; avoiding someone was a simple matter, if Xie Qingcheng truly wished it.
Just think of it as a nightmare, he thought, and don't look back.
In life, there were many hateful things beyond one's control that would never be dealt with in a satisfactory manner. Sometimes, just escaping in one piece was the best possible result.
Xie Qingcheng had been through a lot in his time, so it wasn't that he didn't understand this principle, no matter how disgusted he felt by what had happened. But he still often startled awake in the dead of night. His illness had receded, his fever was gone, and even his nether regions had slowly begun to heal. But deep down, Xie Qingcheng—who had always been resistant to love and desire—had grown even more frigid than before.
He kept dreaming of He Yu's hateful, lust-filled face and of the things they'd done. Then, he'd suddenly sit bolt upright in his bed. Away from prying eyes, Xie Qingcheng would finally show his panic and weakness, gasping open-mouthed as he buried his face in his hands, sweat soaking through his clothes.
He smoked cigarette after cigarette, and even took sleeping pills.
One day in the shower, he noticed that the hickeys He Yu had given him had finally disappeared completely. But he still couldn't relax. He knew he'd been branded to the bone, and his fear and disgust toward sex grew even more intense. His memories pricked at him constantly, reminding him how he had lost control under He Yu, how he'd vented the desire he always suppressed—a desire that he'd almost managed to quash completely—in a way that he abhorred.
He had screamed, shaken, and lost himself. These memories were like welts left by a whip, stinging him, humiliating him, tormenting him without end.
He had no choice but to turn on his computer, click open his jellyfish videos, and try to divert his attention by watching those ancient, serene life forms float through the water.
He couldn't keep sinking like this.
A few days later, He Yu returned to the He family residence to the rare sight of all the lights switched on. The moment he walked into the entranceway, he furrowed his brows against the warm glow; it was as though he were a vampire who had grown accustomed to desolation, whose most familiar environment was the silence and darkness of an ancient castle.
"You're back," came a familiar voice.
"…Mm."
He Yu was surprised to find both Lü Zhishu and He Jiwei present.
After he'd slept with Xie Qingcheng, He Yu had returned to the villa just once—on the day he tailed Xie Qingcheng to the hospital only to find that there was nothing he could do.
That day, his heart had felt uneasy and especially empty. After all that stimulation, he couldn't help but feel a bit hollow inside when he suddenly found himself all alone. His emotions a mess, he had returned to the main residence, where he could at least find company in the housekeeper and servants.
He knew his parents had recently made a trip back to Huzhou, but agitated as he was, he didn't want to see them, so he had left the residence the next day to stay out of their way. He hadn't returned since. Not until today.
He'd assumed that Lü Zhishu and He Jiwei wouldn't stay for very long, and he hadn't expected they'd still be here when he came back. He wasn't accustomed to receiving this sort of welcome. Perhaps this is fake, too, he thought. Another hallucination.
But then he realized that he had never once dreamed about his parents coming home to eat dinner with him. They had never appeared in any of his fantasies.
"Is it cold out?" Lü Zhishu asked him. "I've made you some nourishing four-herbs soup with morels and abalone…"
"Mom." He Yu fell briefly quiet. This word, one of the first learned by all humans, was a bit clumsy on his tongue. "I'm allergic to that kind of seafood."
Silence immediately descended upon the hall.
Lü Zhishu felt a bit awkward and shot He Jiwei a glance.
He Jiwei coughed. "It's all right, you can eat something else. I had them make you steamed napa cabbage in supreme soup. The stock's been simmering for hours. It used to be your favorite." He Jiwei wasn't very close to He Yu either, but he was somewhat more reliable than Lü Zhishu. He knew what his son liked.
He Yu didn't have any reason to refuse, so the three of them sat down together at the dining table.
The atmosphere grew even stiffer.
He Yu couldn't remember the last time their family of three had sat down together like this. It had been too long. Looking at He Jiwei and Lü Zhishu's faces, he found them a bit unfamiliar. To him, his parents were more like the two profile pictures in his WeChat contacts, with those slightly flattened voices.
"When do you plan to return to Yanzhou?" He Yu asked.
"There's no rush," Lü Zhishu immediately responded, a sickly-sweet smile plastered onto her corpulent face; it had been stuck on there rather too forcefully and looked like it might fall off at any moment. "Your brother's living on campus now, so we don't need to keep an eye on him all the time. And besides, He Yu, you nearly scared me to death. You mustn't do such dangerous things. What if something happened to you? We'd—" A sob seemed to catch in her throat.
