“I-I didn’t say much. I only said… he couldn’t marry Cousin anyway.” Terrified, Song Fan confessed and begged for mercy.
“People naturally make their own actions sound better. What you actually said at the time could only have been worse than that. Will you tell me everything yourself, or should we use a more direct and forceful method?”
“…I-I said Cousin couldn’t possibly be gay.”
“…”
No wonder Lan Xi had come back that day and asked him what “homosexuality” was.
“Since when did my affairs become something you had the right to discuss and criticize?”
Song Fan’s face went deathly pale. Naturally, he had no answer.
“What else? You obviously said more than those two things that day.”
“I-I said Cousin has a brilliant future, so of course he’d marry a woman from a family of equal standing. I wasn’t wrong…”
Fu Hui crouched down, grabbed him by the collar, and nearly hauled Song Fan straight off the floor.
In truth, Song Fan’s parents had not thought their son was wrong either. Naturally, they still had not realized how serious the problem was.
Not until Fu Hui slapped him across the face.
Song Fan’s head snapped sideways. Half his head seemed to go numb, and his ears rang violently.
The taste of blood quickly filled his mouth.
He opened his mouth, intending to say something, only to realize that even his lips had gone numb.
The moment Fu Hui released him, Song Fan crashed straight to the floor and could not get back up for a long while.
Only then did a sharp pain belatedly shoot through his ear.
Song Fan felt as though he had a concussion. Sprawled on the floor, he asked, “What, does Cousin actually plan to marry him?”
Song Fan’s parents were scared half to death and hurriedly lunged forward to cover his mouth.
Fu Hui turned and walked out.
A bodyguard immediately handed him a handkerchief to wipe his hands.
Cheng Yiran was waiting outside too. He had heard every word of Song Fan’s confession just now.
“It’s my fault. If I hadn’t taken Lan Xi out, he never would’ve heard Song Fan spouting nonsense.” Cheng Yiran felt guilty too.
He knew Lan Xi’s current state was dangerous. He was just as terrified that Lan Xi might quietly die somewhere outside without anyone knowing.
If that happened, Cheng Yiran did not dare imagine how Fu Hui would react.
＊
On the way back after paying for the television, Fang Nianqing received a call from his maternal uncle.
He had nothing to say to those relatives, so he hung up immediately.
But very soon, his uncle sent him two messages:
[I’m at your house.]
[When are you coming back?]
That was strange.
Fang Nianqing’s relatives would do anything to seize the house. They would pick the lock while Fang Nianqing was at school, drag their whole family over, and move in. The last thing they would normally do was let Fang Nianqing know about it.
Yet now his uncle had specifically messaged him to announce that he was there?
Suspicious, Fang Nianqing called him back. The first thing he said was, “Get out of my house.”
Fang Nianqing’s uncle had worked construction in his younger years and picked up plenty of rough street habits. Normally, he would already be cursing by now.
But today, his voice was stiff and restrained. “Get back here, now!”
There was even a note of urgency in it.
“What happened?” That was Fang Nianqing’s first reaction.
His uncle stalled for a moment on the other end, then lowered his voice and asked anxiously and fearfully, “Did you offend somebody?”
“Who?”
“Stop playing dumb!” Uncle Fang wanted to curse but forced himself to hold back. He lowered his voice even further. “Don’t ask so much. Just hurry up and…”
Never in his life had Uncle Fang wanted so badly to escape this place!
With a ding, the elevator doors opened.
Fang Nianqing stepped out while his thoughts raced.
“Put them on the phone.” He wanted to know who was on the other side.
Uncle Fang hurriedly handed the phone to the bodyguard.
The bodyguard was speechless. He had not expected this man to be stupid enough to fail at luring Fang Nianqing back and even expose them in the process.
Fortunately, it did not matter much.
The bodyguard took the phone. “It’s a small matter. We need to ask Student Fang a few questions.”
“What about?”
“Have you seen Lan Xi?”
Fang Nianqing’s first instinct was to hang up.
Fortunately, he stopped himself.
Instead, he asked, “Who is Lan Xi?”
“You don’t know him, Student Fang?”
