Yet Qian Wei didn’t stop there—there was still far too much she needed to verify.
“You used to dream of becoming a judge, didn’t you?”
Lu Xun paused, then nodded.
“So why did you change your dream? Why become a lawyer instead?”
Lu Xun fell silent for a moment before finally speaking. “The summer after sophomore year had just started. Most students had already gone home; only a few stayed behind for the school’s practicum program. In your dorm building, a girl who’d stayed on campus lost an expensive necklace. To find it, the dorm supervisor searched the rooms without permission while everyone was out, and found the necklace in your drawer…”
Qian Wei bit her lip. “Why do I have absolutely no memory of this?”
“Because I’d stayed on campus that summer too, so I handled it for you.” Lu Xun lowered his head, his lashes dropping. “The security footage and other evidence proved you had nothing to do with it. For some reason, that girl framed you. And since the room search itself was improper—conducted without consent—the school decided, once your innocence was clear, to simply let the whole matter drop and never speak of it again. Not many students had stayed on campus that summer, so few people even knew. By the time everyone came back for the new term, no one was any the wiser that it had ever happened.”
“‘I hope that one day, I can defend the person I love, rather than maintain a judge’s so-called objective neutrality.'” Qian Wei recited the words softly. “Is that why you chose to become a lawyer?”
Lu Xun froze. “You heard that?”
“What?”
Lu Xun looked flustered. “Something I said to you, at your bedside, while you were unconscious.”
He explained, “Your doctor said your head had taken a serious blow and you might remain unconscious indefinitely. The best approach was to talk to you often—outside stimulation is supposed to help coma patients a great deal. I didn’t know what else to say at the time, so I just wanted to tell you that you were the reason I chose this career path, that I was only willing to change the course of my life and my dreams for you.” Lu Xun turned his head away, his ears faintly reddening. “If I’d known you could hear me, I wouldn’t have said any of that. It was foolish. I wasn’t thinking clearly—I was too desperate.”
“So you also mentioned confessing to me back when you were nineteen?” Once she’d said this, Qian Wei added, blushing, in a small voice, “For what it’s worth, I rather liked you not thinking clearly.”
Lu Xun blinked, his lashes trembling faintly, then answered in a low voice, “No, I didn’t.” At this point not just his ears but his whole face had begun to flush. “I only said a lot of scattered nonsense. It’s better you don’t remember it.”
Now it was Qian Wei’s turn to feel uncertain. She glanced at Lu Xun and decided to lay everything out. “But I had a dream—I dreamed I fell to my death and was reborn back at nineteen. In that reborn life, you wrote me a love letter, but Qian Chuan mistook it for something from his own admirer, and so much else happened besides. I assumed it was all something I’d imagined—that at the very least, none of it existed in this timeline. But now it turns out that’s not the case. I checked with Qian Chuan, and the details and events I don’t actually remember, he can confirm really happened. So maybe it wasn’t rebirth at all—maybe everything really did happen, in reality.” As she spoke, Qian Wei couldn’t help tugging at her own hair. “So what on earth is going on? Have I lost my mind? Or did I really crack my skull open in that fall?” She glanced at Lu Xun. “Is it possible that even this conversation with you right now is something I’m imagining?”
“Qian Wei, do you know—it wasn’t until you said those things to me at the airport last night that I started doubting the same thing. Whether everything in front of me was something I’d imagined, simply because I love you too much.”
Qian Wei blinked. She’d never seen Lu Xun like this before. Tonight he looked both commanding and, strangely, a little fragile—an odd combination of qualities to find in one person, and yet somehow Lu Xun wore them naturally. His eyes were fixed on her so gently, as if he had been waiting for her his whole life.
“But I can say for certain now that all of this is real.” Lu Xun’s dark, bright eyes stayed locked on Qian Wei as he said, in a calm voice, words that left her anything but calm. “My heart rate right now is probably close to a hundred and fifty. I pinched myself on the way here—it really hurt.”
“You didn’t imagine any of it, and there was no rebirth.” Lu Xun lowered his head, the muscles of his arm still faintly tense. “Everything you experienced is connected to your course of treatment.”
“What do you mean?”
Lu Xun paused. “When you were first brought to the hospital, your condition was quite bad. The hospital tried two conventional treatment plans, but neither worked. At the time, your doctor had already told your parents to prepare for the worst—that you might never wake up.”