He Yu looked on dispassionately. After the broadcasting tower incident, his heart had become cold and hard. But he didn't feel like wasting words on these two, so he smiled softly and said, "It's all right. I'm doing very well."
Conversation continued idly over dinner. The scene seemed warm and inviting, but chilly undercurrents roiled beneath the surface.
"I'm done. May I go upstairs?" He Yu asked at last.
Although He Yu was making Lü Zhishu a little uncomfortable, she was a businesswoman through and through; she could keep her thoughts tightly hidden, even when it came to her own son. "Ah, okay. Go on, go on. Get some rest. I'll make you chicken soup tomorrow, okay?"
"…Whatever you want," He Yu said indifferently, then got up from the table and went upstairs.
Lü Zhishu watched him disappear into the upstairs corridor with a complicated expression.
He Jiwei asked, "Why are you suddenly being so good to him? Never mind how he's feeling—I can't get used to it either."
"What's wrong with me being good to my son? Isn't that the most natural thing in the world? I'm his mother, after all…"
He Jiwei started to speak, then seemed to think better of it and closed his mouth. He finally got up. "I have some company matters to take care of, so I need to make a trip to Qingdao tomorrow."
"When will you be back?" she asked. "I'm telling you, I thought about it and realized that I really have let him down too often. I ought to make it up to him properly now. You too—don't stay away for too long. Our children are much more important than work…"
He Jiwei sighed. "These words you're saying sure make me nostalgic." Silence fell for a beat before he continued, "You used to say that sort of thing all the time when you first got pregnant with him." He Jiwei smiled, his eyes fathomless yet unexpectedly pained. "It's been a long time since I've heard you say anything like that."
"Lao-He…"
But He Jiwei had already turned and left.
He Yu lay on the bed in his room. Now that he no longer needed to feign courtesy in front of Lü Zhishu and He Jiwei, the look in his eyes had become rather stormy. He gazed up at the ceiling and, just as he had done this past week when he was alone and lost in his thoughts, mulled over things from the past.
A bell tolled.
To He Yu's surprise, the grandfather clock in the old house was sounding again.
Each dull, deeply resounding peal knocked against his heart, just like it had every night that he'd spent all alone, just like when he stood there for so long on his thirteenth birthday, waiting for the companionship of even a single person, only for it to never arrive.
When he remembered the evening of that birthday, he couldn't help but think of Xie Xue again. Not only had his parents never shown much concern for him, but even Xie Xue was nothing more than a partial figment of his imagination, dreamed up by a boy drowning in the depths of loneliness and extreme sickness. She was a real person, but she also wasn't entirely real. Ever since he'd learned the truth, He Yu's feelings toward Xie Xue had become extremely complicated.
Hadn't he always anticipated all this?
He had always felt that Xie Xue's memory was poor. There were certain things that he could remember with perfect clarity, yet she would say that she didn't have any recollection of them. Back then, he had even said to her, I don't know how you managed to get into university and become a teacher with that memory of yours.
He'd never suspected that those events he remembered so clearly might have been nothing more than blossoms in a mirror, or the moon on the water—beautiful delusions of his own mind.
That version of her didn't exist at all—she wasn't completely real.
He had known all along that these were acts of self-preservation and self-deception, if only subconsciously. He had once written a story for his screenwriting and directing class about a boy whose spirit returned to the land of the living on the seventh day after his death. The dead boy's soul knocked on his teacher's door and sat down with her to eat some snacks and drink some ginger tea… Yet after the teacher woke up the next morning, not a single cookie on the table was missing, and the warming ginger tea had frozen into ice.
The boy hadn't come at all. He had been imaginary, a ghost without a corporeal form.
The fact that this story had come to his mind so easily… Wasn't it just a projection of the way he had imagined Xie Xue?
In the story, the cookies had never been touched; in reality, the birthday cake had never existed. In the story, the ginger tea had frozen into ice; in reality, his heart was so cold it could hardly beat anymore.
It wasn't that he hadn't known the truth on some level. Now, as he carefully examined his memories with the hindsight of someone who had just woken up, he could distinguish dreams from reality.
In dreams, it was impossible for him to tell if he was dreaming or awake. But once he opened his eyes, he could understand what was real and what was fake.
