CH 50

In the darkness, Fu Ge felt that he was falling constantly.

The air around him became thinner and thinner, and there was less and less oxygen he could inhale. It was as if his throat was choked, and a fire was shooting through it. Suddenly, he opened his eyes and really saw a fire.

The fire that engulfed Room 404 of Shengde Hospital.

Roaring flames were coming through two windows and the smoke was so thick and black that you couldn’t open your eyes.

He walked forward step by step and saw the thin, bony Qi Han standing in front of the fire in a prison uniform, two lines of bloody tears flowing from his sunken crimson eyes.

Fu Ge walked up to him, but Qi Han didn’t move as if he didn’t see him. His hands and feet were tied with heavy iron chains, and he couldn’t lift them even if he wanted to.

After a long time, he suddenly opened his mouth: “Gege…”

Fu Ge responded in a hoarse voice: “Yeah.”

Qi Han said, “They are burning my things…”

Tears trickled from his eyes with this sentence, and Fu Ge’s voice trembled: “I made them burn them…”

Qi Han didn’t blame him, he just begged: “Don’t burn them, okay, that’s my last things… There will be nothing in the coffin when I go into the ground. I’m going to be treated as a lonely soul and a wild ghost…”

Fu Ge stuck his fingernails into his palms, and for the first time the pain spread to his heart so quickly, “But those are all fake. You know I’m lying to you. I already… don’t love you anymore…” 

“Fake… isn’t it okay?”

“What… what?”

Qi Han turned around; his skeletal body looked like it would fall down as soon as the wind blew, and trickles of blood and tears dripped from his empty eyes. He said very, very quietly: “I know they’re all fake, but I saved them all for myself… If you don’t want to marry me, don’t get married. I don’t want a wedding anymore. I don’t want anything… I just want those fake things… can’t you…”

Fu Ge opened his mouth stiffly, but he couldn’t make a sound. He was trembling with pain, as if someone was cutting his flesh with a knife.

“But they have been burned by me… all burned… there is nothing left… I can’t give them back to you anymore…”

Qi Han raised his hand tremblingly, and there was still the same plea in his hoarse voice: “Don’t burn them, okay… don’t let them burn… just leave them to me, okay… please…”

Fu Ge stepped back, not daring to look into his eyes again, clutched his chest, covered his face, and gestured in a panic: “I didn’t know… I didn’t know it was your relics… I didn’t have time to look… I’ve burned them…”

The man in front of him froze for a couple of seconds, and finally let his hand drop like a dead thing as he said, “Don’t cry, it’s okay.”

As soon as the words were said, he turned around and flung himself into the fire.

“Ah Han!”

Fu Ge screamed and grabbed him, but his fingers only touched the hem of his clothes.

In the next second, the skyrocketing fire suddenly dissipated, replaced by a wedding scene full of Juliet roses.

Qi Han was lying on the ground, covered in blood.

A pen was stuck in his throat, there was a bite stopper in his mouth, his eyes were sticky with blood, his left leg was broken, lying limply on the ground.

Fu Ge stood on the spot like a madman, watching the boy he once loved so much become like this, still holding the ring and crawling towards him desperately.

“Gege… we are getting married today… you promised me…”

He crawled very slowly, and someone dragged him back and kicked him. The Alpha’s spasming fingers clutched the grass as he pulled himself forward inch by inch; his despairing eyes that no longer had any light kept looking at Fu Ge.

Fu Ge stepped back step by step, tears wetting his cheeks and running into his mouth, “Don’t… don’t come over… I’m lying to you… I’m lying to you, don’t you know…”

Qi Han said: “I know, it’s okay, I was wrong… I’m sorry… I’m really sorry… I will pay you back, you can have my life or reputation, all of it will be paid to you…”

He tried his best to raise his hand, squeezing the ring that was stained by the blood from his fingers.

Fu Ge saw him manage an embarrassing smile with his mouth full of blood: “Will you put the ring on me? It was made for me by gege… I haven’t worn it yet…”

The cry of grief tore his throat, and the young Beta collapsed on the ground.

The memory of the wedding day pierced his head like an electric drill, and the entire corridor turned into a bloody kaleidoscope. In every room, there was a desperate Qi Han, kneeling on the ground and begging him for help.

