The Ghost Doctor’s Second Life

Prologue: The Poisoned Cup

The Great Yan Dynasty, the twelfth year of Emperor Jingde.

They called him the Ghost Doctor because ghosts were afraid of him.

Three winters ago, the Crown Prince had stopped breathing for the length of an incense stick. The imperial physicians had already knelt and wept. Then Bai Yunshen walked into the palace in plain white robes, set nine silver needles into the boy’s chest, and pulled him back from the Yellow Springs with his bare hands.

After that, no one in the capital spoke his name without lowering their voice.

Tonight, the Emperor had held a banquet in his honour. Lanterns burned red along the Jade Pavilion. Ministers raised their cups. And at the end of the long table sat Mo Lingfeng, Head of the Imperial Medical Bureau, smiling like a man who had never once lost.

“Doctor Bai.” Mo Lingfeng rose and carried a cup of wine to him personally. “For years I doubted you. Tonight, I admit defeat. Drink with me.”

Bai Yunshen looked at him for a long moment. Mo Lingfeng had been his senior brother once, under the same master, on the same snowy mountain. They had ground herbs side by side.

He took the cup.

The wine was sweet. Too sweet. Underneath the sweetness, faint as a whisper, was the bitter edge of Withered Lotus Root, a poison that hid itself perfectly in rice wine.

He knew it the moment it touched his tongue. He knew, too, that it was already too late.

The cup fell from his fingers and shattered on the jade floor. Pain bloomed under his ribs like a fire with teeth. Around him, the ministers shouted. Someone called for a physician, and the irony of it almost made him laugh.

Mo Lingfeng knelt beside him, face arranged in perfect grief, and leaned close so only he could hear.

“The man who brings back the dead,” he whispered. “Let’s see you bring back yourself.”

Bai Yunshen’s vision darkened at the edges. His hand reached for the needle pouch at his waist, out of pure habit, and found it gone. Of course. Mo Lingfeng had thought of everything.

If there is another life, he thought, as the lanterns blurred into one long smear of red, I will not die owing anyone. And I will not die so foolishly again.

Then the darkness came.

And after the darkness, strangely, there was water.

Waking in the Water

Cold. Blue. Endless.

Water filled his nose and his mouth. Bai Yunshen thrashed on instinct, and his hand struck something smooth and hard, a wall of tiles too perfect to be stone.

A strong grip seized his collar and hauled him upward.

He broke the surface coughing, and was dragged onto a flat white floor that burned with sunlight. Above him stood a middle-aged man in a strange black coat, breathing hard, water dripping from his sleeves.

“Young Master Su.” The man’s voice was polite. His eyes were not. “If you are finished, please go and change. President Gu will not be coming home early, no matter how many times you fall into the pool.”

Young Master Su?

Bai Yunshen pushed himself up on one elbow. Around him, two maids in matching grey dresses stood at a distance, whispering behind their hands. Neither moved to help.

“Third time this month,” one murmured.

“He’s doing it for attention again. As if President Gu would care.”

He ignored them. He was a doctor first, and a doctor’s first patient was always himself. He pressed two fingers to the inside of his own wrist.

The pulse was thin and floating, like a thread about to snap. The body was young, perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five, but hollowed out by too much wine and too little sleep. And underneath it all, so faint that any ordinary physician would miss it, there was a cold, slow drag in the blood.

His fingers froze.

Poison. A chronic one, fed in small doses over months.

Someone was killing this body slowly, the same way he had been killed quickly.

Before he could think further, a sharp pain split his skull. Fragments poured in that were not his own. A name: Su Yan. A marriage certificate, red as the banquet lanterns. A tall man in a dark suit who never looked at him. Endless empty dinners. Bottles. Shouting.

The memories came in broken pieces, like a scroll torn by the wind. He could not hold on to any of them.

Then, from somewhere behind him, came a small sound.

A child, trying very hard not to cry.

The Boy’s Hands

He turned.

A little boy stood at the edge of the pool, perhaps five years old. He was clutching a fluffy white towel almost as big as he was. His clothes were expensive but slightly too large, as if no one had noticed he had grown thinner. He had a soft, round face that should have been chubby and was not.

And his eyes were the colour of dark tea, exactly like the eyes of the tall, cold man in the broken memories.

The boy took one careful step forward, then stopped, as if waiting to be told he was allowed. Slowly, he held out the towel with both hands.

“Daddy,” he whispered. “You’re wet. You’ll get sick.”

Bai Yunshen reached for the towel. Then he saw the boy’s hands, and everything inside him went still.

The small palms were red and swollen. Across the left one ran three straight, dark lines, the kind of marks only a ruler or a thin rod could leave. On the thin wrist above it, a bruise was fading from purple to sickly yellow. That one was older, at least five days.

He had treated beggars, soldiers and princes. He had seen what cruel masters did to servant children. He knew exactly what these marks meant.

His voice came out very low. “Who hit you?”

The boy flinched. Not at the question, at the voice, the way a dog flinches at a raised hand. The towel trembled.

“Tell me.” Bai Yunshen softened his tone, the way he did for frightened patients. “I won’t be angry with you. Who did this?”

The boy looked at the floor. When he answered, it was barely louder than the wind.

“...Daddy did.”

Silence.

“Because I broke your glass,” the boy added quickly, words tumbling out. “The pretty one. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Please don’t be angry anymore.”

The Ghost Doctor of the Great Yan Dynasty, who had stared into the face of death a hundred times without blinking, felt the floor tilt beneath him.

Daddy.

Me.

Another memory surfaced, sharper this time. A shattered crystal glass. A drunk man’s hand gripping a wooden ruler. A small boy holding out his palms because he had been taught that holding them out was better than running.

Bai Yunshen’s stomach turned. He had been murdered by a man he once called brother. He had thought nothing could be more disgusting than that. He was wrong. Waking up inside the body of a man who beat his own child was worse.

The maids had gone quiet. The butler watched with an unreadable face. No one had stopped this. No one had told anyone.

Slowly, carefully, Bai Yunshen lowered himself to his knees on the wet tiles, so that his eyes were level with the boy’s.

“What is your name?” he asked.

The boy blinked, confused. Daddy had never asked him that before. “...Anan. Gu Anan.”

“Anan.” He took the boy’s injured hand as gently as if it were made of rice paper, and turned it to the light. “Listen to me. Breaking a glass is a small thing. Hitting a child is a big thing. The person who was wrong was not you.”

Anan stared at him, mouth slightly open.

“It will not happen again,” Bai Yunshen said. “Never again. Do you understand?”

The boy didn’t nod. He didn’t believe it, and Bai Yunshen didn’t blame him. Trust, like a broken bone, could not be ordered to heal. It had to be set straight and given time.

He looked up at the butler. “Bring me a basin of the coldest water you have, clean cloth, and a bowl of salt. Now.”

The butler hesitated, startled. In three years, Su Yan had never once used that tone, calm, cold and absolutely certain, like a man used to being obeyed in a palace.

“...Yes, Young Master.”

The Demon Box and the Glowing Stone

He soaked Anan’s hands in cold salt water and wrapped them in clean cloth, humming an old mountain lullaby his master used to sing. By the time he finished, the boy was no longer trembling. He was only watching, wide-eyed, as if his father had grown a second head.

Then Bai Yunshen stood, looked properly at the house, and finally understood that he was not in the Great Yan Dynasty anymore.

The mansion was made of glass. Whole walls of it, clear as still water, without a single crack. The floors were polished stone, perfectly flat. The lamps on the ceiling burned without fire or smoke. Somewhere, a cool wind was blowing indoors, though every window was closed.

Not a palace, he thought. Not anything I know.

Anan, perhaps wanting to please this strange new Daddy, climbed onto the long sofa and pressed a small black stick. “Do you want to watch TV, Daddy?”

The enormous black mirror on the wall burst into light.

A woman appeared inside it, smiling, her voice filling the room from nowhere. “Good afternoon. Here is today’s financial news...”

Bai Yunshen moved before he could think. In one motion he swept Anan behind him, snatched a silver fruit knife from the table, and pointed it at the wall.

“Stay back,” he said coldly. “What kind of demon traps human souls inside a mirror?”

The woman in the mirror kept smiling and talking about stock prices. She did not seem to notice the knife at all.

