The most heart-stopping moment of the entire cable car accident unfolded.

Whether it was the victims trapped inside the cabins, the tourists watching from below, or any other onlookers, everyone’s eyes converged on the two men plummeting through the air at the exact same time.

Even though a double layer of protection had already been set up over the snow, the crowd still instinctively gasped. It wasn’t until one of them, holding the other, landed on his feet and they rolled together a few times—absorbing most of the impact of the freefall and averting a tragedy—that everyone finally managed to exhale, a beat too late.

Everything just now had happened with breakneck speed, spanning only a split second.

The next moment, exclamations of awe and cheers erupted from all sides!

Seeing the two land safely, the rescue team surrounding the air mattress, the scenic area facilities manager, and the production staff—whose faces had turned deathly pale from fright—all rushed forward at once. A young crew member was on the verge of tears as she shouted at the top of her lungs, “Brother Xie! Is Brother Shi okay?! Are you two alright?!”

Xie Jinghe had been knocked dizzy from the fall, a dull ache radiating through his entire body.

He sat up first. Before he could even answer the questions of the staff members, he hurriedly lowered his head to check on his partner’s condition.

The man was lying right beside him. The hand locked around Xie Jinghe’s forearm still hadn’t let go, and those bloodshot eyes were shut tight, showing no signs of opening anytime soon.

Xie Jinghe’s expression froze, turning entirely blank, yet his movements remained swift and decisive.

He abruptly raised his hand and checked beneath the man’s nose.

A steady warmth brushed against his fingertips.

In an instant, the jammed world resumed its gears.

Only then did Xie Jinghe notice that Dr. Li had somehow squeezed through the crowd. Quickly checking the man’s condition, Dr. Li spoke to him in a low, calm voice, “Don’t panic. It’s likely physical exhaustion combined with extreme mental tension that caused him to faint.”

With bloodshot eyes, Xie Jinghe nodded vigorously.

Since many tourists were still trapped in the midair cabins and the rescue team was short-handed, the first two to come down were carried into an ambulance on stretchers by the scenic area staff.

After a brief discussion, it was decided that Dr. Li Huan would accompany them in the ambulance, while two young female staff members stayed behind to check on the condition of the trapped personal camera operator. The scenic area manager drove his own vehicle to follow them.

Inside the ambulance.

Li Huan fluently conversed with the local medical staff in English. Working in tandem with them, he hooked up the two casualties to monitoring equipment to assess their injuries. It even took quite a bit of effort to separate the man’s locked grip from Xie Jinghe’s forearm.

Even though the man had fallen into a coma, his subconscious was still dictating orders to his body.

Don’t let go.

Xie Jinghe’s composure and alertness seemed to have been entirely depleted at the moment of the fall. Now that he was in a safe environment, his expression was dazed. His gaze remained anchored on the man the entire time, as if he couldn’t spare a single shred of focus for the outside world, completely oblivious to the darkened imprint around his own forearm.

A dark-purple mark, resembling a birthmark, was deeply branded into his skin.

He barely even dared to blink.

He was terrified that if he blinked, the man would dissolve into seafoam and vanish.

Noticing his expression, Li Huan continued his conversation with the local paramedics while simultaneously explaining the man’s condition to Xie Jinghe in a gentle and patient tone.

Compared to the life-threatening danger they had just faced, their injuries didn’t seem too severe.

Although the exposed parts of their skin suffered varying degrees of cuts from the shattered glass, thankfully none were in critical areas. The most severe wound was on Xie Jinghe’s right palm.

The cut was long, slicing clean across three of his palm lines.

By the looks of it, it would require at least six or seven stitches.

On the other side of the vehicle.

The unconscious man’s eyes were severely bloodshot, and countless tiny petechiae had surfaced beneath the skin on the side of his neck. Dense and tightly packed, it looked particularly alarming. The ligaments and muscles in his arm were severely strained, his joints had sustained some damage, and a concussion couldn’t be ruled out just yet.

They arrived at the hospital.

Once both patients completed their full set of examinations, Li Huan, acting as their accompanying guardian, flipped through the two medical reports. With a look of helplessness, he addressed the one who was conscious: “Mr. Xie, your left lower leg is fractured. Did you seriously not feel any unusual pain?”

Xie Jinghe froze for two seconds before replying, “I guess there was a little.”

Meeting those deep, unbothered eyes, Li Huan paused before delivering the other person’s test results exactly as requested: “Incredibly fortunately, Mr. Shi doesn’t have any major issues. The brain scan didn’t show any shadows of internal bleeding. It seems he truly fainted due to total physical exhaustion.”

“There’s a high probability he will wake up within twenty-four hours.”

