Chapter 82: Do You Want Me to Stay With You?…
“Strange,” Xia Chun said expressionlessly. “I never told anyone where I was. How did you find me? Don’t tell me you’re a stalker.”
“Or are you going to say that this late at night…” He rested his elbow on his knee and propped up his head, looking down at him. “You came all the way to a creepy place like this just to relax?”
After climbing more than ten floors in one go, Gu Yang was almost out of breath. It had been a long, long time since he’d done such intense physical activity. At this moment he could only lean silently against the wall, panting. Only after he had caught his breath did he slowly turn his head.
His eyes in the darkness looked unusually deep. Whether it was just an illusion or not, Xia Chun somehow sensed a trace of grievance in them, as if blaming him for making him climb so high.
“What stalker,” Gu Yang said. His breathing was still uneven, so his words sounded like the kind of complaint exchanged between acquaintances. “Who would be that kind of pervert?”
“Didn’t you tell me before? About the unfinished building.”
Xia Chun’s eyes widened slightly.
Gu Yang wasn’t entirely certain either. In the original storyline, the place where Xia Chun jumped had been at school. But because precautions had already been taken in advance, it was obvious that he couldn’t carry it out there anymore.
So he had asked Ying Jiayi for help getting the list of apartment buyers, then traced the building unit purchased by someone named Feng Xiaochun and came to take a look.
“Just because of such a baseless guess, you made a special trip to check?” Xia Chun found it a little absurd. “What if I wasn’t here?”
“Who knows.” Gu Yang replied casually. “Maybe I would’ve been too lazy to keep searching. Running around like this is really tiring.”
Xia Chun fell silent, unsure how to respond to that.
“What exactly did you come here for?”
“…No, wait. Who asked you to come?” He shook his head and smiled faintly. “Now that I think about it, we’re not that familiar, are we?”
After saying that, he stared motionlessly at the other person, as if waiting for some kind of answer.
Gu Yang looked at him too. Hidden in the hazy moonlight, his eyes were hard to see clearly. Xia Chun seemed to realize something and gently turned his face aside.
Trying to hide the swelling on the side of his face.
“Was it my mom?” he asked.
That was the only explanation Xia Chun thought made sense.
Because she couldn’t find him and he hadn’t been answering calls, that woman—who was always prone to anxiety—must have run around frantically searching for him. During the process she probably alarmed classmates from the same school. It sounded like the most reasonable explanation.
“Haven’t I already given her what she wanted?” he continued. “That bank card has all my savings in it. The password is written on the note underneath.”
His quiet sigh dissolved into the night wind, both the sound and the emotion diluted by it.
The wind blew his long hair. His indifferent face was half hidden by messy strands, swallowed by the shadows behind him, making his expression impossible to read.
“You should go back,” Xia Chun said to Gu Yang, his tone calm and natural. “I had a bit of a fight with her and didn’t want to stay home. I just came here to get some air. Once I calm down, I’ll go back.”
The words were as perfunctory as something used to fool a child. But Xia Chun felt that with Gu Yang’s personality, he probably wouldn’t want to get involved in this kind of messy situation. The fact that he had come here at all already counted as an act of kindness.
At most he’d notify someone else afterward, pass the baton, and that would be it.
And before the next group of people arrived…
He would definitely end everything.
“Does it still hurt?” Gu Yang suddenly asked.
When Xia Chun didn’t react, he pointed at his own face.
Xia Chun’s curled fingers instinctively touched his cheek. Whenever Feng Xiaochun lost control of her emotions, she would slap him. From the initial grievance to the later numbness, he no longer felt much about it.
Of course, no one would ever care about something like that. Whenever he went out, he always made sure to tidy himself up properly.
Only this time was an exception.
“Guess why she hit me.”
Seriously, why did he ask something like that?
If this were a chat interface, Xia Chun would have already withdrawn that message. But spoken words were always more impulsive than written ones.
Gu Yang stayed silent, simply looking at him.
Since he had already started, Xia Chun continued speaking on his own.
“She was playing cards outside and racked up a pile of debts. I already helped her pay them off once, and she promised me she wouldn’t do it again.”
“But she broke her promise again. Truly… a leopard can’t change its spots.” A mocking expression flashed across Xia Chun’s face. What he had originally wanted to say was “a dog can’t stop eating shit,” but that sounded a little too crude.
During the argument, Feng Xiaochun—already on the verge of collapse because of everything that had been happening recently—slapped him.
What followed was hysterical screaming.
“What kind of heartless child are you? If it weren’t for the mess you caused, would I be so afraid to even go out now?”
“I shouldn’t have given birth to you in the first place—”
“Get out! Get out of here! This is my house, not yours!”
