WMSR — QT Chapter 66

Chapter 66

Feeling that the pressure he had exerted was now sufficient, Xu Weihai finally lowered his face and broke the silence: "Xu Jiangzhe, do you know you were wrong?"

Xu Weihai's words prompted Xu Jiangzhe, who had just readjusted his gold-rimmed glasses, to gently push the bridge of the frames. Lifting his head while his other hand continued playfully stroking the pale, slender hand held securely within his palm, he flashed a nonchalant, unbothered smile: "What did I do wrong?"

Xu Jiangzhe's defiant, unrepentant tone left both Xu Weihai and his wife choking back their words. Unable to hold her tongue any longer, Liu Ling sprang to her feet, pointing a trembling finger at both Xu Jiangzhe and Bai Yichen as her voice turned shrill: "You're still trying to play dumb at a time like this? Tell me, what on earth is going on between you two? If I hadn't accidentally walked in and seen it with my own eyes, just how much longer were you planning to keep this hidden?"

Hearing his mother's accusation, a dark shadow flickered across the depths of Xu Jiangzhe's eyes, and his grip around the delicate fingers clutched in his hand instinctively tightened. He wasn't stupid; when the incident had first occurred, he had been caught entirely off guard. Coupled with his overwhelming distress over Ziqian's injury, he hadn't had the bandwidth to process the bigger picture. But now, with a calm mind, he naturally pieced together the underlying strings. Why had a secret he guarded so meticulously suddenly been exposed precisely when his mother shouldn't have returned? Why had Ziqian—who always resisted his physical advances—suddenly yielded to his kiss at that exact moment? One didn't need to look hard to spot whose shadow lingered behind the setup. Did they really think a petty trick like this would make him back down? Should he call his Ziqian naive, or simply laugh at the attempt?

Receiving no reply from his son, Liu Ling continued her furious interrogation: "When did this start? Did he seduce you? Answer me! You're going to lay out every single detail for me today!"

Xu Jiangzhe quietly waited for his mother to finish her tirade. The faint, serene smile gracing his features remained completely undisturbed, and his gesture of pushing up his glasses stayed as elegant and unhurried as ever.

Watching his son's reaction, a sudden knot of profound unease twisted deep inside Xu Weihai's chest. Sure enough, the next second, the unflappable Xu Jiangzhe uttered words that sent Liu Ling's blood running ice cold: "When did it start? Oh, a long time ago. Back then, Ziqian hadn't even come of age yet—he was so thin and small. I had brought home some 'interesting material' from a classmate, and seeing Ziqian lying helpless in bed, the sudden urge to try it out crossed my mind. So, I just went ahead and did what I wanted. That day, it was pouring rain outside; you were both away attending a banquet, and the servants downstairs couldn't hear a thing over the storm. No matter how much Ziqian cried or begged, nobody came. Oh, that day's Ziqian... truly tasted exquisite." As he spoke, Xu Jiangzhe even let a reminiscent expression slip across his face. "Ever since that day, I became utterly addicted to the feeling. Up until today, we've maintained this kind of relationship for many years now."

Bai Yichen's expression warped with an odd, complex tension upon hearing Xu Jiangzhe's fabrication, because nobody knew better than him just how absurdly, wildly fabricated those words were. Facing the Xu couple as they absorbed those twisted lies, he suddenly felt entirely ill at ease. Yet, ironically, the narrative Xu Jiangzhe was spinning aligned with the precise directional misunderstanding he had originally intended to feed the Xu couple, leaving him unable to open his mouth in contradiction.

While Bai Yichen merely fidgeted in awkward discomfort, Liu Ling reacted as though struck by lightning, her complexion draining and shifting into hues of absolute horror as her son's vivid, descriptive confession sank in. Looking at her impeccably tailored, well-dressed son, she suddenly felt as though she were staring at a depraved monster. Thin and small, not even of age... and according to her own son's words, it had been a forced assault? Forcing a minor—what was that if not a complete sociopath? Not to mention, it had been carried out in absolute secrecy right beneath their noses for all these years. Was this truly the brilliant, pride-inducing son she had always boasted about?

Xu Weihai didn't swallow his son's words as wholesale truth the way Liu Ling did, but a seed of harrowing doubt had taken root in his mind. His son's delivery had been unnervingly earnest, and that lingering, reminiscing expression bore no trace of acting. Coupled with Bai Yichen's unique, vulnerable state—paralyzed from the waist down and entirely dependent on them under someone else's roof—if a forced violation had indeed unfolded precisely as his son described, the boy would have possessed zero capacity to fight back.

Shocked and horrified by Xu Jiangzhe's testimony, Liu Ling's aggressive momentum plummeted dramatically. Abandoning her accusations that Bai Yichen had seduced her son, she pivoted straight to a hardline decree: "I don't care what happened between you two in the past, but it was all completely wrong! Starting today, the two of you are to be separated immediately. All past relations stop here, and this is never, ever allowed to happen again."

A strange, enigmatic smirk flickered across Xu Jiangzhe's face, shadowing his features with a mocking curiosity as he voiced the question aloud: "Stop? Why should we stop? Because it's all 'wrong'? But you didn't adopt Ziqian out of the goodness of your hearts—you only did it to covet his inheritance. So why shouldn't I covet his person?"

"You... you unfilial wretch!" Liu Ling was choked with suffocating rage. Having their long-standing, covert schemes explicitly laid bare by their own son right in front of Bai Yichen thoroughly stripped away their last shred of dignity.

"Besides, whoever I choose to love—whether it's a man or a woman—is my fundamental freedom. Even as my parents, you have no right to dictate that for me. To be honest, Mom and Dad, you should be thanking heaven that it's Ziqian. If it weren't him, it would have been someone else eventually. Surely you wouldn't want a son who becomes the target of malicious gossip and public ridicule as an openly homosexual man, would you?" Xu Jiangzhe spoke with chilling, unhurried poise, though his final sentence carried an unmistakable, sharp edge of intimidation.

"You... you bastard!" Liu Ling clutched at her chest, nearly collapsing backward onto the sofa in a dead faint.

Extending a hand to steady Liu Ling, Xu Weihai rose to his feet and cast a long, heavy, impenetrable gaze toward his son. After a tense stretch of silence, he spoke: "Let's put an end to this discussion for today. We all need time to cool down and collect ourselves. As for you, I trust you've grown up enough to make a rational choice. At the end of the day, we are a family; everything we do is for your own good. Sooner or later, you'll come to understand our bitter, painstaking intentions."

Listening to Xu Weihai's polished, manipulative rhetoric, Xu Jiangzhe remained completely unmoved, his expression etched in cold indifference. There was no one on earth more intimately familiar with his father's predictable playbook than he was.

Regardless of what churned within the hearts of this toxic family, this impromptu family council was temporarily adjourned. The Xu couple clearly had not relinquished their desperate agenda to break their son of his 'vicious addiction,' yet under Xu Jiangzhe's implicit threat of unleashing a scandal involving an openly homosexual son targeted by public gossip, they didn't dare push him with brute force for the time being.

As for forcibly tearing the two men apart—split them? How? By exiling whom? They wouldn't dare play a hard hand against Xu Jiangzhe. And as for Bai Ziqian, he remained their primary, heavily monitored surveillance target. The multi-million-dollar inheritance they had dreamed of seizing kept them locked in a chokehold of greed, ensuring they would guard his physical presence with ironclad vigilance—especially given that the boy had once nearly slipped right through their fingers.