Saying this, Li Huan fell silent for a brief moment before continuing, “For someone like him who hasn’t undergone years of professional strength training, holding up a grown man with a single hand for that long is practically a miracle.”

Seeing Xie Jinghe lift his eyes to look over again, Li Huan didn’t elaborate further, only offering a soft smile.

But Xie Jinghe understood.

He nodded with absolute conviction, saying for the umpteenth time, “Linchuan is truly so good to me.”

There was another sentence that Xie Jinghe didn’t utter aloud.

The man being good to him was real.

But the man wanting a divorce from him also seemed to be real.

As Xie Jinghe thought this, his heart wasn’t swallowed by the familiar panic and oppression. Instead, it was as placid as still water, as if something had blocked the wind, causing it to stop at the shore without kicking up a single ripple in the lake of his heart.

Amidst the agonizing, excruciating wait, he felt a strange sense of peace.

It was blood.

A vast expanse of blood, so red it seemed on the verge of catching fire.

The snow was thoroughly soaked in blood, taking on the translucent clarity of strawberry juice. Meanwhile, Xie Jinghe lay stark naked in the pool of blood he had bled out himself. Those affectionate eyes stared blankly at the sky, his two pupils dilated into large, vacant circles, utterly devoid of light.

At this exact moment, Shi Linchuan realized with absolute clarity that he was dreaming.

He stood beside the corpse, seemingly playing the role of an inconsequential passerby. His analytical gaze swept from the crown of the dead body’s head down to its toes; every single detail aligned perfectly with the image in his memory, down to the millimeter.

The cowlick on the crown of his head.

The tiny mole hidden within his eyebrow.

Every single old scar upon his skin.

And, adorning the base of his left thigh, his own name.

Shi Linchuan crouched down, his gaze falling upon the corpse’s slender ankle, and further down, the rounded, fair toes tinged with a faint pink. They were beautifully shaped, and they possessed quite a bit of strength.

Previously, on a certain night in Xijiang, when the wound on Xie Jinghe’s wrist hadn’t healed yet, Shi Linchuan had to help him bathe. During the shower, he had chided Xie Jinghe in a mock-hostile tone, saying he didn’t just love stepping on people’s feet, but was also so fond of clamping onto things that he was fit to go stomp on wet cement at a construction site.

It had actually been a joke.

He had found it quite endearing.

Xie Jinghe’s toes were genuinely very flexible.

A long time ago, on a crisp and beautiful afternoon.

The two of them had gone for two rounds on the living room sofa. Shi Linchuan was leaning back against the sofa cushions, one leg uncharacteristically lacking in decorum as it rested on the edge of the sofa, enjoying the post-coital mental languor.

Covered in marks from head to toe, Xie Jinghe was both bashful and uninhibited, resting his head on Shi Linchuan’s other leg while lounging lazily across the couch, his two lower legs thrown carelessly over the sofa back.

When he spoke, his voice was slightly raspy.

“Linchuan, let me perform a talent for you.”

Hearing this, Shi Linchuan turned his head to look at him.

He watched as this person immediately splayed his toes like a blooming flower, then proceeded to highly fluidly play an “air piano” with them, even dutifully narrating his performance: “This one is Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Am I impressive?”

Shi Linchuan had watched closely for a few seconds and realized it actually was.

Yet before he could even praise him, Xie Jinghe had already burst into laughter all on his own. The thin sheen of sweat along the side of his neck and temples made him look luminous, yet nothing could outshine those eyes.

Reflected within them was the man’s own silhouette.

In those eyes, Shi Linchuan saw his own fake smile.

He often had a feeling that this world was completely unreasonable, utterly absurd.

When he was a teenager, he could smoothly and completely play highly difficult piano pieces by masters like Liszt and Canon, yet his heart had held nothing but annoyance and boredom. Meanwhile, the person before him had merely gestured a few bars of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star with his toes, yet he could derive a happiness so completely pure.

And he even had the nerve to ask him for a compliment?

Jealousy was a venomous serpent, its cold fangs gnawing at his heart; anger was a blazing fire, its roaring flames incinerating his rationality. In a hidden corner, Shi Linchuan would occasionally harbor a sense of envy—petty and stubborn, refusing to admit it even to himself, doing nothing but constantly ignoring it.

Occasionally, very occasionally, he would envy how forthright Xie Jinghe could be. If he liked something, he liked it; if he hated something, he hated it. He lived like a real human being.

Unlike himself.

He was a dog. Pavlov’s dog.

Shi Linchuan forgot whether he had given Xie Jinghe the praise he wanted back then, but he vividly remembered that dull ache stemming from the deepest recesses of his heart, with nowhere to be vented or released. And so, smiling, he gently hooked his hand around the back of the other’s neck, adjusted his direction…

And unacceptably forced his face down toward his lap.

