CH 194

The peace on this night was unparalleled by any other in the genetics building.

Yan Suizhi and Ke Jin were sleeping off the surgery. 

According to the doctor, it would be difficult to discern any real transformations when just out of the operating room, bar that their lives were saved. Healing was a gradual process, and sleep was the best way to recuperate.

Like the victims of the Elderly Bobblehead case, they were arranged to stay in restricted wards on the top floor. Besides the medical staff attending to their care and close relations, no one was permitted to visit.

And so…

The distinguished Lawyer Gu entered. 

The lil’ Young Master Joe was shut out.

Joe, “…”

“No, hold up.” The little young master was highly disgruntled by this, seizing Lin Yuan who had appointed these wards, questioning, “Explain this to me. What exactly is the scope of close relations? Why can Gu enter but not me?”

Dr Lin knocked the hospital rules. “Well… it isn’t difficult to explain close relations. It’s basically the heir to the estate, as well as… the designated heir.”

Joe, “…”

“Lawyer Gu is obviously the designated heir,” said Lin Yuan.

“How did you know?”

“Dean Yan brought it up when we were chatting, personally naming him as the designated heir. So, naturally, there’s no problem for him to go in.” Dr Lin, knowing that he was right, said boldly, “You’re not.” 

Young Master Joe lurched against the locked door, silently puking blood. “Who came up with this dumbass rule?”

Lin Yuan gave it a thought. “Are you sure you want to know?”

Joe, “…”

Noted. If it wasn’t Eunice, it was bound to be Old Fox. 

He mutely swallowed the ‘dumbass’ on the tip of his tongue back down, glowering at Dr Lin, an unspoken accusation in his eyes. “That wasn’t what you said before.”

Lin Yuan nodded. “You must know, prolonged sleep deprivation can easily lead to a change in temperament.”

“…”

However, the lil’ Young Master Joe was still let into the restricted wards in the end, by the powers of shamelessness and appealing to sympathy. 

Gu Yan had wanted to stay up a little longer and wait for Yan Suizhi to awaken, but Lin Yuan had surreptitiously injected him with a sleep aid; he was out like a light.

Fortunately, Dr Lin was kind-hearted enough to request the nursing staff to add an extra bed in the ward for Gu Yan.

The thought to do the same to Young Master Joe had crossed Lin Yuan’s mind as well, but then remembering that the other party was still somewhat his boss, he reluctantly restrained his trigger-happy hand.

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Anyone who had participated in the research or surgery was sprawled messily across any available horizontal surface, most of them not even changed out of their surgical scrubs yet.

Surgical masks were tossed aside or half taken off, dangling from one ear, and gloves were equally haphazardly half stripped off. A few of them had a hand draped on the bed, then, too lazy to remove their footwear to get into bed, fell asleep in that position, their legs squashing other people’s legs.

They had never slept so deeply nor soundly in the lounge before. 

Two of the doctors on the heavier side snored sonorously, bellowing in unison, yet everyone else was completely unaffected.

The nurse on shift tiptoed over to take a look and, stunned by the chaos in the room, her jaw dropped. She tiptoed back out and locked the door to preserve the dignified image of these respected doctors.

The dose of sleep aid that Lin Yuan used wasn’t small, but Gu Yan still slept restlessly, starting back to consciousness a few times.

Once, when he was more lucid, he even got out of bed to wash up, then pulled a chair over to sit by Yan Suizhi’s hospital bed. But he didn’t last long before falling back asleep under the influence of the medicine. 

And once he did, on the contrary, it was his longest stretch of sleep, to the extent that when he awoke, he couldn’t tell whether it was day or night.

Frowning, Gu Yan pinched the bridge of his nose, a faint sensation causing him to open his eyes.

The curtains were tightly drawn and a single floor lamp cast warm tones around the room. The temperature was set just right, it was just that there was some breeze of unknown origin, ruffling his hair…

He blanked for a few seconds before suddenly processing—the door and windows were shut. The room temperature was regulated by the floor and the walls; it was impossible for a breeze to stir. 

The moment this thought emerged, all at once, Gu Yan was up.

He abruptly raised his head and sat upright, seeing a certain patient beside him remove a hand from the top of his head.

Yan Suizhi was awake.

Lin Yuan had said that while the surgery wasn’t for abrasions, the patient would still require time to recuperate. After all, changes on a genetic scale were much more complicated than those. So, after coming out of the operating room, Yan Suizhi and Ke Jin might remain comatose for some time before gradually coming back to consciousness. 

Especially since the gene segment in Yan Suizhi’s body was from the starting phases, which was much more aggressive and troublesome to deal with. Supposing Ke Jin took a day to wake up, he would take at least three.

But now, just one day after the surgery, Yan Suizhi had already opened his eyes.

The ordeal he went through during these days caused him to lose some weight, but he was still in good spirits, his dark eyes shining, lacquered by warm light from the surroundings.

Gu Yan fixed his eyes on him, not uttering a word. 

“What, has your brain gone silly from sleep?” Too long had passed since Yan Suizhi last used his vocal cords. His talking speed was much slower than usual, his voice breathy and hoarse.

Gu Yan still stared at him unblinkingly, moving his lips minutely yet unable to make a sound.

There was another long spell before he suddenly dropped his gaze, smiling in self-ridicule. The timbre of his voice was rough as he said, “I actually suspect that I’m still dreaming…”

Otherwise… 

Why else would he see Yan Suizhi’s face upon opening his eyes.

With the effects of the gene modifications erased, he looked exactly like the portrait hanging in the law school’s Hall of Fame.

It was the same face that once made him tick and made him smile, later preserved in stasis in the sea of his thoughts, surfacing between lapses in concentration or lulls in his busy schedule.

