Chapter 81: A Belated Wedding

The car wound its way up the mountain road, finally arriving at the hotel. Zhu Zhixi knew of this place; it was the top choice for high-ranking officials and dignitaries when staying in S-City—private and secure.

Surrounded by a silent entourage, they arrived at the suite. Zhu Zhixi hadn’t intended to go in, wanting to give the father and son space after so many years apart. But Fu Rangyi held his wrist, not speaking, not letting go, like a child clinging to a comforting toy when nervous.

“Alright, alright, I’ll go with you.” So, Zhu Zhixi went in as well, passing through the suite’s entryway and living room to the study where they would meet.

Secretary Sun was ahead of them. He pushed open the door. “Admiral Huo, they have arrived.”

The curtains in the study were drawn, and the light was a warm yellow, for a moment resembling a cozy winter evening. The admiral, dressed in the plainest of clothes, stood up the moment the door opened. He strode around the desk towards them, but after a few steps, he suddenly stopped, quietly looking in their direction, his eyes quickly turning red.

He extended a hand and said in a deep voice, “Sit, please sit.”

Afraid of being offensive, Zhu Zhixi didn’t stare at the scars on his face for long, but even a single glance seemed to conjure images of a heart-stopping battlefield, of a figure escaping death from a blazing fire. It must have been so painful.

After escaping danger and finally returning to his country, only to receive news of his beloved’s tragic death—how could one even bear to live?

“Hello, Mr. Huo,” Fu Rangyi said politely. “This is my partner, Zhu Zhixi.”

Zhu Zhixi bowed earnestly and looked up with a bright smile. “Hello, Mr. Huo.”

Huo Ping nodded several times, smiling. He raised a hand to cover the burned side of his face, then lowered it. “I considered wearing a mask or a hat, afraid of frightening you, but then I felt it wouldn’t be respectful enough…”

Zhu Zhixi was very surprised and waved his hands without thinking. “How could we be frightened? This is your medal of honor.”

Huo Ping was slightly taken aback, then finally laughed. He glanced at Fu Rangyi and saw him looking down with a smile.

The first meeting was very awkward. The father and son had similar personalities, not speaking much. Compounded by their difficult pasts, they conversed carefully, afraid of touching each other’s wounds. But Zhu Zhixi could see that in order to make a good impression on this child he’d been separated from for thirty years, Huo Ping was trying very hard, without any airs, even showing some of the helplessness of a new father.

After dinner, they took a walk together in the hotel’s back garden. It was getting late and a bit chilly outside. Zhu Zhixi sneezed, and Fu Rangyi stopped to get him a blanket.

Huo Ping stood nearby with his hands behind his back, smiling. The side of his face covered in old scars was lost in shadow, while the other side still showed traces of his former handsomeness, looking indeed very similar to Fu Rangyi.

“I can tell you two have a very good relationship,” he said in a gentle voice.

Zhu Zhixi smiled. “He is a very good person. Uncle Huo, don’t mind that he’s quiet and seems a bit cold. He’s just not used to this yet. Once you see each other more, you’ll slowly see that he’s actually an exceptionally gentle and kind person. He will be very good to you too.”

Huo Ping looked at him, the fading daylight casting on his resolute face.

“Seeing you two like this, I always think of when I was young,” Huo Ping said softly. “It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about those things.”

Zhu Zhixi hesitated for a long time but curiously asked about the older generation’s past.

He knew it was a heavy and painful memory, so he added, “You don’t have to tell me. I just want to know how his parents fell in love.”

However, the admiral was very generous. But the story of their love was not long; what he recounted in a few sentences was almost all about separation.

He then learned that Fu Rangyi’s parents had known each other since childhood and grew up together. Later, one joined the army and the other became a politician. The campaign was long. On the night before heading to the battlefield, Huo Ping marked him for life and promised that he would definitely come back alive to marry him.

But that departure lasted a full year. So much can happen in a year—a coup, an assassination, the family being framed. And news even spread from the battlefield that Huo Ping had died.

In the end, he returned with a miracle and military honors, only to find the fragmented remains of his lover and an unsolved case.

After listening, Zhu Zhixi couldn’t help but feel a surge of grief. “So, you and your partner, you were never actually married…” He couldn’t continue.

Huo Ping, however, was very calm, a faint smile even appearing on his face.

“Married? I held a small ceremony with his urn, right in his family’s backyard.”

Zhu Zhixi finally shed tears. He turned his face to the side and wiped them away quietly.

Huo Ping continued, “I always thought he left nothing behind. Now, seeing Rangyi, I am on one hand very happy, because this is his child, a piece of his own flesh and blood. On the other hand, my heart aches, because it means that in my absence, he suffered far more than I ever imagined.”