Behind him, there was a small, choked sound.

He turned. Anan had both bandaged hands pressed over his mouth. His shoulders were shaking. And then, as if it escaped against his will, a tiny giggle burst out.

“Daddy, it’s not a demon. It’s just TV.”

Bai Yunshen looked at the knife in his hand. Then at the giggling child. Then at the smiling woman who was clearly not a trapped soul.

Slowly, with great dignity, he put the knife down.

It was the first time he had heard the boy laugh. He decided it was worth the embarrassment.

On the screen, the picture changed. A tall man in a dark suit was stepping out of a black carriage without horses, surrounded by guards. His face was sharp and handsome and colder than winter snow on the northern border. The words beneath him read: Gu Shiyan, CEO of Gu Group, completes the largest acquisition of the year.

Bai Yunshen knew that face. It was the face from the broken memories, the man who never looked at Su Yan.

His husband. My husband now.

At the bottom corner of the screen, small numbers glowed: 2026.

He did the calculation in his head twice, and then a third time. More than a thousand years had passed since the Jade Pavilion. The Great Yan Dynasty was gone. Mo Lingfeng was gone. Everyone he had ever known was dust.

Borrowing a body to return the soul. His master had told stories of it, late at night by the medicine fire. He had always thought they were only stories.

Something on the low table began to buzz angrily, like a cicada trapped in a jar.

It was a thin, flat stone of black glass. As he watched, it lit up from inside. Words appeared on its surface.

Anan leaned over. “Daddy, your phone.”

“...Phone,” Bai Yunshen repeated carefully, as if learning a new herb.

Anan showed him with one bandaged finger how to slide the light across the glass. A message opened. The name at the top read simply: Gu Shiyan.

The divorce agreement is on your desk. Sign it before I come home tonight. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.

Bai Yunshen read it once. Then he looked down at the small boy leaning against his arm, the first person in this strange world to trust him even a little.

He set the phone face-down on the table.

“Anan,” he said. “When did you last eat?”

The First Meal

Anan thought about the question for too long.

“Breakfast,” he said finally. “A little bit. Auntie Zhang said I had to wait for you to wake up before lunch. But you were sleeping. And then you were in the pool.”

It was nearly evening.

Bai Yunshen said nothing. He simply took the boy’s good wrist, very lightly, and felt his pulse. Weak spleen, cold stomach, a child who had been underfed and over-frightened for a long time. No poison here, at least. Small mercies.

He walked into the kitchen.

It was the strangest kitchen he had ever seen. There was no hearth, no firewood, no clay stove. Instead there was a tall silver cabinet that breathed cold air when he opened it, an ice cellar inside a box, full of vegetables, eggs and meat wrapped in clear skin. There was a flat black surface where Anan, standing on a chair, turned a knob and summoned a ring of blue fire out of nothing.

Bai Yunshen stared at the flame for a long moment.

“No smoke,” he murmured. “No ash. Truly, the people of this age live like immortals.”

Then he rolled up his sleeves.

On the mountain, before he ever became the Ghost Doctor, he had been the youngest disciple. The youngest disciple cooked for everyone. He had made medicinal meals for his master for ten years, and he knew that the best medicine for a weak child was never bitter.

Rice, washed three times. Chinese yam, peeled and diced into perfect cubes. Six red dates, pitted. A thin slice of ginger to warm the stomach. Minced pork, seasoned lightly. Into the pot it all went, simmering slowly until the rice broke open and turned silky.

While it cooked, he whisked two eggs with warm water and a pinch of salt, strained it through a cloth, and steamed it into a custard so smooth it trembled like jade.

The cook, a broad woman named Auntie Zhang, had come in to sneer. She stayed to stare. In three years, Young Master Su had never boiled so much as a kettle.

When the porridge was done, Bai Yunshen set the bowl in front of Anan and blew on the first spoonful himself.

Anan took one bite.

Then another.

Then, without making a single sound, he began to cry, big silent tears dropping into the porridge as he kept eating, as if afraid someone would take it away.

Bai Yunshen didn’t say anything. He just sat beside him and gently wiped the boy’s cheek with his thumb.

That was the moment the front door opened.

Footsteps crossed the hall: measured, heavy, expensive leather on stone. The butler’s voice, suddenly respectful. “President Gu. You’re home early.”

Gu Shiyan stopped in the kitchen doorway.

He was taller in person than in the demon box. Broad shoulders under a charcoal suit, a face carved out of cold marble, eyes like a winter lake. Bai Yunshen understood at once why the whole city feared him.

Those eyes moved across the room. The sleeves rolled to the elbow. The steaming bowls. The smell of ginger and red dates. His son, crying quietly into a spoon.

And then the white bandages wrapped around Anan’s small hands.

The temperature in the room dropped.

“What,” Gu Shiyan said, very softly, “happened to his hands?”

Anan shrank into his chair. Auntie Zhang suddenly found the floor very interesting. The butler opened his mouth, ready with an excuse.

Bai Yunshen spoke first.

“I did it,” he said. “Before. With a ruler, when I was drunk.”

No one in the house had ever told Gu Shiyan. Bai Yunshen could see it on his face: the exact moment the ice cracked and something far more dangerous showed underneath.

In three long strides Gu Shiyan crossed the kitchen and seized him by the collar, hauling him up out of the chair.

Bai Yunshen let him. He did not raise his hands.

“Be angry,” he said quietly. “You should be. I would be. But he hasn’t eaten since this morning. Let him finish his porridge first. Then you can do whatever you want with me.”

Gu Shiyan’s grip did not loosen. But something in his eyes changed. This was not the voice of the husband he knew: the one who begged, cried, screamed and threw glasses. This voice was steady. Old, somehow. Like a man who had already died once and was no longer afraid of anything.

This close, Bai Yunshen could see what no one else had noticed. The faint grey shadow under Gu Shiyan’s eyes. The slight tremor in the fingers of his left hand, gripping his collar. The tightness at his temple, the shallow breath of a man in pain who refused to show it.

The doctor in him spoke before he could stop it.

“You get headaches,” Bai Yunshen said. “Every night, around the third watch. Here.” His eyes went to Gu Shiyan’s left temple. “And your left hand goes numb when you wake up. You haven’t slept properly in months. Your doctors tell you it’s stress.”

Gu Shiyan went completely still.

No one knew that. Not his assistant. Not his family. Not the three famous specialists he had paid in secret, all of whom had found nothing.

“How,” he said, “do you know that?”

Bai Yunshen met his gaze calmly, a thousand years of medicine behind his eyes.

“Because it isn’t stress, President Gu,” he said. “Someone in this house is poisoning you too.”

The Hospital

For three full seconds, Gu Shiyan said nothing at all.

Then he let go of the collar as if it had burned him.

“You’re confused,” he said flatly. “You hit your head when you fell into the pool.”

“My head is perfectly—”

“Get in the car.”

Twenty minutes later, Bai Yunshen was sitting in the back of a horseless black carriage that moved faster than any warhorse he had ever seen, watching a city of glass towers and floating lights rush past the window. He pressed one palm to the glass and did not say a word the entire journey. Gu Shiyan watched him from the other side of the seat, and his frown grew deeper with every silent minute.

The old Su Yan would have talked. Complained. Cried. Clung to his arm.

This one just looked at the city like a child seeing snow for the first time.

The hospital belonged to the Gu family. The doctors came running the moment Gu Shiyan walked through the doors. Bai Yunshen was led through white corridors that smelled sharply of something clean and bitter, and laid inside a giant white ring that hummed and clicked around his skull.

They can see inside the head without opening it, he thought, astonished. Master, if only you could see this.

They took his blood with a needle so thin and fine that he almost asked to keep it. They shone lights in his eyes. They asked him what year it was, and he answered “2026” with only a tiny pause.

An hour later, the director of the hospital, a grey-haired man named Doctor Qian, called Gu Shiyan into his office. He did not close the door all the way. Bai Yunshen, sitting on a bench outside, heard everything.

“The scan is completely clean, President Gu. No concussion, no bleeding, no damage. His liver is under some strain from alcohol, but that’s all.”

“Then why is he acting like a different person?”

Doctor Qian hesitated. “With respect... sometimes, when a marriage is in difficulty, a patient may exaggerate. Or perform. Medically, there is nothing wrong with his head. If he’s behaving strangely, it may be a choice.”

