UCS Chapter 117

When Gui Yan came to, he found Gao Shi sitting before him.

 

Who Gao Shi was, no one in their circles did not know. What made it worse was that he was also Gao Gusheng’s father.

 

Gui Yan’s heart gave a sharp jolt.

 

He discovered that both his hands and feet were locked in shackles.

 

The space was pure white, enormously wide. Behind Gao Shi, people in white coats walked back and forth, the kind of place that brought to mind a mad scientist’s laboratory.

 

Gui Yan forced himself to appear calm. “Mr. Gao, unlawful imprisonment is a jailable offence.”

 

Gao Shi said mildly, “Oh? You have the standing to talk about the law?”

 

“A hit-and-run from a year ago. How should that be sentenced? Organ trafficking, and when one transplant attempt failed, you removed the victim’s last remaining kidney. How should that be sentenced?”

 

Cold sweat poured down Gui Yan’s back.

 

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

 

“Shall I spell it out plainly?” Gao Shi’s expression did not change. “A year ago, Bai Mingyue went abroad. In your desperation to go after him, you took to the road in the middle of the night, driving drunk and well above the speed limit. You hit someone.”

 

“The speed was too great. The person stopped breathing on the spot.”

 

“You were afraid the exposure would destroy your reputation and your racing career. So you fled. Add one more charge: hit and run.”

 

“The Gui family could not afford to abandon you. They cleaned up after you, partly to protect you, and partly to teach you a lesson, so they put you under house arrest. That is why you never went abroad to find Bai Mingyue.”

 

This was real life, not a novel. Going abroad was hardly the same as never meeting again.

 

Gui Yan had been put under house arrest. During that time the Bai family gradually fell into decline. There was no trace of anyone by that name abroad, and the Gui family’s overseas connections turned up nothing. Gui Yan had believed they would never meet again in this life, which was why he had found a substitute.

 

Gao Shi tapped his fingertips lightly. “Not long ago, in order to get a kidney for Bai Mingyue, you paid five hundred thousand and bought one. But your people made a surgical error, and to give Bai Mingyue his transplant, they removed the victim’s second kidney as well.”

 

“For the sum of six hundred thousand yuan, you bought a human life.”

 

“Hit and run. Drunk driving. Intentional bodily harm.”

 

“Is there anything you would like to say?”

 

Gui Yan’s expression shifted from belligerence to panic. He had not expected that what he had buried so deeply could have been dug up by the person before him.

 

“I want my lawyer!”

 

Gao Shi gave a cold laugh. “Do you think you are still at the stage of being tried? No. You are already at the stage of receiving your sentence.”

 

“Honestly, I find you pitiable. A reborn individual, and rather than seizing the opportunity to strengthen your family and yourself, you poured every last bit of energy into love and romance, got deceived over and over, and still could not see clearly.”

 

“What did you say?!”

 

Gao Shi looked at him. “You remember, don’t you?”

 

He leaned in and asked quietly at Gui Yan’s ear, “My son’s eye and kidney. Were they useful?”

 

Gui Yan’s pupils contracted sharply. He finally lost all composure. “You remember! I knew it! You remember everything! You are reborn too!”

 

“You don’t know anything! If it were not for me, A-Yue would have died long ago!”

 

“He repaid my kindness with betrayal. All I wanted was his organs, and he tried to kill Mingyue!”

 

Gao Shi landed a kick square in his stomach and silenced him.

 

This wretch had the nerve to bring that up?

 

Gao Shi thought of his son in the dreams and felt as though his heart were being carved out of his chest. “If you had never interfered, my son would have found his footing again on his own. It is precisely because of scum like you that he suffered so much!”

 

Gui Yan was truly nauseating. Every other scoundrel at least knew what they had done was despicable. Gui Yan alone was both stupid and arrogant, even now believing everything was under his control, even now believing that without him Gao Gusheng would crumble to nothing.

 

“After spending so much time with Lele, could you really not see that Lele is not the kind of person who gets crushed by a little hardship?”

 

“You genuinely believe he would have died without you? You genuinely think he is a parasitic vine?”