Maybe because she couldn’t push away the boy who had grown taller than her, or maybe because she realized she had gone too far, Feng Xiaochun shoved him a few times before slamming the door and locking herself inside her room.
He stood there silently, his chest tight. When he finally managed to breathe again and wiped his face, his hand came away wet with tears.
Trembling, he pulled out tissues and kept pressing them against his eyes, crying so hard his whole body shook.
He didn’t understand why his mother could say such things again and again.
Nor did he understand why he could be so weak.
He clearly had the ability to support himself. He didn’t need pocket money from his parents.
But if he truly had to leave this home, his whole world would collapse.
After his emotions finally calmed down, he walked into his room and took out a bank card from the safe.
Most of the money he earned from work had been deposited into that card. It basically held all of his savings.
He placed the card on the table, wrote down the password, and pressed the note under a teacup.
Then he put on his shoes, opened the door, and left.
“The money on that card—I hardly spend it except for daily expenses. After she paid off her previous debts, if she keeps living like this, she should still be able to get by for a while. As for what happens later… I don’t know.”
“Originally I thought that when I got into university, I’d go to a city far away from Jiangcheng. Somewhere with lower housing prices, and bring her with me.”
“The place we live in now is rented. She’s always wanted a home of her own. I could use that money to pay the down payment first, then slowly pay the rest.”
“We could start a new life somewhere nobody knows us. I had it all planned out…”
Xia Chun let out a long breath, suppressing the tremor in his voice, and said in an unusually relaxed tone:
“Even though things have reached this point and there’s no need to explain, I’ll say it anyway. I’m not some pervert with a cross-dressing fetish.”
“Female models get more job opportunities. My mom urgently needed money back then, so when filling out the forms she changed my gender. After that we really did receive a lot of work.”
“She was very happy then. She hugged me and praised me for being amazing. So later I just kept my hair long.”
Immersed in that empty, cheap affection, he allowed the mistake to continue until it became what it was today.
He deserved the consequences.
The money he saved could be considered repayment for raising him.
He had nothing left tying him down.
“Sorry, I ended up talking so much on my own,” Xia Chun said. “But stories like this are probably a bit beyond you. Just treat it like you listened to a random story. At least that way your trip here wasn’t a waste.”
“Gu Yang.”
“It really is hard to understand,” Gu Yang said after listening quietly the entire time, his expression thoughtful. Xia Chun had assumed it was just polite attentiveness. “Because my mother wouldn’t do that.”
Xia Chun’s nails dug into his palm.
He had thought he was completely numb already, but hearing that still ignited a sudden flare of anger.
The anger even drowned out the original pain.
“She passed away a long time ago,” Gu Yang said calmly, as if discussing something trivial.
“That day she swallowed poison in her room. It was probably a sudden impulse. She didn’t tell me in advance or leave me any message. I was the first one to find her. I called the adults, but they couldn’t save her.”
The anger vanished instantly. Xia Chun stared at him in shock.
“Wh… why?”
“She…” Gu Yang paused before continuing. “Maybe because the man who should be considered my father had died a long time ago. Their relationship was very good.”
“Wait—what do you mean ‘should be considered your father’?” Xia Chun’s mind struggled to process it.
“My mother’s fiancé. He died in a car accident before the wedding. Not long afterward she found out she was pregnant. So no one could confirm who the father was. After all, there was also the deceased man’s ill-intentioned younger brother around at the time. And we never did a paternity test later.”
“But that’s not the main point.” Gu Yang said indifferently, intending to skip the topic.
“That’s not the main point?” Xia Chun muttered in disbelief. As a child he had never had a father figure around, so he often clung to Feng Xiaochun asking questions. After learning the truth later, he regretted knowing so much.
Thinking of that, he suddenly understood.
Gu Yang truly didn’t care. As long as he was his mother’s biological child, that was enough. The man she truly loved was the one who died in that accident—the man with whom she once shared a passionate memory.
“She could never move on. No matter how I tried to approach her, it didn’t matter.”
“Ever since I could remember, she stayed in her small room and rarely came out. The one who took care of me was a hired nanny.”
“When I wanted to see her, I would knock on the door. If she said ‘come in,’ I could open it. But if there was no sound…”
This time Gu Yang paused for a long time. A dazed look appeared on his face, as if merely recalling the past was enough to crush his fragile nerves.
Xia Chun’s breathing tightened unconsciously. His previously indifferent emotions had been stirred.
“If there was no sound,” Gu Yang continued quietly, “it might be because she wasn’t in the mood to see anyone… or because she had tried to kill herself again.”
“So Gu Yuhui always reminded me to learn to judge the situation. If something felt wrong, I had to open the door. If I wasn’t quick enough, I might never see her again.”
