XR CH70
Chapter 70: P. Final Movement of Memory
Ning Yixiao stood in the snow for a long time, until his hands and feet went stiff with cold. Only when a passerby came to ask if he needed help did he shake his head and make his way, step by step, back to the apartment he and Su Hui had shared.
The date on his phone screen flipped from December 19th to December 20th. Ning Yixiao didn’t sleep. He sat on the narrow two-seater sofa and felt how empty the room was. He turned on the television and found that the poorly made drama they’d watched together had reached its finale — everyone had been reunited, everyone was happy.
The next morning, the snow still hadn’t stopped. At first light, Ning Yixiao got on his bicycle and rode toward Su Hui’s house. The roads were iced over; he fell once along the way, picked himself up, and kept going. Nearly two hours later, he arrived at the gated villa district and found the right house from memory.
The little garden had withered. Ning Yixiao stood at the entrance and pressed the doorbell three times. On the third try, someone finally came out to open the gate.
It was Xu Zhi.
“Ning Yixiao? What are you doing here so early?”
Ning Yixiao didn’t look at him. “I’m here for Su Hui.”
“He’s gone,” Xu Zhi said. “We’re moving. He left last night.”
Ning Yixiao didn’t believe it. He pushed past him and went inside. He was still wearing his worn-out sneakers, but he walked without hesitation into that magnificent house. The servants were busy everywhere, packing luggage, draping sheets over furniture. Entering the living room, his eyes went immediately to Ji Tailu, seated on the sofa.
Ji Tailu glanced at him. “So you’re Ning Yixiao.”
Ning Yixiao stopped and nodded respectfully. “I am. Sorry to intrude.”
“What do you want?” Ji Tailu clearly had no interest in prolonging this. “We’re in the middle of preparing to move.”
“I’m looking for Su Hui. Is he here? There’s something I need to say to him.”
“He’s not. He took a flight in the early hours of this morning.” Ji Tailu looked at him evenly. “Sit down. Whatever you have to say, you can say to me.”
Ning Yixiao hesitated, but sat. A servant appeared almost immediately with a cup of hot tea.
“I know about you and Su Hui.” Ji Tailu went straight to the point, his authority filling the room before a word of substance had been spoken. “If you’ve come to pursue that matter, you can give up now. You must be aware of his illness — but you probably don’t know what that illness does to the people around him.”
Ji Tailu said something quietly to a servant nearby. A moment later, the servant returned with a box containing what looked like sheets of letter paper.
“Ever since he developed this illness, very little of what he says can be trusted — it’s all driven by disordered thinking. You may believe that Su Hui has strong feelings for you, but during his manic phases, he sends those same signals to many people. It causes a great deal of confusion. His mother and I have been handling that kind of trouble since he was in middle school.”
Ning Yixiao found it unbearable — being told that what he and Su Hui had was nothing but “trouble,” that Su Hui’s affection was merely a symptom.
“During his depressive phases — did he ever show he cared about you? Getting even a single response out of him would have been an achievement.”
Ji Tailu selected a few sheets of paper from the box and slid them across to Ning Yixiao.
“You should recognize his handwriting.”
Ning Yixiao looked down. It was unmistakably Su Hui’s — the letters slightly unmoored, the loose, drifting quality of his manic state.
[I really want to go to Iceland. I want to go with him to Svínafellsjökull and exchange rings there, to pretend we’re getting married on a frozen planet. It’s a shame there’s no gravitational pull like on Miller’s Planet — if there were, ten hours there would be seventy years on Earth. By then, we’d only have each other. No one could separate us.]
He turned to the next sheet. The handwriting was heavy, pressed hard into the paper — the way Su Hui wrote during depressive episodes.
His fingers stilled at the first sentence.
*[I want to die in Iceland. But I don’t want to cause trouble for people — I’ve caused far too much trouble in my life already. I can’t die indoors; that would burden a landlord or a hotel. Jumping from a height might hurt someone else. The best way would be assisted dying, but I don’t want to leave from a hospital. The shore at the end of the road in Reykjavik, perhaps — sitting on a bench there, leaving a letter for whoever finds me.*
A draft, to start:
Hello. By the time you read this, I have already left this world. It was my own choice, and I am satisfied with it. There is no one and nothing in this world I am reluctant to leave behind. I have signed a body donation agreement. Please help me fulfill this last wish — call the number below to notify the body donation volunteers. Thank you deeply. I wish you a happy life and smooth sailing.