 

Gui Yan stiffened his neck. “Ha! After he left me he could not even find work. He was surviving by collecting scrap. If I had not taken pity on him and thrown him a thousand yuan, he would probably have rotted away already!”

 

Even as he said it, he remembered the way Gao Gusheng had looked at him at the time, calm and indifferent, as though looking at a complete stranger.

 

As though from beginning to end, he had never once picked up the banknotes thrown on the ground.

 

He had actually wanted to ask whether Gao Gusheng regretted it. But Mingyue had been calling for him, so he had not gone back to look.

 

Gao Shi was so furious he almost laughed. “And who do you think is responsible for Lele being unable to find work and surviving by scavenging? None other than your white moonlight, Bai Mingyue!”

 

“He schemed to frame Lele, had you throw him out of the Gui household, and kept sabotaging Lele’s jobs, leaving him with nowhere to go.”

 

Gui Yan refused to believe it. “Ridiculous! Mingyue and I grew old together in our past life. Do you think you know him better than I do?”

 

“He has not yet recovered. He knows nothing of any of this. Don’t drag him into it!”

 

As if on cue, at that very moment two Spirit Police officers marched a pig-faced Bai Mingyue past behind them.

 

Gui Yan went completely silent, as though someone had closed a hand around his throat.

 

Gao Shi clapped his hands together. “How deeply felt. Now then, do you happen to know where the Gao Gusheng you failed to abduct ended up?”

 

Gao Shi pointed at Bai Mingyue. “Less than an hour ago, I caught him. Charge: kidnapping.”

 

Gui Yan could not accept it. He screamed toward Bai Mingyue with everything he had. “Mingyue! Mingyue! Are you alright? What he said is false, isn’t it?”

 

Gao Shi waved a hand at the two Spirit Police officers. “If you would. This devoted couple has been entwined for two lifetimes. There is no need to separate them. Lock them up together.”

 

The Spirit Police officers nodded and brought Bai Mingyue to a rack not far from Gui Yan.

 

Gui Yan watched Bai Mingyue being locked up, and it was like watching the moon in his heart being swallowed by dark clouds. The pain was overwhelming. “Mingyue! Mingyue! Don’t touch him! You bastards!”

 

Gao Shi stood with his arms folded, watching this little drama unfold, feeling the fire in him subside by a few degrees. “You still have the presence of mind to call out to him? Your Gui family has been run into the ground by him.”

 

“What?”

 

Gui Yan did not process it immediately. A blankness crossed his face for a moment.

 

Gao Shi looked at Bai Mingyue but spoke to Gui Yan. “Your beloved is far cleverer than you. It seems he was already laying plans to control the Gui family in your past life. He knows every vulnerability the Gui family has. He has already detonated quite a few of them today. The Gui family now has its hands full with its own problems. Tax evasion, the use of undue influence, substituting inferior goods that caused casualties. All of it is the kind of news that cannot be suppressed.”

 

Gao Shi’s voice was like a devil’s whisper. “The Gui family is finished.”

 

Even if Gui Yan had never been involved in the family’s affairs, he knew well enough that the Gui family was the foundation of his comfortable life. If it collapsed, even if he got out of this place, things were unlikely to go well for him.

 

But what mattered more was this. “Mingyue, you… you were also reborn?”

 

He asked in disbelief.

 

At that moment, Bai Mingyue, who had kept his head lowered since the moment he walked in, looked up for the first time.

 

Gui Yan had never seen that look in Bai Mingyue’s eyes before.

 

In his heart, Bai Mingyue had always been the moon in the heavens, cool and noble. But the eyes before him now were like a deep abyss, and the so-called moon was nothing but the reflection of the abyss’s water.

 

“Yes.”

 

“I was also reborn.”

 

Bai Mingyue looked at Gui Yan and gave a contemptuous laugh. “You really are a fool. In the past life and in this one both.”

 

Hearing Bai Mingyue speak to him this way, Gui Yan was more stunned than he had been by his own capture. “What did you say?”

