UCS Chapter 115.2

Even if he had harboured the intention of using Gui Yan from the very beginning, slowly, gradually, he had begun to mean it.

 

And beyond Gui Yan’s own appeal, there was the weight of his family behind him.

 

The assistance the Gui family could offer his own family was immense.

 

Even so, he was never a person whose world revolved around love. He continued maintaining contact with his wider circle of friends, still working to have someone track down a donor for him.

 

For Bai Mingyue, his appearance was the least of his advantages. His greater strengths were racing, and his grasp of business. His personal magnetism had conquered Gui Yan’s circle of friends entirely. They looked at him with undisguised admiration, entirely forgetting that the Bai family’s standing was in truth not quite sufficient to put Bai Mingyue on equal footing with them.

 

Then, not long afterward, the people he had sent out to gather information reported back. He learned that living in Gui Yan’s home was another person.

 

Someone said to bear a faint resemblance to him.

 

Taken in while he was abroad.

 

Bai Mingyue could not help frowning.

 

His first reaction was not hurt, but a sense of danger. Even as he approached Gui Yan’s friends with roundabout questions about the existence of this so-called substitute, and most of them responded with ignorance or dismissive indifference, the sense of danger persisted.

 

If this person was his substitute, then now that he had returned, Gui Yan should have already dispensed with the substitute. Why was he still being kept?

 

The more Bai Mingyue thought on it, the more unsettled he became. He made a light disguise for himself and went to see this substitute in person.

 

He arrived at the small villa described in the intelligence, and when he saw the person sitting on the windowsill, he went still.

 

The young man sitting on the windowsill had a vase of tulips by his feet. He was barefoot, eyes cast downward, lips moving faintly as he read aloud in a quiet voice, word by word.

 

The sunlight fell on the tips of his hair, leaving a small and beautiful halo of light.

 

In a daze, he looked almost like a snow child left behind in summer.

 

Coming back to his senses, he found the whole thing absurd.

 

Someone like this, playing a substitute?

 

Could this young man be a fool with nothing but a pretty face? Fair without and foul within?

 

An unprecedented sense of danger rose in his chest, and it was this that drove him to pierce the thin veil before Gao Gusheng, to let Gao Gusheng know he was nothing but a substitute.

 

Gui Yan had a fiery temper, and was like a child in his possessiveness, frighteningly so. He knew that.

 

And so he was entirely unsurprised to hear that when Gao Gusheng tried to leave, Gui Yan forcibly kept him there.

 

Gui Yan was that kind of person: domineering and self-righteous. In his view, there were only things he no longer wanted, never things he could not have.

 

Gao Gusheng had been brought home by him, nursed back to health by him, and was therefore his.

 

Even now that the real one had returned, not yet having decided what to do with this substitute, he still held on to him with an iron grip.

 

How absurd.

 

Unfortunately, Gao Gusheng’s nature was stubborn, nothing like the softness his outward manner suggested. And so Gao Gusheng could only make Gui Yan angrier, until Gui Yan began to hurt him.

 

It was at this point that Bai Mingyue, as though in passing, let one of Gui Yan’s friends who knew of Gao Gusheng’s existence hear a particular rumour:

 

“They say that two people who look alike are very likely distant relatives, which means a compatibility match is quite probable.”

 

Gui Yan had not taken it seriously, but the information gave him a new avenue for tormenting Gao Gusheng.

 

He wanted Gao Gusheng to suffer. He wanted Gao Gusheng to know that the reason he was being taken to the hospital was to be typed as a potential donor for Bai Mingyue.

 

As for why he did it, it may have been anger, or it may have been because he had suddenly found that the person who should have loved him wholly was beginning to withdraw that love, and so he acted in an extreme way, testing again and again, trying to provoke a response.

 

Bai Mingyue had not taken the rumour seriously either. After all, it was something he had fabricated himself.

 

He understood Gui Yan’s mind too well. He understood all too clearly what Gui Yan wanted.

