PTM 78

Chapter 78: You Can Settle the Scores Yourselves.

Why are Zong Yinzhuo’s eyes red?

After Han Zhe and Chu Luo’s relationship was exposed, the media dug up every detail about Han Zhe, from his alma mater to his family’s collateral branches. I couldn’t recall any information mentioning that he had Wo blood. As for Chu Luo, needless to say, she was definitely a pure Penglai person.

“Your eyes…” I knelt down and gently stroked the corner of Zong Yinzhuo’s eye.

He was half asleep and it took him a while to come to his senses. Suddenly, like a little animal whose tail had been stepped on, he cried out in alarm and laboriously pulled the blanket up to cover his face.

“Uncle, please don’t look. I… I don’t look good right now…”

It seemed he knew he had “red eyes.” Could this be his “genetic disease”?

The truth was like a thin sheet of paper right in front of my eye; I could see its blurry outline with a single breath, but I just couldn’t break through it with the last bit of effort.

“It’s okay…” I suppressed the turmoil in my heart as I slowly pulled down his blanket. “Your [unauthorized copy]father already told me, you don’t need to hide it anymore.”

The fastest way to get to the bottom of this was definitely not through interrogation.

“Really?” He looked at me suspiciously with his big, round eyes.

“Really.” I lied without batting an eye.

I could easily fool his shrewd father, so fooling this innocent little dumpling was a piece of cake.

“That’s good…” Zong Yinzhuo breathed a sigh of relief, his tense shoulders relaxed, and he easily believed my words.

“Why are your eyes red today?” I asked.

Zong Yinzhuo, without any suspicion, readily revealed the truth: “Because… Daddy said that since no one else has come to see me these past few days, I don’t need to get a shot.”

So, it really was through injections that the eye color was changed.

“You……”

Before I could ask a few more questions, Zong Yinzhuo suddenly frowned, and a pained expression appeared on his face.

“Does it hurt?” I subconsciously glanced at his leg, which was dangling in mid-air.

“It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt at all…” Even though his lips had turned pale from the pain and cold sweat covered his forehead, he still shook his head when facing me.

“Daddy said I’m the bravest baby in the whole world!” he said as he laboriously stretched out his hand towards me.

Confused, I took his hand and followed his gentle pull to press it against my cheek.

I felt his soft, warm fingers brush beneath my eyes. Zong Yinzhuo forced a smile: “Uncle, don’t be sad, I really don’t hurt.”

I was slightly taken aback, my heart felt like it had been ripped apart. I held that small hand even tighter and pressed it against my cheek.

He was the one who was seriously injured and lying in a hospital bed unable to move, yet he was now comforting an unharmed adult.

If he were to be left with a disability, unable to run and jump like before, unable to chase and play with Wei [unauthorized copy]Jiarui anymore, how heartbroken would he be? How sad would Zong Yanlei be?

“It’s all Uncle’s fault.” My throat tightened, and my voice was so low it was almost inaudible. “Uncle should have come to find you sooner…”

Before, I always felt that there was nothing to regret in life. I believed that I should be responsible for every decision I made and any consequences that followed. But right now, I felt regretful.

I regret trusting Yu Xuan so easily, I regret not being more wary of him, I regret simplistically assuming human emotions… My arrogance had ultimately came back to haunt these innocent children.

“But Uncle would get hurt too,” Zong Yinzhuo said. “Daddy got hurt, his head was cut.” He pouted with a distressed look.

From our conversation, I learned that the choir children were singing when the explosion suddenly occurred. He was thrown to the ground by the blast wave and didn’t remember anything. He woke up in the hospital and had leg surgery.

Zong Yanlei told him that the accident was caused by aging pipes in the concert hall. All the other children went home, but he was the most seriously injured and would have to stay in the hospital for several days.

Hearing him say that, the tightness in my chest lessened considerably. Fortunately, he didn’t witness that hellish scene, nor did he see the demise of life firsthand.

“Uncle, have you been very busy lately?”

I assumed he had guessed from my haggard appearance, ​visit our site​so I nodded and said, “I have been quite busy.”

“Oh.” He lowered his eyes, looking very disappointed.

“What’s wrong?”