“I could never figure it out before. He was in hiding for so long without a trace, why would he suddenly appear later? Now I understand. It was for this child. After giving birth alone, he knew he would be targeted sooner or later. So after settling the child, he deliberately exposed his location, using himself as bait to protect him.”

In extremely dangerous situations, the only way the child could be safe was if no one knew of his existence.

Zhu Zhixi couldn’t even dare to imagine the pain in Fu Rangyi’s mother’s heart at that time. Losing their husband, abandoning their child, and facing their own grim end.

This family had suffered too much.

Huo Ping said, “Seeing him all grown up now, he should be at peace.” With that, he sighed softly and looked up at the sky. “I’ve found him. Our child is as smart as you, an excellent professor of archaeology.”

Before long, Fu Rangyi returned. He draped the blanket over Zhu Zhixi, wrapped him up, and handed him a bottle of warm milk.

Huo Ping saw this and had a smile on his face, but in the next second, he froze, because Fu Rangyi took another deep gray cashmere blanket from the crook of his arm and handed it to him.

“Please take care of your health as well,” Fu Rangyi said in a low voice.

“Good, good.” Huo Ping’s tone changed. The hand hanging by his side clenched into a fist, then he raised it.

Zhu Zhixi nudged Fu Rangyi. “You should put it on for Dad, silly.”

Both father and son were stunned. In the dim garden, only Zhu Zhixi was laughing, his laughter crisp and bright.

“Dad, don’t you think he looks exactly like you did when you were young?”

With him calling him “Dad” one after another, Huo Ping could hardly suppress the smile on his face. He looked at Fu Rangyi, thought seriously for a long time, and finally said, “His eyes are still more like his mother’s. Better looking than I was when I was young.”

“Then Mom must have been a great beauty,” Zhu Zhixi looked up and smiled at Fu Rangyi. “Next time we visit, let’s look at Mom’s photos, okay?”

Fu Rangyi, somewhat resigned, nodded. “Okay.”

Hearing this, a hint of surprise appeared in Huo Ping’s eyes, which quickly turned into gentle warmth. “It’s a deal. You must come often in the future.”

Before they parted, he stood by the car window and said softly, “Your mother’s pheromones smelled of bitter pomelo.”

The fruit of the bitter pomelo was buried in the earth, and after a cycle of life, it finally bloomed into a new flower.

However, in the many times that followed, it was still Huo Ping who traveled to S-City. He said that Fu Rangyi was a teacher and shouldn’t travel too much, for fear of affecting his teaching work. For the treatment of the malignant susceptibility period syndrome, he provided gland fluid samples several times and participated in every consultation.

Later, Fu Rangyi learned from Li Qiao that extracting gland fluid was extremely painful, could not be done with anesthesia, and was also damaging to an Alpha’s body.

“Admiral Huo’s personal doctor even came later. It seemed like he tried to dissuade him, but guess what he said?” Li Qiao described the scene at the consultation. “It was as if he didn’t hear. He reeled off a bunch of drug names to your attending doctor, all the ones he had taken, and even asked if the 11 closed-door treatments he had undergone before would compromise the purity of his gland fluid, and if it would affect your treatment…”

After hearing this, Fu Rangyi’s heart was filled with extremely complex emotions. Sitting in the consultation room, he stared at the blank wall. Gradually, the figure of a child appeared before the wall, his back against it, hands clasped anxiously.

Knock, knock—the door was knocked. He turned his head, and there was Huo Ping standing at the door. The “child” also turned his head, as if he had heard a “lost and found” announcement at an amusement park. He ran over and hid behind his tall father.

That day, he finally asked the question that had been circling in his mind.

“Dad, do you have time to attend my and Xiao Xi’s wedding?”

---

The wedding preparations took nearly three months.

Like curating an exhibition, Zhu Zhixi was exceptionally serious and meticulous. He even designed many versions of the wedding invitation.

In the end, he chose a handmade flower-petal seed paper. The paper was uneven, mixed with pomelo petals and wormwood seeds, and the ink was infused with cypress essential oil. Tucked inside the invitation was a wide-format Polaroid of the two of them, taken under the blooming pomelo tree in their home.

During the making of the invitations, he received a gift box from Granny. Inside was a photo album with Snowball’s paw print on the paper, and a velvet jewelry box. Opening it revealed two diamonds.

Xiao Xi, these are diamonds made from Snowball’s ashes, a wedding gift for you.

Fu Rangyi had the diamonds set into a pair of stud earrings, one for each of them. Zhu Zhixi, in turn, imprinted Snowball’s paw print on every wedding invitation, next to his and Fu Rangyi’s handwritten signatures.