 

When Gui Yan spent time with this little substitute, real feelings had developed. The possessiveness and the emotions he could not bring himself to acknowledge had no outlet. Gui Yan, like a child experiencing his first stirrings of affection, could only express his feelings and his fear through the logic of I like you, therefore I must torment you.

 

The problem was that Gao Gusheng was an orphan who had known hardship. What he needed was absolute gentleness and acceptance, not this kind of affection that bordered on cruelty.

 

A clever person never directly intervenes in other people’s conflicts. One only needs to apply a light touch, and let the contradictions dissolve on their own.

 

He needed Gui Yan’s love.

 

Even if, at this point, he did not love him quite so much in return.

 

As expected, Gui Yan had Gao Gusheng typed.

 

What no one had anticipated was that the match succeeded.

 

When he learned the news, Gui Yan went rigid.

 

Bai Mingyue was also stunned.

 

The file in his hands happened to be open to the page with Gao Gusheng’s photograph. The young man in the photo was warm and gentle, full of sunlight, taken by the director at his welfare home when he had just entered university. Like a small white poplar tree, vibrant and full of hope.

 

A tangled web of emotions moved through him. In the end, he quietly closed the file.

 

Gui Yan could not bring himself to do it. He knew that.

 

Gui Yan was searching for a donor outside. He knew that too.

 

But he could not wait any longer.

 

His condition had been deteriorating rapidly, and so he timed it carefully. He stood looking out the window, his thin silhouette letting through just the right degree of vulnerability, which he folded away the instant he saw Gui Yan, leaving Gui Yan to wonder if he had imagined it.

 

“I am fine. Do not worry too much.”

 

“I think I am actually very fortunate. To meet you in the final stretch of my life.”

 

Bai Mingyue stopped himself from saying more. The feeling in his eyes was carefully concealed, and in the end only a smile was allowed to show.

 

Throughout this period they had never laid bare what was in their hearts, and Bai Mingyue had always maintained a half-near, half-distant quality. Only now, like wind dispersing thick fog, had a corner of it been revealed.

 

He knew Gui Yan would feel it.

 

He had guessed right.

 

In the end, the kidney transplant succeeded just as he had known it would.

 

On the day of the surgery, he and the little substitute crossed paths at the hospital.

 

Gui Yan watched over him as though he were the pupil of his own eye. Only this once had he been left without close attendance, and it was then that he encountered the little substitute, also alone.

 

He himself simply had no one accompanying him at that moment. The little substitute had never had anyone.

 

Bai Mingyue did not know what Gui Yan had said to make the little substitute willing to give up a kidney for him. Gui Yan was so unconcerned that he had not even stationed a bodyguard at the little substitute’s side.

 

What could it have been?

 

A large sum of money, enough to keep him comfortable for the rest of his life? Surely it was not that this little substitute loved Gui Yan so deeply that he was willing to wound himself for Gui Yan’s sake?

 

The cold white light fell on his face, and there was a loneliness there that defied description.

 

Bai Mingyue turned his head away and moved to leave, and walked straight into a clumsy young man rushing to welcome his girlfriend home from hospital with an enormous armful of red roses.

 

Bai Mingyue took a heavy impact. His body was far weaker than it once was, and he fell to the ground.

 

But that was not the worst of it. The worst was that he was severely allergic to rose pollen.

 

The young man’s face went white with panic. Rose petals scattered through the air. And then he saw the little substitute come running toward him.

 

Time seemed to slow. He watched rose petals fall into the little substitute’s hair, and fall against his own chest.

 

The little substitute gathered him up into his arms. A petal was crushed against his white shirt, leaving a smear of deep rose-pink.

 

Perhaps it was the breathlessness and dizziness that came with the allergic reaction, or perhaps it was something else entirely, but he felt his heart suddenly become loud and unruly.

 

In his entire life, he had never lacked for care. Many people liked him. They saw him as the moon, as an immortal above the clouds, a visitor from some higher realm. And yet not one of them had ever loved him with nothing held back.

