Chapter 8: Lies

I immediately switched to a video call, but Xie Yun refused it. The sound of crying on the other end grew weaker and fainter, gasping intermittently as if a pair of hands were strangling her throat. “Turn on your camera!” I snapped in a cold, commanding tone.

A few seconds later, the screen lit up. Xie Yun was standing inside a hotel room. On the king-sized bed behind him, Mai Tu was tied up tight, trembling uncontrollably like a fish on a chopping block.

Around my field of vision, the floating text comments began to go wild:

Is this actual bondage play??? Holy crap, so hot!

Mai Tu looks so pathetic and helpless. Male lead, hurry up and dispose of the side character so you can go back to loving the FL!

Jesus, he’s answering the side character’s call in the middle of this? Peak drama!

Suddenly, Xie Yun turned toward the camera. His eyes locked directly onto the empty air — right where those glowing bullet comments were hovering in front of me.

“Sweetheart,” he asked softly, “is it these things?”

Before I could even process what was happening, Xie Yun reached out and slammed his hand around Mai Tu’s neck, squeezing hard. In an instant, the floating comments vanished simultaneously, like snow hitting boiling water.

Mai Tu choked frantically, the color draining completely from her face as her eyes bulged in absolute shock. “No way… how can you see the comments…”

Xie Yun smiled at me through the screen. “See, sweetheart? She wasn’t anything special.”

“Xie Yun, are you insane?!” I practically screamed. “No matter what she did, you can’t just murder someone!”

I wished I could physically crawl through the phone screen. Unfortunately, I was still iron-chained to the bedframe; if I wanted to save anyone, I had to figure out how to unshackle my own leg first.

“Sweetheart,” Xie Yun murmured, his dark eyes brimming with melancholy. “Why would you trust those things instead of trusting me?”

His grip tightened. Mai Tu’s breathing turned shallow and frail, and the faint traces of floating text I could still see began to blur into nothingness: “This isn’t right… only the female lead is supposed to see them… it’s impossible…”

Mai Tu’s voice cut off abruptly. A second later, every single bullet comment evaporated into thin air. Then, Mai Tu’s entire body dissolved into countless tiny motes of white light, vanishing right before my eyes.

I sat there, utterly petrified. A living, breathing human being… just turned into light and disappeared?!

Xie Yun casually wiped his hands with a wet wipe, a look of profound disgust on his face, as if he had touched something filthy. Then, his voice softened into a gentle coaxing tone: “Wait for me to get home. I’ll explain everything.”

I sat on the bed in an anxious tailspin for nearly half an hour before Xie Yun finally returned. The moment he stepped into the room, I demanded, “Where’s your fiancée?”

Xie Yun leaned down and bit my lip — hard enough to sting. “How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t have a fiancée.”

I blinked, thoroughly stunned. Xie Yun’s betrothal was supposed to belong to his older brother, passed down to him only after his brother died — at least, that was what the bullet comments told me.

Then Xie Yun let out a low, cold laugh. “I don’t have a brother. I’m an only child.”

My mind went completely blank for several seconds.

So… everything from the start was a lie?

The day before Mai Tu showed up, those floating comments started appearing. They said Xie Yun would eventually kill me, that Mai Tu and Xie Yun were soulmates written in the stars, and that I was just a disposable side character doomed to a tragic end. That was why I panicked, why I hid my pregnancy, and why I secretly ran off to get an abortion.

If those bullet comments had never existed… maybe I would have happily told Xie Yun that he was going to be a father. He would have been out-of-his-mind thrilled. We would have carried on just like before: getting tangled up in each other, fighting, and then curling into each other’s arms to sleep.

At the very least… our relationship wouldn’t have turned into a literal ball and chain.

Xie Yun laced his fingers tightly through mine, his voice barely above a whisper. “Sweetheart… will you trust me a little more from now on?”

My mind suddenly drifted back to five years ago. The very first time I laid eyes on Xie Yun at that party, I had naively thought, maybe, just maybe, he actually likes me.

Unfortunately, it was far too late for that.

My trust had died the exact second his sharp blade sliced open my cheek. It had evaporated during those ninety-two suffocating seconds he held me underwater, drowning me without a second thought.

When the ice-cold seawater flooded my mouth and nose back then, I had looked up helplessly through the shimmering surface, clearly seeing the man standing on the shore, indifferently watching me thrash for survival.

That man… was Xie Yun.

He had simply lowered his gaze, watching me drown in misery with cold detachment.

In that moment, I genuinely despised him. I hated him so much that I swore to myself: if I survived, I would stay as far away from this man as humanly possible, preferably never setting eyes on him again for the rest of my life.

Yet life always loved playing sick jokes. The harder I tried to run, the closer I was dragged back to him.

A textbook “female lead” had clearly appeared — gorgeous, fitting the script perfectly, tailored to draw all of Xie Yun’s attention and give me a completely legitimate excuse to slip away. So why did she fail? Why was she the one who ended up disappearing into nothingness?

I raised my head and happened to spot a small gray songbird fluttering into the villa from outside. It landed lightly on the vanity table, tilting its tiny head to stare at me with round, pitch-black eyes before letting out a burst of melodic chirping. The clear sound echoed sweetly in the quiet room.

I leaned my head against Xie Yun’s shoulder and whispered softly to the little bird by the window: “Go on. Fly away.”

As if understanding my words, the bird flapped its wings and took off, soaring toward its own wide-open sky.

And I… remained here, by Xie Yun’s side.

So in the end, I gave him my final answer, softly uttering a single word: “Okay.”