Chapter 74#

Nie Xu carried the person through the wrecked dock, locating Jiang Lei’s car parked by the side of the road amid the chaos.

Jiang Lei pulled open the car door. Nie Xu placed Ji Yang into the back seat, climbed in after him, and drew the man against his shoulder. The moment the door shut, most of the noise outside seemed to be severed by an invisible barrier, leaving only the distant wail of police sirens and the residual mechanical hum of cranes powering down, muffled as they passed through the car body.

“The Lanjiao Village guesthouse, or should we leave and find a hotel?” Jiang Lei started the engine and glanced into the rearview mirror.

Nie Xu looked down at the person in his arms.

Jiji Yang seemed caught somewhere between active superficial consciousness and the stupor that follows extreme physical exertion—his breathing was short and hurried, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead not yet dry before more broke through.

“Find a decent hotel,” Nie Xu said.

Jiang Lei nodded, pressed the accelerator, and the car pulled out of the dock area, heading south along the coastline toward the city.

Ji Yang could faintly hear their conversation.

But the moment he closed his eyes, his eyelids felt as if weighed down by a thousand pounds, and no matter what, he couldn’t open them.

“Ji Yang” was aboard the Qiming.

So the couple holding “him”—were they Nie Xu’s parents?

Ji Yang didn’t know why he was seeing the original host’s memories. That sudden influx of images made his temples throb as if pierced by needles, the pain lingering without relief, and it even continued beyond that.

He followed Nie Xu home.

Then they separated in a hurry.

The next moment, the scene shifted. Before him stood a dense forest stretching up beyond sight, eerily overlapping with his earlier dream—only this time, the vague figure of a half-grown boy suddenly had a face.

He was meeting the teenage version of Nie Xu for the second time.

Because of that first segment of memories, the Nie Xu before him now felt both familiar and foreign.

The brother who had picked him up and told him to live well—in their second encounter—had already become a fierce, savage beast.

He had recognized him too.

Shock. Fury. Probably disbelief as well.

Ji Yang could feel the terror rising within himself. It wasn’t Nie Xu who frightened him—it was the environment, everything he was going through. He couldn’t even clearly understand what was happening. There was only a voice constantly telling him, “You can’t tell anyone. You can’t say anything.” He only knew those words were crucial, and the person who said them mattered just as much.

So all he could do was shake his head.

He thought Nie Xu would abandon him.

The truth was, he didn’t.

Although this brother felt nothing like before, the younger self in the memory wasn’t afraid of him.

Nie Xu led him through the mountains through the night. Rain made the damp and the rotting smell of leaves oppressive. The faint light filtering through the canopy made it nearly impossible to judge the passage of time.

From his adult perspective, Ji Yang perceived how small and helpless he had been.

Hunger, cold, treacherous mountain paths, the howling of unknown animals, and the terrifying people they had to evade—any one of those things, set before him now, would be an impassable chasm.

Nie Xu barely spoke, yet he would toss over his last scraps of dried rations.

When Ji Yang couldn’t eat them because they were too hard, Nie Xu would glare at him and say, “What kind of pampered young master are you? If you don’t want to starve, eat.”

When Ji Yang couldn’t walk anymore, Nie Xu would frown and say, “If you can’t keep up, just wait for them to catch up and put a bullet in you”—but he would still crouch down and hoist Ji Yang onto his back.

They seemed to travel for a long time, and yet Nie Xu appeared to be leading him in circles through the endless mountain ranges.

Until they found that group of people.

All wearing cloth masks over their faces, weapons in hand.

The ones who had brought him here.

They were resting on a sloped trail in the mountains, two bags at their feet.

The leader crouched down and prodded one of the bags with his knife, apparently checking whether the person inside was still alive.

The man next to him kicked the larger bag and asked, “So what now? Right now we’ve got a Ji family bastard son and an unwanted branch of the Lu family. Should we just deal with them here? They’re dead weight either way.”

