Yu Zhining suddenly opened his eyes.
He was still sitting in the chair in the corridor room, bathed in the warm orange glow.
Yu Xiaxing stood beside the chair, slightly bent at the waist as she quietly watched him.
For a long while, their eyes met, and neither of them spoke.
Just then, Yu Zheng’s exasperated voice came from the doorway. “Yu Zhining, are you still sleeping in there?”
Yu Zhining immediately looked away and turned toward the door.
Yu Zheng had one hand braced against the wobbling door. It was obvious the two of them had forced their way in.
When they had arrived, they found that this was the only room whose door was still locked. All the other doors stood open, and the staff had disappeared.
They had knocked, but no one answered. Worried that something might have happened to Yu Zhining inside, they had simply grabbed a dinner knife from the restaurant and come over to force the door open.
And sure enough, Yu Zhining was inside.
Yu Zheng had no idea whether Yu Zhining had recalled something frightening. The allotted experience time had ended long ago, and all the equipment in the room had automatically shut down, yet he still hadn’t woken up.
It wasn’t until Yu Xiaxing walked over and bent down to say something to him that he finally came around.
Yu Zheng was growing impatient. “If you don’t get up and go do your job, all those old clients under you are going to be swindled out of their fortunes. Then no one will renew their contracts with you!”
Yu Zhining’s eyes instantly cleared. He braced himself against the armrest and sat up. “We’ll talk outside.”
The three of them headed out.
Yu Zheng suddenly asked, “By the way, Third Brother, when we came in just now, you kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, little sister.’ Which sister were you apologizing to?”
Yu Zhining didn’t want to talk about it.
After hearing the words “I forgive you,” he already felt much better, and his emotions had settled down again.
But whenever he looked back on what had happened back then, he still felt guilty.
He hoped no one would ever find out about it and that everyone could simply turn the page.
Then they could handle the matter maturely, like adults.
What he hadn’t expected was for Yu Xiaxing to admit it outright. “Me.”
She said it so naturally that Yu Zhining turned his eyes toward her and silently watched her.
Yu Xiaxing glanced back at him, then walked over to Yu Zheng’s side and began recounting what had happened back then with a smile.
“He was just too sensitive. One of his classmates implied that our relationship wasn’t pure, and he got scared. He didn’t dare play with me anymore.”
Yu Zhining: “…”
After a moment of shock, Yu Zheng understood everything. “No wonder! Back when we were at the hospital getting Fourth Sister’s scumbag fiancé sterilized, you brought this up the moment you saw each other. I thought you were just being a demon for no reason. I didn’t realize you were deliberately making sarcastic remarks about what happened back then!”
Yu Xiaxing immediately defended herself. “There was a reason behind every single thing I said, okay?”
Yu Zheng found the whole thing utterly ridiculous now that he knew the story.
If someone had spread rumors like that about him and his sister, he probably would have thrown a punch, gotten expelled, and called it a day. He’d never wanted to stay in school anyway.
If it had been that shameless Yu Yuanchen, he might even have deliberately spread even more outrageous rumors about himself and those people, just to fight poison with poison.
His logic was simple: If you fling sewage at me, I’ll tackle you to the ground, roll around with you on your parents’ bed, and shout for your parents to join us…
For him and Yu Xiaxing, it would have been no big deal.
But Yu Zhining was different. He was clear-headed and restrained, with an intense sense of morality and shame. Whatever he did, he had to consider public opinion and the consequences that might follow.
He was the sort of person who could debut at any moment, yet his antis could dig and dig without finding a single scandal.
There was no way he could simply ignore the rumors and continue being close to his sister.
But after truly distancing himself from her, he had been miserable and wracked with guilt.
Now that this experience had awakened his memories, it had dragged out the guilt he had carried for years.
No wonder he had been trapped in that nightmare for so long.
The more Yu Zheng thought about it, the more frightened he became. He was genuinely worried that if he and his sister had arrived any later, Yu Zhining might have driven himself insane.
Yu Zheng walked on, thinking about it all.
Yu Zhining and Yu Xiaxing fell behind.
In a quiet voice, Yu Zhining asked, “I never told anyone about this. You were too young to understand what was happening back then… How did you find out?”