“How old were you then?” Xia Chun asked, feeling the situation was absurd.
“Primary school, maybe? I don’t really remember.” Gu Yang answered vaguely.
Xia Chun fell silent. After a long while he said softly,
“Why would they make you bear that responsibility?”
He had probably asked himself that same question countless times.
Keeping uncomfortable long hair. Unable to fit in with girls, yet unable to fit in with boys either—like an out-of-place oddity.
Classmates discussed how much allowance their families gave them each month. But in his world, he was the one giving money to the adults.
So he would silently turn away and refuse to listen, stabbed by those ordinary happinesses.
In middle school, photos of him wearing the blue-and-white school uniform went viral online. Brands sent collaboration offers one after another. He had no choice but to focus on earning money and couldn’t balance schoolwork, so his high school entrance exam results were unsatisfactory.
In truth, it didn’t matter to him which high school he attended.
But Feng Xiaochun went to find that man and arranged for him to enter Guanli High School as a tuition-free special recruit.
For a private school, that wasn’t particularly unusual.
But that day, overwhelming humiliation nearly swallowed him whole, dragging him back to that snowy day.
That boy who had kindly offered him help back then…
Was also his half-brother.
The school wasn’t that big. Running into each other within its boundaries was perfectly normal.
What if they really met?
No—
He had probably already learned the truth. Learned that after all these years, he shamelessly appeared again in his world.
But the spot had already been secured. Any resistance from Xia Chun would only shatter Feng Xiaochun’s already fragile nerves.
It was wrong.
Everything had been wrong from the beginning—from the moment he was born into this world.
His complicated gaze slowly shifted toward Gu Yang.
He hadn’t expected that his final moments would be spent with this person.
They weren’t close at all.
Yet somehow Gu Yang occupied the most delicate position in his life.
Why did he tell him all those things?
He knew how painful it was to tear open ugly memories like that. Yet the person in front of him had still said them.
Was he trying to save him?
There was no need.
Didn’t he know what kind of relationship existed between him and that person?
Xia Chun closed his eyes, feeling the night wind brushing across his face. For some reason, tonight’s wind felt unusually gentle, as if coaxing him to fall into its embrace.
“I still keep wondering…” Gu Yang’s confused voice drifted through the night, interrupting the resolve Xia Chun had just formed.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“Gu Yang, that wasn’t your fault. Absolutely not. So stop blaming yourself.” Xia Chun sighed.
Those were also the words he wanted to say to himself.
But saying them was easy—doing it was impossibly difficult.
Gu Yang’s expression was faint and distant. Xia Chun’s comfort clearly had no effect on him.
“If it was depression, she should’ve gone to a hospital. Why would she let you—”
“It wasn’t depression,” Gu Yang interrupted softly, shaking his head. “She wanted to die for love.”
The previously gentle wind suddenly turned cold and sharp. In that instant, Xia Chun felt a chilling cold wrap around him. For a moment he thought he had misheard.
“Long ago, my mother told me a story,” Gu Yang said slowly, his expression soft and nostalgic.
“Her parents loved each other very much. At their wedding they promised that only death could separate them. They stayed together from youth all the way into middle age.”
“Until one of them was diagnosed with a terminal illness. They searched for the most authoritative doctors in the field, but nothing could cure it. In its final stage, the disease was pure torture.”
“In the end, they fulfilled the promise they made at their wedding.”
Xia Chun frowned instinctively. A terrible premonition rose in his chest.
“They held hands,” Gu Yang said calmly.
“And hanged themselves together.”
The plain words struck like thunder.
A loud crash suddenly sounded beside Xia Chun. Startled, he turned and saw that some steel bars stacked on the open platform below had fallen to the ground.
He had no idea why the steel bars had suddenly toppled, but Gu Yang seemed completely unaware. And Xia Chun had no time to worry about such trivial matters.
Cold sweat ran down his back.
“Then your mother…”
“When she came home and saw everything, she lost her guardians and was sent to an orphanage. After becoming an adult, she entered a local university. That’s when she met the man who came there to study abroad.”
“She thought it was the start of a new life. But in the end, she walked the same path.”
“From that moment on,” Gu Yang said quietly, “I kept wondering… does genetics really not contain something like a suicide gene?”
As he spoke, his voice strangely carried a drifting, lingering tone.
“Will I, in the future, meet someone I love enough that when they leave this world, I’ll follow them because of this so-called gene?”
“Or before that ever happens…”
“I’ll choose my own ending first.”
At that point, he paused slowly, then lifted his eyes and said softly to Xia Chun—
“So if you feel lonely… would you like me to stay and accompany you?”
