Mo Xi’s feelings of anger and revulsion flared up again like a wildfire. His face remained cold, but fierce flames of rage smoldered beneath his dark eyes.
He felt resentment, yet he didn’t know what he was resenting.
Naturally, he shouldn’t resent the people who had come to turn over Gu Mang’s plaque. They were merely paying for their own amusement.
Nor should he resent Lord Wangshu. Lord Wangshu and Gu Mang had a history of betrayal and enmity between them. All he was doing was humiliating a disgraced traitor.
Which left Mo Xi with only one person to resent.
Gu Mang.
He stared at the bright red characters on the plaque. That shade of red was like some stubborn disease, spreading effortlessly into the depths of his eyes.
How terribly familiar it all was, like the reenactment of a nightmare.
Years ago, he had received a call from a classmate and hurried from his university dorm to a nightclub in the city center. His classmate had told him that they thought they had spotted Gu Mang there, drinking and doing drugs, despite having lost contact with him for so long. Mo Xi hadn’t believed it.
Yet when he arrived, panting like an idiot, and stood amid the dim, shifting lights, pushing past the flamboyantly dressed men and women before forcing open the heavy door to a private room, he still saw that familiar figure at the far end of the lounge.
It was the same face.
But the person seemed to have become someone else entirely.
Gu Mang was sprawled deep in a dark leather sofa, surrounded by women adorned in pearls and jewels. The cigarette between his fingers burned slowly, inch by inch, while wisps of pale blue smoke curled into the air. Smiling, he drained the drink a woman offered him. Hearing the commotion, he languidly opened his hazy eyes and glanced at Mo Xi with his dark gaze.
Yet he seemed utterly oblivious to the anger and anguish on his old friend’s face. All he did was giggle.
Mo Xi felt something inside him shatter at Gu Mang’s unrestrained laughter.
Yes.
It was nothing but flesh.
“It’s just sex. Why take it so seriously?” That was what Gu Mang had told him in the nightclub’s private room.
Gu Mang had never cared about such things. In the real world, he had lain there with a smile; in the novel, he had written about them with the same indifference.
“What’s the big deal?”
After the Gu family fell into decline, Gu Mang had not chosen to pick himself up and start over. Perhaps his father’s execution and his mother’s lifelong imprisonment had already shattered his soul. He had chosen instead to let himself sink into the mire.
Cigarettes. Alcohol. Women. Pills.
Whatever could release the most dopamine, he would drown himself in it. Only within those fleeting, illusory pleasures could he still be Young Master Gu, with his family and the beautiful years of his past never having left him.
Mo Xi couldn’t stand it any longer. “You’re a coward.”
Gu Mang looked at him with those dark eyes.
“Yes, I’m a coward. Everything I had is gone. If you were in my place, wouldn’t you be afraid? Could you still go on being so naive?”
Before Mo Xi could answer, he laughed again. With a sugary, saccharine smile, he said, “Oh, sorry. I forgot. I shouldn’t ask you that. You’ve always been a penniless pauper with nothing to your name. You’ve never had anything at all, so of course you wouldn’t be afraid of losing it.”
“You’ll never understand me.”
“As long as I’m alive, as long as I can enjoy myself, there’s nothing wrong with being a coward.”
Gu Mang had given him a warning in the real world long ago: as long as you were alive, even if you lived like a heap of mud, that was still good enough. So Mo Xi should have seen this part of the story coming, shouldn’t he?
But Mo Xi had never told Gu Mang that he hadn’t always been left with nothing.
There had been a hero in his heart, one no one else knew about. Even while surrounded by flowers and adoration, that hero had been willing to extend a hand to Mo Xi as he struggled in the mire. For so many years, simply remembering that he had such a friend had made Mo Xi feel as though he carried a ball of fire inside him.
But the instant he opened the door to that private room, he lost the flame that had kept him warm all those years.
His hero had died.
And Gu Mang had still told him that he had always been a man with nothing, that he couldn’t possibly understand the pain of losing things he had once possessed. That he had started out utterly destitute, and that was why he could afford to fight and struggle with such fearless courage.
Those vivid memories intertwined with the horrifying reality before him now.
Faint voices drifted from the private rooms of Luomei Villa. Mo Xi felt as though he could no longer breathe. He abruptly turned and walked to the end of the covered corridor, gasping for air as he faced the outside. His slender fingers dug into the wooden window frame, crushing the wood until a crack appeared beneath his grip.
Bastard.
Mo Xi’s eyes were bloodshot. He stared silently into the endless night before him.