All this time, he had believed that he alone had been carrying the burden, and that his sister had been angry because he had distanced himself from her for those few days.
Yu Xiaxing lowered her head. “I didn’t understand, but someone explained it to me.”
“After I left your study that day, I went downstairs to draw. Not long afterward, Huo Mian came over and said—”
“Don’t you understand why your brother suddenly doesn’t like you anymore? It’s because everyone in his class could tell that you two had no sense of boundaries. Everyone was laughing and saying that you and your brother were…”
“To be honest, I still didn’t understand what she meant by the rest of it. The part I cared about most was the first sentence: You don’t like me anymore.”
“So I got angry and shouted, ‘Whoever speaks to the other first is a dog!’”
After hearing the whole story, Yu Zhining felt that he was the one most at fault.
He really had been distancing himself from her during those few days. That was what had given outsiders the opportunity to exploit the situation.
Yu Zheng had heard the entire history of their feud by then. He leaned over and asked, “So which one of you is the dog now?”
Yu Xiaxing immediately pointed at Yu Zhining with absolute certainty. “Him, of course. Last time at the hospital, he called the three of us useless. That was the first thing he said after we fell out, so he was the one who spoke first.”
“…” Yu Zhining did not argue.
Yu Zheng moved around to Yu Zhining’s side and bumped him with his shoulder. “Third Brother, come on. Give us a bark.”
Yu Zheng loved picking on people who were this restrained. It was hilarious watching them flush with embarrassment and lose their carefully maintained composure.
Yu Zhining stared at him expressionlessly. “Give you what?”
Yu Zheng grinned. “A bark.”
Yu Zhining: “Give you what?”
Yu Zheng: “A bark.”
Yu Zhining: “What?”
Yu Zheng finally lost patience. “Woof, woof, woof! Are you deaf?”
The corners of Yu Zhining’s eyes curved slightly. With a faint smile, he nodded. “Now I hear you.”
Yu Zheng: “…”
Walking beside them, Yu Xiaxing shook her head mournfully.
Had I really fought to the death with two such childish idiots in my previous life?
Someone with Yu Zheng’s intelligence had actually made it to the finals. If I won the championship, what would there even be to feel proud of?
The two of them were still bickering.
As Yu Xiaxing listened, she suddenly felt a little dazed.
A lot of things only became dark and rotten when kept hidden in your heart. Once brought into the sunlight, they were really nothing to worry about.
She thought about how, in her previous life, when Fifth Brother had become paralyzed, she had actually wanted to show concern for him. But she always felt that they were already opponents in the inheritance competition, and going to comfort an opponent would seem like provocation.
Later, after he was discharged and began using a wheelchair, she sometimes saw how difficult it was for him to get around and wanted to go help him. But she never did.
Deep down, she had always felt terribly guilty.
Then she thought of Fourth Sister’s imprisonment, and how the affair between her scumbag fiancé and his mistress had been exposed in a trending-news scandal.
In truth, Yu Xiaxing had secretly leaked the information herself in her previous life.
She had never liked Fourth Sister’s personality and had been angry at her for refusing to fight back. But she also couldn’t stand by and watch someone bully the Yu family, so she had made sure the people who hurt Fourth Sister were utterly ruined.
Only in this life had she learned that Fourth Sister, once pushed to the limit, was even more ruthless than she was—and far more graceful in the way she handled things. She had done the family proud.
As for Yu Zhining, she had always thought that what happened to him was because of Huo Mian.
Who could have guessed that the real root of the problem had been her?
When something happened to him, she refused to believe it. How could someone so clearheaded and rational possibly end up in that state?
When she heard Huo Mian promise, in the end, to take care of him for the rest of his life, she hated him even more simply because she hated Huo Mian.
Now that she thought about it, the irony was almost unbearable. She had not even known what was causing him pain.
She had actually allowed her enemy’s scheme to succeed, leaving those who loved her in anguish while her enemy rejoiced.
By then, she had reached the end of the corridor of her life.
She pulled open the door, and the mountain estate’s night breeze swept toward her, carrying the vibrant scent of grass and trees.
She turned back to the two of them. “Come on. Let’s walk out together.”