 

Bai Mingyue was bound to the rack, yet looked as relaxed as though he were reclining on a sofa. “I said you are stupid. And nauseating.”

 

“And so is your love.”

 

“In our past life I drove A-Yue out of the Gui household for you, helped the Bai family rebuild, and in this life I even killed someone for you. And you say my love is nauseating?!”

 

Gui Yan erupted. He had never been a person of even temper, and now his eyes were red with fury, feeling every tender feeling he had ever held being thrown to the ground and trampled.

 

“If you loved me, then why did you find a substitute? Why, after being with me, did you keep him in the house?”

 

“And if you loved the substitute, why did you keep getting entangled with me, and even give him his kidney transplant?”

 

“At the end of it all, you are just a child who never grew up. You love only yourself and do as you please.”

 

Bai Mingyue said evenly, “You feel angry and hurt? Then the Gao Gusheng of the past life had far more right to feel hurt. After all, he liked you so much that he willingly gave his kidney and cornea to me just so you could have what you wanted.”

 

Gui Yan went rigid.

 

Bai Mingyue made no effort to conceal his jealousy. “Why did someone like him fall for a piece of scum like you?”

 

Something flashed in Gui Yan’s mind. He asked in disbelief, “You, you have feelings for him? You like A-Yue?!”

 

Bai Mingyue smiled, which pulled at the wound on his face and twisted his expression. “Of course I do. Love that genuine, who would not want it?”

 

“What a pity. The person he loved was a fool like you, who trampled other people’s feelings without a second thought.”

 

Why. Why did someone like that get to have the things he had longed for his whole life.

 

Whether it was a distinguished family or a wholehearted love.

 

Why did he get to live a lifetime being simple and happy and none the wiser?

 

Bai Mingyue smiled with a cruel edge. “Gao Shi was right. It was I who framed Gao Gusheng back then. The whole point was to drive him away from your side.”

 

“And afterward it was also I who sabotaged his work, so that no one else would discover what made him wonderful, and so that he would never fall in love with anyone else.”

 

Gui Yan was struck completely still. Scene after scene from his past life played out in his mind, until everything froze on one image: Gao Gusheng’s eyes in the downpour.

 

Like two glass beads filmed with dust.

 

And yet when he had first found him and brought him in from the rain, those eyes had still been bright.

 

When they looked at him, cautious and careful, carrying small flickering points of hope, so beautiful it defied reason, like fireflies sealed inside a jar.

 

The fragrance of afternoon tulips. Love poems held in his hands. The faintly cool fingertips in a racing car. All of it transformed into endless remorse and struck him.

 

The one he had thought was his soulmate had been deceiving him all along.

 

The one who had truly offered up every shred of love was A-Yue, whose love he had trampled.

 

Now that his own feelings had been thrown to the ground in turn, he finally understood just how much pain what he had done to A-Yue had caused.

 

Bai Mingyue looked at Gui Yan’s hollow, lost expression and laughed. But as he laughed, tears fell.

 

“Why did I wake up so late. If I had woken half a year earlier, the one at his side would have been me.”

 

He thought of the moment he had bound Gao Gusheng, his fingertips accidentally grazing that soft, warm cheek. The sleeping young man had been as beautiful as a handful of roses touched with morning dew.

 

The scene from their past life would never come again in this one.

 

“But I had already… I had already gotten him…”

 

Gao Shi watched the two of them tearing into each other and felt the last of the anger in his chest release.

 

He turned and walked out of the research institute without looking back.

 

He knew that this pair, once hailed as the perfect couple, would spend the rest of their lives using their knowledge of each other’s deepest wounds against each other, like two dogs savaging one another.

 

One drowning in regret. One drowning in the despair of having held something and lost it. Neither would know peace for the rest of their days.

 

The weather was fine today. The sunlight outside the research institute was almost painfully bright.

 

Gao Gusheng, like an eager puppy, leaned out from the back seat and grinned at Gao Shi alongside Ying Bujie.

 

“Dad, the weather is so nice today. How about the three of us go for a drive?”

 

***

 

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