Chapter 37: Dark-Skinned Rugged Honest Man 37

Jiang Rang had finally sunk into despair.

It was a mental numbness, a complete loss of spirit for any activity, as if all his senses and feelings were forever trapped on the day of their escape.

Jiang Rang couldn’t sleep night after night.

The moment he closed his eyes, that dim yellow light would descend once more, and Hang Liu’s smile would appear by his side. The young man wore that white linen shirt he had once complimented, nestling gently against him with tender affection. Their fingers intertwined, full of anticipation for a happy future ahead.

But like a curse, the twilight piled up indifferently like sinister deathly qi. The blood-red sun, now muddied and polluted, sank into the mist. Streetlights along the Panshan Highway flickered on one by one. A fine rain carried by the fog pricked the earth like needlepoints.

The world plunged into dead silence in an instant, yet the sedan’s speed grew faster and more ferocious. In the rearview mirror, the driver’s half-visible face gleamed with a sickly pallor. He slowly turned his head toward Jiang Rang, staring at the young man with eerie, uncanny fixation. His pitch-black pupils brimmed with a horrifying grin.

Jiang Rang went rigid with cold dread. He gasped like a dying fish, his mind screaming with sharp warnings to “run away.” But he couldn’t move a muscle. He could only listen as the voice of his fiancé beside him plunged him into abyss-like despair.

Hang Liu’s head rested on his shoulder, his smile as captivating as spring waters. He gazed softly at Jiang Rang and said, “A-Rang, we’re finally together.”

Almost as the words left his mouth, a massive crash erupted from the front. It unfolded like a disaster movie in slow motion. Jiang Rang watched in horror as his fiancé’s beautiful face beside him was crushed and shattered. The young man’s flushed lips still opened and closed, but blood and entrails spilled eagerly from between his white teeth.

In a daze, Jiang Rang heard his fiancé’s final words.

“A-Rang, we’ll be together forever and ever.”

No sooner had he spoken than the young man’s beautiful body dissolved into a spray of blood, splattering across Jiang Rang’s cheeks, wrists, and body.

The Beta trembled violently. He gulped down air in heaving breaths as the metallic stench invaded his nostrils and mouth like a slug slithering in.

In that instant, Jiang Rang felt ensnared in a net of razor-sharp blades, tightening around him mercilessly, the edges piercing deep into his flesh and churning his organs.

“Jiang Jiang, Jiang Jiang, don’t be afraid. I’m right here with you…”

His consciousness floated unmoored. In his haze, Jiang Rang seemed to see a familiar, anxious, handsome face.

Like a faint light piercing the fog, he desperately reached for this lifeline.

His tensed fingers dug into the man’s wrist with vengeful force. The Beta shuddered all over as his sharp teeth sank into the man’s taut arm with all his strength. In a flash, the sickly scent of blood spread through the frigid room.

The man didn’t struggle. Instead, he gently encircled the young man’s waist, allowing him to slump half into his embrace. His long, knuckled fingers stroked the spine that felt stripped of bone, with a tenderness bordering on cruelty.

He willingly offered his own flesh and blood, letting his beast-like lover tear into him.

The young man in his arms gasped like a drowning man, his breaths growing more frantic. After a long while, as if finally accepting some decreed death in his will, he awoke amid a slick mess of tears.

The Beta’s newly cleared eyes stared blankly, the reddish-brown shadows under them smearing across his face like bold strokes from a wandering poet’s hand.

“I dreamed of A Liu again.”

His hoarse voice rasped like air from a broken fan, low and fractured.

Chen Jingxu’s soothing hand paused slightly. After a moment, he held the young man even tighter. His usually refined voice cracked with a hint of choking unease.

“Jiang Jiang, don’t think about him anymore.”

His warm wrist gently turned the Beta’s pale cheek toward him. Their breaths mingled as the man’s voice turned almost pleading. “Stop tormenting yourself. And stop tormenting me. Jiang Jiang, look at me sometimes too—with those eyes of yours.”

Jiang Rang stared at the man in blank confusion, standing frozen in silence, as if the impact was too great for him to comprehend the words.

Chen Jingxu half-covered his reddened eyes in defeat. His usually neat, executive-style short hair now hung in disarray. His pale face looked as dull as wall ash, and a shadow of stubble darkened his jaw.

The man sighed. After a pause, as if forcing his emotions back under control, he managed a gentle smile and said softly to the young man, “Alright, enough of that. Jiang Jiang, shall we go get some dinner?”