“No.” Fang Nianqing paused. “If there’s nothing else, I’m hanging up.”
The bodyguard remained perfectly polite. “All right.”
The moment Fang Nianqing ended the call, the bodyguard immediately sent the recording to Fu Hui.
Fu Hui responded faintly, “Mm.”
Fu Hui had already returned to the residence and was sitting in the place Lan Xi usually liked to stay.
Lan Xi really had no guile… Fu Hui lowered his head and pulled open a drawer. Lan Xi’s diary was sitting right inside, without the slightest attempt to hide it.
To Lan Xi, this was his most important possession, something he carried wherever he went. Yet when he left, he had not taken it with him.
Did he really want nothing anymore?
Fu Hui took out the diary and opened it.
He flipped past the entries cursing him and praising him, past the delighted exclamations and the furious ones.
Then Fu Hui saw the newer entries Lan Xi had added afterward.
[So annoying QAQ. Why am I still not allowed to sleep with a second person? I want to go back to Hell.]
Fu Hui paused almost imperceptibly, then continued turning the pages.
There were more and more [I want to go back to Hell] entries, so many that the sight of them was shocking.
He closed the diary and did not put it back.
Next, Fu Hui listened to the recording of Fang Nianqing twice. Fang Nianqing had been calm enough, but his eagerness to end the call still came through.
“Where is Fang Nianqing now?”
The bodyguard answered, “Qingshi Hotel. He’s working there as an accompanying interpreter for a bunch of foreigners.”
Fang Nianqing did not have much money, and Lan Xi almost never mentioned him.
He did not seem like the sort of person Lan Xi would choose to seek refuge with.
Maybe Lan Xi had never intended to seek refuge with anyone. Maybe he had only found somewhere to quietly… Fu Hui stopped himself there. He pressed at his throbbing temple and would rather Lan Xi had run off to find some other man.
“Keep him under watch for now.”
“Yes, Sir.”
＊
Fang Nianqing returned to the room and shut the door behind him.
Lan Xi had calmed down a little by then. He looked Fang Nianqing over. “A dog chasing you?”
Fang Nianqing froze. “No.”
But he quickly understood what Lan Xi meant. “Do I look that panicked?”
“You’re nervous.” Lan Xi thought about it. “Because you have no money?”
“No…”
With obvious pain, Lan Xi tossed out one of his gold bangles. “Take it. Sell it.”
Fang Nianqing bent down and picked up the bangle, pressing his lips together. “I’m not that desperate yet.”
Perhaps still brooding over what Lan Xi had said before, he could not resist adding, “I can still afford to feed you.”
He gave Lan Xi no chance to argue and immediately changed the subject. “That Fu Hui you mentioned… I think he found his way to my house.”
“Oh.” Lan Xi did not seem surprised. “He’s very powerful.”
Fang Nianqing had vaguely begun to sense that too, even though he had never even met the man.
He stepped forward, intending to put the gold bangle back into Lan Xi’s hand.
But then his fingertips brushed something unusual.
He looked down. “There’s some kind of special device in here?”
Lan Xi looked blank. “What?”
Fang Nianqing brought the gold bangle closer and examined it carefully. “It’s a remotely controlled electrical-discharge device.”
Lan Xi: “Huh?” He thought about it. “Is it still worth money?”
Fang Nianqing choked. “Yes.”
“Oh.”
“But…” Fang Nianqing still found the whole thing strange. Who would deliberately install something like this in a piece of jewelry? And just who was this “Fu Hui”? How had he found Fang Nianqing’s home so quickly? Powerful? Exactly how powerful?
“Why are you hiding from Fu Hui?” Fang Nianqing felt that perhaps this was the crux of the problem.
“I’m not hiding from him.” Lan Xi turned his face away. “I just hate him. I despise him! I only wanted to leave, but he probably wouldn’t like that.”
Probably wouldn’t like it was an understatement.
He was extremely unwilling to let Lan Xi leave.
Fang Nianqing had already seen Lan Xi’s missing-person notice on social media. The reward was so enormous that Fang Nianqing had no doubt that if Lan Xi had not disguised himself, if he had not hidden here, Fu Hui would have had him taken back in minutes.
