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Time seemed to rewind, and Song Xuanhe was brought back to that rainy evening that changed everything.

In the car back then, the boy in front of him had the same expression on his face, the youthful face tense with the effort of pretending to be calm, while his eyes couldn’t hide the nervous love that he felt.

He had a beautiful face, with eyes that were both full of emotion and concealed his intentions. When someone had these kinds of features, it was easy for people to forgive his wrongdoings and his imperfections. Xiao Yuanmu used this natural talent to great effect, and because he had so many other talents, it was even easier for others to let him off the hook easily.

This was a natural fault in the nature of humankind, it was impossible to change.

Even as a designer who often saw beauty in all its forms, who wasn’t easily moved, Song Xuanhe had a hard time resisting this attack.

Back then, Song Xuanhe had already forgiven him the moment he spoke. But at that time, because of forces outside of his control, he couldn’t say anything.

This time, though, it was different.

Song Xuanhe closed the door behind him, and moved steadily to Xiao Yuanmu’s bedside. He placed his hand gently on his face, brushing a finger across the corner of his eye while saying: “You and I are the same. There will never be anything that you can do that will hurt me, except if you leave me.”

He looked at Xiao Yuanmu, finding his answer in his shaking gaze. “Are you preparing to leave me?”

Xiao Yuanmu looked at Song Xuanhe, dark eyes overflowing with light. He gently lifted the corners of his lips and took Song Xuanhe’s hand. “No matter what, I will never voluntarily leave you.”

Song Xuanhe blinked hard, the sour feeling at the back of his nose rising to his eyes.

“Xiao Yuanmu, what exactly is wrong with you?”

Xiao Yuanmu didn’t answer, but the system did.

[Xiao Yuanmu is experiencing organ failure.]

Song Xuanhe asked blankly: [What does that mean?]

[Whether it’s his heart, liver, spleen, lungs, kidneys, stomach...]

“I know what organ failure means!” Song Xuanhe shouted. “I’m asking why.”

[After you completed your mission, my system was returned to its original settings, and it takes longer for me to execute many tasks. I’m trying to figure out why he’s experiencing organ failure, but I need more time...]

“How much?”

[I don’t know, I’m guessing around fifty hours or so.]

“Xuanhe.”

“Can’t it be faster?” Song Xuanhe’s face was tense. “Can you find a treatment?”

[If I could find the reason for the failure, then the chances of finding a treatment would be high. But I can’t be sure that this planet will have any way of completely treating Xiao Yuanmu.]

“Please find the cause quickly,” Song Xuanhe said softly. “Thank you.”

The system paused, then said: [Don’t thank me, and don’t apologize to me either. Everything I do for you is only what I’m supposed to be doing anyways.]

Song Xuanhe opened his mouth to reply, when Xiao Yuanmu interrupted him and asked: “Who are you talking to?”

“Wait until the time is right.” Song Xuanhe looked at Xiao Yuanmu. “You told me that before- that, when the time is right, you’ll tell me your secret.”

Xiao Yuanmu looked into his eyes, then suddenly laughed. 

“You’re not Song Xuanhe,” he said confidently.

“I am Song Xuanhe.”

“Not the Song Xuanhe I met,” Xiao Yuanmu shook his head, pulling Song Xuanhe’s hand down and tracing it. “Until now, I kept thinking that it was a parallel universe.”

Song Xuanhe looked at him without much surprise.

Xiao Yuanmu had a distant look on his face, and he raised his hand. “A few days ago, I suddenly found that it was difficult to control my hand.”

Song Xuanhe’s gaze moved to his hand. His hand was beautiful, with long pale fingers, neatly cut nails, and no imperfections. Looking closer, though, he saw a faint tremor going through the hand.

Xiao Yuanmu’s lips tilted up slightly. “This is what happens when I use all of my strength to control my hand.”

“A few days ago, I went back to visit Dr. Gao Sen to do a physical checkup using his private laboratory,” Xiao Yuanmu said. “I found irregularities in my body at the time in my life when I was most looking forward to the future. It was my fault for not properly paying attention to my health. I kept putting off telling you until it came to this.”

“Back then, I could tell that you were going through something difficult,” Xiao Yuanmu told Song Xuanhe. “I didn’t want to burden you more when I didn’t have any definitive results.”

Song Xuanhe didn’t look at Xiao Yuanmu, the hand resting on his bed turning pale.

