Chapter 54 “What Do You Think.”

Chapter 54 "What Do You Think."

The man curled on the ground trembled continuously. After a while, he turned his body with great difficulty, and his eyes were filled with tears of pain that glistened in the darkness.

When Zhou Liao saw the face of the person squatting in front of him, he instinctively thought it was over, that he had completely returned to the past and was having hallucinations again. He struggled to suppress the urge to tear apart the person in front of him, his lips opening and closing several times without uttering a single sound.

After a few seconds of stiffness, he suddenly turned around and tried to headbutt the chair in front of him.

"Zhou Liao." Qin Zhan grabbed his shoulder.

"Let go of me!!" Zhou Liao, startled by the real touch, almost screamed in despair, "You fucking let go of me!! Didn't you want me dead all along!!!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Fucking one year already!! How else am I supposed to pay you back!! Tell me, how else am I supposed to pay you back before you'll let me go!!!"

"I never came looking for you. What are you paying back?" Qin Zhan's voice sounded devoid of any emotional fluctuation as he gripped the person in front of him, applying more force unconsciously.

The pain from his shoulder being held made Zhou Liao realize that the person in front of him was not an illusion but the real Qin Zhan. However, this realization only brought a flood of intense and complex emotions.

"Yes! You didn't come looking for me!! But did I stop suffering because of you?!"

"What do you think caused me to become like this now!!!"

"What do you think I've been taking so many drugs for!!!"

Overwhelmed by anger and unbearable pressure, Zhou Liao choked up as he spoke, curling up and bending over in pain, coughing violently. Qin Zhan watched his back heaving from the coughing, then reached out his hand. But just as his hand was about to touch Zhou Liao's back, Zhou Liao slapped it away.

"Get out."

Zhou Liao took a few deep breaths, but the person behind him remained silent. He yelled again, "I said get out, can't you hear me!"

"Weren't you supposed to let me live my own life?"

"Weren't you supposed to stop meddling in my affairs? What are you doing here?"

"Are you some kind of masochist!"

Qin Zhan narrowed his eyes. This time, he didn't remain silent behind Zhou Liao; instead, he stood up: "You said it yourself."

The warmth behind him disappeared abruptly as Qin Zhan straightened up and walked towards the door without saying another word.

The scene of the other person's back disappearing at the door, leaving him alone in endless darkness, replayed once again.

Zhou Liao hung his head, his entire body slumped on the ground, listening to the footsteps behind him, his heart beating weakly in sync.

"Tap."

"Tap."

"Tap."

One step, two steps, three steps, in the silent and enclosed space, the sound of the soles of the shoes touching the ground was exceptionally clear. After a dozen seconds, the sound of footsteps turned into the sound of pressing down on the door handle. The subtle sound of the metal gears turning was pressing on Zhou Liao's nerves. He pressed his chest, and as the gears were about to complete a full rotation and the light from the door crack was about to leak in, he suddenly didn't know where the strength came from and stood up and rushed over.

"Snap!"

The door to the dressing room was smashed down by his punch, then slammed shut again, plunging the room back into darkness.

The figure in front paused for just a few seconds before releasing the doorknob and turning around to look at him quietly.

In the vast expanse, two tall men were squeezed at the narrow entrance, their breaths subtly entwining in the air due to their close proximity.

Zhou Liao's hand still firmly pressed against the door, with Qin Zhan enclosed within his circle. There was no action or speech from him; he had no intention to stay, nor did he wish to leave. He simply looked at him, with an innate indifference etched in his genes and a cold silence forged by his past environment, just looking.

Zhou Liao's eyes seldom revealed the slightest hint of emotion. Qin Zhan was like an exquisitely calculated machine, designed and then destroyed by human hands, with the world's affairs hardly able to stir the waves of his emotions.

But now it's different; if this continues, he will truly die. Yet, even before death, he must express all the unforgettable love and hatred he carries within.

"I let you go, and you just go? I never saw you so obedient before."

"What do you want to say?"

Zhou Liao lifted his head, his eyes red and terrifying: "Qin Zhan, do you know how much I fucking hate you?"

Just the same.

"The same?" Zhou Liao sneered, "I am not the same as you. My entire being has been ruined by you."

"But do you know... compared to hating you, I damn well hate myself more. I hate how you treated me, yet I can't forget it for the life of me! I can't get over it!"

Zhou Liao's gaze was like a blazing inferno, filled with fierce murderous intent and a decadent determination to the end.

In the past, when you gave to me, I would catch it like a dog, gratefully thinking you were the best person in the world to me, able to give me what they couldn't.