Lan Xi clearly did not want to say more, so Fang Nianqing could only probe indirectly. “Is he your family?”
“No.”
“Then he’s…”
Lan Xi pulled a long face and used the word Song Fan had used that day. “My lover.”
Fang Nianqing’s expression changed.
He tightened his grip on the bangle. “He used something like this on you?”
“Mm.”
“He put this thing on you…” The corners of Fang Nianqing’s eyes tightened. He blurted out in anger, “Is he insane? What is he trying to do, punish you or imprison you?”
Lan Xi was not some overbearing young master of the Wen family, yet he had suffered in Wen Lan’s place.
Now, looking at Lan Xi, Fang Nianqing felt as if he were seeing his old self from when Wen Lan had harassed him.
The guilt of misunderstanding Lan Xi, the suffocating sympathy of having suffered something similar, and the shame over the dark thoughts he had once entertained all surged up together.
“Mm. He did want to imprison me.”
Lan Xi’s tone was so calm that Fang Nianqing was startled.
“Later, he started acting really strange. I go out with his younger brother every day, and he doesn’t care.” Lan Xi looked puzzled.
Fang Nianqing froze at first.
Then he frowned and said coldly, “That’s because of this thing. Of course he can pretend to be generous when he has this.” He lifted the gold bangle in his hand.
Lan Xi remembered something. “One day he secretly tried to take it off.”
Fang Nianqing froze again. “Then why do you still have it?”
Lan Xi said, “I wouldn’t let him.”
Fang Nianqing: “…?”
Fang Nianqing discovered a problem.
If Fu Hui wanted to control Lan Xi, then at the very least this thing needed to be on Lan Xi’s wrist. But Lan Xi had just pulled it out of his pocket.
Lan Xi looked angry again. “Maybe he doesn’t want to control me anymore.”
Fang Nianqing vaguely sensed that the direction of this conversation was becoming strange, but he still could not resist asking, “Why do you think that?”
“He’s going to marry a woman. Maybe.” The succubus chose his words carefully.
Fang Nianqing’s expression grew colder. “Then what right does he have to come looking for you?”
Lan Xi leaned against the headboard and stopped talking.
His hair fell along his cheeks, making his pale features look at once otherworldly and painfully vulnerable.
It felt as though a pair of hands had lightly plucked at Fang Nianqing’s heart.
He thought Lan Xi probably liked that person…
But judging from what he had heard, that person really did not sound like a good man.
“Why did he imprison you in the first place? Did he want to keep you as his plaything?” Fang Nianqing sounded as if he were asking, but in truth he was reminding Lan Xi not to be fooled by that man.
Lan Xi raised his face slightly and thought seriously. “Because he’s stingy. He wouldn’t let me sleep with a second person.”
Fang Nianqing: “…………”
All right. Pretend none of his earlier deductions had happened.
He looked at Lan Xi again. Lan Xi had lowered his eyes once more.
Pitiful and delicate.
Fang Nianqing could not help pressing his lips together.
Still, that aside… “Even then, he shouldn’t have imprisoned you.”
Lan Xi did not respond.
There was no television to watch anymore, so he rolled over. “Sleep.”
The rooms arranged by the event organizers were all standard twin rooms with two beds. Fang Nianqing went to the other bed, sat down, then lifted the blanket and stiffly lay beneath it.
Only after quite a while did he remember that neither of them had eaten yet.
“Lan Xi?”
Lan Xi was already asleep.
Fang Nianqing frowned as he looked at Lan Xi’s quiet, beautiful face and began worrying about how to get him to eat properly.
Because there was no television, when Fang Nianqing went out the next day, he left his own phone behind for Lan Xi to play with.
He switched to a simple old-fashioned phone himself.
Fang Nianqing did not rely heavily on a smartphone anyway. As long as he could make calls and stay reachable, that was enough.
After Fang Nianqing left, Lan Xi used the phone to search things like “where to find angels” and “how to go to Hell”…
Eventually, several posts appeared saying that if he joined certain enthusiast groups and everyone followed the given instructions together, they could reach Heaven.
Curious, Lan Xi joined one.
At that moment, Fu Hui was looking at his phone too.
