Chapter 49

On his way home, Yang Siguang felt restless and on edge.

He kept replaying the words Xu Lu had told him.

Could Li Chen have actually... saved him?

Just the thought of it made his chest feel unbearably heavy.

Try as he might to recall the life he led when he first entered university, only fragmented and shadowy glimpses surfaced in his mind. Whether moments of joy or sorrow, all had faded into dim, hazy silhouettes.

For someone of his disposition, possessing too good a memory would only make each day harder to endure.

Shutting off his inner self and completely burying all unpleasant, vexing matters had long since become a survival instinct—yet now, Yang Siguang utterly despised this instinct.

He could not remember.

No matter how hard he tried, he could not dig up any clear picture from his memory of what had happened on that night when people forced alcohol down his throat.

He could only vaguely recall the noisy private room, the steam rising from the hot pot mixing with the stench of cigarettes and beer, the clumsy young men acting worldly as they threw their arms around each other's shoulders and spoke in booming voices, and a vague, malicious gaze falling upon him, making him feel as repulsive as if cockroaches were crawling over his skin...

And then?

Then came the bitter liquid filled with carbonated bubbles, flooding his teeth and lips.

Amidst the steam, the senior's bizarre, hideous grin and his ceaselessly rolling eyeballs.

All memories cut off at that exact moment, leaving only a chaotic void thereafter.

Back then, he had not yet fallen out with his roommates, let alone moved back home. He vaguely remembered waking up the next day with his body so heavy and achingly sore that even moving a finger was an effort, yet his skin felt unusually clean, and even his outer jacket had been neatly folded and placed at the foot of his bed.

He had always assumed Xu Lu was the one who took care of him.

Until today, he learned that the person was actually Li Chen.

The very person who loathed him, who was cold to the extreme...

Had once witnessed him in such a pathetic, cowardly state of being forced to drink until he collapsed unconscious, right from such a close distance?

Sitting stiffly in the ride-hailing car, Yang Siguang found his breathing turning agonizingly difficult.

"Young man? Are you alright?"

Only when the driver's voice broke through did he abruptly snap back to reality.

He raised his head just in time to catch the driver casting uneasy glances at him through the rearview mirror.

"Are you carsick? If you are, there are throw-up bags in the back," the driver added warily.

It took Yang Siguang a long while to relax enough to murmur, "I'm not carsick. I'm just... I've arrived. Stopping right up ahead will be fine."

*

After getting out of the car, Yang Siguang noticed his palms were damp. When he opened his hands, he discovered a deep bite mark along the edge of his palm, which had already begun to ooze blood.

Ah, his old habit was acting up again.

Yang Siguang thought belatedly.

Perhaps the driver had been so nervous not because of his pale complexion, but because of this—whenever pressure reached its absolute limit, he always subconsciously inflicted pain upon himself.

...

A dull pain slowly spread along the bite mark.

The bitten area was already slightly swollen, but Yang Siguang paid it little mind. Clutching the bottle of formalin solution in his bag, he walked somewhat unsteadily toward his home.

*

Opening the front door, Yang Siguang prepared to head straight to his room. However, he accidentally kicked a pair of brand-new sneakers in the entryway.

Yang Siguang's nerves instantly tightened as he looked up toward his bedroom door. The door, which he had carefully locked before leaving home, now stood ajar with a narrow gap.

"What are you doing in here—"

Yang Siguang rushed forward, shoved the door open, and forced back the tremor in his voice as he roared at the figure inside.

A young man wearing a school uniform was currently sitting on the bedroom floor, supporting himself with both hands.

*

Hearing Yang Siguang's voice, the boy let out a shrill scream, jerked his head around in a sudden motion, and widened his eyes as if they might pop out of their sockets.

The person who had sneaked into the room was, much to Yang Siguang's lack of surprise, his stepbrother, Ding Xiaolong.

What did surprise him, however, was that the brother who had always been lawless and unruly in his presence now looked as though he had seen a ghost upon seeing him arrive. His face had gone as white as plaster, filled with sheer terror and cowardice.

Yang Siguang had never before witnessed such a cowardly and frightened expression on Ding Xiaolong.

"Bro, I, I-I... I was just coming to look... Mom confiscated my pad... b-but..."

Ding Xiaolong stammered incoherently, so terrified he could barely move.

Yang Siguang's eyebrows knitted tightly together.

"How did you get in?"

He had clearly locked the door.

*

Ding Xiaolong was currently in middle school, yet he was already growing nearly as tall as an adult, exceptionally robust.

Perhaps to preserve her marriage, Mother Yang had treasured this younger son from childhood onwards as if he were the apple of her eye.

As far as Yang Siguang was concerned, Ding Xiaolong, raised in parental indulgence, had grown tall enough, but his brain seemed to have remained stuck in the prehistoric era, failing to grow alongside his body.

Unlike Yang Siguang, who had topped his class since childhood, Ding Xiaolong went to school like a chimpanzee loose in a city, and his academic performance was an absolute mess.

