Chapter 79#

That year in the forest, the mist rose slowly from beneath the roots of the trees.

Nie Xu led his men through more than half the night before finding Lu Li half-dead in a rock crevice at the bottom of a slope. He had broken free from those people mid-way; half his face was caked in blood, his left eye swollen almost shut, clinging to his last breath.

The kidnappers had preferred to forgo the money from selling a live catch, abandoning him here for the wild beasts and insects of the mountains to feed on.

“Nie… Xu?” Lu Li could still barely recognize his voice, breath so faint he said: “I lost this test. I thought that even without the Lu family, I could carve out a different path for myself. Now it seems I am nothing.”

Nie Xu: “This was never the Ji family’s test. It was nothing more than a self-aggrandizing act by people who hold human life in contempt.”

“No matter what it was,” Lu Li said: “I can’t get out of here.”

When Lu Li said these words, the moment a waterskin touched his lips, he rallied as if touched by a sudden burst of vitality, grabbing that small hand in disbelief and asking Nie Xu: “You rescued the Ji family’s third young master?” He turned toward Ji Yang, straining to see him clearly, voice hoarse: “I held those people off so you could run, you were crying and saying you were scared… Never mind. It’s good that you’re safe.”

Ji Yang looked back at Nie Xu.

Nie Xu signaled that he was fine, there was no need to pay attention to him.

Ji Yang genuinely didn’t pay attention to him.

He only spoke to Nie Xu, yet over those two days and one night, between two half-grown boys who were at odds on every topic and moreover locked in a life-or-death rivalry, he had busied himself without pause. Even in such a scene and circumstances, if he was sharing half a flatbread with Nie Xu, he would find the reason that it truly wouldn’t go down and extract his own half, soak it in water, and press it into the other person’s hands.

Lu Li fell in and out of feverish delirium repeatedly, and getting him out of there seemed almost impossible.

But he ultimately didn’t die. With that breath sustained by Nie Xu finding and stuffing into his mouth a certain wild mountain herb, he was kept alive.

The rain in the forest didn’t begin until after dark.

It was their third day trapped in these woods.

Three days was enough time for everything outside to be turned upside down. The kidnackers circling through the forest with them had completely lost their patience.

At first it was just a few drops leaking through the gaps in the dense canopy overhead, tapping against leaves with muffled sounds, like the footsteps of something drawing near. Then it grew thicker, more urgent, and soon the entire mountain was wrapped in a damp, cold, gray curtain.

The sound of rain amplified every noise — every snapped branch, every stumble through the mud, every breath forced down a tight throat.

Nie Xu crouched behind a fallen giant trunk, his back pressed against damp bark, his entire body taut as a fully drawn bow.

Along his lower back was a long, deep gash, sustained when he’d tumbled down the slope mid-flight, shielding the child, slashed by a sharp stone. Blood had already turned a large patch of his clothes dark brown, and the exposed wound was gruesome and terrible. But in the rain, the smell of blood was almost impossible to detect — the downpour diluted everything.

His right hand clamped firmly over the child’s muffled sobs. Each breath was light and short, the exhale carrying faint, uncontrollable tremors born of pain: “Shh — I’m fine, don’t cry.”

The child’s eyes were wide in the darkness, but he gripped Nie Xu’s hand, obediently making no sound.

Only tears fell onto the back of that hand, making the icy rain feel scalding.

Twenty meters away, the beams of flashlights cut horizontally through the gaps between trees — one beam, two beams, three beams — as if woven from light into a net.

Footsteps landed on standing water and rotting leaves, making wet, viscous sounds.

Someone cursed in a heavy accent: “Damn it, I definitely heard something.”

Another said: “Don’t stop. Our mission is different from those kidnappers. They lost both the person and the files — they’re done for. What we need to do is make sure that brat from the Nie family dies here. Understand?”

The first one said: “They said that kid was taken by the one surnamed Nie! Can’t even save his own hide and he’s dragging around extra baggage — he can’t have gone far!”

When the speaker was only fifteen meters away, a flashlight beam swept across the top of Nie Xu’s head, then slid away, and across a patch of low shrubs and bushes, another voice suddenly shouted: “There’s someone here!”

The light beam snapped toward them.

Nie Xu’s hand had already reached the hilt of the short knife at his lower back, when he suddenly realized — it was Lu Li.

Lu Li shouted: “You dog bastards — if you’ve got the guts, kill me!”

The cacophony of footsteps and curses, like a pot of muddy water being churned, quickly receded in another direction.

But time was far too limited.

Lu Li couldn’t hold them for long.

The child was clearly on the verge of tears now. He reached out to press against Nie Xu’s lower back: “Big brother, so much blood!”

“It’s fine, it’s fine.” Nie Xu soothed him twice, then crouched down. In the darkness he couldn’t make out the boy’s figure clearly, so he had to reach out and grip his shoulders. He was making rapid assessments — what to do, weighing every possibility and its consequences.

In the end he found: attacked from both front and rear, there was no path of retreat.

The sounds in the distance seemed to have stopped. The howling of wind and rain across the mountain was especially unsettling.