A pause.

“You mean he’s acting.”

“I’m only saying the tests show nothing.”

Bai Yunshen looked down at the small cotton ball taped to the inside of his elbow. Of course the tests showed nothing. The poison in this body was old and patient and clever. It did not show itself to machines. It hid in the pulse, in the colour of the nail beds, in the faint bitterness at the back of the tongue. Only someone who had spent a lifetime with poison would find it.

And he had not told them about the poison in Gu Shiyan. Not here. Not where anyone could listen.

When Gu Shiyan came out, his face had returned to stone.

“The divorce papers,” he said, on the drive home, without looking at him. “That’s what this is about. A new act so I’ll change my mind.”

Bai Yunshen turned from the window.

“Believe whatever you want about me,” he said calmly. “But the headaches are real. And they will get worse.”

Gu Shiyan didn’t answer. But at the next red light, Bai Yunshen saw his left hand flex once, slowly, as if testing whether it was still numb.

A Stranger in the House

Gu Shiyan expected the act to last two days. Three at most. Su Yan had never been able to keep anything up for long.

It lasted a week. Then two.

On the first morning, the maids found every bottle of wine in the cellar of the east wing poured down the sink, and the empty bottles lined up neatly by the back door like soldiers.

On the second morning, the gardener saw Young Master Su in the garden at dawn, barefoot on the wet grass, moving through slow, flowing positions like an old painting come to life. His breathing was so quiet that a sparrow landed two steps from his foot.

By the end of the first week, he was walking Anan to kindergarten himself, holding the boy’s hand the whole way. The other parents stared. Su Yan had never once been seen at the gate.

He asked strange questions. He asked the driver why the carriages stopped at red lights and went at green ones. He asked Auntie Zhang what “delivery” meant, and when she explained, he looked genuinely moved. He spent whole afternoons on the sofa with Anan’s phone and Anan’s picture books, learning the modern world one page at a time, while Anan proudly taught him words.

“This is a plane, Daddy. It flies.”

“A flying ship made of iron.” Bai Yunshen nodded gravely. “Impressive. How many people does it carry?”

“Like... a hundred!”

“Then the people of this age must have mastered the art of flight. I must learn it.”

Anan giggled so hard he fell off the sofa.

Gu Shiyan saw almost none of this. He left before dawn and came home after midnight, the way he always had. But he heard about it. The butler reported. The driver reported. Even Auntie Zhang, who had never liked Su Yan, said quietly one evening, “Young Master Su made the boy’s medicine soup again today, sir. The boy has gained a little weight.”

And the divorce papers stayed on the desk in Gu Shiyan’s study, untouched and unsigned. On top of them sat a single slip of paper. The handwriting was nothing like Su Yan’s messy scrawl. It was elegant brush calligraphy, every stroke as sharp and graceful as a sword.

Not until the boy’s hands have healed.

One night, near two in the morning, Gu Shiyan stopped outside his son’s bedroom. The door was open a crack. A small lamp was still on.

Su Yan was asleep in the chair beside the bed, a picture book open on his knee. One of his hands rested on top of the blanket, where Anan’s small fingers had curled around it in his sleep. The bandages were gone now. The boy’s palms were pink and healing.

Gu Shiyan stood in the dark hallway for a long time.

He had been married to this man for three years. He had known him to be selfish, loud, desperate and cruel when drunk. He had never known him to be quiet. He had never known him to be gentle.

Who are you? he thought.

He did not go in. But he did not walk away for a long time either.

Three Meals a Day

Bai Yunshen had thought about it carefully.

Gu Shiyan did not trust him. He would never sit still for needles, never drink a medicine bowl from the hands of the husband he wanted to divorce. And the poison was still in him, every day, from some source Bai Yunshen had not yet found.

But every man has to eat.

And on the mountain, his master had taught him the oldest rule of medicine: the best physician heals with the kitchen before he ever touches a needle.

So on the first Monday, at exactly seven-thirty in the morning, Young Master Su walked into the lobby of Gu Group Tower carrying a three-tier lunchbox wrapped in a dark blue cloth.

The receptionist did not recognise him at first. Su Yan had always arrived in designer sunglasses and a temper. This man wore a plain white shirt, his hair washed and neatly combed back, and he bowed his head slightly when he spoke.

“Good morning. I’ve brought breakfast for Gu Shiyan.”

The receptionist dropped her pen.

By the time the elevator reached the sixty-eighth floor, the staff group chat had exploded.

[Reception]: SU YAN IS HERE

[Reception]: HE SAID GOOD MORNING TO ME

[Finance]: ??? Is he here to cause a scene again

[Reception]: HE BROUGHT FOOD. IN A LUNCHBOX. HOMEMADE.

[Marketing]: the world is ending

At the top floor, the elevator doors opened onto a wide, silent office of glass and grey stone. And standing in front of the CEO’s door, as if she had been waiting, was a young woman in a fitted cream suit.

She was beautiful in a neat, polished way: hair in a perfect low bun, pearl earrings, a tablet held against her chest like a shield. Her smile was flawless.

“Mr. Su,” she said sweetly. “What a surprise. I’m Shen Ruoxi, President Gu’s personal assistant. President Gu is very busy this morning. I’ll take that for him.”

She reached for the lunchbox.

Bai Yunshen did not let go.

He had spent years in the imperial court. He knew that smile. He had seen it on concubines and ministers’ daughters, on every woman in the palace who had ever wanted something she could not have. And when Shen Ruoxi glanced towards the closed office door, just for a moment, he saw exactly what it was she wanted.

Ah, he thought. So that’s how it is.

“Thank you,” he said politely. “But I’ll give it to him myself.”

He knocked once and walked in.

Gu Shiyan looked up from his desk. For a moment, sheer disbelief flickered across his face before he hid it.

“What are you doing here?”

“Breakfast.” Bai Yunshen untied the cloth and opened the tiers. Millet porridge, warm and golden. Steamed buns with mushroom and greens. A small dish of pickled radish. A cup of hot tea, pale gold, smelling faintly of chrysanthemum. “Chrysanthemum clears the head. Millet calms the stomach. You skip breakfast every day and drink black coffee instead. It’s why the pain is worse in the mornings.”

Gu Shiyan stared at the food. Then at him.

“I didn’t ask for this.”

“I know.” Bai Yunshen set down a pair of chopsticks. “Eat it while it’s warm.”

Then he left, before Gu Shiyan could argue.

He came back at noon with lunch: rice, steamed fish, and a clear soup of fish head and gastrodia root, the oldest remedy in the world for headaches and dizziness. He came back at seven in the evening with dinner, because Gu Shiyan never went home before midnight and never remembered to eat.

Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Every day.

The whole company talked of nothing else. Within a week, there were bets on how long it would last. Within two weeks, the bets were on whether President Gu had actually started eating it.

He had.

Not in front of anyone. Never in front of Su Yan. But on the third night, after everyone had gone home, Gu Shiyan finally opened the lunchbox at eleven o’clock and drank the soup, and for the first time in four months he slept until morning without the pain waking him at the third watch.

He told no one.

And outside his office, every single day, Shen Ruoxi smiled her perfect smile at Su Yan, and her eyes grew colder.

Don’t Come Again

A doctor’s work is noticing. And after two weeks of visiting the sixty-eighth floor three times a day, Bai Yunshen had noticed a great deal about Shen Ruoxi.

She took photographs of Gu Shiyan. Secretly. Her phone held low by her hip, angled upward, a soft click while he bent over his papers. Once, through the glass wall, Bai Yunshen saw her scrolling through them alone at her desk, smiling to herself. There were hundreds.

She went to every meeting. Even the ones where an assistant was not needed. Even the ones where she was told to stay behind. She always found a reason: a document he had forgotten, a call he must take, a coffee she had brought him, the exact way he liked it.

She stood too close. She wore a soft floral perfume that drifted after Gu Shiyan into elevators. Once, she tipped a coffee “by accident” on his sleeve and spent a long minute dabbing it with a tissue, her fingers lingering on his wrist.

And Gu Shiyan noticed absolutely none of it.

“Clean that up,” he said, and went back to reading.

Bai Yunshen almost laughed. The most feared man in the city, who could read a rival company’s weakness from a single page of numbers, could not see a woman in love with him from one step away.