“Gege… help me… I’m allergic…”

“Don’t burn them, okay… that’s my things…”

“Aren’t we getting married today…”

“It was a lie from beginning to end… right…”

…… ……

The world was cut apart, memories gnawed at his brain, there was a huge hole in Fu Ge’s heart, and all the pain that had been dulled by illness for the past five years flooded his body in an instant, as if he had been executed by the death of a thousand cuts.

He closed his eyes and jumped down the stairs.

His legs suddenly bounced, and he opened his eyes to see the ceiling of the green train.

It was nine o’clock in the evening on February 28th.

On the way back from Litang, he had a long dream.

Fu Ge sat up on the narrow sleeper bed, leaned on the carriage wall and hugged his knees, and quietly looked out the window at the passing scenery.

He didn’t know why he wanted to go to Litang again. He opened the app, looked at the tickets and bought one. He did all these things as if his soul was out of his body.

From Qi Ji’s tomb, he went directly to the airport. On the way back, he took the train because there were no air tickets.

Coincidentally, it was the same train that he and Qi Han took a month ago coming from their honeymoon, and the same carriage.

Fate had tortured him to the core. Both his love and his hate were impure. He thought he would never be disturbed by nightmares again once he had his revenge.

But the new nightmares were more painful than ever.

He met Kang Zhuo in Litang, the Tibetan guy who gave Qi Han the walnut wine. The other party recognised him as Qi Han’s companion at a glance. The second sentence after the greeting was to ask: “How is he recovering from his injury?”

So Fu Ge got to know everything that happened that night.

Know that Qi Han almost died on the snowy mountain because of his allergy after he had left him behind, know that the call he hung up was Qi Han’s plea before he was dying, know that he had been wearing a turtleneck because of a hole in his trachea, know that when he and Zhuo Ma were partying all night in the bar, Qi Han was struggling to crawl down the snowy mountain to find help…

Eighty percent of the regrets in life come from misunderstandings and delay in information. He and Qi Han had experienced firsthand that these two things could kill people.

Kang Zhuo told him that Qi Han wore a white khata the night he prayed for him on the snowy mountain, saying that his boyfriend had won it for him.

Fu Ge guessed that the self-deceiving khata was one of Qi Han’s relics and was burned by him.

“Do you remember what wishes he made when he prayed for blessings?”

“I don’t remember, but I should’ve kept that.”

Kang Zhuo searched all his pockets to find the piece of paper written when he helped Qi Han translate his wishes and unfolded it to show Fu Ge, “This is the Tibetan I translated for him. Shall I translate it back to Chinese for you?”

“No need.” Fu Ge subconsciously covered the words on the paper with his hand, “Just give it to me, I know some Tibetan.”

For some reason, he never dared to open that piece of paper.

After staying in Litang for a few hours, he was in a daze all the way, walking many, many roads, but he didn’t dare to go up that mountain again.

It was not until half an hour before the return trip that he had the courage to set foot there again.

His memory seemed to be selectively blurred. The route he had ridden that day was clearly imprinted in his head. He walked up step by step, his eyes always staring at the snow under his feet, and soon he found a brick-red mark the size of a fingernail.

Snow can bury many traces, and it can also leave many traces.

It hadn’t rained in Litang since the end of their honeymoon. It was getting colder and colder, and the snow would only thicken layer by layer and would not melt.

So after Fu Ge dug through the snow a little bit with his hands, he easily found proof that Qi Han had struggled here.

It was a large puddle of blood that had been frozen and browned. It was left when Qi Han pierced his throat with a pen. Next to the blood there were a few deep scratches that had also been frozen. He scratched the snow with his hands in the last few seconds before he was about to die.

Fu Ge knelt on one knee on the ground, tears dripping into the snow. He gathered a handful of blood, and the pain was so sharp that he could hardly breathe.

“Didn’t you know that I was lying to you… why were you calling me…”

Severe allergies on the plateau can kill people. The last few seconds before suffocation are the most precious rescue time. Qi Han scratched the ground so hard, he must have tried with all his strength to take out his mobile phone and dial it.

He must have thought that Fu Ge would look back at him even if he was angry.

But Fu Ge didn’t.

The last hope was annihilated with the sentence “Don’t bother me”. Was he really trying to save himself when he stabbed himself in the throat with the pen?

