97 Crossing Hearts

“You have truly forgotten some things,” Fu Zhi said coldly. “But I don’t know exactly what they are. I only know you are under a binding gu. I promised not to tell Bei Gong Qiyi, but he knew it himself, and Bei Gong Juechen will know one day anyway. Better he hear it from me than from someone else prying it out.”

He kept thinking to himself that he could not bear it.

“What gu?” Bei Gong Juechen asked.

Fu Zhi replied evenly. “It is called the Binding Bug. As the name implies, it shackles all the power in your body. Bei Gong Qiyi planted it in you on the day you married.”

Bei Gong Juechen lifted his brows slightly. “And then?”

Fu Zhi looked up at him once, his voice turning low. “Then you came to me to remove it. I required you to stay with me for ten days.”

Bei Gong Juechen gave him a cold glance. After a long pause he whispered, “I agree.”

Fu Zhi nodded slowly. “Yes, you agreed. For these ten days, you lie beside the window.” He pointed to the edge and continued. “These ten days were, in my life, the happiest since my childhood.” His tone remained flat as always, yet Bei Gong Juechen heard the word “happiest” clearly in it.

“Half a day after taking the antidote, your whole body will go limp and weak. On the tenth day—the day the gu is being broken off—you know who arrived. Bei Gong Qiyi. He must have planned it in advance, timed his arrival perfectly. He took you away then. I knew no more than that.”

Bei Gong Juechen’ brow furrowed deeper. Qiyi had surely tampered with his memory, but still… “I think he must have cast another bug on me. Can you do anything about that?”

Fu Zhi pulled Bei Gong Juechen’s sleeve up, revealing the smooth white skin of his forearm, and frowned faintly. He suddenly stood and tugged open the front of Juechen’s collar. The man made no move to resist. The skin across his chest was still impossibly fair; Fu Zhi’s gaze skimmed over it as if searching for a hidden mark. At last, behind his left breast, he found a faint bright red spot.

Narrowing his eyes, Fu Zhi murmured, “Juechen, I need to see your back near the waist.”

Bei Gong Juechen nodded without hesitation. Fu Zhi pulled his shirt up to the hips and saw another red point at his waist and backside.

He drew the clothing back into place and said in a low voice, “Now I understand one thing.” He buttoned his own robes and stood still.

“What is it?” Bei Gong Juechen asked.

“The day you escaped from Li Manor, it was certainly arranged by Bei Gong Qiyi. He calculated every step. The gu in you needed the Binding Bug as a key, so he released you from the manor—because your affliction had to be undone first.”

“Why didn’t he undo it himself?”

Fu Zhi gave him a detached look. “Because removing a bug consumes spirit force, and planting one consumes even more. If Bei Gong Qiyi wanted to be certain there was no mistake, he wouldn’t risk it. So he guided you out of the Hundred Demons Palace, letting you find me in peace.”

“He was really careful to scheme at every step,” Bei Gong Juechen said with a cold sneer. Fu Zhi continued, “I said his timing was exact. Your original bug had not fully dispersed then. He used the remnants in your body as bait and slipped another bug into you.”

Playing with an emerald signet on his thumb, Bei Gong Juechen gave a half-smile. “What kind of bug is it?”

Fu Zhi rose and walked to the shelves, pulling out a worn volume. “It is called Crossing-Emotion, an extremely old sorcery bug. I never thought anyone still knew how to make one. Bei Gong Qiyi is, truly, a genius at it.”

He read from the book: “This bug is named Cross-Emotion. When cast, it can alter the victim’s memories. Gradually, almost without their knowing, the victim comes to love the caster. Their feelings are carried across together; that is Cross-Emotion. The only way to undo it is…”

“What?” Bei Gong Juechen asked coldly.

He closed the book and set it back. Fu Zhi looked at Bei Gong Juechen’s deep green eyes and spoke one phrase after another: “By dying together.”

Round pearls of peanuts rolled over Chumi’s pale smooth fingertips, and Bei Gong Qiyi sighed, tilting his head. “Chumuji, do you know? I always believed I would never fall in love with anyone. Yet I do not know why, from the first moment I saw Bei Gong Juechen after I was born, I fixed every one of his details in my memory and kept it there.”

He smiled faintly and put a peanut in his mouth. “How can a newborn remember that much? And yet—believe me—I remember everything about him. Not one thing has faded.”

Even though he crossed worlds with memories from a past life, nearly seventeen years had already passed since he came here.