The leader said, “Wait a bit longer. The higher-ups said the kid who ran off is Elara’s biological son—has to be taken alive. Once these two wake up, we’ll ask them; maybe there’ll be leads.” Then he added viciously, “Worst case, selling them alive fetches more than frozen meat.”

The man beside him asked, “That Ela… whatever her name is—what’s her background? She’s got the entire underground market after her.”

The leader let out a cold laugh. “What else could it be? Ever heard of the Blue Ocean Project?”

“The Blue Ocean Project?” The man next to him looked blank. “What’s that?”

“Big cross-border business.” The leader straightened up from the ground, slapping his knife against the man’s chest. “You think the Ji family is running weapons and smuggling antiquities for nothing? All that profit feeds this experimental project. Xile Gate supplies the live subjects—those are all experimental materials. Now a female researcher has gone on the run with the experimental data, and you still think this is trivial?”

The man next to him kicked a tree in frustration and cursed, “Son of a bitch! All because of one woman, we’re all holed up in this godforsaken forest. Even if we find her, how much money are we going to get?”

The leader slapped the back of his head.

“Fool! You think this is still about money? The Nie family could have their entire bloodline wiped out and have it ruled an accidental shipwreck—what hope do we have? That’s why I said we must find that kid. The woman’s dead, and the thing is most likely on him!”

At this moment, Ji Yang was gagged and pinned behind a thick cluster of thorny bushes on the slope above.

Nie Xu had his hand clamped tightly over his mouth.

Threatening.

“If you don’t want to die, keep quiet! If those lunatics outside find out you’ve got it on you, they’ll string you up and feed you to the wolves—believe it or not!”

Then a low, harsh command.

“Don’t cry!”

Ji Yang struggled with all his might, but the tears still streamed down his face like pearls falling without cost.

“The woman is dead.”

He had experienced it once before—he knew what death truly meant.

The word “Mom” hadn’t been difficult for the Ji Yang of that memory.

But he could only say it in his heart.

Over and over.

Until he was utterly spent, and the person behind him picked him up.

Ji Yang finally woke.

He found himself still in Nie Xu’s arms—just a magnified version.

They were in the car, though it had already driven into the city of South Island. The kaleidoscopic city lights not only dragged Ji Yang out of the chaos at the dock, but also pulled him awake from the fragmented memories concerning Nie Xu.

He still couldn’t tell whether those memories were his own or the “original host’s.”

But they were so heavy.

So overwhelming.

Even fragmented as they were, they pressed down suffocatingly, making it hard to breathe.

Ji Yang instinctively touched his own chest.

Too real.

So real it felt like he had lived through it himself.

From what the kidnappers had said, it wasn’t hard to guess—the smuggling was just one link in the chain. What happened to the Nie family was very likely connected to that so-called “Blue Ocean Project” research program.

An experimental project requiring massive funding and live human subjects—one that could involve the Fanzhou Chamber of Commerce in covering things up, that could have families like the Qi and the Lu coordinating together, that could bring catastrophe upon a great maritime dynasty, and that could dispatch an entire kill order against a researcher at enormous cost—its sheer scale behind the scenes spoke volumes.

Elara?

Ji Yang turned the name over in his mind. He was certain he had never heard it before.

He had no mother. The man who couldn’t even be called a father never mentioned who his mother was. In the neighborhood gossip, his mother had run away because his father beat her.

Jinzhou was neither big nor small, but in a barrel-shaped apartment block where no amount of wind or commotion could escape the neighbors’ gossip tongues…

His life had been unremarkable—just the same day after day.

The only thing that could be called peculiar was probably the mother and son from upstairs. The woman was said to have married a rich man and taken her son to ascend to a new life.

He’d been around middle school age when he heard that family had come back.

Luxury cars, bodyguards—a pretty impressive entourage.

For quite a while, it was one of the staple topics of conversation after meals for every household.

So, was Elara the original host’s mother?

But the original host’s mother had died of illness—that was on record, and it didn’t add up.

Where exactly was the problem?

“Feeling better?”

A voice came from above.