Fu Ge blinked his crimson eyes, took out the piece of paper Kang Zhuo had given him, carefully flattened it and saw Qi Han’s four wishes written in tiny letters from top to bottom.

Fu Ge read them out one by one facing the snow-capped mountain—

“One, I wish him a hundred years of worry-free life. Two, I wish for him to get what he wants. Three, I wish him to have a happy family. And four, I wish him… to never meet me again in the next life…”

The last words were carried away by the wind, and Fu Ge trembled all over, crouching on the snow, his pale fingers sinking deep into the frozen blood, gradually coinciding with the Alpha’s painful, desperate scratches: “Ah Han, how do you want me to be happy…”

At ten o’clock in the evening, Fu Ge got off the train alone, with a handful of snow mixed with blood in his bag.

If the things in Room 404 hadn’t been burned, he would have found that Qi Han had also left Litang with a handful of snow and kept it as his relic.

As soon as his mobile phone was turned on, the text messages popped up in droves. Fu Ge didn’t really look at them. On the top of WeChat there was still “Mr. Bear Cub”, but he knew that there would never be a small red dot of unread messages after these three words.

As soon as he was about to take a taxi, there was a phone call, and Qi Chuan informed him in a panic: “Xiao Ge! The prison van escorting Qi Han was hijacked!”

Half an hour later, on the Linhai Highway.

A black Santana was speeding up through the rain.

There were four people in the car. The driver and the gunman were sitting in the front. In the back seat was an Alpha who was on guard. It was the man who had tripped up Qi Han at the auction house, the leader of the gland hunters who had almost died on this road.

And at his feet, the handcuffed Qi Han lay huddled on the car floor, and his head covered with a black hood swayed with the movement of the car.

From the time he was kidnapped to the time he was dragged to the car, he didn’t resist for a moment, his eyes half-opened through the whole process, staring dumbly into the void.

He looked like a walking corpse at the mercy of others, his bruised and battered body containing a rotting heart.

“Big Brother, something doesn’t seem right up ahead!”

“Don’t fucking bullshit me, the cops are all left behind!”

At the sound of these words, a bright light suddenly hit the front of the car.

The driver braked abruptly, and the front tires plunged directly into the mud on the right side of the road. At the same time, with a bang, the windshield exploded, the shards hitting them all over their heads and faces.

More than a dozen motorcycles in ambush on the road ahead speeded forward with their lights on.

In an instant, the sound of gunshots and the roar of engines were endless. The firepower on the opposite side was more than ten times that of the gland hunters. The three of them had no chance to resist. The Alpha pulled Qi Han out of the car, holding a grenade in his hand.

“Don’t come over! Come any closer and we will die together!”

As soon as he finished speaking, a violent engine sound came from behind him. The Alpha subconsciously turned his head, and the strong light shot directly into his eyes.

At this moment, a slender driver suddenly rushed forward from the other side, and in less than half a second was straight in front of him, “Then let’s see which of us dies first!”

The front of the motorcycle was raised high. The Alpha cried out and fell backwards. Fu Ge grabbed Qi Han and pulled him onto the motorcycle, then gripped the handlebar and moved back with all his strength, running straight over the gland hunter’s calf.

“Ahhh!”

A harsh scream pierced the eardrums, the grenade rolled to the ground, and the explosion blasted Santana into the air. The motorcycle that was moving at full speed was also blown over.

Fu Ge rolled forward five or six metres, dislocating his arm and scraping the skin off his shoulder.

He didn’t care about himself at all, stood up and looked for Qi Han’s figure in a panic, and saw the Alpha in a prison uniform in front of the burning Santana.

Qi Han knelt on the ground with his back to Fu Ge. In two days he had lost so much weight that he was as thin as a terminally ill patient who no longer  had a chance to live. The cold wind blew his prison clothes like a kite, as if he would float to the sky in the next second.

Somewhere he had found a gun, and now he raised it slowly and pointed it at his head.

“What are you doing…” Fu Ge asked him in a dumb voice.

Qi Han’s eyelids twitched, the rising flames filling his stagnant eyes with light.

He smiled weakly, closed his eyes and said word by word: “I saw Dad, and I also saw… Xiao Ge. They said I’m free now, I can go home…”