Chumuji watched him in silence. At first he had thought someone like Bei Gong Qiyi would never truly love a man. When he first sensed this strange attachment, he had taken it for a child’s possessiveness, never imagining Bei Gong Juechen would become his obsession.

When obsession deepens enough, it becomes a demon-mire.

“Do you know why I moved lotus blooms here from Hainan?” Bei Gong Qiyi said, eyes half-lidded as if returning to that summer. “That year I saw the most beautiful lotus in the world. To be precise—someone leapt out to pluck a lotus bloom, his dark green robe and the lotus leaf beneath him nearly one with each other. But his face was a hundred times more beautiful than the open white lotus.”

Chumuji looked at him, and the dark pool in his eyes seemed for a moment to swirl and then soften, before deepening again.

“You know, at that time I was nine. Even so, I clearly knew I had a strange possessive feeling for my older brother. But after a few days he left the manor for cultivation. He was gone nine years. In those nine years, I almost did not miss him. Yet when I saw him again, I finally understood: I had not failed to miss him. I had simply engraved him into myself from the beginning.”

Bei Gong Qiyi smiled.

“At that time I was nine, yet I clearly knew I had fallen for one man—a man, whom I called my elder brother by name. I liked him.”

“Those years away from the manor did not make that feeling fade,” he went on. “It only grew stronger. I knew I had fallen into a whirlpool and could not climb out. In truth, I did not want to.”

He drank from his cup, then added softly, “Beauty’s pavilion, hero’s grave—all that said about them was true.”

“So from then on you began planning, and step by step you drew Bei Gong Juechen into that whirlpool. You loved him so much you could not bear that he might not love you back. You wanted his body, but you wanted his heart even more. You used every method to make him love you, and… Bei Gong…” Chumuji cut in before he could finish, fixing Qiyi’s dark eyes with his own and speaking low, “Now that he is said to like you, how can you know whether his love is genuine or only one the bug has made?”

Bei Gong Qiyi blinked, then laughed. “You’re wrong, Chumuji. I did use every means to make him love me, but what he feels for me is real.”

Crossing-Emotion can make the afflicted fall in love with the caster. But if there is no feeling in return, it cannot be called true mutual crossing. Bei Gong Qiyi calculated every step to secure victory, and he did. He fed his own love and desire into Bei Gong Juechen’s ears, into his heart, in quiet, gradual ways.

All he needed was the little feeling that Bei Gong Juechen had for him. A little, just a little—an ember is enough to set a prairie on fire.

“Bei Gong,” Chumuji said with a bitter smile, “the one who is loved by you is truly the most unfortunate person under heaven.” And yet there are many who want to be that unfortunate one, but never get the chance.

Qiyi brushed the peanut crumbs from his sleeves and rose. “My love for him is such that I do not demand equal love in return. But at least he must have some feeling for me, if only so my devotion to him is not in vain.”

No one else remained in the room. The wine vessel was empty. Chumuji lowered his head, hiding his expression behind his palm. A low bitter laugh escaped him. “Qiyi, Qiyi—he loves you, and you demand that he love you in return. What of my love? How selfish you are.”

When he left Fu Zhi’s pavilion, evening had already thickened. Bei Gong Juechen walked slowly. He did not feel the urge to return to Li Manor; Qi Yi’s deception did not matter to him now. He was thinking only one thing: was this quiet fondness of his for Qi Yi born from Crossing-Emotion, or from his own heart?

A red figure brushed past and did not even glance at him, then stopped and turned back. “Bei Gong Juechen?”

He turned, expression blank. The girl gave a faint smile. “I am Ran Luo. You and Qiang Yanxi married, we met then.”

“I only remember the marriage with Qiang Yanxi. I remember nothing after.”

Ran Luo stepped closer. “It’s Bei Gong Qiyi?”

He nodded once. Then, suddenly, he asked, “Do you know about Cross-Emotion?”

Her expression changed at once. “You are under it?”

Bei Gong Juechen nodded. Ran Luo’s face grew stern. “Bei Gong Qiyi truly planned every step. I know Cross-Emotion well enough.”

The sky had darkened fully, and a shadowed tone would not leave the face of the strikingly handsome man.

Crossing-Emotion is crossing together; only if both hearts hold feeling can they truly cross one another.

So my liking for you is real, he thought. He shut his dark green eyes and a faint smile spread at the corner of his mouth.

Bei Gong Qiyi, in this round, you win.

Author’s note: Ahahaha—at last the so-called Great Brother finally admitted his feelings. Not easy at all.