The young doctor gnashed their teeth. “And yet you have the guts to talk about not discriminating against the mentally ill—”
“Tell me, how do you talk to cancer patients? Do you tell them, ‘Oh, my condolences. You’re about to die soon’?” There wasn’t the slightest hint of expression on Xie Qingcheng’s face; his features were colder than hoarfrost. “I’m sure you don’t. The truth is one thing, and the words we say are another. As a doctor in mental health, I need to give my patients hope and encouragement. I need to let them feel as if they’re being treated like normal people. But ask yourself, everyone. Do any of you truly feel no apprehension at all toward mentally ill patients who are identified as dangerous? Which one of you would willingly interact with them alone and go so far as to hand your life over to such patients without the slightest reservations? Could any of you do it?”
“So…everything you said was nothing more than superficial platitudes… You’re just… You’re just a despicable fake putting on hypocritical airs!”
Xie Qingcheng didn’t argue with the people who had lost their tempers; just as always, he was extremely calm, so calm he almost seemed callous, so callous he almost seemed cold-blooded. “Qin Ciyan might have been a saint. But I’m nothing more than an ordinary person. When I come to work and put on these clothes, I’m a doctor who’s treating his patients. When I leave work and take these clothes off, I have a family—I have a wife and a little sister to take care of. I haven’t reached Qin Ciyan’s level of enlightenment.”
No one spoke.
“If you want to become Qin Ciyan, then go ahead,” Xie Qingcheng said, removing the medal which he’d just received and putting it back into its velvet-lined brocade box. His gaze was extremely sober and exceedingly calm. “I just want to be an ordinary person.”
At this point, the video suddenly flashed and abruptly flickered and faded to nothing.
Now that the countdown on the WZL death game had concluded, the police couldn’t allow the perpetrators to continue their outrageous behavior. They had gained the ability to reclaim control over the information transmission channels a little while before—but they didn’t dare to act rashly on the chance that it would precipitate a terror attack on Huzhou’s innocent citizens. So they could only let their opponents do as they wished.
But now, there was no way the police could allow the video to continue playing. With an order from the top, the “bloody sword” broadcasting tower that had bustled with activity for the whole night seemed to wake up from its demonic possession at last as its central power supply was cut off.
A bang rang out with the massive power outage.
Like curtains lowering over a stage at the end of a play, the entire broadcasting tower went dark as all its light vanished in an instant. Like a giant beast that had been tranquilized in the middle of the school’s campus after spending the night going berserk, it had returned to being utterly, deathly still, without any signs of life.
Behind the broadcasting tower, the conflagration was still raging, its soaring flames dyeing the night sky over the archives crimson. Police officers surrounded the area around that centuries-old building blazing away; someone had dialed the 119 emergency dispatch line.
Every corner of the campus was in an uproar; no one was sleeping tonight.
But inside the car, it was deathly silent.
The video was gone.
The scene was over.
But He Yu’s eyes, which had been fixed on the broadcasting tower this whole time, were still gazing at that completely darkened building—he hadn’t moved a muscle, extraordinarily serene to the point of being a little frightening.
“The vast majority of mental illnesses are normal people’s responses to abnormal circumstances…”
“Social inequality, abnormal environments; the main culprits dealing the greatest damage to their psyches, very ironically, nearly all originate from their families, from their workplaces, from society—they originate from us.”
“He Yu, sooner or later, you’ll have to depend on yourself to walk out of the shadows in your heart.”
“You need to rebuild the bridges that link you with other people and society.”
“I wish you an early recovery.”
“Hey, little devil.”
“Doesn’t it hurt…?”
Silence.
At this moment, the words that Xie Qingcheng had said back then—the words that pried open the shackles in He Yu’s heart, the encouragement that convinced He Yu to grudgingly view Xie Qingcheng as different from the others, the comfort that Xie Qingcheng once gave He Yu when he had been going through his most difficult times—they all seemed to float up like a cloud of dust, rendered indescribably ridiculous and cold.
He Yu looked at the tower.
His eyes were just as terrifyingly black as that unlit building.
Counting the days, it couldn’t have been more than a month after this video was filmed that Xie Qingcheng resigned from his post as his personal physician and then disappeared without a trace. It was as though Xie Qingcheng had been escaping from the lair of a predatory beast, or perhaps fleeing from someone with a contagious disease.
