“I’m proud of him…”
Gong Ze’s eye rims felt warm. With difficulty, he moved his gaze away from the smiling faces of the Feng couple, Feng Yuan, and Panpan in the flower cluster.
The flower bud swayed and tilted toward him.
As if reluctant to part from him.
‘Daddy!’
Panpan’s voice sounded from inside, and Feng Yuan was calling him too: ‘Gong Ze!’
Gong Ze closed his eyes. His eyes were red.
His steps were no longer as wide and impatient as before. He held back the desire to touch the flower bud and kept walking.
Behind him was the storyline of Gu Panpan’s biological father, the protagonist gong Gu Xiangyu. His mission required raising Gu Xiangyu’s favorability to 80.
Gong Ze had never deliberately raised it.
After all, he had so much time.
He and Gu Xiangyu had become friends upon first meeting. Later they kept in contact online and occasionally met offline for a meal, chatting about life.
Gu Xiangyu could not stand the original body’s muddled life and education. Gu Xiangyu, who had been a university professor in the original world, clearly understood that he had no background, and knowledge was his only way out to improve his life. So Gu Xiangyu worked desperately and then took the adult college entrance exam.
He was a good person.
And very persevering.
Gong Ze admired and respected Gu Xiangyu. During that time he sporadically lent a hand a few times, so Gu Xiangyu would not be in a fluster because of poverty.
When Gu Xiangyu fought to stay at the school as a teacher and tragically had his spot stolen by an opponent with backing, Gong Ze, already President Gong, used his ‘money ability’ to help him slap the cannon fodder in the face.
So he not only became Gu Xiangyu’s close friend, but also the only relative and friend Gu Xiangyu, as an Earthling, could find a sense of belonging with in this dramatic ABO world.
Was reaching 80 favorability hard?
If not for Feng Yuan’s jealousy, Gong Ze could have raised it even higher.
Although later, when Gu Xiangyu and Gu Panpan’s true father-son blood relation was exposed, Feng Yuan exploded and nearly divorced Gong Ze, saying Gong Ze was keeping a mistress and even letting Gu Xiangyu join their family.
Thinking of this, Gong Ze could not help laughing out loud.
After laughing came a low, wistful melancholy.
“Goodbye, Feng Yuan.”
He said softly to Feng Yuan, whose brows and eyes were wild and unrestrained in the light.
The road ahead was already covered with flaunting blue-stemmed flowers tilting toward him. In them he saw the second world’s Lu Youling.
He and him had grown old hand in hand.
At that time, who would have thought that the generation’s holy physician, the national hand, a man countless medical students worshipped as a god, globally invited for lectures, steady to the point of being somewhat sexually frigid—Mr. Lu—had once worn women’s clothes when young, cross-dressing as a woman just for a bite to eat, running off to be a “celebration bride” for someone.
Boldly seducing the man who almost became his brother-in-law, in the middle of the night in a desolate mountain village house, passionately entangling.
No one knew his whimsical cleverness.
No one knew he had sold chicken feet, made milk tea, those jaw-dropping lively pasts.
Gong Ze’s gaze was gentle, like an old person watching his lifelong companion. Once turbulent and surging, countless extraordinary days had all become peaceful, turning into a calm sea.
“Probably because being a doctor always means witnessing too much life and death, and the tangles of human nature.”
Gong Ze said to himself as he looked at Lu Youling in the light, middle-aged, wearing a white coat, thin and cold-faced.
Later Lu Youling became the cold and aloof persona.
But what left the deepest impression on Gong Ze was still that time at the airport, when they had been in cold war and had not seen each other for months, and he suddenly appeared, deciding to accompany Lu Youling abroad to study.
Lu Youling, choking, lay on his shoulder, saying he did not want to divorce him.
Then there was Sang You.
Sang You died in his arms.
Gong Ze killed everyone, and in the end they went to death together, corpses tightly embracing. The emotionally fragile Sang You curled up, a small ball in his arms.
That young master, bright and striking like a little peacock, yet unfortunately in poor health, was a bit silly, a bit dumb.
For love he could say any bold declaration and do anything.
“Sang You was a bit of a lovebrain, but he dared to love and dared to hate.”
At the end, facing death, the beautiful, delicate youth could waver not at all. He inserted that knife into Gong Ze’s chest, avenging his parents, and also going to death for his lover.
He would never forget those afternoons, when Sang You, like an elegant white Persian cat, sat on his lap while he worked, wrapping his arms around Gong Ze’s neck and mischievously biting Gong Ze’s Adam’s apple.
Gong Ze felt guilt toward Sang You.
“I’m sorry… I should have loved you well…”
His fingers brushed emptily over the youth’s pale, bloodstained face in the flower cluster. Gong Ze stood for a long time, piercing pain throbbing in his chest. Slowly, he moved his legs and left the flower bud that seemed to be reaching out to him.
He endured the urge to look back. Suddenly it was as if a thousand catties had been added to his shoulders. His body became as cold as the River of Styx beside him.
The only warmth was the soul in his palm.
“I have loved many people…”
They were all the same person.
So do not be bewitched, do not be moved, do not linger.
Gong Ze recited silently to himself.
Along the way he also saw the worlds he had transmigrated through before that. In those worlds he had been a villain, a vicious second male lead, a cold, merciless executioner.
Finally he arrived at the initial world.
Looking at the familiar appearance of that person.
Looking at the young man, the youthful version of himself, Gong Ze’s face gained a bit of relaxation.
He lingered and picked among the flower buds of his own different age stages, and finally chose the memory fragment of himself at eighteen, just barely an adult.
The year he could no longer endure his secret love for his teacher and, in self-loathing, chose to run away.
Gong Ze lowered his head and looked at the glowing white soul in his hand. His expression softened, and there was a smile too. “Teacher, I’ve finally brought you back. Even though you went through so many worlds, all of this was worth it.”
“Let’s go back, Teacher…”
“Back to the world I regretted countless times, back to the beginning of all my mistakes. This time… I will boldly tell you my feelings. I will pursue you by any means, even if I have to abandon face and pester you shamelessly. I will become your partner, your man, and then…”
“I will not let you die again in a strange foreign land!”
Gong Ze, now resolute, focused his mind, clenched his left hand, and stretched out his right. He no longer hesitated and directly touched the chosen light cluster.
Suddenly!
Just then, Gong Ze, whose hand had just touched the light cluster, was shocked to discover blue light erupting behind him.
He turned back in astonishment and saw that the light clusters he had passed behind him had actually peeled off from the strange plants.
Like flower pollen blown up by wind, they rushed toward him all at once!
Gong Ze: “!”
Gong Ze’s pupils slightly constricted: “How could this—”
Before he finished speaking, the light cluster he had just touched instantly brightened, sucking him in, along with his teacher’s soul in his palm, and those drifting memory fragments, all at once!!!
Gong Ze: …
Gong Ze: …Holy shit?!
At the moment he lost consciousness in the light bright as day, Gong Ze could not help but curse a national curse with a ferocious expression.
“Fuck your mother, Main God!!”
What the hell can you do?
Fuck your—
“Boom!!”
Leave a Reply