 

His father saw him as the hope of reviving the family. His brother’s care for him carried a thread of worry within it. Everyone around him had their own designs. The mother who should have given him the most genuine love had left far too early.

 

He had always believed he did not mind.

 

Until he watched the little substitute come running toward him.

 

His one leg was not right. The file said it had left a lasting problem, that he could not engage in strenuous movement.

 

And yet when he ran toward him, he was so fast, like a breeze sweeping through a summer’s day.

 

…

 

After the kidney transplant, his recovery went well. The cornea surgery was also a success.

 

Sometimes when he looked at himself in the mirror, he would think of the little substitute running toward him, those eyes full of worry and urgency.

 

He would occasionally dream of that scene: a young man running through a deadly rain of roses falling from all directions.

 

Gui Yan seemed to be feeling guilty about the little substitute, and had been coming less often these past few days.

 

Bai Mingyue could not allow Gui Yan’s heart to drift.

 

And so he wrote a letter saying Gui Yan had had an accident, telling the little substitute to come immediately.

 

The little substitute came.

 

Bai Mingyue timed it carefully and let out a startled cry. The little substitute, disregarding his body that had not yet healed, rushed in, and saw Bai Mingyue collapsed on the floor.

 

Scattered around Bai Mingyue were rose petals.

 

“Are you alright?”

 

The little substitute rushed over, recognised him as the patient from the hospital who had been having an allergic reaction to rose pollen, and hurried to him, trying to help Bai Mingyue away.

 

“What are you doing? Stop!”

 

At that moment, Gui Yan came back.

 

And so, as naturally as one thing follows from another, the little substitute became the culprit in an attempted attack on the white moonlight.

 

The look Gui Yan turned on him was full of disbelief.

 

What was he thinking? Was he regretting having saved him?

 

He leaned against the wall and watched the snow child be pushed out into the torrential rain, washed by the downpour into a puddle of dark filth.

 

He knew Gui Yan too well. This proud and self-righteous man would not allow the little creature he believed to be entirely within his control to have deceived him.

 

There was no longer any possibility between them.

 

The matter should have ended there.

 

But later, by chance, he learned why the little substitute had been willing to donate his kidney in the first place.

 

Because the little substitute loved Gui Yan.

 

He loved him so much, so deeply, loved him to the marrow, loved him enough to want him to have what he wished for.

 

He had so little. Even if the love Gui Yan, who had once pulled him from the downpour, gave him was false, it was enough to warm the road he walked for a time.

 

Even if only a small scrap of love was spared for him, he was willing to offer all of his own love in return, for Gui Yan to take as he pleased.

 

And so Bai Mingyue thought again of the moment the little substitute had come flying to his rescue.

 

And he felt, suddenly, an overwhelming and consuming envy.

 

The envy burned like fire, scorching his chest. The rose petal that had fallen and been crushed against his heart became a cinnabar stain that would never fade.

 

Why did he deserve that kind of love?

 

Why was it not me who encountered Gao Gusheng first?

 

But it was impossible. It could never be.

 

He and Gui Yan spoke their hearts to each other, and they became the perfect couple that everyone admired.

 

In the dark, a small creature called unrequited longing gnawed at his heart.

 

And so he quietly sent people.

 

These people sabotaged the little substitute’s work, disrupted his life, kept him constantly running from one difficulty to the next until he grew thin and worn.

 

Let the rose wither.

 

So that no one would notice the rose.

 

He could not have the rose, but he did not want anyone else to have it either.

 

The thought of someone receiving a love as vivid and radiant as that rose made him feel as though he could not breathe.

 

It was like being taken back to that afternoon, the hospital corridor, the falling rose petals.

 

With no one to save him.

 

…

 

Gao Shi sat bolt upright.

 

“Don’t follow Gui Yan’s car. Investigate Bai Mingyue!”

 

***

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