Shen Ruoxi, however, had noticed him. And she did not like what she saw.

It happened on a Thursday evening.

Bai Yunshen stepped out of the elevator with the dinner box, the soup in the top tier still steaming. Shen Ruoxi was waiting in the corridor, as she always was.

“Let me,” she said, and reached for the lunchbox.

“There’s no need—”

She didn’t take the handle. She took the top tier and pulled it sharply towards herself.

Hot soup splashed across the back of her hand.

She screamed. It was a perfect scream, high and frightened, loud enough to carry through every glass wall on the floor. The lunchbox crashed to the ground. Fish, rice and broth spread across the grey stone.

Staff came running from every direction. And the CEO’s door flew open.

Gu Shiyan took in the scene in one glance: Shen Ruoxi clutching her reddened hand, tears in her eyes, and Su Yan standing over the wreckage of the food.

“President Gu,” Shen Ruoxi whispered, trembling. “It’s not his fault. I’m sure Mr. Su didn’t mean to—”

Then she turned and ran towards the restroom, sobbing.

Bai Yunshen stepped forward at once, the doctor in him moving before the man. “Cold running water. She needs at least ten minutes under cold water, not ice, and nothing—”

But Gu Shiyan was already walking past him. Following her.

He didn’t look back.

Bai Yunshen stood in the middle of the corridor surrounded by whispering staff, the spilled soup soaking slowly into the hem of his trousers. He had seen the burn. A small one, on the surface of the skin, the kind that would barely blister. She had pulled the box towards herself. He had felt it in his hands.

It didn’t matter. No one had seen that part.

Ten minutes later, Gu Shiyan came back. His face was unreadable.

“Ruoxi is going to the clinic,” he said. “The driver is taking her.”

“Good. The burn is shallow, she’ll—”

“Su Yan.” Gu Shiyan’s voice was quiet and cold. “Stop coming here.”

The corridor went silent.

“Whatever you’re trying to do,” Gu Shiyan said, “this is my company. Not your stage. Don’t bring food again. Don’t come again.”

Bai Yunshen looked at him for a long moment.

He could have explained. He could have told him exactly how the box had moved, exactly which way the soup had fallen, exactly what kind of woman stood beside him every day with a camera hidden at her hip. In the palace, he would have. He would have won.

But he was tired. And for some reason he did not want to examine, the words don’t come again had struck somewhere under his ribs, in the same place the poison had burned a thousand years ago.

“Understood,” he said.

He knelt, gathered the broken pieces of the lunchbox into the blue cloth, tied it neatly, and walked to the elevator without another word.

Silence

At seven-thirty the next morning, Gu Shiyan looked up at his office door.

He didn’t mean to. He only noticed afterwards that he had done it, and that he had been waiting for a knock.

No one came.

He drank black coffee. By ten, the pressure had started behind his left eye, familiar and dull. By noon, it was a hammer.

At lunch, Shen Ruoxi knocked and came in with a paper bag from the most expensive restaurant on the street. A small, neat bandage was wrapped around the back of her hand. She set the food in front of him with a brave little smile.

“I didn’t want you to skip lunch, President Gu.”

It was beef in black pepper sauce, rich and heavy. Gu Shiyan ate two bites and pushed it away. It tasted of nothing.

Outside, the staff group chat was quieter than it had been in weeks.

[Reception]: he didn’t come today

[Finance]: I lost 200 yuan

[Marketing]: honestly... I kind of miss the soup smell

That night, Gu Shiyan went home at nine. It was the earliest he had come home in a year. He told himself it was because of the headache.

The dining room light was on. From the hallway, he heard Anan’s voice, bright and chattering, and then a sound he had never once heard in this house in three years.

Su Yan was laughing. Softly, warmly, the way a person laughs when they are completely at ease.

Gu Shiyan stepped into the doorway.

The laughter stopped.

Su Yan looked up. His face did not turn cold, exactly. It simply turned polite, like a door closing quietly.

“Good evening, President Gu,” he said. “There’s dinner on the stove if you’re hungry. Auntie Zhang made it.”

Then he turned back to Anan, and helped him pick a fish bone out of his rice.

President Gu. Not Shiyan. In three years, the old Su Yan had called him by his name a thousand times, desperate, angry, pleading, drunk. He had never once called him President Gu.

It shouldn’t have mattered. It was what Gu Shiyan had wanted. Distance. Quiet. No scenes.

So why did it feel like a door had been shut in his face?

The next day was the same. And the next. Su Yan did not come to the company. He did not call. When they passed in the hallway at home, he nodded and stepped aside. He was courteous and calm, and he was utterly, completely unreachable.

On the fourth night, the pain woke Gu Shiyan at the third watch, exactly as Su Yan had said it would. His left hand was numb to the wrist.

He went downstairs in the dark, not quite knowing why. The kitchen was clean and cold. There was no pot on the stove. No covered bowl. No small slip of paper in elegant brush calligraphy.

He stood in the empty kitchen with his hand pressed against his aching temple, and for the first time, a thought he did not want slipped through.

He didn’t argue. He didn’t explain. He just said “understood” and picked up the pieces.

The old Su Yan would have screamed that it wasn’t his fault.

So why didn’t he?

Gu Shiyan took out his phone, and in the cold blue light he typed a message to the head of building security.

Send me the 68th floor corridor footage from Thursday evening. Tonight.

The Footage

The file arrived at 3:40 in the morning.

Gu Shiyan sat in his dark study, his left hand still numb, and pressed play.

The corridor of the sixty-eighth floor. Thursday, 7:02 p.m. The elevator doors opened and Su Yan stepped out, carrying the blue-wrapped lunchbox carefully in both hands, the way someone carries something that matters.

Shen Ruoxi walked towards him. She reached out. Not for the handle, but for the top tier. And then, clear as daylight on the high-definition screen, she pulled it sharply towards her own body.

The soup splashed. She screamed. She looked towards his office door before the tears came.

Gu Shiyan played it again. And again. Five times. Ten. On the eleventh, he slowed it down frame by frame and watched Su Yan’s face in the moment the soup fell. There was no anger in it. Only surprise, and then, immediately, the instinct to step forward and help her.

Cold running water, Su Yan had said. At least ten minutes.

And Gu Shiyan had walked straight past him.

He asked security for every recording of the corridor from the past month. He sat until the sun rose watching Shen Ruoxi angle her phone at his back, again and again, a hundred small secret clicks he had never once noticed.

At nine o’clock, she came into his office with his coffee, smiling, the little bandage still on her hand.

Gu Shiyan didn’t look up. “Put your phone on the desk.”

Her smile flickered. “President Gu?”

“Your phone. Now.”

The photo album held four hundred and twelve pictures of him. Gu Shiyan scrolled through exactly three of them, then set the phone down.

“HR will process your resignation today,” he said. “If you ever come near my husband or my son again, my lawyers will make sure no company in this country hires you.”

She cried. She begged. It made no difference. Twenty minutes later, security walked her out of the building with a cardboard box.

Gu Shiyan cancelled his afternoon meetings. For the first time in his life, he left the office at four o’clock on a weekday. He had no idea what he would say. He had never apologised to anyone. He only knew he had to say it today.

The house was quiet when he arrived. Su Yan was out. Anan was at kindergarten.

He went into his study.

The divorce agreement was no longer under the slip of paper. It lay in the very centre of his desk. On the last page, the signature line had been filled in with two characters in elegant, sword-sharp brush strokes: Su Yan.

Beside it lay the black bank card Gu Shiyan had given him on their wedding day. The card that, for three years, had paid for sports cars, designer watches and nightclub bills worth millions.

And under the card, a folded note.

President Gu,

The papers are signed, as you wished. I am returning your card. Since the day I fell into the pool, I have not spent a single coin from it. You may check.

From now on, the only thing between us is our son. We need only take care of Anan together. There is no other relationship.

Please look after your health. Do not drink the tea in your study.

Su Yan

Gu Shiyan opened the banking app on his phone with fingers that were not entirely steady.

The last transaction on the card was dated the morning before the pool. After that: nothing. Five weeks of nothing. Not one coffee. Not one taxi.

He sat down slowly in his chair.

For three years, he had wanted exactly this. A signed paper. No more scenes. No more demands. Freedom.