Whenever his parents looked at Ding Xiaolong's horrifying grades, they had no other solutions besides the three-pronged approach of confiscating his phone, confiscating his tablet, and docking his allowance. And the moment they confiscated his belongings, Ding Xiaolong would turn around and find ways to steal them back from Yang Siguang.

Most of the time, Yang Siguang couldn't be bothered to argue with such a fool, but today, he could not hide his lingering hostility, and his voice turned remarkably sharp.

"I, I don't know. The, the door opened by itself."

As he spoke, Ding Xiaolong actually began to shed tears.

Seeing Ding Xiaolong frightened to this extent, Yang Siguang was somewhat stunned.

Given Ding Xiaolong's fearless personality, a few casual questions from him shouldn't have been enough to scare the boy to tears.

"Bro, y-your room—"

Ding Xiaolong swallowed hard, preparing to continue explaining, but at that exact moment, a fierce gust of wind suddenly blew in through the window.

The billowing curtain struck the pen holder on the windowsill directly.

With a loud thud, the pen holder tumbled to the floor and rolled all the way under the bed.

Startled out of his wits by this minor mishap, Ding Xiaolong let out a shriek. The teenager leaped up from the floor, shoved past Yang Siguang, and bolted out of the house as if his pants were on fire.

To be fair, Yang Siguang was startled by Ding Xiaolong's frantic behavior. The impact caused him to stagger, nearly sending him tumbling to the floor.

In a daze, he felt something ice-cold reach out and steady his back, allowing him to regain his balance.

Yang Siguang suddenly shivered and whipped his head around, only to find that what he was leaning against was merely the cold doorknob.

His pounding heart slowly began to calm down.

What was going on just now... Why was Ding Xiaolong acting like a madman?

Yang Siguang gazed suspiciously in the direction of Ding Xiaolong's escape for a moment, unable to make any sense of it, before walking over to shut his bedroom door once more. Back inside the room, he re-checked his belongings.

Nothing was missing.

After all, he was already accustomed to keeping no valuables whatsoever in his room, so what on earth was Ding Xiaolong...

Abruptly, his heart skipped a beat.

He rushed toward the drawer, shoved aside the books blocking the front as a disguise, and plunged his hand into the deepest recesses of the drawer.

His fingertips instantly brushed against the smooth surface of a glass jar.

The eyeball was still resting securely at the bottom of the water. When Yang Siguang lifted it out, it shifted gently at the bottom of the jar along with his trembling hand.

*

The eyeball was still in its original place.

The order of the books blocking the front was also undisturbed.

Then... theoretically speaking, Ding Xiaolong shouldn't have been scared by seeing this.

At this thought, Yang Siguang was finally able to breathe normally.

"I'm sorry..."

He murmured to Li Chen's eyeball inside the glass jar.

Though even he himself had no idea why he was saying this.

"I'm back late."

Speaking softly, Yang Siguang sat down slowly at his desk.

Gathering his wits, he reached out, his pale fingertips plunging into the slightly decaying, lukewarm liquid, and carefully retrieved the eyeball.

He held his breath and observed the eyeball for a long time.

Compared to when he first saw it, the surface of the eyeball seemed slightly sticky.

Its texture had also grown softer.

Perhaps because Yang Siguang's entire body was freezing while the summer room temperature was too high, even knowing it was merely an illusion, Yang Siguang still felt as though a trace of lingering warmth from the living still clung to Li Chen's eyeball.

A strange, aching soreness surged into his nasal passages once more, and he blinked, wondering why he felt like crying again.

"It's okay."

"Everything's okay now."

Yang Siguang muttered to himself, then placed Li Chen's eyeball into a brand-new, airtight glass jar.

He poured formalin solution into the jar.

The eyeball bobbed up and down within the jar, taking quite a while before finally sinking back to the bottom.

Yang Siguang carefully screwed the lid on tight, and a moment later, offered a faint smile toward the eyeball.

"There, now you won't rot."

The golden-brown pupil gazed gently back at him.

The room began to fill with the pungent, distinctive odor of formalin, yet faintly, Yang Siguang could still clearly smell that unique stench belonging to a corpse.

*

This shouldn't be the scent that belonged to Li Chen.

Yang Siguang thought.

*

He didn't remember when he had fallen out.

His dream was permeated with an uncomfortably heavy scent of alcohol... and a woodsy fragrance that felt inexplicably familiar.

Steeped in the warmth of a man's body, that scent brought to mind ashes and tobacco—rich and deeply comforting.

Unable to help himself, he buried his face deep into the embrace of that person, like an uncomprehending young beast, greedily and expertly drawing in the man's fragrance.

"Ngh—"

A short, muffled grunt escaped someone's lips right beside his ear.

Followed by a spasm-like tremor.

Yang Siguang could feel his body tightly restrained by a pair of taut, muscular arms. The man's strength was immense, binding him tightly enough to cause a dull ache. An ordinary person would have instinctively pulled away from such discomfort.

Yet Yang Siguang was different.

He had long since derived pleasure from being tightly bound.

And so, at this very moment, he merely let out a soft whimper, endlessly yearning for harsher chastisement and restraint, as if he were already accustomed to reaping sweeter rewards from that person.

The breathing beside his ear grew heavier and heavier.