In the instant he was sent flying, Qiao Ning’s mind was still on the bug a coworker had reported—its cause and the fix.
It wasn’t until he hit the ground and the pain began to sharpen that he belatedly realized: oh, he’d been hit by a car.
Today was supposed to be a day off, but a coworker had called him in to work overtime. A traffic accident on the way to work—surely that counted as a workplace injury?
In the span of that single moment, passersby and nearby shop owners had already crowded around, phones out, filming.
The culprit of the accident was obviously that black car that had jumped the green belt and plowed into the bike lane. The driver stayed hidden inside, and Qiao Ning wasn’t the only unlucky one.
A young mother with a child, swerving to avoid the car, had fallen onto the sidewalk bike, child and all.
Thankfully it was just scrapes; it didn’t look too serious.
A food delivery rider to his diagonal front scrambled up in one roll and was checking the meals in his insulated box.
Only Qiao Ning had been well and truly launched by the car. His head had knocked against something—he couldn’t tell where. Bracing against the paving tiles, he sat up. His cheek was wet; he wiped it with a hand and came away with blood.
“Don’t move—” A hand reached out from beside him and gripped his wrist.
Qiao Ning blinked. Half his face was smeared with blood, blocking his view. He stared blankly a couple of times before he could see clearly—then looked a few times more.
Half-crouching before him was a man wearing a mask. The exposed half of his face was handsome enough on its own, though his brows and eyes were cold and aloof, carrying a hint of distance.
Qiao Ning wasn’t staring because the man was good-looking. Okay, that had a little something to do with it. Mainly, he felt the man looked extremely familiar, but no matter how he tried, he couldn’t remember where he’d seen him.
Straining to recall… his head only grew dizzier.
Dizzy and slow to react, Qiao Ning failed to notice that when the man in front of him got a clear look at his face, the man also froze for an instant.
But that instant was far too brief. The man quickly composed his expression, lowered his gaze, and examined the wound on Qiao Ning’s forehead.
“I’m a doctor at the First Affiliated Hospital of Jiang University. I’ve already called emergency services. Don’t move for now.”
As he explained, the man performed a quick facial assessment of Qiao Ning. He had already seen the wound—an open laceration, still bleeding, but mercifully with no embedded debris. Pupils and breathing both looked normal. He quietly breathed a sigh of relief.
There was a pharmacy nearby, and a kind passerby brought back gauze. The doctor thanked them, tore open the packaging, and stopped the bleeding for Qiao Ning.
Slow as ever, Qiao Ning lifted his head to say thanks—and came face-to-face with a phone camera. The kind passerby appeared to have started livestreaming.
“Family, I’m at the accident scene right now! This is the poor guy who got hit. I’m the one who brought the gauze. Family, smash that follow button… Ooh, he’s handsome? Yeah, the boy really is pretty. Family, send some little red hearts for our unlucky hunk…”
Qiao Ning: “…”
“Don’t move.”
The doctor lightly touched his cheek, stopping his big movements, and asked in a low voice about his condition—whether anything felt off.
All Qiao Ning felt was that his head was getting dizzier and dizzier. It was hard to describe, as if something had been stuffed into his brain. He even wanted to reach up and feel it, convinced his head had swollen bigger.
The doctor frowned as he listened, asked whether Qiao Ning felt nauseous. When the answer was no, his brow knitted tighter.
Just as he was about to ask more, Qiao Ning’s phone rang. The moment he answered, an anxious coworker’s voice burst through: “Qiao, why aren’t you here yet? Can you hurry up?!”
Qiao Ning answered dazedly: “I… I got hit by a car…”
“Oh, hit by a—” The voice on the line spiked sharply. “Hit by a CAR?! How bad? Can you still make it into the office?”
Qiao Ning’s head hurt too much to notice the doctor in front of him glaring darkly at his phone.
How the call ended afterward, he couldn’t remember. His head ached so badly he couldn’t stay seated, and when he toppled over, the doctor caught him.
The ambulance came fast, hauling Qiao Ning and the delivery rider off in one trip.
The rider lay on the stretcher beside Qiao Ning. He’d originally been about to get up and finish his deliveries, but after a glance at his phone, he lay back down.
As he was loaded into the ambulance, Qiao Ning heard the kind doctor handing over his first-aid details to the accompanying medic. He really wanted to ask for the doctor’s name—he ought to at least send a Silk Honor Banner.
But his head was too miserable. A throbbing ache from the inside out—he suspected his head had swollen as big as a watermelon.
At the hospital, he went through a battery of tests. He was relatively lucky: no serious internal injuries elsewhere, no intracranial bleeding. The dizziness, pressure, and headache he was experiencing were diagnosed as a concussion, and he was told to rest properly.