So why did the room feel so empty? Why did his chest ache as if someone had walked out of it and closed the door behind them, gently, without making any sound at all?

He read the note again. Then he folded the divorce agreement in half, put it in the bottom drawer of his desk, and locked it.

He did not sign it.

The Empty House

Gu Shiyan tried to apologise. He truly did.

But Su Yan was never there. He left before dawn and came back after Anan’s bedtime, and when Gu Shiyan waited up for him, the light under the guest-room door simply went out. Once, they passed on the stairs. Gu Shiyan opened his mouth. Su Yan nodded politely, said “Good night, President Gu,” and was gone before a single word came out.

For the first time in his life, the most feared man in the city did not know how to begin a sentence.

Then, on Friday afternoon, Old Master Gu arrived.

Gu Zhenting was eighty-one years old and still walked with his back as straight as his ebony cane. He had founded Gu Group with his own hands, and it had been his order, three years ago, that his grandson marry the youngest son of the Su family, a decision no one in the family had ever understood.

He arrived unannounced, as always, and sat in the living room while the butler trembled.

“Where is Su Yan?”

“Young Master Su is... out, sir.”

The old man took out his phone and called his grandson.

“I am at your house,” he said, the moment Gu Shiyan answered. “I have not seen your husband in two months. Bring him to me.”

Gu Shiyan, in the middle of a board meeting, closed his eyes. “He’s busy, Grandfather.”

“Busy?” The old man’s voice sharpened. “Su Yan has never been busy a single day in his life. What have you done?”

“Nothing. I’ll bring him on Sunday.”

“See that you do.” The line went dead.

Gu Shiyan sat through the rest of the meeting without hearing a single word.

He went home at eight that night. The house was dark.

The butler met him at the door, and for the first time in years, the man looked frightened. “President Gu. Young Master Su left this afternoon. He... he took the little master with him. He said he would contact you about visiting.”

Gu Shiyan walked past him without answering.

The guest room was neat and bare. The enormous walk-in closet was still full: the designer suits, the silk shirts, the forty pairs of shoes the old Su Yan had bought with Gu Shiyan’s money. None of it had been touched. Only a few plain white shirts were missing from the end of the rail.

Anan’s room was worse.

The bed was made. The small toothbrush was gone from the bathroom. The stuffed green dinosaur that Anan slept with every night was gone from the pillow.

In its place was a drawing done in thick crayon. Three stick figures holding hands under a yellow sun. One small. One tall, with a frown. One smiling, with a bowl of something steaming in his hand.

Underneath, in a child’s wobbly letters: DADDY. PAPA. ME.

Gu Shiyan stood in his son’s empty room holding the drawing for a very long time.

Then he took out his phone and called Su Yan.

It rang once, then went to voicemail.

He called again. Voicemail.

He called a third number.

“Xu Ming,” he said, when his new assistant answered. “Find out where my husband is living. Tonight.”

The Report

Xu Ming was twenty-six, quiet, wore round glasses, and had been Gu Shiyan’s assistant for exactly four days. At seven o’clock the next morning, he stood in front of the CEO’s desk with a thin folder and the careful expression of a man about to deliver very strange news.

“Mr. Su has rented a two-bedroom apartment in Willow Lane,” he said. “It’s an old neighbourhood near the little master’s kindergarten. Fourth floor, no elevator. He signed the lease three days ago and paid six months in advance.”

Gu Shiyan frowned. “Paid with what? He didn’t use my card. Not once. The Su family cut him off years ago. How can he have money?”

Xu Ming adjusted his glasses.

“He’s been treating patients, sir.”

Silence.

“...Treating.”

“Yes, sir. It started about a month ago. An old man in Willow Lane had a stroke on the street. The ambulance was stuck in traffic. Witnesses say Mr. Su knelt beside him, took out a set of silver needles, and the man was sitting up and talking before the ambulance arrived. The hospital said he’d have been paralysed on one side if not for whatever was done in those first ten minutes.”

Xu Ming turned a page.

“After that, people started coming to him. Neighbours first. Then their relatives. He sees patients every morning in a small room behind a herbal medicine shop. The poor ones, he doesn’t charge. The others pay what they can. The people in Willow Lane call him Little Divine Doctor Su.”

Gu Shiyan said nothing. He was remembering the white ring at the hospital, Doctor Qian saying medically, there is nothing wrong with him. Remembering two fingers resting on Anan’s wrist, the slight absent frown of someone listening to something no one else could hear.

“There’s more, sir.” Xu Ming hesitated. “Last week, he treated Rong Che.”

That name made Gu Shiyan look up sharply.

Everyone in the city knew the Rong family. Old money, older than the Gu fortune by two hundred years, descended from a real imperial bloodline. The newspapers called them the royal family of Jiangcheng, and they were not entirely joking. Two years ago, their only heir, Rong Che, had been in a car accident that left him unable to walk. The Rong family had flown in the best specialists from Germany, America and Japan. All of them had said the same thing: he would never stand again.

“Seven days of treatment,” Xu Ming said. “Needles and herbal medicine. On the eighth day, Rong Che walked across his father’s study with a cane. His doctors are calling it a miracle. The family tried to pay twenty million yuan.”

“Tried?”

“Mr. Su refused. He said his fee for the week was two thousand yuan and that was all he would take. So the Rong family transferred the twenty million anyway and called it a gift. For the little master’s future, they said.” Xu Ming closed the folder. “And sir... the kindergarten teacher said the little master has gained three kilos this month. She said he never used to talk in class. Now he won’t stop. He tells everyone his daddy is a doctor who can fly.”

Gu Shiyan stared at the folder on his desk.

For three years, he had thought of his husband as a weight. Something loud and greedy and hopeless that had been tied to his life by his grandfather’s stubbornness. And for these last five weeks, a stranger had been living in his house. A man who healed strangers in the street for free. Who refused twenty million yuan. Who had saved his son, quietly, one bowl of porridge at a time, and had tried to save him too.

And Gu Shiyan had looked at all of it and called it an act.

He pressed his hand flat against the desk, as if the floor had moved.

I didn’t lose a burden, he thought. I lost something I never even bothered to look at.

“Sir?” Xu Ming said carefully. “Is there anything else?”

“Rong Che,” Gu Shiyan said slowly. “His treatment is finished?”

“Yes, sir. Though...” Xu Ming coughed. “According to the herbal shop owner, he still comes by the clinic every day. For follow-up visits. He usually brings flowers.”

Grandfather’s Secret

On Sunday, Gu Shiyan went to the old Gu estate alone.

His grandfather was in the tea room, sitting by the window that looked out over the plum garden. He took one look at his grandson’s face and set down his cup.

“Where is he?”

Gu Shiyan did not lie. He told him everything: the pool, the hospital, the lunchboxes, the footage, the signed papers, the unused card, the empty room with a crayon drawing on the pillow.

When he finished, the old man was silent for a long time.

Then he struck the floor once with his ebony cane, hard enough to make the teacups jump.

“Fool,” he said. “You stubborn, blind fool. Did you never once wonder why I made you marry him?”

“Every day for three years,” Gu Shiyan said quietly.

Gu Zhenting looked out at the plum trees for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was lower.

“Forty years ago, I was dying. A wasting sickness no hospital could name. The only man who saved me was an old Taoist master at Qingyun Temple, high in the mountains. He never took a single coin. He only said that one day, the Gu family would owe him a favour.”

He turned his cup slowly in his hands.

“Three years ago, he sent for me. He was more than a hundred years old by then. He told me that you must marry the youngest son of the Su family. I said the boy was a drunk and a disgrace. He said: I know."

The old man’s eyes met his grandson’s.

“He said: Do not judge that child by what you see now. That body carries a soul that does not belong to it, a lost and borrowed thing. One day, the true soul will return to its home. It is the soul of a great healer, from very long ago. When it returns, it will save your family’s bloodline. Until then, be patient."

The tea room was very quiet.

“I thought it was the riddle of an old man near the end of his life,” Gu Zhenting said. “But I owed him my life, so I did as he asked. And for three years I watched that boy and wondered if I’d ruined yours.” He paused. “Now you tell me your husband put needles in Rong Che and made him walk.”

Gu Shiyan didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

Because everything was falling into place inside his head, one piece after another, like a lock turning.