Just like Xie Qingcheng had said, Xie Xue had indeed been very kind to him, but that kindness was neither exceptional nor unconditional. She treated him like a close friend, but she had plenty of friends—He Yu was merely one among many.
He had never been special.
This truth upset him much more than the realization that Xie Xue liked someone else—his pillar of emotional support had been nothing more than an illusion. For him, even just liking someone, the most normal feeling an ordinary person could experience, was too much to ask for.
With his thoughts running wild, He Yu hadn't had a good night's sleep in a long time. He hadn't been faring much better than Xie Qingcheng that week. The human body wasn't meant to withstand such intense and unrelenting stimulation, so even though He Yu's mind was a mess, he still took a few pills and slowly closed his eyes, falling into his first deep sleep since that night at the club.
He Yu had a dream.
He dreamed of a pair of dangerously bewitching peach-blossom eyes. The Peach Blossom Spring within those eyes had enticed him countless times before, so at first he thought he was dreaming of Xie Xue—that he was in another fantasy, that the pathetic hope in his heart had once again taken on her appearance to comfort him.
But as the dream grew clearer, He Yu saw that those eyes weren't lovely and smiling at all. They were ice-cold, sharp, hostile, and resolute… and also distraught and helpless. He suddenly realized that those were Xie Qingcheng's eyes, the way they looked after he had been drugged with Plum Fragrance 59 in that private room.
The dream was a product of his own subconscious mind, so as soon as he realized whose eyes those were, the full scene began to materialize.
Once again, He Yu saw Xie Qingcheng's body sprawled out on that buttery, black leather sofa. Xie Qingcheng's skin was strikingly pale, like a precious gemstone ensconced in a case lined with black velvet, so fair it seemed almost transparent. What had once been a clean white shirt was now soaked through with red wine. The fabric was plastered to his skin, revealing the lines of his firmly muscled chest as it rose and fell.
He Yu had tormented Xie Qingcheng into a miserable state—he was so drenched in sweat that he looked like he had been fished out of the sea. His body was fully tensed, purely masculine, and ferociously powerful— like a flame struggling as it was doused with water.
The drug coursed relentlessly through Xie Qingcheng until he couldn't take it anymore. He arched his neck helplessly as he clawed at the sofa, staring upward as if he were trying to grab onto something, exposing his wrists and the delicate script on his left wrist that read, Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
He Yu stared at that line of text until the clearly distinct words blurred, and finally he couldn't make them out at all anymore. The words were like some kind of demonic curse that was sucking his soul from his body, and he stepped forward like a man possessed…only for Xie Qingcheng to grab his hand with a slap.
Those peach-blossom eyes seemed suffused with a peach blossom miasma.
Once again, that hoarse, impassioned cry, the likes of which He Yu had never heard before, echoed through his dream.
Xie Qingcheng panted, his lips parted, his eyes misted over, and the veins in his neck shivered hypnotically—like a snake demon that had cast off its molted skin to reveal the vulgar desire beneath, enticing a man to bite and tear into it ruthlessly, to swallow it until that desire melted into his bones. Drawing him into a nightmare that didn't even spare his flesh and blood…
When He Yu woke up, he was still panting for breath.
The watch on his wrist was coldly dormant, a calming weight on his sweat-soaked arm. He lay on the large walnut bed in the villa, the vegetal sweetness of his bamboo sleeping mat flooding his nose with each inhale.
Beyond the window, an edge of grayish blue the color of a crab's shell had begun to peek out from below the horizon. It couldn't even be considered the first rays of dawn—at around four in the morning, it was still too early, and all the servants in the villa were asleep in their respective rooms. He Yu was the only one awake, just surfaced from a dream drenched in cold sweat and shivering from the chill.
A light autumn quilt was draped over his waist. As he stared up at the ceiling, the brass inlay tiles seemed like an array of mirrors; lying on the bed, he could see himself reflected on their surface.
He Yu blinked, his throat bobbing. He was like the empty shell of a body that had just been spat out of a nightmare. But an empty shell would not be affected by the stirrings of desire, and he knew that the thin blanket was concealing the searing evidence of his own debt of sin, yet unrelieved. It had followed him here into the real world, belatedly crossed over from that fantastically vivid dreamscape to desperately seek comfort in something soft, wet, and warm.
He Yu's fingertips twitched, and he was certain that he had truly gone insane. How did he end up dreaming about that night he'd spent with Xie Qingcheng?