“You haven’t come to see me in a long time. I wanted you to come and listen to me sing, but Daddy said you’re too busy to come.”

“I’m sorry,” I promised softly. “Next time, next time Uncle will definitely sit in the front row to listen to you sing, no matter how busy I am.”

“Will Rui Rui come too?”

I chuckled: “Yeah, I’ll bring him too.”

He laboriously extended his little finger: “Pinky promise.”

“Okay, pinky promise.” I hooked my little finger around his and sealed it as a vow.

Zong Yinzhuo was seriously injured and exhausted, so he needed to rest more. Besides, this was Bazel, and I was at risk of being discovered at any time, [unauthorized copy]so it was really not advisable for me to stay any longer.

After about ten minutes, I told him to rest and got up to leave. But suddenly, he, who had been so well-behaved just moments before, started crying. He clutched my clothes tightly and refused to let me go.

The child, who had just been gritting his teeth and saying “it doesn’t hurt at all” despite his face pale from leg pain, cried his eyes out as I tried to leave, his face covered in tears and sweat. But his crying wasn’t heart-wrenching; it was a very restrained, weak sob, as if he was trying his best to suppress his reluctance to part.

Perhaps this was also a way to release pressure. After all, it must be very tiring for such a young child to always pretend to be strong in front of his loved ones.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry, Uncle won’t leave. Uncle will stay and tell you stories, okay?” In the end, I couldn’t harden my heart, so I withdrew my foot, sat back down on the edge of the bed, and wiped away his sad tears.

He responded with a soft “Mmm.” His red eyes, glistening with tears, were even more vibrant, and paired with his silver hair and snow-white skin, he looked exactly like an adorable little white rabbit.

“One night, I was asleep when I suddenly felt a beam of light shine into my room…”

I continued the story of “star and eye” that I had told him before.

“I opened my eyes and saw a staircase of turquoise light hanging down from the star and extending all the way to my bedside.”

I climbed up the ladder of light, for a very long time, until I finally reached the star.

I sat down next to it and asked it how it had been doing.

“Excellent!” it said, pointing to the distant Milky Way. “Look, that’s Orion, and that’s Sirius. Before, when I was injured, I could only lie in the mud and couldn’t see anything. Now, I can see the whole universe.”

It turned its head, looked at my right eye, and asked, ‘Does it hurt?’

I told it, just like you did, that it didn’t hurt at all. And deep down, I didn’t really feel like I’d lost an eye.

Although the star is far away from me, I know he’s there to help me see the world clearly.

To watch how shooting stars streak across the long night; to watch how the sun ignites the first golden rays above the sea of clouds; to watch how the moon illuminates the pitch-black night.

Every time I look in the mirror, I think of it, as if we’ve never been apart…”

Zong Yinzhuo was already exhausted, and after crying for a while, he quickly fell asleep again.

“We had a very pleasant time.” I carefully tucked him in and stood up quietly. “It was [Read on]so pleasant that I even wanted to stay by his side forever.”

“But it won’t work.” I gently stroked Zong Yinzhuo’s soft silver hair one last time, ending the story in a low voice. “The air around him is too thin, and the environment I’m in isn’t suitable for him to stay in either. I can only stay on the ground, he belongs to the sky. We… are destined not to be together.”

I pulled up my mask and turned to leave the ward. However, I froze on the spot after only pushing the door halfway open.

The two bodyguards who were originally guarding the outer lounge were nowhere to be found. In their place stood Wuxi Li, dressed in a silver-gray business suit, facing the ward door, as straight and elegant as a pine tree.

“At least you have some conscience left to visit the child.”

She stared at me coldly, her eyes like knives. Any pretense was futile in her presence; one glance was enough for me to know she had recognized me. No, perhaps my easy infiltration was orchestrated by her, with her deliberately letting me through.

“Madam……”

I slowly closed the door behind me, pulled off my mask with my other hand, and greeted the other person with a forced smile, while using my peripheral vision to observe the various conventional and unconventional “exits” in the room.

“Do you know how much I’ve wanted to kill you these past years?” Wuxi Li made no attempt to hide her disgust for me. “It wasn’t enough that you ruined my child, now you’ve ruined my grandson too.”

I lowered my eyes to avoid her gaze, then unauthorized copywhispered an apology and prepared to slip away at any moment.