The elegant brush calligraphy, nothing like Su Yan’s old handwriting. The strange old-fashioned way he spoke. The third watch, he had said. Not three a.m. The third watch, like a man from a history drama. Anan, giggling, telling the maids that Daddy had tried to fight the TV with a fruit knife. The calm in his eyes, like someone who had already died once.

The doctors had said there was nothing wrong with his head. They were right.

It was never an act.

The man in his house was not Su Yan pretending to be someone else. He was someone else.

And Gu Shiyan had told him: Don’t come again.

He stood up so fast that his chair scraped the floor.

“Where are you going?” his grandfather demanded.

“To bring my husband home,” Gu Shiyan said, and was already out the door.

He did not call the driver. He took the keys to the black car himself and drove out through the estate gates faster than he had driven in ten years.

Behind him, in the tea room, the old man picked up his cup again and smiled for the first time all day.

But I Didn’t

Willow Lane was narrow and old, lined with plane trees and little shops selling steamed buns and herbal tea. Washing hung from balconies. Old men played chess on a stone table by the corner. Gu Shiyan’s black car did not fit here at all, and every head on the street turned as he parked it badly half on the pavement.

No elevator. He took the stairs two at a time, all four floors, and arrived in front of the faded green door with his heart pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with the stairs.

He raised his hand to knock.

The door opened before he could.

Su Yan stood there, a cloth medicine bag over his shoulder, clearly on his way out. He was wearing one of the plain white shirts, sleeves rolled to the elbow. He looked rested. He looked well. He looked, Gu Shiyan thought with a strange tightness in his chest, more at home in this small, shabby doorway than he had ever looked in the mansion.

For one second, surprise showed in his dark eyes. Then it was gone, replaced by that quiet, closed politeness.

“President Gu,” he said. “Anan is having his nap. If you want to see him, you could have called.”

“I did call. Many times.”

“Ah.” Su Yan’s expression did not change. “I must have been with patients.”

Then a voice came from inside the apartment. Warm. Easy. Far too comfortable.

“Doctor Su, is it the delivery? Tell them to leave it, I’ll carry it up—”

A young man stepped into view behind Su Yan.

He was tall and handsome in a sunny, open way, with soft brown hair and a smile that probably made the newspapers swoon. He leaned lightly on a polished walnut cane. On the little table behind him sat an enormous bouquet of white peonies, and beside it, two cups of tea, still steaming.

Gu Shiyan knew that face. It had been on every financial magazine in the city for years.

Rong Che.

Rong Che looked at him, and then at Su Yan, and his smile did not falter at all. If anything, it grew a little sharper.

“President Gu,” he said pleasantly. “What a surprise. I was just about to drive Doctor Su to the clinic. And then I’m taking him to dinner.” He turned to Su Yan, and his voice softened in a way that made Gu Shiyan’s jaw lock. “You promised, remember? You said if I could walk down all four flights of stairs by myself, you’d let me buy you a proper meal.”

“I said I would consider it,” Su Yan corrected mildly.

“Consider it fast, Doctor.” Rong Che grinned. “You gave me back my legs. The least I can do is give you the rest of my life. Or at least dinner. Dinner’s a start.”

Something hot and furious rose in Gu Shiyan’s chest. It was not a feeling he had a name for. He had never felt it before in his life, not for anyone.

He only knew that the sight of another man standing in his husband’s doorway, smiling at him like that, was unbearable.

Before he could think, he reached out, caught Su Yan’s wrist, and pulled.

Su Yan stumbled forward a step, straight into his chest. And Gu Shiyan wrapped both arms around him and held on, tight, in front of Rong Che, the neighbours on the stairs, and the entire watching world.

“He is my husband,” Gu Shiyan said.

His voice was low and steady and utterly certain.

For a moment, Su Yan was perfectly still in his arms. Gu Shiyan could feel his heartbeat through the thin white shirt, quick and startled, like a bird.

Then Su Yan spoke, very calmly, against his shoulder.

“President Gu. I’ve already signed the divorce papers.”

Behind them, Rong Che laughed softly. He leaned on his cane, his eyes bright with challenge.

“Well then,” he said. “That means I have a chance.”

Gu Shiyan’s arms tightened around the man he had ignored for five weeks, and three years, and almost lost forever.

“He signed,” he said quietly. “But I didn’t.”

I’ll Go With Daddy

“...Papa?”

A small, sleepy voice came from the bedroom doorway.

All three men turned. Anan stood there in green dinosaur pyjamas, hair sticking up on one side, rubbing his eyes with one fist. The stuffed dinosaur dangled from his other hand.

Gu Shiyan’s arms loosened. Su Yan stepped back out of them at once, smoothing his shirt, his face composed again, as though nothing had happened.

Anan looked at his papa. Then at his daddy. Then at the strange tall man with the cane and the flowers. He was only five, but he had spent his whole short life watching grown-ups’ faces for danger, and he understood more than anyone gave him credit for.

“Papa,” he said, very seriously. “Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?”

Gu Shiyan crouched down so they were eye to eye. “Anan—”

“If you get a divorce,” Anan said, and his lower lip trembled, but he held his ground, “I’m going with Daddy.”

He walked past his father, straight to Su Yan, and wrapped both arms around his leg.

“Daddy makes porridge,” he said into Su Yan’s trousers. “Daddy doesn’t shout. Daddy reads me stories and he knows how planes fly now. I’m staying with Daddy.”

No board meeting, no rival, no billion-yuan deal had ever hit Gu Shiyan as hard as those few words from a five-year-old.

Su Yan laid a gentle hand on the boy’s head. He didn’t look at Gu Shiyan. “Anan, you can see Papa whenever you want. Papa loves you very much.”

Anan only held on tighter.

Rong Che, to his credit, had the good sense to be quiet. He picked up his car keys from the table. “I think I’ll wait downstairs, Doctor Su.”

“There’s no need,” Su Yan said. “I’ll take the bus to the clinic today. Anan is awake. Thank you for the flowers.”

Rong Che looked at him for a long moment, then smiled, a little ruefully, and limped out past Gu Shiyan. At the doorway, he paused and said quietly, so only the CEO could hear: “You’d better not waste it.”

Then he was gone.

Gu Shiyan stood in the doorway of the small apartment. Su Yan had already turned away, kneeling to help Anan put on his socks.

“I’ll come back,” Gu Shiyan said at last.

“Anan will be happy to see you,” Su Yan replied. Polite. Kind. Unreachable.

Gu Shiyan went down the four flights of stairs slowly this time. He sat in his black car on Willow Lane for twenty minutes without starting the engine.

He had come here to bring his husband home. He was leaving with nothing. Not his husband. Not even his son.

For the first time in his life, Gu Shiyan did not know how to win.

The Old Fox

Gu Zhenting was still sitting in the tea room when his grandson walked back in alone.

The old man looked at the empty space beside him. Then at his face.

“Well?” he said. “Where is my grandson-in-law?”

Gu Shiyan didn’t answer. He sat down heavily across the table, picked up a cold cup of tea, and stared into it as though it might tell him what to do.

The silence went on long enough to answer the question.

Gu Zhenting sighed, deeply, the sigh of a man who had built an empire from nothing and somehow raised a grandson who could not build a single sentence when it mattered.

“In business, you are a tiger,” he said. “In love, you are a block of wood. Did you at least tell him you were sorry?”

“...There was another man there.”

“And?”

“I told him Su Yan was my husband.”

“And?”

“Su Yan said he’d already signed. And then Anan said if we divorced, he’d leave with Su Yan.”

The old man stared at him. Then he laughed. A big, delighted, completely unsympathetic laugh that made the plum blossoms outside seem to shiver.

“Good boy, Anan. My great-grandson has more sense than you.” He wiped his eyes and held out his hand. “Give me your phone.”

“Why?”

“Give it to me.”

Gu Shiyan handed it over. His grandfather found Su Yan’s number, pressed call, and put it on speaker.

Then, before his grandson’s astonished eyes, the founder of Gu Group sagged in his chair, pressed a trembling hand to his chest, and transformed in an instant into a frail, dying old man.

“Xiao Yan...” His voice came out thin and cracked, as if every word cost him. “It’s... Grandfather...”

On the other end, a pause. Then Su Yan’s voice, instantly alert. “Grandfather? What’s wrong?”