Two vicious, cutting words had suddenly surfaced in his mind. This was the first time in his life he had ever thought of someone in such a venomous way.
Gu Mang, you bastard.
He had once believed he understood Gu Mang. He had once believed he understood him better than anyone else. He had been so foolish as to keep Gu Mang in his heart.
Both inside and outside the novel, he had stubbornly and unwaveringly trusted Gu Mang. Even when the evidence was laid out before him, Officer Mo had refused, deep down, to believe that Gu Mang could have fallen so far without seeing him for himself. Even when everyone condemned him, before their relationship had been poisoned by their enmity on the battlefield, Lord Xihe had stood in the great hall of Chonghua’s royal palace and declared to everyone:
“I, Mo Xi, swear on my life that Gu Mang will never betray his country.”
But Gu Mang had deceived him.
Gu Mang had betrayed him.
He had betrayed Mo Xi’s trust, again and again, and disappointed his expectations, day after day.
In the end, he had even pierced Mo Xi’s heart with his own hands, telling him that there was no turning back.
And yet, even after all that, even now, a tiny, faint hope still lingered in Mo Xi’s heart.
He had hoped that at least within the novel, Gu Mang would remain the same unyielding Gu Mang he had once known—the man who would rather die than bow his head to the powerful, the man who refused to surrender his freedom and happiness to the whims of the nobility.
Perhaps then, the heart Gu Mang had already wounded countless times might still find a little comfort.
But Gu Mang wouldn’t even grant him that small consolation.
Mo Xi felt the bones buried beneath his flesh trembling with hatred, shaking with fury.
Gu Mang had truly been willing to debase himself to this extent just to stay alive…
He could actually…
With a bang, the door opened.
Mo Xi’s back stiffened abruptly, like an eagle poised to hunt. He didn’t turn around, but he knew the sound had come from Gu Mang’s room.
Someone emerged, cursing and swearing. He spat a thick glob of phlegm onto the floor, continuing to curse as his heavy footsteps descended the stairs. The covered corridor filled with the pungent smell of alcohol.
A drunken lout.
Mo Xi’s revulsion grew even worse. He was a severe germaphobe, with no shortage of other obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Standing where he was, he desperately tried to suppress the fury churning in his chest.
A long while passed, until the smell of alcohol had completely faded and he could no longer detect even the slightest trace of it.
Only then did he tilt his head back and close his eyes. Slowly, he opened them again. With an almost eerie calm, he returned to the door without saying a word.
He paused, raised his black military boot, and pushed open the carved, lacquered door that someone had closed only a short while ago.
If only it had been like this back then—if only he had finally entered that room.
The room was dim, lit by just a single oil lamp. The same nauseating smell of alcohol still hung in the air. Mo Xi entered with a rigid expression and swept his gaze around.
No one.
He looked again. Halfway through his second scan, he noticed a faint trickling sound of water coming from behind the folding screen.
Mo Xi’s blood surged restlessly once more.
Gu Mang was bathing.
The realization struck him like a heavy club, leaving him dizzy. He was practically going mad from holding everything in—betrayal, disappointment, loathing, hatred. He had suppressed every emotion until his heart seemed to bleed. The blood surged upward, staining his eyes red. Biting his lip, he turned his head away. His fingernails had already dug into his palms, and only with great difficulty could he keep the overwhelming fury under control.
He had never known he could be this angry. He had already endured something equally disgusting once before, yet when he faced it again, his resentment had only grown stronger with the passing years.
To keep himself from losing control, Mo Xi sat down at the small round table and silently closed his eyes. While waiting for Gu Mang to come out, he wondered:
What expression would Gu Mang wear when he saw him?
What should Mo Xi say when he finally saw Gu Mang?
How different would the Gu Mang in the novel be from the one in reality?
And what exactly was the “problem with Gu Mang’s body” mentioned in the outline?
Perhaps mistaking these questions he was asking himself for questions directed at it, the setting book’s Gu Mang notification voice chimed in cheerfully.
【I’ll now answer all the questions I can. First—】
“Shut up.”
【…】
“You don’t need to tell me. I’ll find out for myself.”
He didn’t need any of the novel’s settings to tell him what to expect. This world was no longer just a shallow fictional world to him. He would see with his own eyes, listen with his own ears, and feel with his own heart. He would wait for that person himself.
He sat there, grinding his teeth in silence for a long time. He didn’t even notice when the sound of running water stopped.
He was still resenting Gu Mang for having abandoned all his dignity.
It wasn’t until another candle was lit in the room that he abruptly came back to his senses. He turned his head and opened his eyes.