How wonderful.

Xie Jinghe looked like a dog now, too.

His exclusive, pathetic dog.

Back then, he had thought with such malice.

Inside the dream, time lost all meaning.

Shi Linchuan sat beside the corpse, his heart devoid of a single ripple of emotion.

He knew this wasn’t Xie Jinghe.

Xie Jinghe was a living, breathing entity, full of warmth, with eyes that shone brilliantly. Wherever he was, there was bright sunshine and lively air; one never had to worry about feeling lonely.

Because he would loudly and boisterously declare, “I love you, I truly love you.”

So much so that even though Shi Linchuan had repeated “I hate you” thousands upon thousands of times, the magic refused to work on that person. This had caused him to want to turn tail and flee on multiple occasions, unwilling to face the inevitable defeat that lay ahead.

He couldn’t lose.

Suddenly, the boundless snow within the dream melted away, yet the corpse still lay there. Shi Linchuan saw high walls rise up before him; a grim, ancient castle, cold and heavy, sealing out all light. Brambles crawled to his feet like countless hissing serpents.

Everything before his eyes was so distorted.

Just like his heart.

Right at that moment, Shi Linchuan suddenly heard the corpse speak.

“It’s okay.”

“Linchuan, you can let go of my hand now.”

The air fell silent; time ground to a sudden halt.

There wasn’t a single expression on Shi Linchuan’s face. He simply spaced out for a very long time, before responding with immense exhaustion, “You think I don’t want to?”

“I just can’t do it.”

The words had only just left his mouth.

The entire dream world began to experience a massive earthquake, letting out a rumbling, deafening roar. Simultaneously, the deformed and distorted castle gradually collapsed, the thorn-covered brambles were burned to ash by subterranean fires, and the heavy ground split open into a deep abyss.

An unfamiliar plant tremulously straightened its stem from within the pit, making its presence known to its master. Its flower buds were vivid and delicate, its faint fragrance overpowering the scent of gunpowder and dust.

Shi Linchuan gazed down at it, never once questioning its origin or species. Across both worlds—inside and outside the dream—probably no one understood it more clearly than he did.

This was a seed Xie Jinghe had inadvertently sown in his heart. Consciously or unconsciously ignored by him for years, suppressed for years, it had stubbornly taken root and sprouted…

And at this exact moment, Shi Linchuan finally welcomed its blooming season.

He had no choice but to look at it directly.

The world was collapsing. The world was also reconstructing.

Shi Linchuan merely sat there quietly, letting it turn his world upside down. No longer did he try to stop it in a frantic rage like before; instead, he watched powerlessly, adopting a posture of total surrender.

After a long while, his voice was raspy as he muttered in a tiny volume:

“Xie Jinghe.”

“I’m a little scared.”

“…”

A dim, yellowish light pierced through the man’s eyelids, forcefully jolting his consciousness awake. Shi Linchuan abruptly opened his eyes, a massive friction generating between his eyelids and the globes beneath them, as if some unknown entity had buried an entire desert inside them.

It was incredibly dry.

The night outside the window had grown deep.

The double hospital room was quiet.

Shi Linchuan blinked his eyes. Suddenly, he heard a bout of broken, Chinglish grammar coming from the doorway. The syntax was completely fractured, and a simple sentence was delivered haltingly, sounding highly unnatural.

He turned his head around, only to see Xie Jinghe standing at the hospital room doorway propped up on a crutch. His left lower leg was encased in a plaster cast, and his right hand was wrapped up to look even more like a pig’s trotter than before. He was using his hand to help gesture, asking the female nurse who had just finished her rounds and was preparing to leave, “A long time has passed. Why has my husband still not woken up?”

“Should we do another check?”

The nurse barely managed to understand. She opened her mouth to deliver several fluent, long sentences in response. Xie Jinghe fell silent for a moment, letting out a few “uh-huhs,” seemingly racking his brain to translate and figure out how he should express himself…

Shi Linchuan couldn’t help but let out a couple of soft chuckles.

The volume was extremely low.

The person at the doorway immediately spun around, his eyes wide and round. For half a beat, he didn’t say a word, seemingly experiencing a touch of apprehension now that he was close to home. Shi Linchuan closed his eyes to relieve the dryness, then instructed with a calm expression, “Move a bit slower. Don’t break your other leg too.”

Standing there, the tears Xie Jinghe had held back for an entire day finally spilled over.

Shi Linchuan tilted his head to look at him, letting out a silent sigh.

“Don’t cry.”

“When you’re like this, I don’t know what to do.”