WMSR – QT Chapter 32

 

WMSR – QT Chapter 32

By

siofra

Chapter 32

The second Song Junchi connected the video feed, his eyes locked unblinkingly onto Bai Yichen. Because Bai Minghao’s desk was tucked into a more shadowed corner and the boy was short in stature, Song Junchi hadn’t noticed a second presence lingering in the room. Being abruptly jolted by that sudden, clear voice nearly startled him out of his skin.

Bai Yichen cast a sidelong glance toward Bai Minghao and casually instructed, “Move on to the next problem first. Leave that one be; I’ll walk you through it in a moment.”

Having settled Minghao, Bai Yichen pivoted back to face the screen, signaling Song Junchi to speak his mind. After all, given how grave Song Junchi’s expression had looked, he naturally assumed whatever was on the other end carried substantial weight.

In reality, Song Junchi’s sudden decision to dial up Bai Yichen tonight had been purely triggered by the searing shock of learning about the upcoming blind date earlier that day. Tormented by the thought that if Bai Yichen was going to go through with a blind date anyway, he couldn’t afford to let a lifetime slip past without ever launching a single confession, his impulse had driven him to call. Yet the moment the connection went live, that fierce wave of reckless momentum instantly evaporated. Coupled with the realization that Bai Yichen’s younger brother was sitting right in the room, his resolve to force a showdown cracked completely, giving way to a flood of paralyzing anxieties. How would Yichen react? Would the Bai family still grant me the same casual access to Yichen as before…? Smothered beneath these tangled, chaotic fears, his facial muscles slowly stretched into a rigid, awkward smile. “Well… my dad just handed off a new project to me…”

Bai Yichen listened quietly through Song Junchi’s breakdown of the corporate logistics, offering whatever pragmatic guidance he could muster. After a few more rounds of casual banter mirroring their standard nightly routines, Song Junchi manufactured a hurried excuse about having work to wrap up and terminated the call.

As the study’s display lapsed back into absolute darkness, Bai Yichen furrowed his brows in lingering perplexity. Was it just my imagination, or did it feel like… Junxhi wanted to talk about something entirely different?

Pondering the puzzle for a moment without yielding any breakthrough clues, Bai Yichen temporarily shelved the doubt. After all, unless it was a cataclysmic operational crisis, he trusted Song Junchi’s native competence to weather it; and if a genuine crisis really had struck, it wasn’t something the other man could successfully keep under wraps for long anyway—he would inevitably catch wind of it soon enough.

Having cleared his mind of the distraction, Bai Yichen shifted his gaze toward the small study desk across the room, remembering his promise to break down that troublesome math problem for Minghao. But the instant his eyes locked onto the workspace, the expression across his face froze solid and rapidly curdled into a dark, thunderous scowl.

Because the compact desk sat completely, mercilessly empty—abandoned alongside a half-finished workbook, while the person who was supposed to be planted securely in that chair had long since vanished into thin air.

With his jaw locked in a tight, dark line, Bai Yichen pushed himself up from his chair to hunt down the runaway. Down in the playroom, the familiar, high-intensity concussive blasts were already thundering through the speakers once more. A tiny figure sat with rigid posture perched on the oversized sofa, features locked in a stiff, expressionless mask as he blasted incoming starships out of the sky one after another. A closer inspection revealed that his fingers were hammering the controls with ferocious, white-knuckled violence—as if he weren’t obliterating virtual pixels, but wreaking vengeance on some actual target. Leaning in closer still, one could even catch the faint, venomous mutterings slipping past his teeth: “Bad big brother! Smelly big brother!”

Just as Bai Minghao was fully indulging in venting his toddler grievances inside the digital universe, the playroom door swung open. Unsurprisingly, the delinquent was promptly cornered and frog-marched right back to the study by an unyielding Bai Yichen to finish his sentence. That math problem Minghao had previously claimed was an insurmountable wall was systematically dissected, step-by-step, under Bai Yichen’s patient guidance. Though Minghao maintained a sullen, foot-dragging attitude from start to finish, the session ultimately crossed the finish line without a hitch. Once every single assignment had cleared inspection and verified error-free, Bai Yichen couldn’t resist dropping a warm, affectionate palm over the boy’s hair, praising, “Look at that. Wasn’t that a breeze once you applied yourself?”