That should do. By the time I’m forty, at least, I want to have seen this through.]
Each sheet was dated. Ning Yixiao realized that the wish to marry him in Iceland and the wish to die in Iceland were written barely a month apart — both during the time they had been together.
Something he had held as certain inside himself cracked open, quietly and completely.
He thought back to what the doctor had said at the hospital: that manic patients present with intense enthusiasm that closely resembles being in love.
So the happiness he thought they’d shared — it could flip into suffering at any moment. The future Su Hui had imagined with him could, within weeks, become a landscape of desolation and silence. What, then, was real?
“You see now.” Ji Tailu’s voice was measured. “This is what truly lives inside Su Hui. He is more unwell than you imagine. When he’s doing well, he can make you feel deeply loved — because he does the same with us. The moment his state changes, you become nothing. Can you really call that love?”
“Most of the warmth he showed you, the way he pursued you — that was mania. His central nervous system was in a state of abnormal excitation, and he needed an outlet. You were that outlet. All of the passion he displayed was pathological. Medication dampens it. Depression extinguishes it entirely.”
Ji Tailu’s tone remained perfectly calm. He pushed the whole box toward Ning Yixiao. “There are more, if you want to read them. Most of them read as though they were written by different people. That’s the most honest portrait of Su Hui’s inner world.”
“And you, Ning Yixiao — I’ve looked into your background. You have a certain intelligence, and you’re reasonably ambitious. But you are not suited for him.”
“These past months have thrown this household into constant turmoil. Su Hui’s grandmother has fallen ill. His mother’s health is poor and she worries every day. As the head of this family, I am telling you plainly: I will not permit a man to entangle himself with my grandson. Let go of this. Su Hui’s future will be with a suitable young woman from a comparable background. They will have a stable life — not this kind of sordid arrangement. We have spoken with him, and he agreed. He came to his senses in time.”
“If you want something in return, name it. Whatever is within my power, I’ll grant it — consider it compensation for the time and effort you spent on Su Hui. I understand it isn’t easy to manage someone with a mental illness. And since you’re ambitious, since you’re willing to go to such lengths — even with a man — I, this old man, can give you a leg up…”
Before he could finish, Ning Yixiao stood.
He gave a measured bow, then straightened. “You’ve misunderstood. I only came to see Su Hui. Since he’s gone, I have nothing further to say.”
He paused. “And homosexuality is not a disease. Everything you’ve just said only reveals your own ignorance and prejudice.”
He turned and walked out of that grand house without once looking back.
The snow was still falling, blurring everything. Ning Yixiao’s vision swam with a single image — himself and Su Hui lying in the bathtub, talking about the future. He thought perhaps he was the one who was sick, and badly so, trapped in a nightmare he couldn’t wake from.
At the roadside, he found his bicycle and tried to unlock it — only to find his phone had shut off from the cold.
When it finally restarted, a call came through. A number he had dialed so many times these past days he almost had it memorized.
He answered and heard the other party say: his visa application could be resubmitted.
“Thank you.” He had nothing more to say. He put the phone away. Then a long text message arrived — from the unfamiliar number Su Hui had borrowed to contact him before.
But this time, the sender was someone else.
[Xiao Ning, hello. I’m Su Hui’s grandmother. You are an outstanding young man — grounded, hardworking, willing to endure hardship. I don’t want to dismiss what you felt, and I know you gave your heart genuinely. But Xiao Hui is a special case, and a life together with him would be extraordinarily difficult. Things have come to this, and as an elder who watched this unfold, I feel a deep sadness too. I wish you a smoother path ahead, and hope this doesn’t leave a lasting mark on your life.]
Ning Yixiao read the message in silence. His eyes stung — but the tears didn’t fall.
He closed his phone, got on his bicycle, and headed back to school to submit his documents.
What he didn’t notice was that a car had been watching him from the moment he left the villa complex.
The windshield wipers swept back and forth as Ning Yixiao drew closer, meter by meter. Feng Zhiguo sat in the driver’s seat, noting how much Ning Yixiao looked like his mother — nearly identical.
And their fates were the same too. Qin Yue had destroyed him; now her son wanted to destroy his.
Feng Zhiguo thought of what Xu Zhi had told him recently, and rage rose in his chest. Exposing Ning Yixiao and Su Hui’s relationship hadn’t been enough. The thought that Ning Yixiao might actually go to the university — as Xu Zhi had suggested — and report what Feng Zhiguo had done to his mother all those years ago, ruining Feng Cheng’s chance to study abroad, stripped him of all reason.
