The ICU was a cathedral of sterile light and mechanical whispers. Han Ruyan, usually a pillar of ice, faltered at the threshold. Her breath, hitching in a throat tight with unspoken apologies, inside the room was the only sound against the relentless hiss-click of the ventilator.
She looked at her son.
Shu Yao lay beneath the harsh fluorescent glow, looking less like a man and more like a fallen lark. His condition was a heartbreaking landscape of translucent skin and blue-tinged shadows.
The tubes and wires snaking from his body felt like parasitic vines, draining the very essence of the boy she had spent years trying to "mold."
Han Ruyan froze, her gloved hand clutching her coat as if to keep her own heart from shattering. Her lower lip trembled—a violent, tremors fracture in her mask.
"My Shu Yao," she choked out. The words were a ragged thread of silk. "Why is it always the kindest? Why is it always my son?"
George stood a few paces behind her, a 200 cm silhouette of silent grief. He watched the woman who had been so harsh finally crumble.
He stepped forward, his heavy boots silent on the linoleum, but he didn't speak.
What words could a man like him offer? He was built for protection, for violence, for the heavy lifting of the Rothenberg empire—not for the delicate surgery of a mother's soul.
Han Ruyan reached out, her fingers hovering inches from Shu Yao's cooling forehead. She was terrified. To touch him was to acknowledge the fragility of his life. To touch him was to realize he might never touch her back.
"I shouldn't have been so harsh," she whispered into her lace handkerchief, the fabric damp with the salt of a decade's worth of regret. "My boy... I'm so sorry."
George turned his gaze away, his own eyes burning. He felt out of place—a behemoth in a room made of glass. Throughout his life, people had recoiled from him. They saw the height, the broad shoulders, the "scary Rothenberg" legacy, and they fled. He had failed to comfort so many because his very presence felt like a threat.
But not Shu Yao.
Shu Yao had always been the exception. The boy had never flinched. He had walked into George's shadow and found a parasol instead of a storm. He had ended up in George's arms a thousand times, seeking safety, never realizing that he was the one protecting George from his own loneliness.
He was Unable to bear the sight of the boy's stillness a second longer, George turned and strode out of the room. He needed the cold air of the hallway. He needed to be a sentinel, not a witness. He was too afraid to watch the light go out in the only eyes that had ever seen him as a human being.
So he left the room quietly, tears spilling freely the moment the door slid shut behind him.
Deep beneath the layers of coma, where the sound of the ventilator became a distant, rhythmic tide, Shu Yao found himself in a place of devastating beauty.
The sky was a soft, bruised lilac, and the air smelled of rain and ancient honey. He was sitting in a vast, undulating field of roses—vibrant, deep crimson blooms that stretched toward the horizon. But these were not the roses of the living world; they were thornless, soft as velvet against his skin.
Shu Yao looked down at himself. He wasn't wearing the golden shroud of the Rothenbergs. He was wearing his old school clothes—an ivory shirt and soft brown trousers. His hair was short again, the way it had been before the world tried to make him a "Saint."
He looked breathtaking, a centerpiece of purity in a sea of red.
"Why am I here?" he whispered. His voice didn't rattle; it was clear and light. "I don't belong here yet."
He turned his head, and his heart—the soul version of it—leaped into his throat. Standing a few yards away was a man in a long brown coat, his face illuminated by a smile that held the warmth of a thousand suns.
"Father?" Shu Yao's lip trembled.
Shu Yuelin stood tall, his features a mirrored, more mature version of his son's. He looked at Shu Yao with a pride so thick it felt like a physical embrace.
Shu Yao scrambled to his feet, his breath coming in jagged hitches of joy and terror. He ran. He didn't care about the roses; he only cared about the man who had been a ghost in his heart for years.
He collided with his father, burying his face in the soft wool of Shu Yuelin's chest. The scent of old books and cedarwood enveloped him. Shu Yao sobbed, his small frame shaking against his father's solid form.
"You are just like when you were my little boy," Yuelin murmured, his voice a low, soothing vibration.
Shu Yao looked up, his eyes swimming with damp sorrow. "I... I am sorry, Father. It was all my fault. For everything."
Yuelin shook his head slowly, his large hands framing Shu Yao's face. He leaned down and pressed a tender kiss to his son's forehead.
"Don't cry, my boy. You didn't do anything wrong. I died because I chose to. I died because I couldn't let anyone hurt you. It was a father's gift, not a son's burden."
Shu Yao leaned into the touch, his tears soaking into his father's palms. "I should have been stronger. If I was stronger, they wouldn't have bullied me.
"No," Yuelin interrupted, his gaze piercing and kind. "If you see clearly, you are a kind and pure-hearted boy, just like me. That is your strength, not your weakness."
Shu Yao nodded, his throat tight. He listened as his father spoke the truth he had been running from.
"My boy will rather hurt himself than say a word to hurt another," Yuelin said softly. He crouched down, reaching Shu Yao's height, his hands resting firmly on the boy's shoulders. "But listen to me. You need to fight. You need to go back. You cannot come to us.
Terror flooded Shu Yao's eyes. He gripped his father's coat with white-knuckled desperation. "No! I want to stay. I want to go with you! Please, take me with you!"