Jiang Rang didn’t move. The young man seemed to be suffering from lingering aftereffects of a severe illness, his reactions excruciatingly slow. It took a long while before he slowly worked his lips, his gaze drifting blankly toward Chen Jingxu.

“Chen Jingxu,” he said, “I won’t like you.”

The man froze in place in an instant. His eyes turned flustered and damp, ink-green irises brimming as if with an unstoppable downpour. His haggard expression was heartbreakingly pitiful, like a little dog in a low-rent apartment waiting day in and day out for its master to come home.

“So…….”

“Jiang Jiang.” Chen Jingxu slowly lowered his gaze, cutting off the young man’s words. It was as if something had finally clicked for him; the alpha’s face settled back into composure, save for a faint redness lingering at the corners of his eyes.

He pursed his lips. “Qi Yu is searching high and low for you.”

As he spoke, the man abruptly lifted his thin eyelids, those ink-green eyes locking deeply onto the young man. In a soft voice, he added, “If you leave now, you’re walking straight into a trap.”

Chen Jingxu was sharp—he knew it well. He understood Jiang Rang’s deep-seated guilt toward Hang Liu and the heavy repression weighing on his heart. No matter what, the young man would never willingly return to that cage.

The beta was like a white dove with one wing clipped. He’d been confined too long, so he’d sooner leap into another snare than go back.

Sure enough, Jiang Rang paled, his trembling lips falling silent once more.

Chen Jingxu drew the young man close and slowly tilted his head up. In the process, he caught sight of their reflection in the water-streaked glass mirror on the windowsill.

The weather that day was brilliantly clear. Sunlight streamed through the glass, spilling gently into the home the master had so meticulously arranged. Patterns on the green-brown walls glimmered faintly. The beta’s handsome face was etched with panic, his honeyed skin pressed against the alpha’s pale complexion—uncomfortable, yet somehow perfectly matched.