He couldn’t allow this person to destroy his son. His son was everything to him.
The more he thought about it, the more his fury consumed him. He unscrewed a bottle of baijiu, took a long pull, and pressed down on the accelerator.
The rare, heavy snowfall filled the air. Few cars were on the road, fewer pedestrians. The sky was a flat, dim grey. Ning Yixiao’s figure on the bicycle looked like a splinter in the snow, and it drove Feng Zhiguo’s vision red.
At the moment Ning Yixiao turned, their eyes met briefly. Feng Zhiguo saw his face clearly — and the last thread of restraint burned away. He drove straight at him.
The car radio cut off with the impact. The deployed airbag slammed into Feng Zhiguo with brutal force, nearly knocking the air from his lungs. The shock jolted him back to his senses. He looked at the snow ahead of the car, slowly turning red, and fear flooded through him. Without stopping to think, hands trembling so badly he could barely manage the controls, he restarted the car and fled the scene.
The whole way, he kept dialing Xu Zhi’s number. No answer. He was nearly at the edge of the city before the call finally connected.
He had always thought of Xu Zhi as his lifeline. “Xu Zhi — Xu Zhi, I hit someone. I hit Qin Yue’s son. Is he going to die — what do I do?!”
Xu Zhi’s voice was ice. “How did you become this stupid? Feng Zhiguo, you’re a killer now. You’ve truly destroyed your own son.”
“No — you told me! You said Qin Yue’s son was going to ruin me!”
“But I never told you to kill anyone.” Xu Zhi’s tone was almost breezy, edged with contempt. “These are your choices. How could I have known what you would do?”
Feng Zhiguo plunged into despair. On the empty road, his was the only car moving. He wanted to drive into something and end it — but his son’s face appeared before him.
“However…” Xu Zhi spoke again, offering a thread of hope. “I can give you another option. For the sake of us being from the same place.”
“You’re already guilty of hit-and-run. Whether Ning Yixiao lives or dies, you’re a criminal, and your son’s future is finished either way. You might as well do one last thing for me. I promise you — I’ll give your son enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his life. He won’t have to struggle. He can live above others.”
Above others.
Such a seductive phrase. Not only Feng Zhiguo had dreamed of it — Ning Yixiao had too.
But in the moment he lay bleeding in the snow, every ambition seemed to drain away. He wanted only one person. Everything else could go.
And yet — that seemed harder to have than being above others.
In his half-conscious state, he heard someone call emergency services. Bystanders gathered one by one. The ambulance arrived quickly. He was lifted onto a stretcher, and then he lost consciousness.
The antiseptic smell of the hospital was sharp, but what Ning Yixiao mostly smelled was blood. In his delirium, he saw Su Hui’s face — as though Su Hui were lying in the bed beside him, something placed between his teeth to keep him from biting down, instruments on his head, a needle in his arm.
Every time the defibrillator sent a charge through Ning Yixiao’s chest, the Su Hui beside him seemed to undergo the same — a synchronized electric shock treatment.
In a disjointed space between times, both were pierced by current, as though they were being made to pay the same price for a love that was never supposed to exist.
What Ning Yixiao didn’t know was that his hallucination was not a hallucination at all — but a truth playing out on the other side of the world.
Even Su Hui himself hadn’t expected that his surrender would deliver him to a place like hell.
His grandfather — his closest blood relative — had, in the midst of Su Hui’s hysterical breakdown, already agreed to his stepfather’s proposal. Using psychiatric treatment as the stated reason, he arranged for personal escorts to accompany the sedated, unconscious Su Hui on a flight to a private, closed psychiatric facility in North America.
All because Xu Zhi had told him: this was the finest institution of its kind in the world. One to two years, and Su Hui would be back to his old self. Far more manageable.
When Su Hui woke, everything had changed. He was in a room — a small window, a single bed, a desk and chair, an electronic lock on the door that couldn’t be opened from the inside. A prison, made respectable.
It was nothing like any psychiatric facility he’d been to before. He reached for his phone and found even his clothes had been changed. All he had on him was a letter in his grandfather’s handwriting.
He skimmed it. Every word felt like it was trying to swallow him whole.
[When you are well again, Grandfather will treat this as though it never happened. You will still have the best of everything — and I will find you a suitable girl. When the time comes, I’ll come take you home.]