Feeling his hair ruffled by that long, warm palm, accompanied by genuine, soothing words of approval right beside his ear, Minghao instinctively tilted his head away in awkward defiance. While his expression remained stubbornly hardened, the corners of his mouth betrayed him, curling upward into an irrepressible arc.

Hmph. If the smelly big brother keeps hanging around like this, I might just generously forgive him.

Author’s Note: Ah, isn’t sibling bonding just the most wholesome thing in the world? Cupping my face and drooling happily (?￣ ? ￣?)

Chapter 17: The Cards

Time slipped away by a handful of days, bringing the scheduled face-to-face meeting between Bai Yichen and his blind-date target—Uncle Yang’s daughter—closer by the hour. Mother Bai had even worked herself into a tizzy of excitement, meticulously selecting and laying out Bai Yichen’s entire ensemble days in advance.

Compared to Madame Bai’s bubbling enthusiasm, Bai Yichen remained an ocean of serene, unruffled calm. It was, after all, nothing more than a brief social formality; once exchanged, they would glide right past each other without a single lingering intersection.

Yet, on the very eve of that scheduled rendezvous, Bai Yichen’s phone rang. Glancing down at the incoming ID to find Su Yuanhang’s name flashing across the screen, a faint wave of curiosity crossed his mind. The moment he swiped to connect, however, his ears were met with a familiar voice rendered distinctly thick, slurry, and unmistakably inebriated: “Chen-gege…”

The instant that mangled syllable hit his eardrum, Bai Yichen’s brows locked into a sharp crease: “Xiao Hang, have you been drinking? Where are you right now?”

“Chen-gege…” The voice on the other end babbled out another incoherent whine before sluggishly registering the query, meandering through a slow-motion memory recall: “I’m… I’m over at… Junting…”

“What on earth sent you out there? Entertaining clients?”

“Mhm… they, they already cleared out—hic…”

Listening to the unmistakable, crisp hiccup echoing through the receiver, Bai Yichen’s frown tightened further into a knot: “Are you flying solo? Where are your assistant and your driver?”

“Driver… the driver… took the clients back. My assistant had a family emergency…”

Piecing together the fragments of stuttering audio, Bai Yichen rapidly mapped out Su Yuanhang’s isolated predicament. Picturing the younger man knocked sideways by alcohol in an empty lounge, he discarded any hesitation: “Stay right where you are. I’m coming to pick you up.”

“Mhm, Chen-gege…” Right as the call clicked shut, a final, feather-light whisper floated across the line: “…You’re so good to me…”

Arriving at Junting, Bai Yichen located a heavily intoxicated Su Yuanhang slumped inside a private VIP parlor without breaking a sweat. His initial instinct was to haul Su Yuanhang straight back to the Bai family estate; though the hour was pushing late, Su Yuanhang was hardly an outsider, and a casual word to his parents would easily smooth over the intrusion. But the moment Bai Yichen maneuvered a stumbling Su Yuanhang out to his vehicle and deposited him in the passenger seat, the previously semi-comatose youth snapped back to a semblance of coherence, immediately chanting a stubborn mantra about going home.

By “home,” of course, Su Yuanhang meant his own private residence. Though Bai Yichen was generally aware of which district Su Yuanhang maintained his A City apartment in, their daily interactions invariably mapped back to the Bai estate as their default nexus, meaning Bai Yichen had never once set foot inside Su Yuanhang’s private domain. Fortunately, he retained a rough mental pin on the location, and despite Su Yuanhang’s tipsy state, the young man kept parrot-looping his exact residential address with surprising clarity, eliminating any navigation guesswork for Bai Yichen.