Chapter 27
Song Zhang had almost forgotten what Lu Yichuan had been like four years ago.
Their friendship wasn’t particularly deep. Or rather, his friendship with anyone besides Jiang Heng wasn’t particularly deep.
He had become friends with Song Zhang because he needed a friend like him. Clean background, a father who was a respected writer, and a mild-mannered personality – the perfect choice for a friend.
They had met a few days before Jiang Heng’s accident.
Lu Yichuan didn’t smoke, but he would drink for social occasions.
Colorless vodka clinking against ice cubes, refracting the colorful lights, in the hazy night, Song Zhang hadn’t been able to see his expression clearly.
Lu Yichuan, holding his glass, had asked him a strange question.
“How do you make someone like you?”
It was the first time Song Zhang realized that even the privileged Lu Yichuan would worry about matters of the heart.
Like any ordinary person in love, he had cast aside his usual rationality and judgment, seeking answers from an outsider.
“Do you think he’ll like me?”
At the time, Song Zhang hadn’t known the answer, and within a few short days, the opportunity to answer that question was gone forever.
…
He learned about Jiang Heng’s accident half a day later.
A swarm of reporters crowded the hospital entrance. The news of the Jiang family’s swapped-at-birth sons had already been a sensation, and now, just a few days later, the “fake” young master had been in a horrific car accident.
Song Zhang pushed his way through the reporters.
In contrast to the commotion outside, the hospital was quiet, eerily so. He looked down, his face clearly reflected in the polished floor tiles.
He found Lu Yichuan at the entrance to the morgue.
The man sat there, covered in blood, his face strangely calm, his right hand clenched into a fist, as if gripping something.
Song Zhang hesitantly sat beside him. Lu Yichuan’s expression wasn’t so much grief as it was bewilderment. In the end, Song Zhang could only offer a perfunctory, “Are you okay?”
Lu Yichuan, like a rusted clock, took a few seconds to react. He turned his head, saw Song Zhang, and tightened his grip on his fist, his voice strangely calm.
“I’m fine.”
“…”
Song Zhang opened his mouth again, wanting to say something, but any words of comfort felt hollow and inadequate.
Zhao Huailan was sobbing hysterically, while Lu Yichuan remained eerily quiet.
Song Zhang suddenly remembered seeing Lu Yichuan’s mother once. Usually an elegant and poised woman, she had become hysterical when her illness flared up, staring at Lu Yichuan with a venomous and terrified gaze.
“Lu Yichuan, you’re a monster! You can’t even shed a single tear! You’re heartless!”
Lu Yichuan hadn’t shed a tear indeed.
Song Zhang wondered how he would feel if his loved one died.
He couldn’t imagine it, because he didn’t have a loved one who had been by his side since he was four.
Before he could gather his thoughts, a gold watch was placed in his hand.
“The watch is broken. Can you have it repaired for me?”
Song Zhang looked down. The gold watch was covered in blood, the crystal shattered, the gold stained crimson.
He took the watch, his fingers trembling almost imperceptibly.
After that day at the hospital, he hadn’t seen Lu Yichuan for several days. The Jiang and Lu families had suppressed all news, and no one knew what happened afterward, not even when the funeral was held.
Song Zhang took the watch to a repair shop.
The old watchmaker, wearing his glasses, examined the cleaned watch. “It can be repaired. The broken crystal is easy to replace, but the hands seem to be stuck. I need to remove whatever is blocking them.”
Song Zhang also looked closely. “What’s blocking them? I don’t see anything.”
The watchmaker said, “It’s too small to see with the naked eye.”
He took out a magnifying glass and peered at the watch. “The object is strange. It’s not a stone…it looks like…”
The watchmaker hesitated.
“…a bone fragment.”
Song Zhang’s mind went blank.
He couldn’t describe what he felt at that moment. He suddenly remembered Lu Yichuan’s expression when he had handed him the watch.
His face had still been covered in blood, but his expression had been blank, his eyes dark and empty, as if something inside him had died.
And then, a chilling calmness.
Later, only the crystal of the broken watch was repaired.
The hands remained frozen in time, never to move forward again.
…
Song Zhang went to see Lu Yichuan with the repaired watch and found him after he had slit his wrists.
The cuts were deep, clearly a suicide attempt. After being rescued, he had been quiet and calm, only accepting the watch from Song Zhang with an unnervingly steady hand, his face pale as he fastened it onto his left wrist, covering the gruesome wound.
He had even thanked him with a smile.
“Thank you.”
Song Zhang had been chilled to the bone.
He knew the incident wasn’t really his fault, but perhaps because of the phone call he had made just before Jiang Heng got on the bus, he felt a lingering guilt.
This guilt kept him returning to Lu Yichuan.
Until one day, the man came to him…
He was holding a bird, the usual shadows in his eyes seemingly dispelled by his smile.