The man dropped his gaze, cradling the youth’s subtly toned muscles in his palm, his thumb tracing over them with endless fascination.

~~~

Jiang Rang ended up staying at the Chen Family Villa.

In truth, most days, he didn’t even step out of the bedroom.

The beta showed no interest in anything, and Chen Jingxu forbade anyone from disturbing him. As a result, Jiang Rang exchanged scarcely more than a few words with the man each day.

This wasn’t normal, and Chen Jingxu knew it all too well—knew how his own ambitions had swollen unchecked under the young man’s unwitting indulgence.

Every time he saw Jiang Rang fall utterly silent around others, only to unconsciously gravitate a little closer to him, that ravenous craving in his chest eased just a fraction.

As if it proved he was special.

In this warped atmosphere, Chen Jingxu went so far as to bar anyone from even approaching Jiang Rang.

During the day, if he wasn’t home, the servants were to limit themselves to routine cleaning and cooking before vanishing entirely.

The Chen Family Villa was vast, designed for cozy domestic warmth. But with no one else around, that inviting glow from the lamps took on an eerie chill, utterly out of place.

A pair of wheat-toned wrists pushed open the brown wooden door. The young man traversed the warmly lit corridor and descended the stairs at a leisurely pace.

The villa’s soundproofing was top-notch. The whole space echoed only with Jiang Rang’s footsteps—no other sound intruded. The silence was so profound that the beta could even faintly hear the sluggish beat of his own heart.

Lately, Jiang Rang had fallen into the habit of spacing out. He simply couldn’t summon any energy or interest in the world around him.

He wasn’t hungry or thirsty, felt no spark of life. Even coming downstairs to eat now took three or four phone calls from Chen Jingxu to coax him.

Perhaps it really was some mental affliction. Amid the sound of his footsteps and heartbeat, Jiang Rang suddenly thought he heard something else—a faint noise.

It seemed to emanate from the storage room near the second-floor stairwell: a rustling, interspersed with odd, muffled moans.

Jiang Rang’s steps faltered, and the sound cut off.

He lowered his eyes, fingers absently rubbing the vermilion mark on his wrist. After a long moment, the beta pivoted on his toes and made straight for the storage room.

“Pat, pat…”

His footsteps weren’t loud, but the closer he drew to the squat little room, the more harshly they reverberated.

The storage room door was deep black, kept locked and easily overlooked by the passing servants.

His steps came to a gentle halt before it. For an instant, the beta’s heart thundered in his chest. There, in the door—a thin slit.

Dust motes danced in the faint light seeping through, like a rift torn into another dimension. Pushing it open felt like it would unleash something irreversible, shattering the world as he knew it.

Jiang Rang felt his fingers quiver, the hairs on his arms standing on end.

He had imagined a thousand possibilities—even A Liu’s mangled, horrifying corpse.

When he finally pushed open that door, his eyes were met with a deep brownish damp carpet, silver-gray walls, and a single pitifully dim yellow lamp flickering beside them.

Jiang Rang’s tall, athletic figure cast a shadow over the man huddled in the corner. At first glance, it looked like a darkness that could never be dispelled.

It was an alpha, chained to the wall in the corner.

The alpha wore ragged clothes, his face smeared with grime, his glasses shattered on the bridge of his nose, and his body covered in countless glaring, foul-smelling wounds that made him appear utterly wretched.

He seemed to sense someone standing before him.

The man slowly lifted his ashen, pallid face. He squinted against the hazy light, and the moment he made out the youth clearly, Chen Yanyu broke into a bizarre smile.

He parted his cracked, dry lips, his expression twitching unnaturally.

Jiang Rang’s eyes trembled. Overwhelming fear and horror made him stagger back two steps involuntarily.

Chen Yanyu leaned his head slowly against the cold wall behind him. Then he grinned and spoke in a hoarse, neurotic rasp. “He’s already locked you up too, hasn’t he?”

A look of confusion and pitiful bewilderment flashed across the youth’s face. He seemed utterly unable to comprehend what the man meant.

Chen Yanyu let out a series of snickering laughs. He coughed amid the laughter, and from deep in his chest came strange, wheezing gasps.

At last, he wiped the dark red bloodstain from the corner of his mouth. He opened his bloodshot eyes, veined like spiderwebs, and laughed with exaggerated glee. “You still don’t know?”

“Your fiancé… he’s probably dead by now, right?”

Jiang Rang’s eyes shuddered violently. As if the world had turned into some grotesque hallucination he couldn’t grasp, the youth clamped his hands over his ears in a desperate, self-destructive bid to shut out the pain.

But the man’s voice only grew shriller, stabbing into his ear canals like silver needles, relentlessly piercing the beta’s fragile hold on sanity.

“He really inherited the Chen Family’s rotten genes. Even his dirty deeds are done with such shameless entitlement.”

“He’s telling you right now that he’ll help you find your fiancé, isn’t he?” The man laughed wildly, on the verge of madness. For a fleeting moment, his familiar features bore an uncanny resemblance to Chen Jingxu.

Chen Yanyu hacked up a mouthful of blood. In a rasping voice, he continued, “He made up some reason to keep you stuck here and chased everyone else away.”

“Jiang Rang, care to guess what he really wants?”

“Or maybe… why did he lock me up in here, of all places? Specifically so you could find me?”

The beta’s face twisted sharper and sharper. His dark, downcast eyes brimmed with raw, choking tears.

He could no longer bear the truth. He turned and stumbled toward the exit.

A faint, hazy voice drifted after him like a curse. “He’s wanted to chain you up for a long time now.”

With that, the man dissolved into snickering laughter once more. Chen Yanyu’s gaze went vacant, as if he had plunged completely into some twisted delusion.

Meanwhile, the youth rushed to the villa’s front door like a gust of wind.

His hands shook as he fumbled with the knob.

The first try failed. The door wouldn’t budge.

The second try failed too.

On the third, the door finally swung open—but from the outside.

A handsome man stood there beyond the threshold, smiling calmly at the youth. “Jiang Jiang, I’m home. Were you waiting right here for me?”

The beta trembled from head to toe. His eyes were bloodshot, burning with a terrifying hatred.

He swung his hand in a fierce slap across Chen Jingxu’s face. His voice quavered as he spat, “You beast! I never should have saved you!”

Chen Jingxu’s head snapped to the side. His pale, jade-like cheek swelled red almost instantly, but he betrayed no hint of pain.

The man slowly licked the hot, injured flesh inside his mouth. When his dark, serene eyes met the youth’s, a faint smile curved his lips.

“So feisty today, Jiang Jiang,” he said mildly.

Jiang Rang shook with rage and raised his hand for another slap.

But Chen Jingxu was already pressed close. He seized the youth’s hand and clamped the wrist firmly against his own reddened cheek.

A strange look of relish spread across the man’s face.

His voice trembled, his cheeks flushing as he murmured, “Even when Jiang Jiang hits me, you look so beautiful.”