WMSR — QT Chapter 67

Chapter 67

Thinking back on that incident, it was their own precious son who had dropped that critical hint back then, snapping them to attention so they could check the loophole and intercept the boy just in time. At the time, she had been overflowing with emotional relief that her son was finally maturing; but in reality, their son had been far more terrified of Bai Ziqian leaving than they ever were, and the true underlying cause was undoubtedly this.

With that realization, Liu Ling's complexion turned even more ghastly.

On the one side, the Xu couple scrambled through every possible machination to counteract their son's unspeakable fetish; on the other, Xu Jiangzhe wheeled Bai Yichen back to his bedroom.

Throughout the entire day, Bai Yichen had remained profoundly quiet—from the moment Liu Ling caught Xu Jiangzhe kissing him to their subsequent interrogation downstairs, he hadn't uttered a single syllable. He stayed chillingly muted, minimizing his presence to the point of near-invisibility, playing the part of an entirely harmless bystander.

Yet the moment Xu Jiangzhe wheeled him deep into the bedroom, he braced both arms against the sides of the wheelchair, trapping the boy seated within in a tight, inescapable perimeter.

Lowering his head until the distance between them shrank to a breath-sharing intimacy, he fixed his gaze straight into Bai Yichen's eyes: "Don't you have anything at all to say to me?"

For instance, why had his mother—who had no business being home at that hour—suddenly materialized and caught him mid-kiss? He should have been on high alert; why had Ziqian, who always maintained a cold, guarded detachment toward his advances, suddenly let slip that fleeting look of shy vulnerability that coaxed him into diving straight in for the kiss? Was he completely blinded and compromised by physical beauty in that instant?

Under Xu Jiangzhe's pressing interrogation, Bai Yichen maintained his signature, unshakeable indifference.

Watching the flat expression plastered across Bai Yichen's face, a flash of frustration abruptly spiked through Xu Jiangzhe. Abandoning his aggressive posture, he bent down and scooped the boy gently out of the wheelchair, settling him back onto the bed. Noting the harsh, glaring red handprint still disfiguring Bai Yichen's cheek, his heart twisted with acute agony. Reaching out a fingertip to brush lightly against the bruised skin, he murmured softly: "I'm sorry. It's my fault for failing to protect you."

Xu Jiangzhe's words carried a raw, ringing sincerity, saturated with profound, unmistakable guilt. Anyone could tell that he meant every single syllable he uttered.

Bai Yichen returned his gaze with a flicker of genuine surprise. Given that Xu Jiangzhe's sharp deductions earlier had made it clear he saw right through the trap—realizing that Liu Ling's untimely appearance was entirely orchestrated by Bai Yichen's maneuvering—he still found it baffling that Xu Jiangzhe was apologizing to him over injuries inflicted by his own mother.

Ignoring Bai Yichen's stunned silence, Xu Jiangzhe continued caressing the healing welt on his cheek, his dark gaze shifting through complex, volatile emotional currents before finally dipping down to press a soft kiss directly against Bai Yichen's lips: "Ziqian, I won't ever let anyone hurt you like this again."

Faced with this unprompted, sudden assault of physical affection, Bai Yichen instinctively knit his brows together.

Yet Xu Jiangzhe only chuckled softly at the sight of Bai Yichen's furrowed brow. Leaning forward again, he planted a second, deliberate kiss right across the boy's lips, a teasing curve of amusement touching his voice: "Ziqian, every coin has two sides. While my parents knowing about us means they're bound to throw obstacles in our way, now that everything is out in the open, I won't have to hold back or hide anything anymore."

Hearing that declaration, Bai Yichen finally snapped out of his passive stance, lifting his eyes to lock onto Xu Jiangzhe.

However, Xu Jiangzhe merely flashed an enigmatic, unreadable smile. Wearing the resolute air of a man who had forged an irrevocable decision, he straightened his posture, turned on his heel, and strode out of the room with heavy, decisive steps.