Su Hui raged and wept. What answered him were the faces of foreign doctors and nurses — they opened the door, administered treatment, set up his IV, gave him his medication, and brought him to the therapy room for electroconvulsive treatment.
It wasn’t Su Hui’s first time receiving ECT. But it had never hurt like this.
They spoke to each other in English, saying his illness was severe, that he had begun to experience auditory and visual hallucinations. Su Hui paid none of it any attention. He only wanted to leave. He tried many times. He failed every time.
The place was airtight — nothing with which to end things, and no freedom whatsoever. Su Hui could only lie down, sit up, and watch the same tree outside his window, day after day.
The first month was the worst. Su Hui had always loved his freedom above all else, and he was completely unable to accept being confined. The harder he fought to escape, the harsher the treatments became.
On January 28th, because he refused to recite scripture with the other patients and tore the book in front of him in resistance, he was forcibly escorted to the therapy room and subjected to four sessions of high-intensity treatment in a single day. He was left barely coherent, unable to move from the treatment bed.
Under that relentless pressure, something in the architecture of his mind began to shift. The chaos thickened. The impulse to flee faded. What remained was something simpler: he missed Ning Yixiao. Even though Su Hui knew, with perfect clarity, that he had already lost him.
The nurses here mostly avoided conversation with the patients — the patients were all in terrible states, erratic and unwell, and the nurses gave them a wide berth when they could. The one exception was the head nurse, a woman named Danny, who often stopped to talk to Su Hui. She even knew a little Chinese. She was the only point of light Su Hui could find in that place.
Occasionally he was allowed out for supervised movement within the hospital grounds — not outside, just within. When he saw other patients receiving family visits, Su Hui would stand still and watch from a distance.
Danny came over to guide him back to his room. Su Hui asked quietly, “Can my family come visit me too?”
“Yes, if they want to.”
Su Hui nodded slowly, his voice going very faint, barely there.
“And… what about someone who isn’t family?”
“You mean a friend?” Danny looked at him, a flicker of guilt in her eyes. “If they want to come, they can.”
She knew better than anyone that no one would come. From the moment the unconscious Su Hui had been brought in, she had been instructed to monitor his every move.
But she couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth.
“I see.” Su Hui looked at her. “But there’s no phone here. How would I let him know to come?”
Danny said nothing.
“Could you lend me yours?” His eyes were full of pleading.
She looked at him for a long moment, and finally shook her head. “It would break the rules. I’d lose my job.”
“Then — paper and a pen?” Su Hui’s voice had taken on the quality of a child no one wanted. “Some of the others have paper. They can even draw. I’d like that too.”
Danny relented. The following day, she brought him a pen and a small stack of white paper.
It was the first time Su Hui had looked genuinely happy. He smiled and thanked her, went quietly back to his room, smoothed the paper open, and carefully wrote a name at the top.
*[Ning Yixiao:*
I don’t quite know what to say — it took so long to get paper and a pen, and now that I have them, all I want to do is write to you. You probably haven’t left for abroad yet by now, so sending this to the university should be fine.
I’m sorry, Ning Yixiao. I know you hate being left behind more than anything — and I did it anyway. I’m so sorry. Every promise I made, I broke.
If I could, I would go back to before the first time we met. If I hadn’t gone to that café that day — if I’d just gone home and ended things then — I wouldn’t have caused you so much trouble. We never would have crossed paths. I never would have hurt you.
I had this paper in my hands and I was going to ask you something — a small request. But now I don’t think I should. I’m the one who did wrong. I shouldn’t disturb you.
There are a lot of patients here like me, but I don’t have any friends. It’s noisy at night and I can’t sleep. The man in the room diagonally across from mine cries every single day, like a small child. It frightens me.
When are you leaving? I don’t know if this letter will reach you. If it does, forget what I wrote above — I just hope everything goes well for you. I know it will.
Ning Yixiao, wishing you health and happiness, and a bright future ahead.
— Su Hui, in his own hand]
Su Hui wrote almost every day, but he didn’t hand the letters to Danny right away. He saved them up, and when his mind was clearer, he would sort through the pile and choose the ones that sounded most coherent, then give them to Danny with careful, repeated instructions: please seal them properly, and please don’t get the address wrong.
Danny nodded and promised.
Writing became the only comfort Su Hui had during the hardest stretch of that time. He would sit on his bed, still as a dead sea, composing drafts in his head, imagining when Ning Yixiao might write back.