"Every day I live is for waiting for you to come back, as if you are my entire world."

"After that, you said nothing and suddenly sent me away. I was like a headless fly, unable to find myself in the real society, living like a walking corpse... But even so, damn it, I was still looking for you, searching for your whereabouts day and night, driving from the city to the address registered in your household registration, asking every household if they knew anyone named Qin Zhan?"

Zhou Liao's veins bulged on his forehead, each word he uttered seemed to be like weeping blood, and even the hand that was propping the door was almost making an indentation there. He had already become a torn piece of silk, shattered beyond recognition.

"Later on, I was admitted to the hospital for treatment. A white sheet recorded all my symptoms. Do you know what it feels like to be tormented by hallucinations to the point of wanting to die? Do you know how deformed it is to be unable to integrate into normal human society? Do you know how many times I faced collapse after electroconvulsive therapy? Do you know how severe my withdrawal symptoms were after taking medication? Do you know how it is to pretend everything is fine in front of the doctor every day, playing along in this act?"

"Do you have any idea what it feels like to regain my senses and come out to see you again?!"

"By what right are you unharmed! By what right do you dismiss all my pain with a mere casual phrase, 'live your own life'!"

"Do I not want to live my own life? Haven't I tried hard to go back to the past?! ...But who the hell is going to compensate for a normal me?! How do I go back!"

"I'm fucking stuck here, do you understand, Qin Zhan!!!" Zhou Liao roared in agony, unable to bear the excruciating torment that felt like a split personality, "Who will compensate me for my normal self!"

"Qin Zhan, if I had a knife right now, I would really want to stab you and then stab myself!"

"I can no longer endure endless insomnia and anxiety, the nausea that prevents me from eating, or the marks you left on me when I try to be intimate with others. I can no longer bear the fact that even though I want to kill you, I also want you... look at me."

Tears of near-mad desperation welled up in Zhou Liao's eyes, filled with rage and determination. If time could turn back to the day Qin Zhan accidentally bumped into him while descending the stairs, he would never have asked who that person was.

With a sinister, gleaming scalpel, he had today laid himself bare before Qin Zhan, exposing his flesh and blood forged from pain and longing to the air.

"... Do you think there is any difference between you and me?"

Qin Zhan's voice remained low and cold, but upon closer listening, one could sense the indescribable turmoil beneath the surface.

He ran his hand through Zhou Liao's hair, silently gazing at the face torn by hatred and love. Unlike his outwardly calm demeanor, beneath the surface, a storm raged.

He liked broken things.

Not because he was born liking them, but because he had never possessed anything whole. Only when something whole became shattered did it seem to stay with him forever.

Zhou Liao was his creation, the once-proud son of heaven now fragmented and shattered by his own hand.

He watched as the man before him writhed in agony, drenched in cold sweat, recalling how he had instinctively called out his name for help earlier, and now hearing his desperate, torn words. His entire body surged with blood, his heart pounding almost out of his chest, feeling an unbearable heat.

Now, what stood before him was a broken, shattered, ruined, and utterly destroyed Zhou Liao.

And what he brought him was precisely what he craved most, something he had never possessed before: the intense need of another.

This need threatened to fill his chest, like a river swollen with rain during the rainy season, until it burst forth in a flood.

"Do you think you haven't destroyed me?"

"Do you think I don't suffer?"

"Do you think I'm unscathed?"

"Do you think I haven't thought about death?"

Qin Zhan rarely spoke so many consecutive sentences, but in this apocalyptic outpouring, everything became extraordinarily abnormal.

Zhou Liao's breath nearly stopped at his words, each word striking him with a heavy, indescribable emotion.

With red eyes, he stared at Qin Zhan, unable to utter a complete sound despite opening and closing his lips several times.

Suddenly, thunder boomed outside, like a chemical plant exploding. The heavy rain that followed the drawn blinds added to the gloom and subtlety inside, dissolving all the unspeakable emotions in the sound of the rain.

"... What do you mean?" Zhou Liao finally managed to say a complete sentence amidst his overwhelming heartbeat.

Qin Zhan simply looked at him with lowered eyes. "What you understand it to mean."

As soon as Qin Zhan finished speaking, the man before him kissed him fiercely, as if a caged beast had awoken, a mix of pain, struggle, sorrow, longing, and that deformed yet uncontrollable emotion.

Before the next bolt of lightning struck, it illuminated the slightly worn walls of the changing room through the drawn blinds.

In that instant of white light, only the shadows of two tall adult men swayed on the wall, as if fighting, entangled and trying to drag each other into the abyss of dark desires.