When he fucked Xie Qingcheng, he'd believed he wasn't doing it out of any sense of desire. He had lost his mind at the time, and all he knew was that this was the best way to humiliate Xie Qingcheng; completely irrationally, he would follow Xie Qingcheng into the mire if it meant that he could cover him in mud and see that wretched look on his face.
He Yu had originally planned to use the retaliatory madness born of the wine to bring their relationship to an end. After that night of sex, he'd even blocked Xie Qingcheng on WeChat like some booty-calling fuckboy, with no plans of contacting him ever again.
So why would he dream of Xie Qingcheng again, of that hoarse cry that made even the dimples on his back prickle with pleasure? It wasn't like he was gay—how could he get caught up like this?
He Yu closed his eyes and lifted a hand to his temple. The more he tried to evade those memories, the more insistently they rose to the surface, stimulating the desire hidden beneath that thin blanket and teaching him the meaning of primal instinct.
He endured it. But his sweat kept beading, and his breathing grew rough. This masculine instinct disgusted him, and he strove to evade it, but still, it pounced upon him.
He Yu was bloodthirsty, but that night, he'd quenched his thirst with another man. Before then, he had never kissed anyone, much less held someone or sank into the depths of pleasure with them while savoring the taste of passion.
Male virgins around twenty years old who'd just had their first taste of sex were the absolute worst. At that age, they weren't just in their peak condition physically, they were also curious and in possession of a great deal of free time. Every hotel near a university could attest to that fact. He Yu was unique in many aspects, but he was also just a nineteen-year-old boy; he couldn't resist the desire that the serpent in the Garden of Eden had enticed humans to swallow.
Just one taste, one try, and a boy would—
Inevitably think about it.
Inevitably crave it.
In the end, He Yu couldn't handle the stimulation anymore. He threw off his covers and roughly grabbed his phone.
There was a soft beep as he unlocked the device. But to his ears, it crashed like a clap of thunder.
He Yu froze for a long moment. At last, he stiffly moved his fingers and, mind reeling from the intense inner conflict, tapped open a photo album. Saved within were the pictures he had taken of Xie Qingcheng asleep in bed. As He Yu stared at the screen, his dreamscape instantly overlapped with reality.
The details in the photograph were crystal clear—even the faint hickeys on Xie Qingcheng's collarbone were visible. He Yu immediately recalled the intense heat between the two of them as they entangled so tightly together. The sticky-soft sounds of their lips and tongues seemed to echo in his ears.
He Yu hadn't looked at these photos since he left the club that day. Now that he'd broken off their relationship, he didn't want to harbor any desire toward Xie Qingcheng.
But now, one could only guess the sort of bizarre thoughts that were running through He Yu's mind as he opened that securely encrypted folder. Enclosed within the blackout curtains of his room in the villa, lying on his huge bed, he felt like something heavy had knocked him down without warning, pressing on his chest and making it difficult to breathe.
The wet heat of that image—Xie Qingcheng's completely bare body, his disheveled hair scattered across his forehead, the bruising at the corner of his mouth where He Yu had bitten him when they'd kissed—pinned He Yu down on the sleeping mat, tearing into his masculine instincts.
After only a single glance, he immediately closed his eyes and turned off his phone.
In an instant, he had become soaked in hot sweat…
Had he gone insane?
His heart kept pounding harder and harder—ludicrous—as he grew more and more disgusted. He really had gone insane… It wasn't like he was gay!
That's right, he thought. Between the sleep deprivation and his sickness, he must have gone crazy.
Ashen-faced, He Yu tossed his phone aside, got off the bed, and padded barefoot into the bathroom in a haze of heat. The sound of icy water echoed for the better part of an hour before he stepped out of the bathroom.
Then, he exited the photo app and lay in bed with his hair still wet. He spent some time scrolling social media, trying to distract himself as quickly as possible.
The internet wasn't at all quiet at night; its pages were filled with the sparkling spirit of the sleepless.
He Yu scrolled for a while, only to realize that at some point, he'd subconsciously searched for "Xie Qingcheng." He stared in consternation at the search results.
Sometimes, when people are completely relaxed, they act just like this—they unconsciously scribble the name echoing in their head into their notebook or type it out on the keyboard.
He Yu couldn't accept that he had subconsciously typed Xie Qingcheng's name. It was beyond absurd. Coming back to his senses, He Yu was about to exit the app—but it was then that he suddenly noticed a post.