But gradually, even that hope faded. No matter how many letters he handed to Danny, there was never any reply.
Every time the nurse in charge of the mail walked past, Su Hui would stop her and go through every envelope in her hands. None of them were ever for him.
“There’s nothing for you. Really.”
Su Hui went back to his room, disappointed, and heard a patient in the hallway say the hospital was no longer giving him drawing paper. A hollow panic swept through him. He ran to his room and pulled open the drawer — only one sheet left.
*[Ning Yixiao:*
I’m sorry — I just finished ECT, so my handwriting is shaking a bit. It looks terrible; please bear with it. They might not give me paper after this, so I can’t waste this last sheet.
I want to see you. I really want to see you. During the electric shocks, all I can think about is you. Last night I dreamed about you — you said you forgave me. You held me.
Ning Yixiao, why won’t you come see me? Don’t be angry with me anymore, please. I’m much better now. Come visit me once — take me away from here. Please.
If I can’t write to you after this, would you come find me after you read this one? I’m not asking you to take me away. Just let me see your face once through the glass. Just once, I promise. I’m not lying.
None of them have come to see me. They don’t want me anymore.
My hand is shaking too much. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say — after treatment my head is always a mess, everything is slow. I miss you so much. Are you in California now? Please get some sun. Sunlight makes you feel better. Please eat enough. Please sleep. Stop washing your hands so often. Are you doing better? Is the anxiety still bad? Please get well soon. I miss you so much.
Ning Yixiao, wishing you health and happiness, and a bright future ahead.
— Su Hui, in his own hand]
Two years later, that notorious psychiatric facility — undone by financial collapse and the downfall of its backers — was investigated by the local authorities and forced into bankruptcy. As the institution was being dismantled, the families of every patient were contacted.
Every patient except Su Hui.
On the day he was finally released, Su Hui walked out of that five-story building and put on the coat he had arrived in two years before. The pockets were empty. All around him, every other patient had someone waiting. For Su Hui, not a single pair of footsteps paused in front of him.
He couldn’t find Danny anywhere. He walked alone through a foreign country, directionless, feeling as though he’d stepped out of a different lifetime entirely.
He came to a bus stop, thick fog pressing in on all sides, making it hard to see more than a few feet ahead. He sat on the bench and waited a long time before a passerby came by. He asked carefully if he could borrow the person’s phone. The stranger was kind enough to hand it over.
Su Hui stared at the screen and found he couldn’t remember any phone numbers.
The treatment had left damage that couldn’t be undone. His memory was in pieces. He tried again and again — every number came out wrong.
At that bus stop, in a foreign country, Su Hui borrowed phone after phone and tried over and over, and none of them connected to Ning Yixiao’s number.
When the sky finally went dark, he suddenly began to cry — at a bus stop, in an unfamiliar country, drawing the eyes of strangers.
A kind person approached. “What’s wrong? Did you lose your wallet? Your phone? Is there anything I can do?”
Su Hui cried like a child, and kept repeating the same words.
“I lost him. I can never get him back.”
Author’s Note:
That’s where the flashback arc ends. If you’ve only been reading the P chapters, it really does read like a tragic ending — but this is a second-chance romance. They will meet again, years later, and fall in love again. Even knowing that, writing these chapters broke my heart.
Also: most psychiatric facilities are dedicated to the care and recovery of their patients, and the medical staff who work in them do incredibly difficult and dangerous work. What I’ve written here is fictional — this kind of institution may not actually exist, and I’ve written it in service of the plot.
Electroconvulsive therapy, for reference, is actually a recognized and established treatment option, typically considered when medication hasn’t been sufficiently effective. It does carry some side effects, but it’s not the crude “shock treatment” people tend to imagine.
This whole separation arc was actually the first thing I conceived when I started planning this story. The biggest challenge for me in writing a second-chance romance is always: how do you make the initial breakup feel inevitable? In reality, two people who love each other enough will almost always find ways to stay in contact. If they could do that here, I felt the separation wouldn’t be worth writing at all. So I pushed myself toward something less conventional — two people who are genuinely powerless, who can’t even find each other, a brutal kind of breaking apart. But they never stopped loving each other for a single day.
The remaining threads — Xiao Hui’s years drifting abroad, the changes in his family, and the reckoning that comes for those who did wrong — will be woven into the main chapters. The P arc ends here. Please don’t cry (too much).
