Chapter 10

“Siyan!”
Su Wan and Xi Yucheng lunged forward to stop him. Wang Song reacted on instinct and threw him over the shoulder. The knife flew away, and Xi Siyan passed out.
Su Wan dropped to her knees crying, repeating, “How did it become this…?”
Her son—because of a “fool,” because of another man—no longer wanted his parents, and no longer wanted himself.
And what had she done?
She had broken the leg of a child whose body had already been fragile.
After Xi Siyan recovered, he said one sentence to Su Wan—“Mom, I’m sorry”—and then he moved out of the Xi home for good.
He was a state-subsidized research talent, not some wasteful playboy. He had saved up plenty of money.
Xi Siyan relocated, bought a small three-story villa under Jing Miao’s name, and hired an honest, kind housekeeper. When school wasn’t busy, he would live there with Jing Miao.
But Jing Miao was ill for a long time.
He was afraid of people. He woke up screaming at night. He didn’t dare look in mirrors. He feared floors. He feared stairs.
Later, Xi Siyan investigated everything that had happened.
He caught the men responsible and dealt with them outside the law—beating them until his own knuckles bled, until grown men lost control in fear.
He demanded, “Which hands touched him? Where?”
They didn’t dare answer, so he kept hitting—never killing, but leaving each of them ruined, then throwing them onto a smuggling boat to somewhere unknown: maybe dead on the way, maybe sold into a life they would never escape.
So many people had seen the way Jing Miao crawled home that day.
Xi Siyan dragged one culprit into prison on charges of kidnapping and trafficking the Xi family’s “young master.”
When Xi Yucheng heard what kind of people Su Wan had hired and what their outcomes were, he felt both shocked and—strangely—relieved.
At least his son hadn’t killed anyone in the heat of the moment.
Xi Siyan calculated everything clearly:
the suffering Jing Miao endured would be paid back tenfold and a hundredfold.
As for his mother, he chose a punishment that cut the heart.
Nearly sixty, Xi Yucheng felt exhausted in body and soul. After he understood the whole story, he finally scolded Su Wan for being the truly insane one.
Su Wan cried that she regretted it, that she would apologize to Jing Miao.
Xi Yucheng said, “First accept Jing Miao in your heart—then talk.”
He didn’t think Xi Siyan loving Jing Miao was some unforgivable thing.
He knew his son.
No one could force Xi Siyan into anything he didn’t want.
If you traced it back, it wasn’t hard to understand:
in the two years Jing Miao had been in the household, Xi Siyan had gone from dutiful repayment, to sudden manic resistance, to complete acceptance.
What happened in between didn’t matter for Xi Yucheng.
He only needed to know Xi Siyan must have fought a brutal inner battle—then finally faced and accepted himself.
That was good.
Life was only one lifetime, after all.
Xi Yucheng thought: this could have ended well.
The Xi family didn’t have a throne to inherit. Children could be adopted in the future.
Nothing mattered more than being together, as a family—so long as Xi Siyan was happy, so long as he felt that happiness was real.
Su Wan understood too late.
She tried desperately to make up for it—training everyone in the household on how to treat Jing Miao with importance, educating herself about gay people, even changing her WeChat status to “All love is equal.”
She renovated Jing Miao’s room carefully, then thought the two of them would live together anyway and expanded Xi Siyan’s room as well.
Only sometimes she still hesitated, wondering if Xi Siyan… counted as being attracted to “children.”
But Xi Siyan never came back.
When she tried to apologize, her son refused to let her see Jing Miao. Calmly, he told her Jing Miao’s trauma response was severe.
Xi Yucheng comforted her. “Let’s wait.”
At first, Jing Miao wouldn’t even let Xi Siyan touch him. If anyone came near, he would clutch his head and scream.
He screamed at the sight of floors. He screamed at the sight of stairs.
If he woke up in the middle of the night, Xi Siyan could spend the entire night coaxing him.
In front of a mirror, he would touch his face and drop to his knees sobbing.
If Xi Siyan lifted a hand, he would panic and beg for mercy.
The long shadow and torment made this man with the mind of a seven-year-old think of death.
He began trying to end his life in different ways—sometimes with sharp objects, sometimes by climbing up to dangerous heights, sometimes by trying to disappear under water.
Crying, he begged Xi Siyan to let him die:
“Gege, let me die… please… I don’t want— I don’t want to be touched… I don’t want to be hurt… please, gege…”
He cried, “Gege, save me.”
Xi Siyan, exhausted to the bone, held Jing Miao while the person in his arms struggled with all his strength, screaming, “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!”
Xi Siyan whispered, “Miaomiao… save me too.”
You saved me once.
Save me one more time.
They held each other and cried—one shrieking in panic, the other weeping silently.
Xi Siyan wrapped him tight and didn’t let go through Jing Miao’s breakdown and despair. He held him like that through a day and a night.
When Jing Miao woke again, he no longer resisted Xi Siyan’s closeness.
He began to depend on him in a sick, desperate way.