Chapter 48
At the foot of the snowy mountains are the grasslands. The autumn air is sweet and fresh, with the coolness of the rain. As soon as Lu Bai arrived at the temporary filming location, he was wrapped in a cotton coat from head to toe.
In the distance are the snow-capped mountains glittering under the light of the setting sun, but the grassland at the foot of the mountains in the evening is almost empty and deserted. With the wind whispering in his ears, Lu Bai hugged the youth tightly around his waist and buried his face in his embrace, as if this was a paradise where only the two of them existed.
“Xiao Qu, I missed you so much.” Lu Bai’s voice was a little muffled, with deep dependence and intimacy.
Qu Xueyu hugged the other back, helping him straighten his coat collar, stroking the other’s head with a smile: “What’s wrong?” He could easily hear the abnormality in the teenager’s voice, as if it was instinctual. Today’s scenes have been shot, and everyone has returned to the hotel. This part of the grassland has been contracted by the crew to ensure that there is no one there, so he can hold his young man with freedom and enjoy the warmth of the moment.
Touching the cool ears of the teenager, Qu Xueyu stretched his hands to cover them, he asked, “Do you want to lodge in a tent or in a hotel?”
Lu Bai looked up at the youth’s clean and clear eyes and said, “If we stay in a tent, will it be just me and you, and I can do whatever I want to do to you? To do anything to you in the grasslands sounds like a very romantic and appealing experience.”
Qu Xueyu raised an eyebrow, he said in his heart ‘If we stay in a hotel, you’ll still be sharing with me, and we can do whatever we want to do…’, but he still smiled and nodded. With that, he wrapped his arm around the teenager’s waist and headed in a certain direction.
Here the crew set up their tents, not far away from a shallow river. Qu Xueyu’s role is important, and the hotel is some distance away from here, so when he has too much to act, he simply sleeps in his tent. This afternoon, after the crew made adjustments, everyone went back to the hotel to rest. Qu Xueyu sent away Bo Yangzhi and the others, and then waited for Lu Bai – he would have liked to take the teenager for a walk under the snowy mountains, but it looked like the teenager had something he wanted to share with him.
After the sun had completely sunk, the tent was lit up with warm lights, which made it look like a small boat drifting on the dark grassland.
Lu Bai briefly scrubbed his body, Qu Xueyu then stripped the teenager of almost all his clothes, and tucked the other into the thick, soft, and warm blankets on the simple bed – tucking him in tightly so that he wouldn’t be exposed to the slightest breeze – and then placed a cup of steaming black tea into the other’s hands, setting a plate of snacks in his lap before sitting down next to him, and he contentedly gathered the other into his embrace with his blankets, and said: “Talk while you eat.”
Lu Bai nodded obediently and sipped his black tea, “Oh.” After a pause, he met the youth’s gentle eyes in the lamplight and said, “Xiao Qu, if I say that I’m actually not from this world, can you believe me?”
Saying such an absurd and earth-shattering statement, Qu Xueyu nevertheless just quietly looked at Lu Bai, the tenderness and love in his eyes still sparkling – he wasn’t even surprised. After a long time, he just rubbed the young man’s hair, “I’ll believe it if you say so.”
Lu Bai’s eyes suddenly got a little hot, he put the black tea on a small table to the side and leaned over to snuggle into the youth’s embrace, Qu Xueyu pulled the blanket around him a little tighter and lowered his head to kiss the teenager’s forehead.
The night wind blew on the tent, producing a vague starting sound. Lu Bai felt that the blanket on his body was soft and warm, and the youth’s embrace was so comfortable that he slowly started talking about some of his past memories to his favorite person.
“It seems a long time since I had the luxury of remembering them. In my world, my parents loved me too-they were the ones who loved me most in that world. But one day, they were driving me to the airport and we were in a car accident.”
“I’ve always wondered if they had loved me just a little bit less, or if they simply didn’t have a child like me if they wouldn’t have died and would have lived happier lives.” Had they not loved him so much, his parents wouldn’t have personally taken him on a simple trip to the airport. Had they not loved him so much, his mother wouldn’t have shielded him in the moment of the crash, and his father wouldn’t have almost subconsciously jerked the steering wheel at that moment, choosing to put his own body right in the oncoming path of that truck.