Beside the lampstand stood a man in a simple white robe, quietly watching him. Mo Xi had no idea how long he had been standing there.
The man’s face was still the same as Mo Xi remembered.
Just a little thinner.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The man stood silently, his robe loosely fastened, a spell-engraved shackle around his neck. He was barefoot, his jet-black hair unbound and hanging obediently over his shoulders. It made his face look even paler and more gaunt, while his eyes appeared especially clear and bright.
He had just finished washing. Water dripped from his hair, one drop at a time, running down his neck, over his collarbones, and onto his chest… before disappearing into the shadows beneath his robe, leaving only a few faint, indistinct trails of moisture behind.
Gu Mang.
Gu Mang…
The room was frighteningly silent, making the laughter and playful voices of the men and women next door all the more grating.
Mo Xi’s eyes were still slightly bloodshot. His clenched fingers trembled. He stared at the man, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he struggled to speak, but not a single word came out.
He had finally seen him again.
Finally, after all this time, he was seeing him again.
Yet not one of the many questions that had filled his mind earlier remained within reach.
The only image that flashed indistinctly before his eyes was the final scene from reality, when he had carried Gu Mang onto the ambulance himself. Gu Mang had been covered in blood, his face as white as paper, his eyelashes tightly shut. His expression had looked strangely peaceful and serene.
At the time, Officer Mo had thought that perhaps he would never see Gu Mang open his eyes again for the rest of his life.
And yet now, Gu Mang stood perfectly well before him, gazing at him silently with a calm expression.
It was almost laughable. Their hatred ran so deep, and yet Mo Xi’s first reaction in that moment was a pang of regret that he hadn’t noticed Gu Mang’s arrival in time. He had missed the expression on Gu Mang’s face when he first saw him.
Now, Gu Mang was already looking at him with complete composure, utterly unmoved, just as he might have looked at any of the guests who had entered his room over the past two years. There wasn’t a trace of any of the emotions Mo Xi knew so well.
What a quiet reunion this was.
They stared at each other for a little longer. Then Gu Mang walked over and sat down beside Mo Xi.
Perhaps the calmness of this simple gesture was so far beyond Mo Xi’s expectations that it startled him. Though his expression remained utterly impassive, he instinctively shifted back a little.
“You…”
Gu Mang picked up a small bundle of bamboo slips from the table and silently handed it to him.
Mo Xi had no idea what it was about, but he accepted them anyway. Using the faint candlelight, he unrolled the slips and scanned the contents at a glance. As he read, he felt the heat rush through his blood, then turn icy cold.
By the time he reached the end, he had half-closed his eyes. Suddenly, his fury surged. With a sharp slap, he flung the bamboo slips onto the table.
The silence shattered.
“…Gu Mang.” Mo Xi stared at him, still struggling to hold himself back. But the molten fury in his eyes grew more intense, and his knuckles cracked as he clenched his fists. “Are you fucking insane?”
“You have to choose.”
Gu Mang spoke in the same soft, silken voice Mo Xi remembered from reality, though it was slightly hoarse and low.
He picked up the bamboo slips again and held them out to Mo Xi once more.
“Choose one.”
“What the hell do you think I came here for?!”
Gu Mang seemed to have only one word left in his vocabulary.
“Choose.”
Mo Xi was so furious he could have exploded. His chest heaved, and his bright black eyes were filled with ferocity. The redness in his eyes deepened, until anger, disappointment, hatred, and grief all merged into a blood-red haze reflected in his gaze.
He held the small bundle of bamboo slips. After a long moment, he threw them onto the table again.
The bamboo slips fell open. Neatly written across them was the price list for Luomei Villa, ranging from casual conversation and drinking companionship to venting one’s anger, and then… and then…
Mo Xi abruptly turned his gaze away.
“If you don’t choose, what am I supposed to do?”
Mo Xi was practically being driven mad by him, yet he was still holding himself back. He was genuinely irritable, but he was also extraordinarily good at enduring things. Each word was ground out between his teeth.
“What do you mean, what are you supposed to do?”
Gu Mang looked at him calmly, his gaze like an ancient well without a ripple.
“Didn’t you come here to hire me for sex?”
“………………”
Mo Xi’s face went rigid.
He couldn’t believe that one day this word would be applied to him.
He even felt his stomach beginning to cramp.
“Gu Mang, you…”
“Everyone comes here to do these things,” Gu Mang said. “If you aren’t going to do them, why did you come?”
For the third time, he pulled the bamboo slips toward himself, raised them, and unfurled them in front of Mo Xi.
“Choose, or leave.”
“…”