WMSR — QT Chapter 68

Chapter 68

Though Liu Ling had been temporarily stunned into silence by her son's explosive confessions during that three-way confrontation and refrained from immediately targeting Bai Yichen, her ingrained nature quickly reasserted itself. As the days dragged on, she convinced herself that her precious son could never possibly be in the wrong.

Even though Xu Jiangzhe had aggressively stepped forward that day to shoulder 100% of the blame, Liu Ling's irritation toward Bai Yichen only metastasized, prompting her to independently manufacture a sweeping web of self-soothing rationalizations. Back then, Bai Yichen was underage, but so was her son! What could underage kids possibly know about right and wrong? And why on earth did her son choose him instead of anyone else? It had to be because Bai Yichen gave her son the wrong signals; otherwise, how could a normal, well-behaved boy suddenly develop romantic inclinations toward another man? Pushing her logic to the most absurd extreme, she reasoned: Even if we step back a million paces and look at what allegedly transpired, why didn't he ever speak up about it? Yet, living under the exact same roof for all these years, we never caught a single whisper of a scandal—we only witnessed her son bending over backward to pour his heart and soul into serving that crippled freeloader. Clearly, this had been his grand design all along; her son had undoubtedly been seduced right from the start!

A cascade of toxic assumptions convinced Liu Ling that her narrative was absolute truth, rendering her gaze toward Bai Yichen increasingly venomous. She began picking apart every minor detail to manufacture petty conflicts. Thus, though Bai Yichen was successfully insulated from Xu Jiangzhe's direct advances, his day-to-day existence deteriorated into an escalating nightmare of petty misery.

The meals provided to him—which were previously quite decent—suddenly grew meager and overly simplistic. Furthermore, every plate arrived stone-cold, and on multiple occasions, the dishes bore the dull, discolored hues of recycled leftovers.

The domestic servant assigned to assist him with his daily sponge baths grew progressively rougher and more careless, leaving dark, purple contusions blooming across his skin whenever she finished.

While Bai Yichen managed to grit his teeth and absorb those indignities, a far more humiliating crisis breached his tolerance threshold: when he rang the bell to summon help for basic physiological necessities, his calls were ignored with escalating frequency. On one particularly agonizing day, left trapped without a response for hours, he attempted to crawl across the mattress toward his bedside wheelchair on his own, only to slip clumsily off the edge, coming within a hair's breadth of suffering a complete loss of bladder control.

Following that humiliating incident, he deliberately cut his daily water intake down to an absolute minimum, terrified of ever triggering a recurrence of such helpless vulnerability.

Fully aware that these domestic workers were executing calculated, passive-aggressive harassment under covert instructions, Bai Yichen abandoned any foolish notions of lodging complaints. Instead, he locked the injustices deep inside his ledger, silently searing a debt against the Xu family and Xu Weihai and Liu Ling. If there ever comes a day when I manage to walk out of here...

Despite being buried under an avalanche of corporate responsibilities at the office and kept tightly isolated from Bai Yichen at home, Xu Jiangzhe still caught wind of the subtle anomalies creeping through the household. Endowed with a razor-sharp, meticulous intellect, he knew that calculated malice left an undeniable trail. Staring at the inexplicable bruises marring Bai Yichen's wrists, alongside his chronically parched, chapped lips, Xu Jiangzhe tightened his grip over the wheelchair handles until his knuckles turned bloodless.

Ziqian, just hold on a little longer.

Very soon—I am going to take you away from this place for good!

Just when Bai Yichen resigned himself to enduring Liu Ling's petty, proxy-torture tactics for the foreseeable future, an abrupt disruption occurred. On a day when Xu Weihai and Liu Ling were both away from the estate, Xu Jiangzhe suddenly materialized at the head of a squad of burly, professional bodyguards, marching straight into Bai Yichen's bedroom and ordering his men to scoop the boy right off the mattress.

Recovering from their initial shock, the resident household servants rushed forward in a panic to block their path. After all, the single most draconian rule burned into their contracts since day one was that Bai Yichen was strictly, unconditionally forbidden from ever crossing the threshold of this house.