If he hadn’t been such a distracting child to raise from a young age in the first place, his parents wouldn’t have died at all, and would surely have been able to live a much happier life.
The cold pool of blood seemed so far away, and yet in this moment of recollection, he felt as if he could reach out and feel the blood-tinged mess everywhere. The pressurized and deformed car was dark and cold, and there was blood everywhere.
“Live, Xiao Bai, live happily…”
Those were the last words his mother left him.
The young man was speaking calmly when he said those words, but Qu Xueyu felt that his heart was being torn by the placid sorrow contained within them. As words had lost their meaning, he just clutched the young man a little tighter and kissed his brow over and over again.
“After coming to this world, I still had my original memories,” Lu Bai said, “My mom and dad in this world treated me well, but I didn’t want them to love me. I always felt that people who love me like that must suffer misfortunes.”
So before the age of five, Lu Bai didn’t cry, didn’t laugh, didn’t talk, resisted all approaches and intimacy from the Lu family, and refused to establish relationships with anybody. This was actually a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. Naturally, the Lu family didn’t know what the child had gone through in his “past life”, and they were anxious to take him to the doctor, where he received a diagnosis of autism.
They poured more love and care into the child and did not ask for anything in return. When the child was five years old, he finally cried and jumped into Ming Yan’s arms and called for his mother, Ming Yan hugged the child tightly and cried her heart out, while Father Lu’s eyes reddened at the same time.
“When I was five years old, I fell down from a very high step, my mom caught me but she fell down with me onto the ground. She’s a painter, but at that time, when the back of her hand and arm were scratched up with bloody trails, she was busy just asking me if I was hurt.” Lu Bai said, “Xiao Qu, I always make the people who love me sad.”
The moment he called out “Mom,” it seemed as if he was hearing those words again-“Live on, Xiaobai, live happily…”
After coming to this world, the world told him that he had to follow the plot or he would be punished, and the plot of this world concealed the correct answer for him to be able to live.
He had planned to deal with it passively, there was no meaning to him in living, even if he did manage to survive and return to his original world, his parents were no longer there.
But knowing that he was so valued by this world’s loved ones, he could no longer treat his life and death so selfishly and casually. Whether to stay here or go back to the original world, only after he was able to achieve victory and survive would he be eligible to choose. So after that, he began to organize the plot instilled in his mind by the “world”, and began to think about how to survive.
These memories had been there all along, but for some reason they had been ignored until he saw this notebook – he had almost forgotten why he was here.
Now, both the real plot of the original story and the plot that had been strangely born in his mind had completely collapsed.
Lu Bai’s hand tightly grasped the youth’s shirt collar- For some reason, he felt a strong sense of unease. The plot that had completely collapsed, his tampered memories, this notebook that had suddenly appeared, and that weird paper airplane all made him feel intensely uneasy.
Qu Xueyu sensed the teenager’s emotions, his brows furrowed slightly as he gently patted the teenager’s back, “Xiao Bai.” He kissed the teenager’s brow, kissing all the way down from his brow, kissing over the bridge of the other’s nose, the tip of his nose, and finally planting his lips on the teenager’s lips as he said, “Believe me, it’s a blessing to love you. I love you happily.” This teenager’s family -his original-worlds family as he called it or this world’s family -would also be grateful for the same.
Lu Bai’s eyes suddenly turned a little red, and a smile seeped out of the corner of his mouth as he murmured and kissed the youth all over again, a sentence gently melting between their lips, “Xiao Qu, you’re so wonderful.”
~~~~~
Lu Zhi sat in his office, his fingers tapping the desk, and asked, “How’s it going?”
Mr. Secretary pushed up his glasses, a light flashed across his lenses, and said, “Chen Ming has already contacted Young Master Qin.”
Lu Zhi scoffed and said: “Only sending someone to jail is boring ah. It’s much more painful to execute them first and then send the body to jail. He started framing my nephew at the age of fourteen, drugged him, and then tampered with his car, so it’s not too much to ask that I send him in to get someone to take care of him, right?”
Mr. Secretary corrected, “Boss, this matter has nothing to do with you. He broke the law and Chen Ming reported him, that’s all. You are a good citizen who abides by the law.”
