WMSR – QT Chapter 37

 

WMSR – QT Chapter 37

By

siofra

Chapter 37

Having been badgered and harassed beyond endurance by endless blind-date setups, Miss Yang clicked with Bai Yichen’s proposal almost instantly, reaching an agreement without a hitch. After all, she had long resigned herself to the prospect of spending her life shackled to a man she didn’t love. Yet this uninvited proposition handed her a masterstroke: while she would bear the outward title of marriage, in reality, she stood to gain years—if not a lifetime—of substantive freedom. Even better, Bai Yichen’s family pedigree matched her parents’ exacting standards with flawless precision, and Bai Yichen had given his word that if she cooperated with the scheme, various strategic business partnerships could be forged between their respective households.

After letting out a fierce internal surge of jubilation, Miss Yang managed to regain her composure. Yet as her gaze drifted back to the refined, gentle-mannered Bai Yichen sitting before her, maintaining an unshakeable smile, a heavy layer of inescapable pity welled up in her eyes.

Ah. Who could possibly look at the man sitting before them and fathom that his days were numbered? Born into the same upper-crust echelons of A City, Miss Yang had grown up steeped in the legendary tales of Bai Yichen’s peerless brilliance. Remembering those towering accolades now, she felt only a magnified, bitter wave of sorrow.

Sharply attuned to the flash of sympathy and mourning crossing Miss Yang’s face, Bai Yichen carefully masked his expression, offering a polite, immaculate farewell before taking his leave.

Miss Yang was the very first person outside his family to be entrusted with the truth of his condition, and her awareness was an absolute necessity—after all, a myriad of operational details moving forward relied entirely on her coordination.

The engagement timeline was compressed into a tight window just one month away. Though Bai’s parents—still entirely in the dark—felt the scheduling rushed, they embraced it as their son’s joyous milestone and threw their full weight behind making it happen.

Every logistical facet of the engagement banquet unfolded with seamless precision. Both Su Yuanhang and Song Junchi attended. Those two eternal rivals, locked in a lifelong war of attrition, shared a rare moment of identical psychological desolation as they stared from a distance at the picture-perfect couple standing together in the spotlight. Throughout the reception, both men remained mute, burying their heads as they relentlessly poured alcohol down their throats, getting thoroughly hammered long before the banquet even drew to a close.

As the evening wound down toward its conclusion, Bai Yichen approached Su Yuanhang with his fiancée in tow.

Even though Su Yuanhang was practically drowning in alcohol, the second his eyes snagged on Bai Yichen, a sharp spike of sobriety jolted him upright. Shifting his gaze to the breathtaking woman looped through Bai Yichen’s arm, a thick, searing wave of bitterness flooded the root of his tongue. Yet, summoning every shred of iron-willed self-control left in his body, he forced himself to look straight at the person he loved most in the world, choking out the formal blessing: “Chen-gege… I wish you both happiness.”

Following the conclusion of the engagement banquet, Bai Yichen and his fiancée, Yang Yingying, spent their days glued to each other’s sides before frequently vanishing abroad on back-to-back overseas vacations, rendering themselves virtually invisible.

During the final two months of his lifespan, Bai Yichen finally ripped the bandage off and laid the unvarnished truth before his parents. The sudden, brutal blow devastated Bai Jinchuan and his wife; for a long stretch, they flatly refused to process the reality. But the identical, corroborating diagnostic dossiers issued by two independent medical facilities forced them to accept the crushing verdict. In a single night, both parents looked as though they had aged a decade.

Yet no matter how cataclysmic the blow, as long as breath remained in one’s lungs, life demanded endurance. Once his parents had clawed their way back from the edge of emotional collapse, Bai Yichen solemnly tabled a singular request.

What parents could ever bring themselves to deny a terminal wish uttered by their son in his final days? At that juncture, they lacked even the residual energy to interrogate why Bai Yichen had orchestrated such an elaborate scheme. What purpose would investigation serve anyway? With their boy slipping through their fingers, what did it matter why he had chosen this path, or whether it involved a certain man? Their sole remaining mandate was to fulfill every dying wish harbored by their son, sparing him any lingering regrets as he crossed the finish line.

Even though executing that request felt like twisting a rusted blade directly through their hearts—watching their supreme source of pride slip away—they were legally bound to keep the tragedy sealed. They had to maintain the charade, burying the truth from the world, and most crucially… keeping it locked away from a specific individual for all eternity.

Author’s Note: After skimming the feedback from the previous chapter, I think I finally grasp everyone’s headspace, coupled with the lingering trauma my sweet little angels carry from my previous book o(╥﹏╥)o

Chapter 20: The Concealment

The countdown clock of his life steadily flipped its pages downward, hurtling into the final month. Aside from squeezing out every available second to accompany his parents, the remainder of Bai Yichen’s time was swallowed up by endless international flights—publicly framed as an extended honeymoon tour with his fiancée.

Naturally, maintaining such a relentless travel schedule meant interactions with Song Junchi and the others dwindled to near zero. As the weeks stretched on, Song Junchi finally snapped his threshold of patience, marching unannounced straight to Bai Yichen’s doorstep to settle accounts: “I swear, Yichen, you’ve officially crossed into girlfriend-obsessed territory! Did you completely wipe me from your memory the second you got engaged? You haven’t even let me lay eyes on you once?”

Song Junchi’s arrival caught Bai Yichen entirely off guard. While Bai Yichen had issued specific advance warnings and explanations regarding his whereabouts exclusively to Su Yuanhang, he had completely neglected to factor in Song Junchi. Consequently, the breach allowed Song Junchi to storm directly past the threshold, leaving the interior of the apartment exposed in all its unshielded reality right before his eyes.

Song Junchi had charged in breathing fire, fully prepared to read the riot act, but the panoramic display of photographs blanketing the walls instantly short-circuited his brain. A deep sense of wrongness gripped him: Where on earth did Yichen get all these pictures? Taking a closer look, every single frame captured intimate, cozy snapshots of the two of them smiling across various scenic international resorts. An instant wave of burning, toxic green jealousy surged up his throat, choking out an involuntary sneer: “Well, look at you two. Didn’t realize you racked up mileage across quite this many spots.”

Song Junchi’s sudden intrusion, compounded by the sheer volume of photographic evidence scattered across the room that couldn’t be instantly cleared away, left Bai Yichen momentarily cornered. Worse still, since Song Junchi had laid eyes on them directly, there was zero guarantee he wouldn’t piece the puzzle together later down the road.

Faced with this unexpected structural leak, Bai Yichen pinched the bridge of his nose in resignation. After a rapid mental calculation, he made an executive pivot: he decided to drag Song Junchi down into the conspiracy.

In truth, Bai Yichen had initially intended to keep Song Junchi entirely in the dark. After all, he had already woven an intricate, continent-spanning web of deception to shield the truth from one specific person; looping in an extra confidant didn’t seem strictly necessary. Furthermore, Song Junchi was a cherished lifelong friend, and he genuinely wished to spare him the crushing agony of grief. But now, with Song Junchi accidentally stumbling upon the physical evidence, a decisive call had to be made—after all, every supposedly airtight conspiracy inevitably unravels through a missed detail.

Staring down at Song Junchi, who remained blissfully ignorant while glaring at him with a face full of aggrieved, how-could-you-abandon-me-for-a-woman indignation, Bai Yichen let out a silent, internal sigh.

Though every fiber of his being protested inflicting this pain, Bai Yichen reached out to grip Song Junchi by the arm, drawing in a long, steadying lungful of air before stating: “I need to talk to you.”