Ji Yang pulled himself out of his thoughts, tilted his head up, and saw Nie Xu’s chin. He responded with a slow, sluggish hum.

Neither of them spoke again.

Ji Yang told himself not to project emotions that had no business being there onto these two memory segments. But after a moment’s hesitation, he still asked, “What were you like when you were little?”

“How little?” Nie Xu didn’t question the sudden strangeness of the question. He simply answered along with it.

Ji Yang: “You entered the Ji family at twelve, so—before twelve and after twelve?”

“Before…” Ji Yang hadn’t expected Nie Xu to actually answer. He thought for a moment and said, “Hard to say. What do you think?”

Nie Xu turned it back on him.

This genuinely stumped Ji Yang.

Ji Yang sat up from his chest, meeting Nie Xu’s eyes.

The Nie Xu before him now was the one Ji Yang knew best—quiet and steady most of the time, occasionally sharp-tongued. The one who had kissed him in a moment of losing control, the one who had lain in the same bed with him. The first time Ji Yang saw him, he thought he was exactly his type.

But looking at him now, Ji Yang realized that his understanding of Nie Xu had gone so deep that he even knew what the man looked like as a child—knew that his shoulders then had been nowhere near as broad, his facial features not yet as defined, his height at least twenty centimeters shorter than now.

He hadn’t been this hard to read.

Before twelve, he could be called gentle, carrying a natural good upbringing in his bones that even he probably hadn’t noticed.

Even half a year later, the softness beneath the cold hardness was still easy to detect.

Not like now.

The long years had given him a mask that betrayed no trace of joy or anger, and beneath it pressed down an endless black sea.

Ji Yang gazed into the depths of his eyes, as if forgetting that just a moment ago he had been agonizing over whose memories he had been seeing.

A second later, he murmured, “I think… you were probably really fierce.”

Didn’t even let him cry.

That wasn’t just fierce anymore—that was extraordinarily fierce.

This answer made Nie Xu go still for a moment, silent for a good while.

After a beat, he hummed softly.

“Sorry,” he said.

Ji Yang: “…No, what are you apologizing for? I was just talking nonsense.”

Nie Xu looked at him, grabbed his hand, and pulled him back.

His left hand unobtrusively pinched the skin at the back of Ji Yang’s neck, as if confirming something, before he finally spoke in a low, hoarse voice: “It’s fine. Go back to sleep. We’ll be at the hotel soon.”

After everything he’d been through tonight, Ji Yang was genuinely exhausted. He didn’t resist anymore and simply closed his eyes.

At a five-star hotel in the early hours of the morning, they could see most of South Island’s night skyline.

Qi Songqing’s voice came from Jiang Lei’s laptop screen: “It does seem like a stress response, but it’s nothing serious. With proper rest, he’ll recover quickly.”

Ji Yang leaned against the headboard.

Since when do I have a stress response?

He didn’t care about that. He asked Qi Songqing: “Mr. Qi, can I ask you a question?”

Qi Songqing nodded through the screen: “Of course. Your bodyguard called me in the middle of the night just to confirm you were really okay—I’ll spare no detail.”

Ji Yang glanced at Nie Xu leaning against the window.

He looked away, thought for a moment, and said: “Medically speaking, is there any possibility—complete cognitive misattribution, where someone mistakes another person’s memories for their own?”

Qi Songqing: “Cognitive disorder? Or are you just crazy.”

Ji Yang: “…I suspect you’re insulting me.”

As Ji Yang said this, he didn’t notice that Nie Xu had been watching him the entire time.

“I’m wronged, okay?” Qi Songqing said with uncharacteristic flippancy. “For a normal person, this is pretty much impossible. What’s going on? I heard the dock exploded—did it remind you of the car crash two years ago? Your sports car went off a cliff back then, and the car pretty much exploded at the end.”

Ji Yang nodded, giving a perfunctory hum.

That excuse worked well enough.

He couldn’t exactly say that his situation defied scientific explanation.

He was someone who had transmigrated into a book.