As the medic cleaned the wound in He Yu’s arm, it suddenly seemed to throb with agonizing pain. Otherwise, why would he feel cold all over? And why would he have gone so pale?
“He Yu.”
He Yu didn’t answer.
“I meant…”
He Yu heard Xie Qingcheng’s voice from beside him. Patiently, he waited for Xie Qingcheng to finish his sentence.
One second passed, then another.
But Xie Qingcheng did not continue.
He really had said all those things. No matter what the reason was, no matter his goal or the secrets hidden within his words, they had all come out of his own mouth. In the wake of Qin Ciyan’s murder, it was true that He Yu was the one Xie Qingcheng had sacrificed.
The truth was that he didn’t have any excuses to explain himself to this young man.
He Yu suddenly felt ridiculous—he disliked doctors to begin with, and he had disliked Xie Qingcheng in particular from the start. How had this man earned his trust and persuaded him to open the gates of his heart to him? Hadn’t it been precisely because of this so-called “equal treatment”—because Xie Qingcheng had viewed him as someone who was a part of regular society, supporting him as he walked out of his dark dragon’s lair and ventured into the boundless sunlight outside?
But after Qin Ciyan’s murder and before leaving his post, what had Xie Qingcheng said when He Yu wasn’t around, in places he didn’t even know of?
He Yu slowly closed his eyes. He felt like someone had backhanded him viciously across the cheek. That slap had traveled through many long, heavy years before coming to land on his face, so it should have lost its momentum. He Yu didn’t think that he could possibly feel any emotional disturbance from this slap.
But he still felt a faint, stinging pain in his flesh.
“All right. I’ve bandaged your wounds for the time being,” said the police medic who’d been overseeing He Yu’s treatment. “I’ll have someone to take you to the hospital. You still need to get this looked at as soon as possible. Come with me to the other car.”
There was no response from He Yu.
“Hello?” the medic prompted.
He Yu opened his eyes. He was too calm—so calm he seemed a bit terrifying.
Phone calls were furiously pouring in one after another on Xie Qingcheng’s phone, whether out of care, concern, or a desire for confirmation…the callers had various motives.
Xie Qingcheng didn’t pick up. He just stared at He Yu’s profile.
In a gentle, refined tone, He Yu said to the police medic, “Thank you for going to such trouble.”
Then, with one long-legged stride, he got out of the car. He took a few steps forward. It wasn’t until this moment, when he was about to leave, that he was finally willing to stop and turn his head slightly to the side. The flashing red and blue police beacons illuminated his unblemished face with a steadily flickering border of light.
He smiled softly, firelight flaring through his dark eyes. “Doctor Xie. Who would’ve thought that the truth would be like this?”
Xie Qingcheng didn’t say a word.
“It must have been such a sacrifice on your part to pretend for so many years. You’ve really worked hard.”
It’s truly too ironic, He Yu thought.
All these years, the one thing he feared the most was being treated like he was different from the rest. It was Xie Qingcheng who had walked into his lonely lair and bestowed upon him a beautiful set of convictions, giving him a layer of armor to carry through life for the first time and allowing him to believe that someday he could find a bridge he could cross to the rest of society.
He had believed in Xie Qingcheng so firmly. No matter how much He Yu disliked him, no matter how clearly Xie Qingcheng drew the lines between them, no matter how callously Xie Qingcheng had left back then—He Yu still understood his reasons, and he’d clung to those words of encouragement like a fool. Wearing the armor Xie Qingcheng had given him, he’d soldiered on with this stubborn attachment for so long.
But, as it turned out, the inside of that armor was lined with thorns.
He Yu had thought that it could fend off the mockery flung at him from the outside world, but in the moment when he least expected it, hundreds of thorns and thousands of blades had been released from the inside, piercing through him from head to toe.
The articles of faith that Xie Qingcheng had given him were false. Even he had lied to him.
“Xie Qingcheng, if you really were so scared of me, you could have told me directly right from the beginning. You didn’t need to put on an act, and you especially didn’t need to tell me so many great principles against your own beliefs. At least that wouldn’t have been so…”