The doctor running the tests also reminded him that his heartbeat was somewhat arrhythmic, and he should take care to rest.
Qiao Ning smiled awkwardly. His job was demanding; overtime was the norm. When things got busy, he survived on coffee alone.
Sometimes his heart really did spasm with sudden pain—but only a stab or two, and if he endured it, it passed.
Strangely enough, by evening his headache had slowly eased, and when he was discharged the next day, the pain inside was completely gone.
The wound still hurt. The inside of his head didn’t.
He didn’t go into work the day of discharge, but there were still odds and ends to handle—follow-up on the accident compensation.
The next day, Qiao Ning was pushed back into the office to keep grinding. After two days away, a pile of work had accumulated. He was so busy he forgot to eat.
“Qiao, your food’s gone cold. Want me to buy you a fresh one?”
Qiao Ning declined with a smile: “It’s fine, I’ll just heat it up.”
Today’s luck was bad. The grilled meat rice he’d ordered was dry as dust, and heating it made it drier still. He’d barely shoveled down two bites when his phone rang.
He picked it up, glanced at the screen, and frowned involuntarily, carrying the phone out to the fire escape to answer.
“…”
“I wasn’t deliberately ignoring your calls. I’m at work.”
“I wasn’t being disrespectful. What do you want me to say?”
“No. I won’t go back for the blind date. I’ve told you—I don’t like girls.”
“…”
Qiao Ning held the phone away from his ear, staring at it numbly as streams of curses poured from the speaker.
His heart seemed to spasm twice again. Qiao Ning couldn’t quite tell—was it heartache, or his heart aching?
Thankfully, as always, the pain vanished in a flash.
He replied coldly: “Understood. Noted. I won’t be calling you Father anymore… Uncle Qiao.”
Another torrent of vulgar abuse came through the line. Qiao Chenggong had dropped out before even finishing middle school to rough it in the world—in the early years, to put it unkindly, he was nothing but a street thug.
In recent years, with some money to his name, he’d started packaging himself. But faced with his powerless son, his true nature showed through completely.
Qiao Ning didn’t listen any further. He hung up.
He stared fixedly at the call log on the screen. The word “Dad” at the top slowly twisted into a monster.
Without another moment’s hesitation, his finger slid across the screen and dragged the number into the blacklist.
By the time he got back, the reheated grilled meat rice had gone half-cold. The cooled meat gave off a faint rank smell. Fighting down nausea, Qiao Ning forced down half a bowl of rice, brewed himself a cup of coffee, and went back to work.
He had no time for self-pity, no time to weep over his miserable fate. He had to fight—with everything he had—for his prospects, for his future.
His effort wasn’t without reward. He had just made the down payment on an apartment in this city—a home that belonged to him, and only him.
No one would kick him out. No one would leave him locked outside, starving. No one would casually wreck his things.
The thought of that home of his filled Qiao Ning with drive. He could do three more hours of overtime.
In fact, he did five.
Night had deepened, but plenty of lights still burned in the building. Qiao Ning wasn’t the only one working late.
He took off his blue-light-blocking glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes were dry and ached with pressure; his shoulders and neck were so stiff that even moving hurt, and his lower back wasn’t happy either.
He was only in his twenties, yet his body was littered with little ailments.
Frozen shoulder, cervical spondylosis, a bulging lumbar disc, tendonitis in the wrist, migraines, plus a touch of anemia. The arrhythmia mixed in among them was, comparatively, the one affecting his daily life the least.
Then again, his coworkers were all much the same—every last one of them sub-healthy.
His eyes still felt wrong, so Qiao Ning dug out his eye drops and squeezed in a few, closing his eyes to let them work.
His stomach growled. He’d barely eaten anything all day—just knocked back several cups of coffee. Iced Americanos, the go-to for staying awake.
Truthfully, he didn’t like coffee this bitter at all. He’d swallowed too much bitter medicine as a child; bitterness was the taste he hated most.
Back then, someone had coaxed and accompanied him through his medicine. Now no one coaxed him—he just poured cup after cup down his own throat.
At the thought of medicine, Qiao Ning thought of that doctor he’d met a couple days ago.
There really was an inexplicable sense of familiarity, but he just couldn’t place it. That maddening feeling of the answer being one step away was pure torture.
Qiao Ning checked his schedule and decided that on his next day off, he’d go to the First Affiliated Hospital of Jiang University to find his benefactor and deliver a Silk Honor Banner.
After jotting a note in his schedule, Qiao Ning packed up his things to head home.
The moment he stood, his heart seized violently. Pain spread outward from his chest. Instinctively, he braced against the desk, wanting to wait it out—get through this wave and it would pass.
But this time the pain was exceptionally fierce and long. His vision went black, his bracing arm gave out, and he collapsed.
He never got up again.