“I’m sorry, Madam.”

“Sorry?”

She walked slowly toward me, the sound of her high heels particularly loud in the quiet space.

Finally, she stopped in front of me and slapped me across the face.

My face tilted to the side, my ears rang m, and the taste of blood quickly filled my mouth.

“Adult matters should be resolved between adults. He’s only five years old, how could you bear to drag him into this?!” Wuxi Li grabbed my collar, her well-maintained hands bulging with veins from extreme anger. “Do you know how many more surgeries he has to undergo, how much suffering he has to endure? I really wish… I wish I could tear you to pieces.”

I opened my mouth, but I really had nothing to say in my defense, so I could only lower my head and let her beat and scold me.

“What? You’ve become mute? You used to be quite talkative.” She suddenly released me, her features slightly distorted, and pointed at me with her index finger, “You should really thank Xiao Mitang for his affection for you. If he hadn’t liked you so much, the moment you walked out would have been your death.”

After saying that, she took a deep visit our sitebreath, turned her back to me, and dealt with her overly emotional state.

I glanced down at my disheveled clothes and knew she was truly furious. Otherwise, given her noble upbringing, she would never have so rudely tugged at a man’s clothes in public.

“You’ve never even raised him, so why does he like you so much…” She turned her back to me and rubbed her forehead. She sighed, and then, in the most ordinary tone, said the most shocking words, “This is really unbelievable. Is this what blood ties are all about?”

The impact of those words was no less than being hit on the back of my head with a giant iron sledgehammer.

I looked up abruptly: “What did you say?”

I was so taken aback that I forgot to use honorifics.

Wuxi Li walked straight to the sofa, and sat down wearily. Instead of answering my question, she brought up another topic.

“Do you still remember the beating you received before you left the Zong family?”

I forced down my urgency and nodded, “I remember, young master ordered it. What exactly did you say just now…?”

“I did it.” She frowned, interrupting me, and readily admitted, “Without you, he couldn’t have survived. How could he bear to hit you? If he couldn’t visit our site keep you, he wanted to keep something else. I was crazy to do such a heinous thing with him…”

The final layer of mystery was peeled away in a way I never imagined. A shocking, absurd, yet perfectly plausible truth was laid bare before my eyes.

Zong Yanlei’s extraordinary doting on Zong Yinzhuo; the princess’s vague hints; and Zong Yinzhuo’s ruby-like eyes… In an instant, everything became clear.

I touched the place where my bone marrow had been extracted in disbelief. My mind went blank, and my voice was hoarse: “Xiao… Zong Yinzhuo, whose child is he?”

Wuxu Li’s lips curled into a cold smile: “Guess! Guess if Yanlei would raise someone else’s child? Guess what kind of agreement I made you sign back then?”

My throat tightened, and I turned around, hesitatingly opening the ward door again. I looked at Zong Yinzhuo sleeping peacefully on the hospital bed from afar. I was overwhelmed by the shock and the absurdity of the situation.

My foot unconsciously took a step forward, but I stumbled and almost lost my balance. I had to reach out and brace myself against the cold wall to keep myself from falling to my knees.

“Where is he?” I asked, my voice trembling slightly.

Wuxi Li understood who I meant by “he”.

“Things have come to this point, there’s no point in hiding anything anymore. You can settle the scores yourselves.” She raised her chin. “Yanlei is on the rooftop, go ahead. Don’t blame me for not warning you, he’s looking for a place to vent his anger right now, if you go there now, it’s tantamount to courting death.”

I didn’t answer and turned to walk towards the door. The bodyguards guarding the door immediately blocked my way with their tall figures when they saw me come out.

“Let him go.” Wuxi Li’s voice rang out from behind me.

The bodyguard obeyed orders and immediately moved aside.

I rushed out of the room and quickly walked down the corridor, my mind filled with Zong Yinzhuo’s red eyes and Zong Yanlei’s desperate expression when he asked “Did you do this?” in the hospital corridor.

In the end, my pace quickened, and I even started running without a care in the world.

I was already out of breath when I reached the rooftop.

The wind was strong on the top floor. Before I could even fully push open the heavy security door, I could already smell the bitter tobacco scent that had been blown away by the wind.