The last sentence of the invitation was: Please bury our thoughts in the soil. It will grow and become a small piece of spring.

Fu Rangyi, unlike him, was more like an executive planner.

He simulated the wedding ceremony flow over and over, even timing each segment down to the minute, doing his utmost to reduce the possibility of errors. Especially the signatures on the invitations—though they were handwritten, his characters looked more like they were printed, every stroke identical. Any that weren’t good enough were all picked out by him.

“That’s all the paper we have!” Zhu Zhixi exclaimed. “It’s good enough. This one is so beautiful.”

“No, I’ll write it again.” Fu Rangyi was extremely stubborn at times.

Just as he was when he insisted on being involved in selecting the flowers for the wedding venue—a job that anyone could see was not suited for him, given that fresh-cut flowers had never appeared in his apartment before the wedding.

Zhu Zhixi had a headache. “Then what do you want to choose? Tell me, and I’ll discuss it with the florist.”

Fu Rangyi didn’t answer immediately. He said, “Wait a moment,” went to the study, and when he returned to the dining table, he pulled a bouquet from behind his back like a magic trick and handed it to Zhu Zhixi. The outer petals were creamy white, becoming a pale pink towards the center, layered and sweet and lovely.

Zhu Zhixi happily smelled the flowers. “You want white roses.”

But Fu Rangyi said, “These aren’t white roses. They’re Little White Rabbits.”

“Huh?” Zhu Zhixi looked up and blinked.

Fu Rangyi emphasized, “It has a name, the Little White Rabbit rose.”

Zhu Zhixi laughed, clutching the flowers and laughing until his stomach hurt. But Fu Rangyi didn’t know what he was laughing about.

However, he later paid a small price for his stubbornness. This type of rose was notoriously a “hard head,” very difficult to coax from a bud into full bloom.

Zhu Zhixi stood with his hands on his hips. “You ordered them, you’re responsible.”

And so, the day before the wedding, one of the grooms was busy arranging accommodations for the guests and socializing, while the other was busy wrangling 9,999 “Little White Rabbit” buds, trying every means possible to wake the flowers.

“Why are you all as difficult as he is…” Fu Rangyi used every trick in the book, finally resorting to quietly badmouthing the bad rabbit in a room full of flower buds.

But fortunately, they were also like Zhu Zhixi and wouldn’t truly make things difficult. The next day, the vast majority of the roses bloomed into their best state. They were sent in batches to the outdoor wedding venue, adorning the forest, the tables, every corner, as if a heavy snow had fallen on the summer island. A small portion was tied into a snowman to greet guests at the entrance.

Zhu Zhixi had spent a long time choosing the venue.

They were the first to arrive on this green island. Hand in hand, they spent two days exploring the place. In the end, they didn’t choose the seaside, but a spot deep in a forest. Abundant sunlight poured in like mead, making the leaves translucent. The ground was covered in pink evening primrose. When the wind blew, the layered pink petals swayed, making the place look like a fairy tale world.

Most importantly, there was a very large and beautiful tree here, full of natural spirituality. The locals said this tree was nearly a hundred years old.

“Not the seaside. Let’s choose here,” Zhu Zhixi said, looking at the large tree, his hand tracing every mark on its bark.

“Alright, we will communicate with your wedding planner.”

Hearing this, Fu Rangyi smiled. “No need. He is the planner himself.”

The planner turned this once-in-a-lifetime wedding into a blissful exhibition. Every guest who confirmed their attendance received a small admission ticket. It was an acrylic puzzle piece engraved with their name.

At the entrance to the wedding venue, there was a huge magnetic display board. By matching their names, everyone could place their own puzzle piece.

With the help of friends and family, the puzzle gradually became complete, revealing its true form: a silhouette of the two of them holding hands, with the words written below: Thank you for appearing in our lives.

Further in was the sign-in area, but it was very different from a normal wedding. The place they signed was a giant world map. The display title below the map was—Beneath His Footprints.

The map was marked with many circled places, pinned with pink tacks, and hung with transparent artifact bags containing fossils or printouts of artifact fragments. Attached to the bags were Fu Rangyi’s handwritten labels, recording the date Zhu Zhixi visited and related artifact information. Looking at them one by one, these connected footprints became a clue to civilization on an archaeological level.

On the display board to the right was a message also handwritten by Fu Rangyi.

These are all the places the brave Xiao Xi has been. Please sign your name on the place you would like us to go. Our honeymoon destination will be decided by everyone.

The challenge was thrown to them, and so everyone struggled in front of this huge map.