However, the crew of heavy-set operatives brought by Xu Jiangzhe were elite professionals trained in extraction protocols; the ordinary domestic help stood utterly powerless against them. The terrified staff could do nothing but watch helplessly as Xu Jiangzhe marched out with his prize. While one panicked worker scrambled to dial the Xu couple's cell phones, a more quick-witted colleague ran out to alert the community security guards.

Yet Xu Jiangzhe was no anonymous intruder; having lived within the residential enclave for years, his face was intimately familiar to every guard on duty. When the panicked servant demanded that security physically intercept the young master of the Xu household, the guards hesitated, entirely confused by the sudden domestic upheaval. Taking advantage of that fatal window of hesitation, Xu Jiangzhe shoved past the gate, bundled Bai Yichen into his waiting vehicle, and slammed his foot down on the accelerator, tearing straight out of the estate.

The understated black sedan glided smoothly through the bustling urban arteries, remaining entirely nondescript amidst the flowing traffic. Cradled securely within Xu Jiangzhe's arms, Bai Yichen peered through the tinted privacy glass, watching the vibrant, flashing tapestry of skyscrapers, shops, and pedestrians race past. A quiet, stunned blankness washed over his mind... How many years has it been since I last laid eyes on the outside world?

Sensing the boy's fixed gaze, Xu Jiangzhe lowered his head. Choosing to withhold any elaborate explanations, he simply murmured with quiet reassurance: "We're almost there. It's our new home—I promise you'll love it."

Bai Yichen offered zero verbal response to the declaration. Whether he liked the new residence or despised it, and regardless of where they were headed, he possessed zero agency to veto the outcome.

What genuinely caught him off guard was the staggering extent of Xu Jiangzhe's calculated audacity. Over recent years, he had witnessed Xu Jiangzhe steadily expanding his executive leverage and influence over Xu Weihai and Liu Ling, but he never anticipated that the young man would mobilize such radical defiance so rapidly—openly declaring war against his own parents by exploiting their absence to execute a violent, unilateral abduction.

While this dramatic breakout liberated him from Liu Ling's petty, daily torments, it also severed the ultimate tether keeping Xu Jiangzhe's darkest impulses in check. Stripped of the Xu couple's physical surveillance perimeter, the final administrative shackle restraining Xu Jiangzhe vanished into thin air. Furthermore, having completely shattered all familial diplomacy with his parents, Xu Jiangzhe was no longer shackled by the pretense of social boundaries.

Consequently, as Bai Yichen stared out at the shrinking gates of his twelve-year prison, he felt zero overwhelming waves of liberation. He knew with chilling certainty that he was simply walking out of one cage and stepping directly into another—a tailor-made, absolute cage where Xu Jiangzhe held the unbridled power to do whatever he pleased.

After driving for roughly an hour, the car veered into a tranquil, secluded luxury villa enclave. Though entirely unfamiliar with the coordinates, Bai Yichen immediately recognized that Xu Jiangzhe had deliberately selected a destination located at maximum geographical distance from the primary Xu estate—a safehouse so remote that Xu Weihai and Liu Ling likely had zero awareness of its existence.

Off in the distance, a distinct architectural silhouette came into view—a residential property whose structural facade subtly diverged from its surrounding neighbors. A heavy premonition stirred in Bai Yichen's chest, and sure enough, the sedan rolled to a complete stop directly beneath its portico. Lifted out of the car by Xu Jiangzhe's arms, Bai Yichen surveyed his new surroundings with sweeping clarity. Above all, his eyes locked onto the dense, impenetrable thicket of overgrown perimeter foliage deliberately planted to shroud the courtyard in total visual isolation. It was... such an uncannily classic Xu Jiangzhe move.

The squad of elite bodyguards had accompanied them to the safehouse. One of them wheeled out a brand-new wheelchair retrieved from inside the villa. Glancing down, Bai Yichen noticed with a chilling shiver that the make and model were an identical match to the one he had grown accustomed to using back at the main estate. Lowering his long lashes, he wondered how many years Xu Jiangzhe had secretly spent plotting and curating this meticulous trap.