The soft frown or relaxed brows when he spoke, the icy quiet or gentle warmth in his eyes, the troubled or delighted radian on the corners of his lips. His front view, side profile, his head as it was raised or lowered. 

Every minute detail was etched into his memory. It was just far, far too long since he last saw it.

So long such that when suddenly greeted by the sight, his subconscious dismissed it as a dream.

Just like when he first confirmed that Yan Suizhi was still alive.

Caught by a long, persistent sense of surrealism… 

Only this time, at its heart, there was someone who anchored him.

Yan Suizhi’s gentle and calm gaze looked over, and the shadows cast by his eyelashes fractured the light in his eyes into tiny flecks, like a deep lake where stars had fallen.

He held Gu Yan’s hand, his smiling eyes tender as he said, “I was scared that a certain student would get upset if I made him wait too long, so I did my best to wake up early, only for this person to think that he’s dreaming. Don’t you think it’s a bit unfair to me?”

His strength was not back yet, and his voice was soft and slow, carrying a lingering trace of lethargy. 

After saying that, he pressed a butterfly kiss to Gu Yan’s angular finger joints, then raised his eyes and asked, “Can you feel what I’m doing? Can your dream feel so real?”

Gu Yan’s gaze shimmered. He suddenly turned his hand over and clasped Yan Suizhi’s hand in his, his head bowed in silence for a few seconds. When he next raised his head, the redness from exhaustion tinting his eyes emerged again, appearing like a circle of red along the rims of his eyes under the warm light of the room.

He reached his other hand to Yan Suizhi’s face, tracing fingers over his eyebrows to his nose bridge and down to the corner of his mouth. He rubbed his thumb across the small mole at the tail of Yan Suizhi’s eye, leaning in to kiss it there.

Yan Suizhi, feeling the warmth of the touch on the tail of his eye, raised his hands to hug Gu Yan’s shoulders, asking softly, “Are you awake now?” 

Gu Yan quietly uttered “mn” and then, “I’m awake.”

“Do you want to go back to sleep? I know it’s been a while since you slept well,” Yan Suizhi said gently.

“No, it’s okay,” Gu Yan said.

He really hadn’t slept well for a long time; he knew that it was the same for Yan Suizhi. 

He hadn’t felt tired when making himself stay up, but having woken up after a full night’s sleep, all the accumulated tiredness and sleepiness had bubbled to the surface, wrapping around all of him.

But it didn’t matter. No longer would any of this evoke dejection.

The thick curtains darkened the room, thus they didn’t notice that outside, dawn was peeking on the horizon.

In the other ward a short distance away, Joe had sat in a chair all night, finally unable to stay up as it neared dawn, drifting off with his head slanted to the side in an extremely uncomfortable posture.

His head nodded about a dozen times and he slept until light filtered past the edges of the curtains, shining right on his eyes.

Joe raised a hand to shield his eyes, squinting as he adjusted, then was suddenly startled awake.

His immediate reaction was to pry open the curtain and look outside. Traffic was already weaving across the intersecting overhanging roads in the distance, but the sunlight that spilled onto the ground was still goose yellow. 

It should still be in the early morning.

Just then, his smart device vibrated. It was his eight o’clock alarm.

Lin Yuan had said that Ke Jin would wake up roughly around this time, but after waking, the recovery to his mind might not be immediate.

Furthermore, the consciousness of a person who woke up in this type of situation would often be stuck in the previous, abnormal mental state. Thereafter, he would slowly remember some of the past and internalise it. 

It was an adaptive process that could take anything from between a few hours to a few months…

Joe gingerly walked up to the bed where Ke Jin was curled on his side, the edge of the duvet pulled up to his chin. This was a type of sleeping posture indicative of a lack of security, which was also what he usually turned to over the years.

Joe got down to his knees next to the bed, keeping his eyes parallel to Ke Jin’s.

He looked on for a moment, tucking Ke Jin’s exposed fingers back under the covers before rambling quietly, “…It’s a nice day. I just opened the window to smell the air. It smells clean. It may be slightly chilly, but the sun is bright. Lin Yuan said you’d wake up today, I just don’t know when.” 

“Tell you what, if you wake up in the morning, we’ll do a check-up first, then see if Lin Yuan will let me take you down to the garden for some fresh air. If you wake up at noon, then we might only have time for a check-up, it’ll probably be dark by the time we get Lin Yuan to come around. If you wake up at night… then you might have to settle with hearing me say good evening and then we can engage in a staring contest.”

If he hadn’t tucked in Ke Jin, maybe he would have noticed that when he finished his tiny speech, Ke Jin’s fingers had twitched twice, a sign that he was soon about to wake up.

Unfortunately, this little young master missed it.

He simply examined Ke Jin’s face before adding, “But that’s okay. It doesn’t really matter when you wake up. There’s plenty of time for that later, yeah?” 

As expected, still to no response.

A moment later, Joe stood up. This scene was like countless other mornings; he was all too used to it. He reached down out of habit, gently smoothing out Ke Jin’s sleep-furrowed brows, and said, “I’ll go wash my face and wait for you to get up.”

“Good morning, Ke Jin.”

That said, he turned and walked past the bed to the chair that he had sat in all night, drawing the curtains. 

Actually, only ten or so seconds had elapsed, but the moment seemed to stretch on.

Joe would always remember that before his fingers had even left the fabric of the curtains, he suddenly heard a muffled voice—one that he hadn’t heard in a long time; a long-lost, still half-asleep voice—respond from the hospital bed behind him.

Joe was rooted to the spot, lost, and it took him a long time to make out the words.

He said, “Good morning… Joe.”