“My heart... it’s... not good. The doctor says... I may not last the night.” A long, rattling breath. “I am an old man. I only want... to see you and Anan... one last time...”

“I’m coming,” Su Yan said at once. “Don’t move. Don’t eat anything. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

The line went dead.

Gu Zhenting sat up straight, his voice strong and clear as a bell. He handed the phone back to his speechless grandson.

“Grandfather,” Gu Shiyan said slowly. “You are not dying.”

“Of course I’m not dying. I’ll outlive you at this rate.” The old man rapped his cane on the floor. “Butler! Call Old Doctor Lin. Tell him to come right away and look very worried. And lock every guest room in this house. They’re being renovated.”

“Sir,” the butler said faintly, “the guest rooms were renovated last spring.”

“Then they are being renovated again.”

Gu Zhenting turned back to his grandson, eyes gleaming, and Gu Shiyan finally understood exactly what his grandfather had in mind.

“Tonight,” the old man said, “your husband sleeps under this roof. And there is only one bedroom left.” He picked up his tea. “Don’t waste it, block of wood.”

One Night Only

Thirty-eight minutes later, a taxi screeched to a halt outside the gates of the Gu estate.

Su Yan came through the front door at a run, medicine bag over his shoulder, Anan bundled in his arms in a hastily buttoned coat. His hair had come loose from its neat comb. His face was pale with worry.

Gu Shiyan, waiting in the hall, felt a sharp stab of guilt. Then a sharper, guiltier stab of something that felt very much like happiness, just at the sight of him.

“Where is he?” Su Yan asked.

“Upstairs.”

The master bedroom was dim, lit only by a single lamp. Gu Zhenting lay propped against the pillows, looking very small and very old, his breathing slow and laboured. Beside the bed stood Old Doctor Lin, the family physician for thirty years, wearing an expression of deep, theatrical gloom.

“His heart is very weak,” Doctor Lin announced. “He must rest. Absolute rest. No shocks. No disappointment. He must not be upset in any way.”

“Xiao Yan...” the old man whispered, and held out one shaking hand. “You came...”

Su Yan set Anan down and knelt at the bedside. He took the old man’s hand in both of his. And then, out of a lifetime of habit, he slid two fingers onto the inside of the wrist.

He went very still.

The pulse beneath his fingertips was strong as an ox. Steady as a temple bell. Gu Zhenting’s heart was, in fact, healthier than his grandson’s.

Su Yan raised his eyes slowly to the old man’s face.

Gu Zhenting cracked one eye open. For a single instant, the look in it was not dying at all. It was pleading. Then it closed again, and the old man let out a long, pitiful groan.

Su Yan looked over his shoulder. Doctor Lin was very busy examining the ceiling. And in the doorway stood Gu Shiyan, the most feared man in Jiangcheng, looking at him with an expression so lost and so hopeful that, for a moment, he looked almost as young as Anan.

Somewhere inside Bai Yunshen, a thousand years of good sense said: Walk away.

And somewhere deeper, something he had not felt since long before the Jade Pavilion said: Stay.

He turned back to the patient and said, with perfect seriousness, “Grandfather’s qi is very weak. Doctor Lin is right. He must not be upset.”

The old man’s grip on his hand tightened in gratitude.

“Then stay,” Gu Zhenting whispered. “Stay tonight. Both of you. If I wake in the night... I want my family close. Anan can sleep here with me.”

“Yay!” said Anan, and immediately climbed onto the enormous bed.

Su Yan opened his mouth. “I’ll take one of the guest rooms—”

“Under renovation,” said the butler from the hallway, very quickly.

“All of them?”

“All of them, Young Master.”

Su Yan looked at the butler. Then at Doctor Lin, still fascinated by the ceiling. Then at the old man, whose mouth was twitching suspiciously under the blanket.

“Of course they are,” he said.

And so, at eleven o’clock that night, Su Yan found himself standing at the door of the bedroom Gu Shiyan had slept in as a boy, with its tall bookshelves, its dark wood, and its single wide bed.

Gu Shiyan stood by the window. He had taken off his jacket and tie. He turned when the door opened, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.

Gu Shiyan tried. He truly tried. He opened his mouth to say I’m sorry, and I was wrong, and please come home. But the words, which he had rehearsed all the way here, caught somewhere in his throat and would not come out.

“I’ll take the sofa,” Su Yan said quietly, and closed the door behind him.

Under the Moon

The pain came at the third watch, exactly as it always did.

Gu Shiyan woke with his left temple splitting open and his hand numb to the elbow. He bit back the sound, the way he had for months, alone in the dark.

But this time, he was not alone.

A lamp clicked on. Su Yan was already off the sofa and at his side, his hair loose around his face, a slim cloth roll of silver needles in his hand.

“Lie still,” he said quietly. “Don’t talk.”

His fingers were cool on Gu Shiyan’s temple. One needle, then another, then a third, so fine he barely felt them. A fourth in the web of his left hand. A warm pressure at the base of his skull. And slowly, like a tide going out, the pain loosened its grip, and the feeling crept back into his fingers, and Gu Shiyan could breathe again.

For a long time, neither of them spoke. Moonlight came through the tall window and lay across the bed in a pale silver path.

When Su Yan removed the last needle and moved to stand, Gu Shiyan caught his wrist.

“Don’t go.”

Su Yan stopped.

And Gu Shiyan, who had not been able to say a single word earlier that night, sat up, and put his arms around him from behind, and held him the way a drowning man holds onto the only solid thing in the sea.

“I was wrong,” he said into Su Yan’s hair. His voice was rough. “I was wrong about everything. You cooked for my son and I didn’t see it. You tried to save my life and I called it an act. You stood in my office with soup on your clothes and I walked past you. I told you not to come again.” His arms tightened. “I’ve regretted it every single day since. I watched that footage eleven times. Every time, I wanted to go back and break my own legs before I walked past you.”

Su Yan said nothing. But he didn’t pull away.

“I’m not good at this,” Gu Shiyan said. “I’ve never said sorry to anyone in my life. I don’t know how. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry for every day you were alone in that house. I’m sorry I didn’t look. I’m looking now.”

He took a breath.

“Grandfather told me about the old master at Qingyun Temple. About the soul that would come home.” A pause. “I don’t care what you are. A ghost, an immortal, a man from a thousand years ago. I don’t care. I only want to know one thing.”

He turned Su Yan gently around to face him in the moonlight.

“What is your real name?”

The man in his arms was silent for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was very soft, as if he were saying it aloud for the first time in a thousand years.

“Bai Yunshen.”

“Bai Yunshen,” Gu Shiyan repeated slowly, like a vow.

“I was a physician of the Great Yan Dynasty. They called me the Ghost Doctor. I was poisoned at a banquet by a man I once called my brother.” A small, tired smile. “And then I woke up in your swimming pool.”

Gu Shiyan let out a breath that was almost a laugh and almost something else.

Then he reached for the jacket draped over the chair beside the bed, took out a folded document, and held it up between them. Bai Yunshen recognised the elegant brushstrokes of his own signature on the last page.

“I took it from my drawer this morning,” Gu Shiyan said. “Before I drove to Willow Lane. I was going to do this in front of you, but I lost my nerve.”

He tore it in half. Then in half again. Then again, until the divorce agreement was nothing but small white pieces scattered across the moonlit sheets like plum petals.

“Come home,” he said. “Not for Anan. Not for Grandfather. For me.”

Bai Yunshen looked at the torn paper. Then at the man in front of him, the cold, ruthless CEO of the city, with his heart standing in his eyes for the first time.

“You told me not to come again,” he said quietly.

“Then I’ll come to you.” Gu Shiyan didn’t hesitate. “Every day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. As long as it takes.”

“You can’t cook.”

“I’ll learn.”

The corner of Bai Yunshen’s mouth curved, slowly, helplessly, into a real smile, the first he had given Gu Shiyan in this life or any other.

“You’ll burn the kitchen down.”

“Then I’ll build you a new one.”

And Bai Yunshen, the Ghost Doctor who had faced death without blinking, laughed softly, and leaned forward, and rested his forehead against his husband’s.

Gu Shiyan kissed him then. Carefully, as if he were afraid he might vanish. And Bai Yunshen, a thousand years from home, closed his eyes and kissed him back.