Qian Wei was startled. Her situation had once been that dire?
“I couldn’t accept the possibility of you never waking up.” As he recalled that time, a trace of bitterness still lingered in Lu Xun’s voice. “I did everything I could to find alternative treatments. Maybe heaven took pity on me—just as I was on the verge of despair, your doctor told me about a new drug, ACF-02, that had just received regulatory approval and gone on the domestic market. This new drug was very effective at stimulating the brains of coma patients, but it had some notable side effects, and because it was expensive and newly released, most doctors were still cautious about using it. Your doctor explained all the pros and cons to me. But the longer you remained unconscious, the lower your chances of ever waking up. So in the end, I convinced your parents, and with me covering the cost, we went with that aggressive treatment plan.”
Lu Xun’s eyes were clear and steady, his tone as composed as he could manage—but even now, Qian Wei could hear, beneath that even voice, the turmoil and inner struggle of that desperate time.
Choosing a treatment plan for a patient who might never wake up was already a huge gamble on its own—and Lu Xun wasn’t even a direct family member. The psychological weight he must have carried in that moment of decision was surely heavier than anyone else’s could have been.
“If the new treatment worked, that would obviously be wonderful. But Lu Xun, did you ever think about what would happen if it failed? My parents would very likely have blamed you—thought your aggressive treatment plan caused a bad outcome,” Qian Wei said quietly. “In situations like that, doing more only means more room for error, and doing nothing means nothing to be blamed for. If you’d simply provided the money without ever making any treatment decisions yourself, it would have been much safer for you.”
“I didn’t have room to think about all that.” Lu Xun’s voice was hoarse. “Even if there was only a one-in-ten-thousand chance, I’d have spent everything I had to try it, and I wouldn’t have cared if I got blamed for it.”
Facing a Lu Xun like this, Qian Wei felt that no amount of gratitude or being moved could match up to what he’d actually done, fighting so hard against impossible odds.
“So how does this new drug actually work, treatment-wise?” Qian Wei had a feeling the truth of everything was tied up with this medication.
Lu Xun pressed his lips together. “Every day of a person’s life, they take in all kinds of scattered, even useless information—like maybe today you chatted idly with a taxi driver, or yesterday you haggled with an old woman at the vegetable market. That information gets stored in your brain as it happens, but because your brain judges it unimportant, it separates it out as short-term memory and deletes it later to make room for new memories. What this new drug does is stimulate brain cells and functions, especially the areas responsible for storing memory. Under its influence, short-term memories you’d once deleted can be restored, and your brain’s potential gets triggered, generating new energy—which in turn stimulates the brain’s owner to wake up.”
Qian Wei took a long moment to process this before she finally began to understand. She asked cautiously, “So what you’re saying is, all these details and memories genuinely happened. Qian Chuan told me about them too, but I never thought they were important, so I brushed them off and quickly forgot them—didn’t remember they’d ever happened at all—until this new drug stimulated my brain and brought everything rushing back at once?”
Lu Xun nodded. “But the side effects are also quite pronounced. Because the stimulation to the brain and memory is so intense all at once, as you recover those old short-term memories, a huge amount of information floods in simultaneously, and sometimes even the timeline gets scrambled, which produces hallucination-like side effects.”
So it was true that the nineteen-year-old Lu Xun had sent her a love letter—just not on her mother’s birthday, but on some ordinary weekend. That explained why the major events lined up but so many small details didn’t quite match. All those short-term memories flooding back at once, combined with the hallucinatory side effects, had pieced themselves together into the illusion of a rebirth at nineteen.
And so, everything finally came to light.
Qian Wei felt as though she’d wandered a maze for a long time, lost and troubled, until finally someone had reached out, taken her hand, cleared the fog before her eyes, and led her step by step out of the labyrinth that had trapped her.
She looked straight at Lu Xun. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Why hadn’t he told her, why had he carried all of it alone, why had he forced himself to bear it by himself. Qian Wei couldn’t imagine how much he must love her, to have swallowed and endured all that pressure alone—to have given so much for her and never once asked for anything in return, never even letting her know, only quietly, steadfastly, watching over her.