Left behind in the quiet bedroom, Bai Yichen's brows drew into an even tighter knot. He didn't even have the mental bandwidth to wipe away the lingering trace of that unwelcome kiss. What is Xu Jiangzhe planning to pull now? Could this entire strategic move... actually have been a miscalculation on my part?

Author's Note: Second update of the day~~

Chapter 33: The Caged White Moonlight (10)

Over the subsequent days, exactly as Bai Yichen had anticipated, the Xu couple aggressively thrust themselves between him and Xu Jiangzhe to sever their dynamic. Not only were all of Xu Jiangzhe's customary daily care duties—such as wiping him down—completely stripped away and handed back to the domestic staff, but Xu Jiangzhe was also returning home drastically later than usual, as though burdened with an inflated workload. Furthermore, the moment Xu Jiangzhe crossed the front threshold, he was perpetually trailed by either the Xu couple or a hovering servant, designed to maximize physical distance and isolate him from Bai Yichen entirely.

That wasn't even the half of it. The hyper-vigilant Xu couple, wise to the ways of the world, even identified the expansive adjoining balcony bridging their two bedrooms as an operational security risk. They immediately contracted a crew to weld heavy iron security bars right down the middle, stopping just short of throwing up a solid brick wall, determined to eradicate any possible avenue for clandestine midnight rendezvous.

Hemmed in by these suffocating layers of security—not to mention the newly installed bedroom lock whose key remained exclusively in the Xu couple's possession—Bai Yichen finally enjoyed a stretch of peaceful, uninterrupted sleep, completely free from the terrifying hazard of midnight bed-infiltrations.

After settling into this locked-down routine for a spell, Bai Yichen adapted smoothly to the new normal, but Xu Jiangzhe's face grew progressively darker and more thunderous by the day.

Xu Jiangzhe's cryptic warning before leaving had left a persistent, underlying thread of unease gnawing at Bai Yichen's nerves. Yet during this window, Xu Jiangzhe behaved with uncanny discipline, refusing to openly clash or force a direct confrontation with the Xu couple.

Beneath that artificial compliance, however, Bai Yichen could vividly sense that something volatile was brewing beneath the surface, though what exactly remained frustratingly out of reach.

Having temporarily escaped the chastity crisis, Bai Yichen felt a wave of profound relief. Yet, as the old adage went, life rarely afforded absolute perfection: shedding the Xu Jiangzhe problem immediately thrust him straight into the crosshairs of an alternative nightmare—Xu Jiangzhe's mother, Liu Ling.

Because Liu Ling had seized direct personal command over all logistical matters concerning Bai Yichen, combined with the fact that she clutched his master bedroom key in her pocket, her frequency of direct contact with Bai Yichen skyrocketed exponentially.

In her past life as a high-society matriarch, Liu Ling's schedule was a dizzying whirlwind of luxury pastimes—shopping sprees, spa appointments, elite tea parties, and accompanying Xu Weihai to high-society banquets. Combined with her deep-seated disdain for the disabled, orphaned parasite tucked away in their guest quarters, she had historically treated him as invisible, meaning their paths rarely crossed.

Yet following that catastrophic exposure, the realization that her golden-boy son harbored such deeply depraved, unspeakable perversions had completely shattered her social appetite. She had zero remaining desire to grace social gatherings; instead, she abandoned her calendar entirely, holing up inside the mansion for the majority of her days to personally police the two young men and crush any prospective interactions. Inevitably, this lifestyle shift forced her into an endless, daily grind of face-to-face friction with Bai Yichen.

With the two of them rattling around the empty house alone for most of the day, Liu Ling no longer possessed the luxury of filtering him out of her field of vision. Every single time her eyes landed on his face, it triggered a visceral wave of toxic rage, reminding her instantly of the degenerate scandal tainting her family bloodline. The longer she looked at him, the more blindingly offensive his existence became.