“My body was only acting up a little back then, and there were a lot of things going on in the company, so I spent most of my time at work and made an appointment to fly back and check with Dr. Gao Sen afterwards.”

Song Xuanhe raised his head, looking at Xiao Yuanmu and speaking one sentence at a time. “When you came back, you introduced me to your lawyer, your doctor, and your financial advisor one by one. This was because of your results, wasn’t it?”

Xiao Yuanmu grabbed the hand that Song Xuanhe left on the bed, his shaking, chilly fingers sending a shiver through Song Xuanhe’s cold body.

“I thought about getting you to leave,” Xiao Yuanmu’s grip on Song Xuanhe’s hand tightened, eyes darkening. “But I couldn’t.” 

He looked at Song Xuanhe, eyes filled with an apology and an even deeper regret. “I’m sorry.”

Song Xuanhe: “Remember the seafood congee.”

Xiao Yuanmu paused, eyes softening with a smile. “Okay.”

In a moment, the smile in his eyes scattered again, replaced with a thousand heavy emotions. He pushed them down again.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Xiao Yuanmu asked softly. He didn’t look at Song Xuanhe, looking out into the air instead.

“I do.”

Xiao Yuanmu’s eyelashes shook. “I’ve died twice now.”

Song Xuanhe’s eyebrows furrowed, and he looked at Xiao Yuanmu with astonishment. Seeing the surprise in his eyes, Xiao Yuanmu frowned to himself a little mockingly. 

“Are you afraid?”

[Twice?] Song Xuanhe asked in his mind. [Xiao Yuanmu reincarnated twice?]

[Xiao Yuanmu reincarnated twice?] 

From its tone, the system sounded even more surprised.

For some reason, hearing someone be more surprised than him, Song Xuanhe found himself calming down. He looked at Xiao Yuanmu.

“You said before that you thought this was a parallel universe. What do you mean?”

“Before the first time I was reborn, I met you for the first time.” Xiao Yuanmu said placidly. “It wasn’t you, actually, it was another Song Xuanhe. He could be counted as the main reason for my rebirth, and when I was first reborn I truly hated him. But there were too many things that needed my attention, and I gradually forgot to keep track of him. Until his death, I never saw him again.”

“After I was reborn for the second time, I thought it would be like that again,” Xiao Yuanmu said, looking at Song Xuanhe. “But it wasn’t the same.”

“You were different from him. At first, it was only a suspicion, but soon it became a certainty. But this was a good thing to me, since it let me accept the fact that I fell in love with you more easily.” Xiao Yuanmu said. “So I thought of this world as a parallel version of the first world. Now, though, listening to you talk to yourself just now, I’m beginning to think that I might be wrong.”

“Your first rebirth was because of me, what about your second?” Song Xuanhe asked. “How did you die then?”

“A car accident.” Xiao Yuanmu’s lips twitched. “The last round, Xiao Baicong also crushed his leg, but it was only the one leg that time, so he didn’t give up on taking over the Xiao family business. Using Zhang Siwei’s cousin and Bai Mo, they planned a car accident.”

Song Xuanhe frowned and asked: “Why were you fooled back then?”

Xiao Yuanmu looked at him with a smile in his eyes. “Because you weren’t there last time.”

Song Xuanhe didn’t know what subtext lay beneath the surface-level meaning of Xiao Yuanmu’s words, and didn’t try to decipher what story hid behind this phrase. Even with just the words themselves, he could feel his heart twist painfully.

“You have me in this world, so you’ll survive this time.” Song Xuanhe said.

Xiao Yuanmu smiled and shook his head. “Before I met you, I thought that it was because I made too many mistakes in my previous life, that the heavens were punishing me. Now, after knowing you, I understand why I was reborn.”

“Yang Jie and Louis will help you, and the financial advisor that I introduced you to has-”

Song Xuanhe stopped him mid-sentence, teeth digging into his bottom lip and slipping his tongue between his teeth with passion underlaid with fury. Xiao Yuanmu was forced to wrest control back from him as the kiss grew out of control.

By the time the two separated, they were both breathing erratically.

“Xiao Yuanmu,” Song Xuanhe said. “You told me your secret. Now let me tell you ours.”

Xiao Yuanmu looked at Song Xuanhe. 

Song Xuanhe smiled back at him and said: “It’s true that I’m not the original Song Xuanhe, but this isn’t a parallel universe either. It was me that came from a different universe.”

“The other universe is very similar to this one, from its history to the things in it. You could say that these universes are parallel worlds. There are also many things in this universe that weren’t in the other universe. The reason I came to this universe was for you.”

