Chapter 32 The Road to Genius: Gu Zeming, who loved Jiang Chuyu, was...
The next day, Jiang Chuyu was awakened by the sound of a piano. She frowned, her head feeling heavy as if it were filled with water. She was exhausted from the previous night, and her memory was fragmented. She tried to raise her arm, but found that her right hand was bound by something.
"What the hell..." Jiang Chuyu muttered, barely opening her eyes, and saw that her right hand was locked to the headboard with a pair of silver electronic handcuffs.
She instantly snapped awake, abruptly sitting up as the blanket slipped off her shoulders.
"Holy crap!"
Jiang Chuyu tugged hard at the handcuffs, but the chains didn't budge.
She stared wide-eyed as she looked around.
This is Gu Zeming's bedroom, but she is the only one in the room.
The melodious sound of a piano drifted from next door; it was her favorite piece, "Spring Dream."
The playing was intermittent, as if the player was absentmindedly strumming the keys.
"Gu Zeming!" Jiang Chuyu cleared her throat, her voice a little hoarse from calling out so loudly last night. "Are you over there?"
The music paused for a second, then continued.
Jiang Chuyu gritted her teeth: "Gu Zeming! Are you crazy?"
She almost screamed until her voice cracked, but the music didn't stop.
Gu Zeming seemed not to hear her cries and played even more fluently.
Jiang Chuyu trembled with anger, yet also felt a vague sense of fear.
She looked down at the handcuffs and noticed a numeric keypad on the side.
She tried entering Gu Zeming's birthday, but the system prompted an error; she then entered the date they first met, but it was still incorrect; she gritted her teeth and entered her own birthday, but the system seemed to be mocking her narcissism, beeping twice to announce her failure once again.
Jiang Chuyu refused to believe it and continued to try out all sorts of numbers related to Gu Zeming, such as his height and size, but to no avail.
"Gu Zeming, you bastard! You pervert!" Jiang Chuyu pounded the mattress with her other hand. "Let me go right now!"
As the piano music reached its climax, Gu Zeming seemed completely absorbed in his art and paid no attention to her.
Jiang Chuyu leaned against the headboard, feeling utterly helpless, wanting to cry but unable to.
If she had known this would happen, she would have been drooling over him instead of ever getting involved with him...
Jiang Chuyu was filled with extreme regret.
She wanted to find something to smash the handcuffs open, but Gu Zeming was clearly on guard; there was nothing around the bed.
Just when I was in despair, a ringtone came from the other end of the bedroom.
Jiang Chuyu's gaze fell on the sofa in the distance.
Her phone was lying on it, playing a song.
Jiang Chuyu stretched out her left hand, her fingertips still two meters away from the phone.
She looked down and saw that the bed legs were welded to the ground and could not be moved at all.
Damn it!
Anyone who didn't know better would think she was some international criminal, resorting to all sorts of underhanded tactics to deal with her.
The phone rang twice and then automatically hung up; all hope was lost.
Jiang Chuyu slumped back against the headboard and listened quietly to the music.
I really hate this feeling of being unable to break free from constraints no matter how hard I try.
It was as if her life was only fit to rot in a small room.
She thought Gu Zeming would at least understand something, but now she realized that he was no different from those who had bullied her.
Jiang Chuyu stared at the corner of the wall, recalling a day from her high school days.
“You know what?” she said to Gu Zeming on the other side of the wall. She knew he could hear her.
“I had thought about ending my own life several times, and once I was about to succeed when a passerby saved me.”
“I am grateful to him for giving me a second life, but at the same time I hate him for keeping me without my consent.”
"How can he be so sure that my life will get better, instead of getting worse and more painful?"
The music stopped abruptly.
All was silent.
After a long while, Gu Zeming's voice rang out from the other side of the wall.
"0417".
Jiang Chuyu's eyelids twitched, her fingers trembling as she typed in numbers, and the handcuffs clicked off. She took them off and threw them on the bed, quickly dressed, and without a second's hesitation, grabbed her phone and bag and rushed to the door.
As I passed the music room, I glanced inside out of the corner of my eye.
Gu Zeming sat at the piano with his back to her, his slender fingers resting on the keys. Sunlight filtered through the sheer curtains, outlining an almost transparent silhouette around him.
His shoulders were taut, and his back view was aloof and lonely.
Jiang Chuyu felt a tightness in her throat.
She recalled their passionate embrace the night before, how he whispered his heavy breaths in her ear, and the abyss in his eyes that she could never reach.
She loved him, but now, all she wants is to escape.
Ultimately, their relationship was nothing more than a secret pleasure.
It is not normal, and it cannot be sustained.
It should have ended long ago.
"Thank you." Jiang Chuyu looked at his broad and upright back and spoke with difficulty. "I was very happy these past seven days."
The piano emitted a piercing hum the moment the door closed.
Jiang Chuyu didn't look back, her pace quickening until she disappeared into the distance.
From then on, they were the most familiar strangers.
He knew what was going to happen next.
She smiles at others and hugs them.
In the music room, Gu Zeming's eyes finally moved.
As soon as Jiang Chuyu left, his world fell silent, like a mute who couldn't speak.
It's too quiet.
He picked up a chair and, with a fierce determination, slammed it against the piano stand again and again.
The music room quickly became a mess.
He threw away the broken chair, braced himself on the piano stand, panting, his knuckles bleeding, sweat dripping from his Adam's apple onto the keys.
Gu Zeming raised his hand and gently wiped it away, then turned his head to look out the window.
The sunlight illuminated his gloomy face.
He hadn't slept all night, and his eyes were bloodshot.
After an unknown amount of time, the phone screen lit up with a text message from Qin Jiyuan: "[The one-week deadline has passed. What's your decision?]"