Nie Xu’s hand clenched hard. A few seconds later, without a word, he lifted the child into his arms and sprinted down the path toward the lower-left.

The child seemed to have guessed something. He only rested his chin on Nie Xu’s shoulder, arms wrapped around him, saying nothing.

Nie Xu finally set him down at a fork in the path on the mountainside.

Lightning tore open the sky, illuminating this spot not sheltered by the canopy.

Nie Xu pointed to a very, very narrow gap beside them — so narrow that an adult could barely squeeze through sideways — a rock crevice carved out by years of rainwater erosion. Nie Xu pushed him down into it and said: “Do you remember this place? I told you before — follow this through, and you can get out.”

The child didn’t cry. He only took his small, soaking-wet hand and gripped Nie Xu’s fingers, clutching them tight.

Nie Xu knew he had to make a decision.

He instructed: “From here, follow that small path downward and you’ll reach a village. But not yet — I can’t confirm whether anyone is waiting there to catch you.” He touched the spot on the back of the child’s neck that had an unusual feel beneath his fingers, and said: “What’s on your body is far too important. Remember: one whistle means run immediately. Two whistles mean stay where you are and wait. Three whistles mean it’s safe, and you can leave. If dawn breaks completely and you hear nothing at all, then… just keep moving forward. Don’t look back.”

Nie Xu asked: “Do you understand? Repeat it back.”

The child suddenly threw himself forward.

His eyelashes brushed Nie Xu’s shoulder, his voice small and slightly muffled: “Are you going to die?”

“No.” In that moment, Nie Xu chose the lie. “I just have no way of choosing you. You were never my mission in coming into these mountains. I have many things waiting for me to do, so you can’t follow me anymore.”

The child nodded, withdrew into the stone hollow, and looked up at him, saying softly: “Understood, big brother.”

In that instant, Nie Xu’s throat nearly seized.

It was on this day that he suddenly understood — the hardest thing was not life or death. The hardest thing was choosing.

Nie Xu stood up. He took off the jacket on his body and draped it over the child’s small silhouette.

The child tilted his head up: “I’m already grown up, big brother. One whistle means run immediately. Two whistles mean don’t move. Three whistles means I can leave. If there’s no sound, it means you won’t come back for me. Right?”

“Mm.” Nie Xu pulled the jacket snug around him. He was silent for a long time before finally saying: “You have to remember — in this world, apart from yourself, no one can save you.”

Nie Xu turned around, took two quick steps forward, then stopped.

He half-thought he heard the child calling him again.

In truth, the child had not spoken a word. He understood it all, and he was stronger than Nie Xu had imagined.

Nie Xu didn’t dare think about how the child would get through this rain-soaked night.

Even if he could guarantee this place wouldn’t be discovered, how could he guarantee the child wouldn’t be terrified? The forest was so vast, the trees so deep — if the boy was too afraid and took a wrong turn, the probability of survival was vanishingly small.

Nie Xu forcibly restrained every impulse to look back.

Because following him, the probability wasn’t merely low — it was zero.

He could only bring him this far.

That night, on that nameless deep mountain, in the gray just barely brightening after the torrential rain, three sharp, piercing whistles cut through the unbroken mountain range, reaching into the deepest desolation.

No one knew what they meant.

Nie Xu walked out alive.

He had over thirty-eight wounds across his body, practically bathed in blood.

He carried out Lu Li, and the Ji family’s third young master, Ji Chengyi.

The Ji family’s third young master gave a thorough, point-by-point account of every situation they encountered along the way.

No one had ever searched for Elara. There was no such person, and there were no missing files. The Xile Gate had heard that the Ji family had an illegitimate child living outside, abducted him for extortion — and in the end, the person was rescued.

This was the consensus of everyone, and Nie Xu concurred with this version of events.

No one knew that from that day on, he was secretly sent to the training camp overnight, and in every year after he came out, there were always one or two days when he could not be found.

On the open ground outside the rock crevice, weeds grew flat and unremarkable. From that day forward, in all the world, he never again met a child who called him big brother.

That memory had no matching trace, as if it had all been a vast dream.

Until —

“Big brother, big brother, I love you.”

“Fighting, carrying a knives — you came to Zhouling to be a hooligan?”

“Big brother, if one day I’m forced to go into that line of work, does that count as your responsibility too?”

“Brother Nie, my scar hurts.”

…

He had squeezed into his life under an identity and appearance Nie Xu had never imagined, impossible to overlook.

Before the guess of “he is that child from all those years ago” took shape, the concern had already accumulated to a peak. And until this night, when Ji Yang said he remembered — remembered the forest, remembered the kidnapping — he said his memories were limited, yet he didn’t know that he had filled in that gap in memory.

He existed.

A hundred percent.

Even if everyone said he didn’t exist, Nie Xu never denied his own recollection.

But in the moment he recognized the person,

he did not want to admit that the truth of having left him there was something he had carried through the years, something he had never been able to think on closely.

He had thought the boy lay beneath those stacked layers of bones heaped in his dreams — but he had returned.

Not as that tiny child.

Not as a responsibility.

He was the person he loved.

At the crossroads of having him and losing him again, Nie Xu pressed the gas pedal to the floor, about to be driven mad.