Song Xuanhe looked down towards Xiao Yuanmu. “In my mind, there’s a system using technology beyond our worlds. It took me from my world and brought me here. Did you know? I’ve already finished my mission here. If I wanted to, I could leave this world in three days and go back to my own world.”

Xiao Yuanmu suddenly grabbed his hand. Song Xuanhe held it back just as tightly, continuing. “I had many things in my original world.  My relatives, my friends, my mentor. You probably wondered why I suddenly began designing clothes, or maybe you became sure that I wasn’t the original Song Xuanhe because of it. Now I can tell you- it’s because I was a designer in my old world. My teacher was pretty famous in the field, he was picky with designs and with people, but he was willing to accept many different forms of beauty.”

“Even if something was damaged, or incomplete, he was able to accept them all.” Song Xuanhe smiled. “He taught me too many things. Even when my parents and friends all left me, he remained the only person who cared about me.”

Looking at the nostalgia in Song Xuanhe’s eyes, Xiao Yuanmu’s jaw clenched.

Before, when he had thought about the issue that was Song Xuanhe, he wanted to catalog everything different about this person, understand every detail hidden in his heart. This curiosity eventually turned into like, and after experiencing many things with him, like changed again into love.

He had heard once that to like someone was to want to possess them, while to love was to be able to control yourself.

But even using all of his self-control, he wasn’t able to dispel the desire to monopolize Song Xuanhe. He wanted to always be looking at him, to be with him every second of every minute. He even thought, selfishly, that if Song Xuanhe loved him back, he could use that love to tie him by his side, to make it so that they would always stay within each other’s eyes.

Yes, he knew that beneath Song Xuanhe’s careless exterior, there was actually an incredibly soft heart.

He always pretended to be unconcerned, pretended to be cold and indifferent, but as someone who was actually cold, it was easy to see through the facade. From seeing through the facade, he could also trace back into his memories and see how much of Song Xuanhe’s warmth he had received after meeting him.

He wanted to cling to this warmth, and he could also tell by this warmth that the Song Xuanhe of this life was not the Song Xuanhe from his last life, or the life before that.

But this warmth was too ethereal, and he became afraid of losing it. He always had the paranoid idea that Song Xuanhe would leave him one day. The thought always seemed  to come out of nowhere, but he couldn’t keep it out of his mind.

That’s why he was always trying to find the reason for the difference in Song Xuanhe from his previous two lives. Because he had lived many lives, his imagination for what the reason could be was more expansive than others would’ve guessed, to the point where he’d thought about the possibility of alternate universes.

He hadn’t thought that Song Xuanhe’s answer would be even stranger than what he’d imagined.

This answer was better than any future he could’ve planned for Song Xuanhe. Once he left, Song Xuanhe could return to his own world, to the route he was meant to walk. He would have a good life, a mentor that cared for him, his work, and his friends. He could leave this world and the dangers that were rising around them. Any way you looked at it, this was the perfect solution.

But Xiao Yuanmu couldn’t let go of his hand. Dr. Gao Sen told him that he had half a month left. He had planned out what he would need to do for Song Xuanhe in half a month. He had convinced himself to accept the inevitable, convinced himself that he wouldn’t be leaving behind any regrets.

This perfect answer disrupted his plans, shortened his fifteen days down to three.

His time left with Song Xuanhe was three days.

After three days, Song Xuanhe would go to a place where he had never been and could not understand. He would wait until his organs shut down, and leave the mortal plane. He and Song Xuanhe wouldn’t exist in the same world anymore, and their worlds would never overlap again.

“Xiao Yuanmu,” Song Xuanhe’s voice pulled Xiao Yuanmu back. “I’ve constantly been going back and forth about whether or not to return to my world, or to stay in this one. I always thought that I had no reason to stay. But, just in the past few days, I found my reason to stay, and I also found the reason why I came to this world.”

“You are the reason that I came to this world, and the reason that I’m staying.”

“I want you to leave,” Xiao Yuanmu said, lifting his eyes coolly. “After three days have passed, you should return to your world.”

“There’s still hope for your condition,” Song Xuanhe said. “My system is made of extremely advanced technology-”

“Do you know what Xiao Lin asked me when we met that day?” Xiao Yuanmu cut Song Xuanhe off, saying: “He asked me how I could be sure that you loved me.”

Song Xuanhe’s gaze shook as he looked at Xiao Yuanmu.