Shu Yuelin's smile turned sorrowful. He looked toward the horizon, where the lilac sky was beginning to fade into a bright, blinding white.
"The one you love is still waiting for you to come back,"
Shu Yao's grip slackened. Bai Qi. He remembered the obsidian eyes. He remembered the coldness. He thought of his mother, weeping into her handkerchief.
A third figure appeared in the periphery of the roses.
It was Qing Yue. But she wasn't the pale, girl Shu Yao remembered. She was radiant, her hair flowing like liquid gold, her smile bright and free of the malice that had defined her life. She looked at Shu Yao and nodded—a silent acknowledgment that her mission, her role as the "false ghost," was over.
"Come on, Daddy," Qing Yue said, reaching for Yuelin's hand. "Let's go."
Shu Yao tried to speak to her, to ask her why she was smiling, but they were already beginning to vanish. The field of roses started to dissolve into a mist of red petals.
"No! Wait!" Shu Yao cried out, dropping to his knees as the warmth of his father's presence evaporated.
He was alone again in the grey void of his subconscious. He realized then that he was a flower—a rare, colorful bloom that everyone cherished but no one knew how to water. He was soft enough to break, but too bright to be left in the dark.
"I'm sorry," he whispered into the vacuum.
"I'll go back."
Back in the ICU, the heart monitor's drone suddenly broke its monotonous rhythm.
Beep... Beep-beep... Beep.
Han Ruyan gasped, her body recoiling as if she had been struck by a physical wave of sound. She stood up abruptly, her chair screeching against the linoleum.
Her eyes, wide and glassy with terror, were fixed on Shu Yao. The boy was no longer peaceful. His body was a battlefield, a landscape of sudden, agonizing motion.
The door swung open with a pneumatic hiss. A swarm of blue scrubs and white coats flooded the room.
"Vitals are spiking! He's reacting to the Belladonna!" the lead doctor shouted, his voice a sharp blade in the chaotic air. "Get her out of here! Now!"
"No! My son!" Han Ruyan's voice cracked, a jagged sliver of sound. A nurse gripped her shoulders, firm and uncompromising, guiding the shaking woman toward the glass doors. "Shu Yao! Please!"
For Shu Yao, the transition was a violent descent.
The field of roses didn't fade; it caught fire. One moment he was in his father's arms, surrounded by velvet petals and lilac skies, and the next, he was falling through a vacuum of molten lead. The warmth of the dream was replaced by a visceral, screaming pain that radiated from his stomach to his very marrow.
The poison wasn't finished. It was a predatory animal, sensing his attempt to escape, and it dug its claws in deeper.
Shu Yao's pupils rolled up into his head, exposing the whites of his eyes in a terrifying expression of neurological trauma. His cracked, bloodless lips moved. He wasn't screaming for mercy; he wasn't crying for his
mother.
"Bai... Qi..."
The name was a thin, frayed thread of sound. It cost him everything. His throat felt like it had been lined with broken glass and scorched with lye. Every syllable was a laceration.
Even in the heart of a toxic storm, his mind reached for the man who had handed him the cup.
He kicked his feet against the sterile sheets, his body arching in a cramped, defensive reflex. He was trying to endure the unendurable. He was crossing the limits of human resilience, challenging a lethal dose of Belladonna with nothing but the wreckage of his devotion.
"His heart rate is through the roof!" a nurse hissed, her hands frantic as she checked the IV lines. "The toxins are causing a massive inflammatory response. We're losing the rhythm!"
"Increase the sedative! We have to still his body or he'll trigger a cardiac arrest!" the doctor barked.
Shu Yao looked out through the blur of his lashes. He saw the intruders—the masks, the bright lights, the chrome instruments. He didn't see the field of roses. He didn't see his father. And most painfully, he didn't see the obsidian eyes of the Prince.
He was alone in the pain.
"I... I am... sorry..." he whispered, the words dissolving into a dry, rattling gasp.
He was apologizing for the mess. He was apologizing for the chaos of his own dying.
Then, the world tilted. The fire in his veins suddenly turned into ice. The violent energy that had possessed his limbs drained away, leaving him heavy and hollow. His body, which had been fighting with the ferocity of a trapped bird, went still.
The heart monitor's frantic pace slowed. It didn't flatline, but it returned to a sluggish, rhythmic drone that signaled a deeper, more profound retreat.
The pupils drifted back down, then closed. The "Saint" had retreated from the threshold. The darkness had reclaimed him.
The doctors stepped back, their chests heaving with the same exhaustion as the patient. The room, which had been a theater of war seconds ago, returned to its clinical, haunted stillness.
The lead doctor wiped sweat from his brow, his expression one of grim fascination. He looked at the charts, then at the pale, still boy on the bed.
"It's rare," the doctor murmured, his voice hushed with a heavy, academic wonder. "To see a system so weak and yet so... stubborn. He challenged the peak of the poison. Most would have died from the shock of the awakening alone."
"Is he... back?" the nurse asked.
"No," the doctor replied, looking toward the glass "He's drifted back into the coma. And this time, he's gone deeper. The poison has won this round."