He could not stop himself from reading news reports with headlines like “Homeless Person Found Dead”… In modern society, unless someone died deep in the mountains or wilderness, a body would usually be discovered quickly.
There had still been no such reports. At the very least, did that mean Lan Xi was safe?
“Sir, here’s what you asked for.” A bodyguard placed a stack of reports in front of Fu Hui.
Fu Hui began flipping through them.
If Fang Nianqing had seen these reports, he probably would have been genuinely terrified.
They documented every movement he had made since checking into Qingshi Hotel: what he ate at the breakfast buffet, every sentence he translated, the exact times he entered and left his room… Not a single detail was missing.
After flipping through those few thin pages, the taut string inside Fu Hui finally loosened visibly.
“Lan Xi is with him.”
The bodyguard was startled. “But nobody has seen anyone else in his room.”
The housekeepers had gone in and out and seen nothing. The bodyguards had already questioned them.
Fu Hui did not know how Lan Xi had managed to hide from them either.
But…
“Fang Nianqing has been bringing more food back, and the variety has obviously increased too… Cake, sushi, barbecue, milk tea. None of those are things he normally eats.”
After saying that, Fu Hui stood. “Let’s go.”
The housekeeper opened the door to Room 703 once again. After a quick cleaning, she pulled the curtains wide open, then left the room.
A faint rustling sounded in the quiet room.
The flat mound beneath the blanket slowly puffed up.
Then a head emerged. Transforming like this once every day was already exhausting. Lan Xi simply hugged the blanket and began staring blankly into space.
Directly opposite the windows of Room 703 stood an office building.
Fu Hui was standing in the general manager’s office of a tech company inside that building, one hand braced against a telescope as he watched the entire process of Lan Xi emerging from beneath the blanket.
“Brother?” Cheng Yiran was so anxious he kept scratching at his head and ears. “Did you see him?”
“…Mm.”
Fu Hui’s expression did not relax.
He still found it impossible to explain how the housekeeper could enter the room without seeing Lan Xi.
He needed to figure it out.
“Sister-in-law is really in there?” Cheng Yiran pressed again.
“Mm.”
Cheng Yiran was secretly stunned.
Fang Nianqing really had guts! He had actually taken Lan Xi away.
“Then let’s go get Sister-in-law right now…”
“No rush.”
At that response, Cheng Yiran froze solid.
Hadn’t his brother been acting like he wanted to eat someone alive for the past two days?
“If he’s happy where he is right now…” Fu Hui began thoughtfully.
Cheng Yiran blankly continued for him, “Then you’ll let him stay with Fang Nianqing?”
Fu Hui shot him a sidelong glance. “Then I’ll let him be happy for two days.”
Sure enough, Cheng Yiran had been thinking too much.
He clamped his mouth shut.
Fu Hui did not lower the telescope. From that angle, he watched Lan Xi for the entire day.
He seemed to have turned into a stone statue.
Cheng Yiran looked at Fu Hui’s sharply cut profile.
Only then did Cheng Yiran suddenly realize that his brother had lost quite a bit of weight lately too.
Time passed quickly until six forty in the evening. Fang Nianqing returned carrying more food.
Fu Hui glanced over once and instructed the people beside him, “Get Fang Nianqing some money first.”
Don’t let Fang Nianqing take such poor care of Lan Xi that he ruins him.
Cheng Yiran thought about it. “Fang Nianqing’s always worked while studying, and he’s really frugal. Even if you give him money, he might not be willing to spend it on Sister-in-law.”
Fu Hui’s voice turned faintly cold, with an equally faint sourness beneath it. “He will.”
After all, he had just paid Qingshi Hotel five thousand yuan for a television.
Fang Nianqing would not smash a television for no reason. Lan Xi had most likely done it.
Lan Xi had already spent Fang Nianqing’s money like that, and Fang Nianqing still had not thought about turning him in for the enormous missing-person reward.
That afternoon, Fang Nianqing had been interpreting for the foreigners and even gotten a box of foreign specialty snacks from them. Now he was sitting across from Lan Xi, opening the packages for him.
Fu Hui could not even tell whether he should feel relieved.
At least nobody here had wings.
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