Inheriting the original host’s memories seemed normal enough, but his sense of immersion was too strong—so strong that he couldn’t stop dwelling on it.

The problem was, his own memories weren’t complete either.

The more he thought about it, the more his head ached.

“Enough.” Nie Xu had walked over at some point, closed the laptop, and said to Qi Songqing: “He needs rest.”

Qi Songqing raised his hands in surrender. “Fine, fine, fine. I’m signing off.”

Nie Xu shut the laptop and handed it back to Jiang Lei.

Jiang Lei took in Ji Yang’s complexion and said, “I’ll head out too. Get some rest.”

“Wait.” Ji Yang stopped him. “Where are Lin Yue and the others?”

Nie Xu pulled the blanket over him and tucked it in. “Jiang Lei will handle it.”

“Right, don’t worry about it, young master. Leave these things alone for now.” Jiang Lei gestured vaguely at his own face. “Your complexion looks pretty rough.”

Jiang Lei had originally wanted to say: Your complexion is rough, and someone else’s is even worse.

But he thought better of it.

He turned and left.

Once Jiang Lei was gone, the late-night hotel room fell quiet.

Ji Yang couldn’t help but wonder again—where had Zhao Changgen gone after running off? The entire Lanjiao Village situation was waiting to be dealt with, the police were busy with the recovered artifacts and gold. Would they have time to search for one man?

And the route from South Island to Zhouling—if it wasn’t opened for even one day, that was one full day of losses.

His mind kept turning and couldn’t stop.

It seemed like there were too many things waiting to be sorted out, too many things waiting to be handled.

So much so that he overlooked the fact that Nie Xu hadn’t left the room.

Ji Yang heard the sound of water running from the bathroom and was still thinking—Isn’t he taking too long to wash his hands?

Five minutes later, the man came out.

Ji Yang then realized he had taken a shower.

Ji Yang finally registered something: “You’re sleeping here tonight?”

Nie Xu gave a soft hum.

It was so natural—so natural that Ji Yang couldn’t even find a place to object without feeling like he was being unreasonable.

But then he remembered—before leaving Fanzhou, they had just shared a bed in Building No. 4. Sleeping together again now—wasn’t that a little…?

When it was forced by circumstances, there were excuses. But choosing to stay—that carried a completely different meaning.

“On the bed?” Ji Yang tested again.

Nie Xu dried his hair, finally looked at him. “You want me to sleep on the floor?”

Ji Yang hesitated: “I’m not that heartless, but…”

“But what?” Nie Xu had already pulled back the blanket and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at him.

Ji Yang immediately said: “I’m not ready yet.”

A trace of a smile leaked through the depths of Nie Xu’s eyes.

“What do you think I want to do?” Nie Xu stated flatly.

Ji Yang said, word by word: “Although I don’t think you’ll necessarily do anything, I’d guess—two gay men lying together are bound to want to develop something. At the very least, I can’t swear to heaven that my mind is as pure as a blank sheet of paper.”

Nie Xu hummed softly and moved up onto the bed. “It’s your mind. You can let your imagination run wild.”

Ji Yang was truly out of moves.

But he noticed that after this detour, all the tangled, chaotic thoughts in his head had actually cleared away completely.

Even the oppressive headache had eased.

Ji Yang lay down and let out a long sigh.

“That’s nice.”

Nie Xu leaned against the headboard and turned his head to look at him. “What?”

Ji Yang tilted his head up and smiled: “If getting off could cure all ailments, I’d definitely go for something big.”

“Did it work?” Nie Xu asked.

Ji Yang nodded. “It just did.”

Nie Xu suddenly leaned down.

His hand tilted Ji Yang’s chin up, and he kissed him.

Unlike the kiss in the dormitory, Ji Yang’s lips—parted in surprise—amounted to an invitation.

Ji Yang knew for the first time what it felt like for electricity to course through his entire body.

Beneath the covers, everything was a tangle. Nie Xu’s hand moved slowly, inch by inch.

His breath brushed against Ji Yang’s ear. “Let me help you.”