Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Wang Yu stared at me for a moment. The light went out of his eyes, and his mouth twisted in self-mockery.

A few dry, broken laughs scraped from his throat as he pointed dejectedly at my father.

“Why won’t you believe me when I tell you he’s the killer?

“If it weren’t for him, I would never have killed your sister.

“Ask him why he knew I was the murderer and still kept silent for ten years!”

He Zhiyuan’s flushed face turned first green, then white.

I tore the gauze from his mouth. A streak of blood marked it as it landed with a soft thud.

“Say something! Is he… telling the truth?”

I glared at the man before me, so familiar and yet suddenly a stranger, and screamed the question until my voice broke.

This man had spent ten years torturing me with his moral condemnation. Now his face was ashen. He avoided my gaze, unable to force out a single word.

No rage. No denial.

His silence was a deafening answer.

“Why? My sister died in agony. Why would you protect her killer?

“You knew how she died, and still watched me destroy myself searching for the truth for ten years!”

I looked at the hypocrite before me.

The blood in my body seemed to freeze. Ten years of faith and guilt collapsed like a mountain into the sea. Fury and despair warped my voice into a hoarse, broken thing.

“Because he never dared speak!” Wang Yu burst into manic laughter, laughing until tears ran down his face. He pointed at He Zhiyuan on the floor.

“Your respected father, your righteous, moral, exemplary teacher—he’s a pervert who preyed on his own students!

“Have you read Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise? I was a second Fang Si-Chi, and your father was Li Guohua in the flesh!

“I was thirteen… His favorite student? His close friend? All of it was bullshit!”

The revelation struck like lightning. My throat closed, and I stumbled back until my spine hit the cold wall.

“Do you know why I fought so hard to study psychiatry and even minored in psychology?” Wang Yu shouted. “It wasn’t to save anyone else. It was to cure myself!”

He yanked up his sleeve. Layer upon layer of self-inflicted scars covered his arm, one after another, horrifying to behold.

“Twelve years ago, I finally escaped him and got into university. But he still wouldn’t let me go. He forbade me to study outside the city and used photographs from our time together to blackmail me into meeting him at hotels.

“Why should filth like him get to have a perfect, happy family? Why should everyone still worship him?”

Wang Yu’s voice climbed into a shriek, like a demon clawing its way out of hell.

“I couldn’t accept it! I wanted to tear off his righteous mask!

“I wanted to see what he would choose—his precious reputation or his daughter’s life.

“And guess what? He saw his younger daughter’s tortured body and knew at once that I had done it. But to hide his own shame, he didn’t say a word!

“Exemplary teacher, my ass. He’s an animal who swallowed the murder of his own child to protect his name!”

“So you truly killed my sister?” I clenched my molars until they hurt. Hatred made every breath painful.

“She was Li Guohua’s beloved younger daughter,” Wang Yu said, madness flooding his eyes. “Twelve years old—the same beautiful age I had been. She was perfect.

“I invited your father to Lion Mountain that day, and he agreed without a second thought.

“I wanted to lure his daughter into a trap right under his nose, just as he had made me his prey beneath my parents’ eyes.”

I fell apart.

My grief was too vast for tears. The nausea I had only just suppressed seized my stomach again, forcing a sour, bitter taste up my throat.

Ten years.

Ten entire years.

Whenever I closed my eyes, I heard myself saying, If you can’t find the flowers, don’t come back to see me.

I had always believed that one sentence drove her to her death. That I destroyed our happy family.

On countless nights when I could no longer bear it, I climbed alone to the roof of the university laboratory building.

I wanted to close my eyes and jump.

Then I could repay my sister with my life.

But at the final moment, fear always stopped me.

If I died, no one might ever learn why she had died of thirst.

So I could not die.

I did not dare.

Burdened by guilt, I had turned myself into Sisyphus, forever pushing his stone uphill.

Only today did I understand that the source of it all was something so sordid, so filthy, so revolting.

I turned my stiff neck toward the man on the floor—the man I had called Dad for more than twenty years.

He sagged like a heap of mud, head bowed, without a word in his defense.