*
When Gu Zeming was very young, he heard from his parents' generation that the Qin family was a leader in the Beijing business circle, and that the genes of each generation of heirs had to be pure and of high quality. Anyone with even the slightest flaw or defect would be eliminated.
Five years ago, in the summer, Gu Zeming returned to his parents' home with his mother, who suffered from mental illness. His mother, who was radiant when she got married, wasted half her life in the Qin family, transforming from a talented woman admired by everyone into a crazy woman in the attic. When she divorced, she was emaciated and weighed less than 70 pounds.
The room was filled with the smell of medicine. His mother became increasingly taciturn, her eyes so cloudy that she could no longer recognize people. Her thin, bony hand pulled him and said that the Qin family mansion would devour people, telling him not to go back, not to take a single penny from them, and that he must live an ordinary life.
Fifteen-year-old Gu Zeming was thin and frail, gloomy and silent, with mediocre grades. Only his face showed a hint of handsomeness.
The child of a mentally ill person will eventually also be mentally ill.
This is the phrase Gu Zeming has heard the most.
That year, he was a discarded, worthless person, the son of a mentally ill man who brought shame to the family, wearing faded shirts and jeans. His mother and maternal grandparents passed away one after another, and he lived as a dependent, barely surviving by scavenging for garbage.
Alone and aloof, with no friends, little interest, and a bleak future, he wanders the world alone, his soul slowly decaying and rotting.
On a sweltering summer afternoon, at the garbage dump behind the school, the wind was heavy, and aluminum cans and waste paper curled up and scorched in the blazing sun.
Gu Zeming bent down and picked up a deformed aluminum can.
The crisp sound of a dry branch breaking startled the birds in the treetops.
He slowly raised his eyes, and a glimpse of white flashed in his peripheral vision.
Then, he saw her.
A shadowy figure in the distance, very thin, his blue and white school uniform hanging loosely on his body, surrounded by a halo of light, as if it were a hallucination caused by him collecting too much trash.
White canvas shoes crunched over the wild grass. The girl clutched a rough piece of hemp rope in her hand, tiptoed, and threw it onto a tree branch.
The rope always slipped off the tree trunk the moment it hit it. She picked it up, dusted it off, and kept trying, repeating the same cycle like a stuck gear.
When Gu Zeming counted to the seventh time, she suddenly squatted down and hugged her knees.
Amidst the cicadas' chirping, he heard a sound like a small animal whimpering drifting through the heatwave.
She was so tired that even suicide was difficult for her.
Gu Zeming didn't approach; he just watched from a distance. They were separated by distorted air and half a garbage dump, like two isolated islands that didn't interfere with each other, their outlines blurred.
She didn't know who he was, and he had never heard her name before.
They tacitly maintained a delicate balance.
Later, she would come to the back mountain every few days with a rope to hang herself.
He sat on a discarded tire, looking at her with cold, calm eyes.
They are born lacking in empathy, morality, and character.
Until one day.
She finally hung herself up there.
As he kicked over the stone with his toe, the rope creaked under the strain as his body dangled in mid-air.
Her body hung in the wind, like a withered leaf about to fall. Gu Zeming suddenly remembered that his mother had also died in the same way.
By the time he came to his senses, he had already caught her falling body.
My fingertips touched the pulse in her neck; it was still beating, weak but persistent.
He called for an ambulance.
After that day, she never came to the back mountain again.
He knew her name was Jiang Chuyu, the young lady who had just been brought back to the Jiang family. But many people liked to call her a country bumpkin and mocked her Mandarin accent.
He followed her through every corner of the school, saw classmates deliberately knocking over her water cup, saw her locked in a toilet stall, and saw them carving vicious words all over her desk... He threw a punch at those people, only to be punched back, blood seeping from the corner of his mouth. For the first time in his life, he tasted pain, so real.
His knuckles gradually became covered with bruises, and his fists grew harder and harder.
Finally, her world became completely quiet, and no one could disturb her anymore.
In just a few months, her back straightened, her eyes stopped darting around, and her grades climbed from the bottom to the top of the grade, dominating the rankings and becoming a legend in the school.
On a bright summer day, the air was filled with the fragrance of orange blossoms. She stood under the national flag and spoke, her arms snow-white, her hair tip shimmering with a fuzzy halo, her voice clear and firm. She was beautiful to the point of being prickly, yet captivating.
The crowd surged, and she was surrounded by applause and praise.
Gu Zeming stood in the shadows looking up at her, and suddenly realized that she no longer needed him.
He stared at the hem of her skirt, which was being lifted by the wind, imagining the feeling of it wrapping around his wrist.
On stage and off stage, a mere three meters apart, yet the gaze of the entire world is fixed upon them.
Gu Zeming clutched the hair tie in his pocket. It was an old item she had casually discarded, which he had picked up and worn for two years.
After school, he inexplicably followed her to her house.
The second-floor window was open. She pasted the certificate on the headboard of her bed and then sat with her knees drawn up to her chest for a long time.
Gu Zeming's Adam's apple bobbed.
The protective instinct of the past has long since degenerated into a more morbid craving.
In the darkest days of his youth, he longed for someone for the first time so much that just one glance from them would cause him physical pain.
He remembered her face, turned and left, fading out of her world, and picked up a pen.
The child of a mentally ill person can also be an exceptional genius.
Many people have misjudged him.
He was smarter and more ruthless than Qin Jiyuan.
That year, he was the top scorer in Beijing's college entrance examination.
He loves someone, and he wants to give her the best of everything in the world. So, he wants to become that best.
He overcame all difficulties and walked step by step to her, letting her see himself.
Gu Zeming, who loves Jiang Chuyu, is invincible.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