“Your doctor said the side effects of this new drug were hard to predict, so he advised against telling you the full story right after you woke up. It might be too much of a shock—he was worried you wouldn’t be able to handle all the scrambled memories and would break down.” Lu Xun turned his head aside, his lashes catching a lovely curve in the light. “Honestly, if you hadn’t asked me yourself, I might never have told you. It was too foolish.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want you to be with me out of gratitude.” Lu Xun looked at Qian Wei. “Qian Wei, if all you feel toward me is gratitude, then please push me away, please refuse me—because when it comes to you, I have no resistance and no self-control at all.”
Qian Wei said nothing. She simply reached up, cupped Lu Xun’s face in her hands, and kissed his lips first. “I like you. It was never out of gratitude.” She stared into his eyes. “Why would you think I’m with you out of gratitude?”
Caught off guard by the kiss, Lu Xun looked a little flustered himself. He tried to hide the faint flush on his face and keep his voice steady. “Because the second time I confessed to you, you turned me down again. So I really don’t know what could have changed your mind now.”
Qian Wei was stunned. “What second confession? When did you ever confess to me?”
Lu Xun blinked, then quickly seemed to realize something, his tone taking on a note of grievance. “Qian Wei, that legal aid case—have you really still not looked at it, even now?”
“Don’t tell me… don’t tell me you tucked a confession letter inside that legal aid case file?”
Lu Xun pressed his lips tight and said nothing, but the storm brewing in his expression said it all.
It was actually true!
Qian Wei’s voice trembled. Even now, she still felt a strong sense of unreality. “So you’re saying you’ve liked me this whole time? From nineteen to twenty-eight? All this time, all along? Nine years? Stubbornly, hopelessly in love with me this whole time?”
Lu Xun turned his head away, looking out at the deep colors beyond the window.
“Yeah.”
At that moment Qian Wei genuinely wanted to bang her own head against something. What exactly had she missed out on? She wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry. She hadn’t known—she truly hadn’t known—that the nineteen-year-old Lu Xun had written her a love letter that she’d never received through sheer bad luck. And she certainly hadn’t known that the twenty-eight-year-old Lu Xun had written her a second one!
She could hardly imagine what a blow it must have been for someone as proud as Lu Xun, to have his first confession at nineteen go completely unnoticed—and yet, even after that, to quietly keep watch over her for nine years before confessing again at twenty-eight.
“Qian Wei, that legal aid case—look at it right away.”
“Qian Wei, the legal aid case—have you read it?”
“The legal aid case, have you read it or not?”
Qian Wei thought, full of regret and self-reproach, that she really should have noticed how oddly eager Lu Xun had seemed about that legal aid case all along. He’d reminded her so many times—including that very last text that had sent her tumbling into the construction pit. Only now did everything finally make sense. Lu Xun had never been urging her to get to work—he’d been waiting for her answer to him.
Learning that Qian Wei had missed his second confession as well, Lu Xun couldn’t help but look rather displeased. “Qian Wei, I know it’s a bit of a mood-killer to bring this up now, but I am still your boss, technically. Even once you knew I liked you, you shouldn’t have felt so entitled as to completely ignore your boss’s instructions, should you? How many times did I remind you to read that legal aid case file? And you actually lied and told me you’d already read it!”
Qian Wei mumbled her defense. “What do you mean, entitled? I had no idea you liked me at all!” Then, as if suddenly remembering something, she added, “And besides, what kind of ‘liking me’ is that! All your lucrative cases, you never once brought me along on any of them! You call that liking someone?”
“Do you remember the Chenyang Machinery acquisition case?”
Qian Wei blinked, then nodded, a little resentfully. “Of course I remember. I remember it perfectly—that was the only project you ever brought me onto!”
“On that case, in the final due diligence legal opinion for the merger, I made a mistake—one that nearly affected a client’s decision involving several tens of millions in the acquisition. Thankfully we caught it just in time.” Lu Xun pressed his lips together. “For a lawyer, a mistake like that is essentially fatal. If it hadn’t been caught in time, it wouldn’t just have ruined the client’s business—it would have destroyed my own career and our firm’s reputation as well. Qian Wei, I can’t work on the same case or project as you, because just having you standing next to me is enough to break my concentration. I can’t focus on the case itself. I can’t control myself around you. Whenever you’re there, I stop being professional. It’s a real problem.”