“Rongrong came to see me.”
He had said, smiling.
He held up the bird. “Look, its eyes are just like Rongrong’s. It pecks me affectionately when it’s happy, and sulks when it’s upset…”
“So, this is him, right?”
Song Zhang had said, “It’s just a bird.”
“But its eyes are like Rongrong’s. He came back to see me.”
“It’s just an ordinary bird. A bird is a bird; a bird can’t become a human.”
“But…”
“No buts, Lu Yichuan.”
…
But this was only the beginning.
Outwardly, the man seemed normal, living his life as usual, but even the calmest lake has ripples, and Song Zhang had become the unwitting outlet for his unraveling.
At first, it was still within acceptable limits. The man would occasionally have delusions, believing that the animals and plants around him were Jiang Heng, appearing before Song Zhang every now and then, claiming he had seen Rongrong.
He didn’t need Song Zhang to explain anything to him because Lu Yichuan was rational.
This rationality would force him to recognize the fallacy of his delusions after each episode, pulling him back to reality, shattering the illusion, unable to even deceive himself.
The agony of clarity, the despair of acceptance.
That was when Song Zhang realized that being alive was a torture for him.
After that, things spiraled out of control.
Lu Yichuan broke ties with his family, started smoking, drinking, fighting… He seemed to embrace every vice imaginable within a year, yet at the same time, he became close to the Jiang family.
So close that even Song Zhang felt it was excessive and couldn’t help but ask him if he thought this was fair to Jiang Heng.
But Lu Yichuan just smiled.
“I want him to think I’ve wronged him.”
He took a drag of his cigarette and said, each word laced with a chilling determination, “I want him to be so angry that he crawls out of his grave, becomes a vengeful ghost, appears before me, tears me apart, drags me to hell, tortures me however he wants, as long as…”
“As long as he appears before me.”
Song Zhang thought he was insane.
Lu Yichuan continued this self-destructive behavior for a year until one day, he had to be rushed to the hospital for a stomach hemorrhage due to excessive drinking.
When he woke up, he was quiet, the last spark in his eyes extinguished.
In just a year, he had become alarmingly thin, his body frail and weak as he lay in the hospital bed, as if a gust of wind could blow him away.
Clinging to life by a thread.
Song Zhang peeled an apple for him while Lu Yichuan stared out the window. The ward was quiet, only the sound of the knife against the apple’s skin.
After a long silence, the man in the bed turned his head and said, “Rongrong has truly left me.”
Song Zhang’s hand froze.
“I’ve become such a mess, but he doesn’t come to find me. I’m so good to Jiang Xingbai, but he doesn’t come to find me. I’ve drunk so much, I almost died, but he doesn’t come to find me.”
“I’ve begged him for so long, but he doesn’t come to find me.”
“I’ve consulted so many masters, soul summoners, ghost raisers, dream weavers… I’ve lost count of how many I’ve seen, but I still haven’t seen him.”
His voice was soft, his tone calm, even his expression indifferent.
“I’ve abandoned my previous beliefs, desperately hoping that ghosts exist, perhaps I just don’t have the ability to see them, so I can’t even see him.”
“A few days ago, I saw a master, and he said he could help me find his reincarnation.”
The man coughed slightly.
“But that’s not my Rongrong. Even if it’s the same soul, it’s not the Rongrong I raised.”
“I only have one Rongrong…”
He said calmly.
“I have nothing left, only Rongrong.”
“I raised him for sixteen years. He grew from this tall…” he gestured with his hand, “…to this tall. Beautiful, lively, everyone liked him.”
“I was selfish, I raised him so he couldn’t live without me.”
“I’ve never really held onto anything in my life, the only thing I could grasp was Rongrong.”
“My Rongrong…”
Tears finally slipped from his eyes.
“Why did you have to take him away?”
Why take away the person more important to him than his own life?
Like a student convinced of a flawed answer, he had spent a year, trying every method, exhausting every solution.
He had been so sure he could find a loophole, a flaw in the question, writing pages and pages of calculations, but no matter how he tried, the answer remained the same.
The separation had been so painful that it had taken him a whole year to accept this reality.
“Does God think my life was too easy? He knew Rongrong couldn’t live without me, so he took him away from me like this.”
“Then why…”
His voice trembled slightly.
“Why not take me too?”
…
God didn’t answer, and Song Zhang couldn’t offer a solution either.
Just when he thought Lu Yichuan wouldn’t be able to take it anymore, the man somehow endured, year after year.
More than finding peace for the departed, he seemed to be punishing himself.
Punishing himself with life itself.
After that incident at the hospital, Song Zhang rarely heard Lu Yichuan mention seeing Jiang Heng in animals or plants.
Until now, after Lu Yichuan told him he was ready to move on, a few days later, he received a call.
“Song Zhang, I think I’m having another episode.”
He said.
“I saw Rongrong.”