Lu Zhi: “Heh.”
Mr. Secretary, however, then added, “It’s just about that Ms. Xiao…”
Lu Zhi looked at him and said in a puzzled manner, “My elder brother does look gentle and elegant and is very good at deceiving people, but do you seriously think that he is Mr. Nice Guy? My old man was famous in Jinghai for his ruthless methods back then, and in our family, my big brother is the most like him.” When he said this, his face darkened for a moment as he shuddered and “coughed”, “Xiaobai is the center of my big brother’s heart, and no one wants to deal with my big brother’s anger.”
Mr. Secretary’s eyebrows twitched a bit, and then inquired, “Boss, I’m very curious. This Xiao mother and son, why exactly did they get involved with the Lu family in the first place?”
Lu Jie laughed and let out a soft sigh as he said, “Because my sister-in-law is a truly good person.” With that said, he raised an eyebrow at Mr. Secretary and said, “Don’t you know the story of the farmer and the snake best? That’s how things are in this world, sometimes the good people get hurt.”
Mr. Secretary looked straight at Lu Zhi, his eyes somewhat deep.
Lu Zhi shrugged, then began to tell the story: “At first, she was my sister-in-law’s friend. Her husband died in an accident, and her late husband’s relatives were vampires who embezzled the mother’s and son’s assets. My sister-in-law helped her, and then, in order to let her and her son recuperate, my sister-in-law took the mother and her son into the family.”
People are always greedy. In the beginning, it began with envy. The woman envied Ming Yan’s husband, envied the Lu family’s wealth, and envied Ming Yan’s child for having a good father -even though the child was sick, his father still loved him and spoiled him, and wanted to pluck the stars from the sky for him. But her Xiao Yang who is a healthy and lovely child can only tug on her sleeve and say that he envies Xiao Bai’s father and that he also wants to have a father like Uncle Lu.
The woman with her child lived with the Lu family for a few years. Even when they moved out later, Ming Yan found them a nearby house to make it easier for her to take care of them. It was also during the days of living with the Lu family that Xiao Yang met Qin Gu.
Ming Yan is an emotional and spontaneous artist, and when her relationship with Father Lu faded, she went with the flow and got divorced, but Father Lu and the Lu family still treated her as a family member.
When the woman learned the news, she had her own little thoughts. She thought to herself that since Ming Yan had divorced the other person, Father Lu would not stop looking for a new wife, and since Lu Bai was a sick child who needed a stepmother to take care of him, it was only natural for her to be the stepmother! She could have the best of both worlds, she would have a husband she could rely on, a good father for her son, and she wouldn’t have to envy Lu Bai anymore.
The woman had such thoughts but did not look for her friend Ming Yan. Rather cleverly, she looked for Lu Bai, who was still a child at the time, explaining the situation to him. The child’s eyes were clear and simple, but he looked at her and had no mercy in his words: “Auntie Xiao, I don’t want to have such a white-eyed wolf as a stepmother.” Then he turned to leave, but this was heard clearly by the teenager Xiao Yang. That’s why later in Chunming’s scheme – he jumped into the pond and framed the teenager who spoke ill of his mother, but also suggested to the group of teenagers who were full of fantasies about justice beside Qin Gu that Lu Bai was most afraid of the dark.
Ming Yan and the Lu family also learned that the woman had looked for Lu Bai on her own and that later Lu Bai followed the woman’s son to Chunming to look for Qin Gu, but was picked up unconscious. Ming Yan realized that the woman she had helped from the beginning to the end had bitten her ruthlessly, that she had coveted her husband as soon as she had just gotten divorced, and that she had hurt her most beloved son. She and the woman completely severed their relationship, the Lu family warned the woman, who then took her son out of the country.
“Now,” Lu Zhi renewed tapping the table and sneering, “The white-eyed wolves are back, and they’re still thinking of messing with my nephew. And that kid from the Qin family, he’s also a fool. My big brother shouldn’t have listened to Xiao Bai too much in the first place and let Xiao Bai get close to him.”
Shio: Thank you fellow translator Raine for your help with a tricky paragraph :heart: !
Edited: Krone