That night, the sofa stayed empty.

Down the hall, behind a door left very slightly ajar, an old man who was not dying at all smiled to himself in the dark, put an arm around his sleeping great-grandson, and finally went to sleep.

The Poison in the Tea

They went home together the next morning: Gu Shiyan, his husband, and their son asleep between them in the back of the car, holding one hand of each.

But there was one more thing Bai Yunshen had to do before he could call it home.

“The tea in your study,” he said, as soon as they arrived. “Where does it come from?”

Gu Shiyan frowned. “My uncle. Gu Hongwen. He sends a tin of Wuyi oolong every month. Old Zhou prepares it for me every night.”

Old Zhou. The butler. The man who had pulled Su Yan from the pool with cold eyes. The man who had seen a child’s bruised hands every day and never said a word. The man who, Bai Yunshen now remembered from the broken memories, had poured every glass of wine the old Su Yan ever drank.

He asked for the tin. He brewed one cup, exactly as Old Zhou would, and breathed in the steam.

Underneath the rich, roasted fragrance of the oolong, faint as a whisper, was a bitter edge he would have known in any lifetime.

His hands went cold.

“Withered Lotus Root,” he said softly.

The same poison. The very same, from a formula a thousand years old, the one that had burned through his own body on the jade floor of the Jade Pavilion. Somehow, it had survived the centuries in some forgotten book, and found its way to this cup.

He took a silver needle from his roll and dipped it into the tea. When he lifted it out, the tip had turned black as ink.

Gu Shiyan stared at it. For two years, he had drunk that tea every night.

“It doesn’t kill quickly in small doses,” Bai Yunshen said quietly. “It eats at the nerves. Headaches first. Then numbness. Then one day, the heart simply stops, and every doctor calls it overwork.” He looked up. “And the same poison is in Su Yan’s body. Given in his wine, I think. To make him wild and unstable, so that when you finally died...”

“...everyone would blame my drunk, angry husband,” Gu Shiyan finished. His voice had gone very quiet and very cold.

They set the trap that same evening.

At ten o’clock, Gu Shiyan drank his tea as usual. At ten-fifteen, he collapsed in his study. Su Yan screamed for help. And Old Zhou, believing the moment had finally come, slipped into the garden and made a phone call.

“It’s done,” he whispered. “He’s down. And the husband was right there with him.”

He did not see Xu Ming behind the hedge, recording every word. He did not see the two police officers waiting beside him.

Gu Hongwen arrived at the Gu family hospital an hour later, wearing a black suit and an expression of deep sorrow, already holding the papers that would make him acting chairman of Gu Group.

He walked into the private ward. And found his nephew sitting up in bed, perfectly healthy, with his husband beside him and four police officers at the door.

“Good evening, Uncle,” Gu Shiyan said. “Thank you for the tea.”

The confession came out in pieces that night. Two years of planning. A rare medical text bought from a private collector, filled with forgotten formulas from an ancient dynasty. Old Zhou, bribed and paid every month. The chief of the family hospital, Doctor Qian, paid to find nothing in Gu Shiyan’s scans, and to tell him his husband was only acting.

All of them were arrested before dawn.

Later, when the house was quiet again, Bai Yunshen stood alone in the garden under the plum tree, looking up at the same moon that had shone on the Great Yan Dynasty.

A thousand years ago, a man he had trusted handed him a cup of poisoned wine, and he had died on the floor with no one to save him.

This time, he had seen it in time. This time, the cup had been poured out on the grass.

Footsteps came across the lawn behind him. A warm coat was settled around his shoulders, and then a pair of arms.

“Thinking about him?” Gu Shiyan asked. “The one who poisoned you?”

“Mo Lingfeng.” Bai Yunshen leaned back into his husband’s chest. “He’s been dust for a thousand years. I spent my last breath wishing for another life where I wouldn’t die so foolishly.” He smiled faintly. “I think I got it.”

“You did,” Gu Shiyan said, and held him tighter. “And you’re not going anywhere. Not this time.”

One Year Later

The little room behind the herbal shop in Willow Lane was gone.

In its place stood a clinic of grey brick and dark wood, with a carved sign above the door in elegant brushstroke calligraphy: Yunshen Hall. Every morning, the queue stretched to the corner. Old people with stiff joints. Workers with bad backs. Mothers carrying feverish children. The poor paid nothing. Everyone else paid what they could.

It had been built with twenty million yuan from the Rong family. The Ghost Doctor had refused to keep the money for himself, so he had given it back to the city instead.

At eleven o’clock, Rong Che walked in without a cane, carrying a bouquet of white peonies.

“For the clinic,” he said innocently.

“You said that last week,” said Bai Yunshen, without looking up from his patient.

“And I’ll say it next week.” Rong Che set the flowers on the counter and leaned on it, smiling. “Just so you know, Doctor Bai. If that block of ice ever makes you cry, my offer still stands.”

“He won’t,” Bai Yunshen said calmly.

“How can you be so sure?”

At exactly twelve o’clock, the bell above the door rang.

The entire waiting room turned to look. The patients had seen it every day for a year, and they still turned every time.

Gu Shiyan, CEO of Gu Group, the most feared man in Jiangcheng, walked into the clinic in a perfect charcoal suit, carrying a three-tier lunchbox wrapped in dark blue cloth.

On the sixty-eighth floor of Gu Group Tower, the staff group chat was already exploding.

[Reception]: PRESIDENT GU LEFT WITH THE LUNCHBOX AGAIN

[Finance]: day 365. I can’t believe I lost that bet

[Marketing]: xu ming says he got up at 5am to make soup. he burned it twice

[Xu Ming]: Please stop discussing the President’s soup in the company chat.

In the clinic, Gu Shiyan set the lunchbox on Bai Yunshen’s desk, gave Rong Che one long, cold look that could have frozen a lake, and untied the cloth.

Rice, slightly too soft. Tomato and egg, a little burnt at the edges. A clear soup of fish and gastrodia root, cooked carefully from a recipe written in elegant brushstrokes and stuck to the fridge.

Bai Yunshen tasted the soup. Everyone in the waiting room held their breath.

“Too much salt,” he said.

“I’ll do better tomorrow,” Gu Shiyan said.

“You said that yesterday.”

“And I’ll say it tomorrow.” Gu Shiyan reached out and brushed a strand of hair from his husband’s forehead, right there in front of everyone. “Every day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. I promised.”

Bai Yunshen looked at him, and the smile that broke across his face was so warm that half the waiting room sighed out loud.

Rong Che picked up his flowers again, sighed dramatically, and gave them to the old lady at the front of the queue instead.

That spring, under the plum tree in the garden of the old Gu estate, they were married again.

Not with a contract this time, and not because a grandfather had ordered it. They wore traditional red wedding robes, embroidered in gold. Bai Yunshen’s hair was bound up in a jade crown, the way it had been a thousand years ago. Gu Zhenting, eighty-two and healthier than ever, performed the tea ceremony himself, and wept openly, and denied it afterwards.

Anan, now six, carried the rings on a red silk cushion with enormous seriousness. He had announced that he was going to be a doctor when he grew up, “like Daddy, but I’ll also fly planes.” He practised taking pulses on everyone. His great-grandfather’s, he reported proudly, was “as strong as an ox.”

The old man coughed and changed the subject.

As the sun went down and lanterns were lit in the plum branches, red as the lanterns of the Jade Pavilion long ago, Gu Shiyan took his husband’s hand.

“Do you ever miss it?” he asked quietly. “Your old world?”

Bai Yunshen looked around at the garden. At the grandfather pretending not to cry. At Anan chasing fireflies across the grass in a tiny red robe. At the man beside him who had learned, slowly and badly and with a great deal of salt, how to love him.

“In my last life,” he said, “I died alone on a cold floor, owing everything and having nothing. My last wish was for another chance.”

He laced his fingers through his husband’s.

“I don’t miss it. In that world, I was the doctor who brought back the dead. In this one—” he smiled, “—I finally came back to life myself.”

Gu Shiyan kissed him under the plum blossoms, while the lanterns glowed and their son laughed and the old man pretended very hard to look at the sky.

That night, on the back of their wedding photograph, the Ghost Doctor wrote one line in elegant, sword-sharp brushstrokes:

A thousand years to find my way home. Worth every one.

THE END