Chapter 10: Alright, I Know You’re in the Honeymoon Phase

The temperature in the mountains is always much lower, and the cold seeps in gradually through the gaps in the clothing, causing a shiver to run through the body.

Xu Huai knelt on the ground in a disheveled state. Blood stained the branch, red and as thick as a forearm. A dead branch pierced his waist and abdomen, and even the simplest breath caused unbearable pain.

The color had drained entirely from Xu Huai’s face, and a layer of grayness covered his light brown eyes. Soon, his eyes were obscured by the black bangs falling over his forehead as he lowered his head.

The feeling of life flowing out of his body seemed to become concrete at this moment.

–It’s over.

Coughing caused his body to tremble, tearing the wound even wider. Cold sweat broke out on Xu Huai’s forehead from the pain. He endured the pain and lifted his eyelids, looking at the surrounding environment.

If this place weren’t far from the city, and there were traces of frequent human activity nearby, he might be discovered and barely rescued.

But this was in the mountains, and the surrounding vegetation was dense, with no traces of human activity at all.

With such a serious injury in this place, his chances of being rescued were zero.

The loss of blood caused his consciousness to dissipate gradually, and the pain in his body also began to fade…

A cold, Yin touch suddenly appeared on his neck, slowly moving from his neck to his jaw, using a little force to force him to lift his head. Xu Huai was unable to open his eyes, only able to feel a sinister gaze falling on his face.

His brain had completely lost its ability to think. He could only rely on instinct, squeezing out the last of his strength to call for help.

But before he could even put together a complete syllable, Xu Huai fell into a coma.

Darkness and an empty mind impact a person’s perception of time. He didn’t know how long it had passed…

Xu Huai slowly opened his eyes.

The sunlight outside the window gently poured into the ward. Xu Huai hadn’t recovered from the feeling of near-death in his dream just now. He lay blankly on the cot, turning his head to look at Xie Jing on the bed next to him. It took him three to five minutes to come to his senses.

Xie Jing didn’t seem to have noticed that the other person in the room had woken up. He was holding his phone and looking at something.

Seeing that the rain outside the window had stopped and the sky was turning dusky, Xu Huai picked up the phone next to him and looked at the time. It was already six in the afternoon.

“Awake?”

Hearing the movement of Xu Huai getting up, Xie Jing on the bed looked over. Seeing the man looking at him with a smile, Xu Huai suddenly realized that the situation was that his employer was sick in bed, and he, a healthy person, had slept soundly next to his employer for nearly three hours.

Fortunately, Xie Jing hadn’t reached out to him through the [National Security Special Protection Department]; otherwise, he would definitely be facing complaints about his extremely improper work attitude.

Though he wouldn’t care if someone complained about him, the only person who would be concerned was Song Lianzhou. However, being nagged for half a day was quite annoying.

“Yeah.” Xu Huai straightened out the corners of his clothes that were a little wrinkled from sleeping and got out of bed. “Sorry, I accidentally fell asleep.”

He usually slept very lightly, and some noises would wake him up, but today he had slept so soundly for three hours.

Xie Jing shook his head: “Waiting in the hospital is boring anyway. You don’t need to apologize.”

“Besides, you were also tired for a long time in the villa before. It’s normal to rest now.”

His employer had even thought of a reason for him.

He really…

Xie Jing added: “However, can you help me with a small favor now?”

Xu Huai looked up.

Xie Jing pointed to the outside of the window: “I came over without having lunch at noon, and now I’m really hungry. Can I trouble the boss to go to the hospital cafeteria and get me some food?”

Xu Huai naturally agreed. After sharing his phone number with Xie Jing and telling him to call if anything happened while he was out, he left the ward.

But at the moment he went out, Xu Huai paused.

He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but the temperature in the ward felt cooler and more Yin than in the corridor. The Yin coldness surprisingly comforted him in this stuffy weather.

After Xu Huai went out and found the hospital floor plan, he discovered that the cafeteria was in the next building, which required walking a certain distance and crossing an open-air corridor.

The small puddles formed on the ground by the previous rain hadn’t had time to evaporate. Looking at the reflection of the sky above, Xu Huai remembered the dream from the moment before.

In the past, he would always have a recurring dream.

He didn’t know the specific details of the dream. No matter how many times he wrote them down, the memory in his brain always reverted to its original settings, like a computer in a school computer lab after he woke up.

He could only remember that, as he woke up, with the dream receding like a tide, the last image left in his mind was a highly blurred, gray-colored block.

Besides that, there was the despair and fear of near-death.

But now he clearly remembered the dream he had during his nap. In the dream, he was seriously injured, and a dead branch pierced his waist and abdomen.

He used to forget it before waking up, so why did he suddenly remember the content of the dream now?

The dreams, including the fact that he could inexplicably see ghosts wandering around—ghosts that initially had no intention of appearing before people—started because of Xie Jing’s appearance.

Thinking about it this way, Xie Jing, or rather, the ghost clinging to Xie Jing… was indeed a bit too unusual.

Xu Huai slowed down his pace, raising his head to look in the direction of Xie Jing’s ward.

But until now, he hadn’t felt anything threatening. If he didn’t actively provoke those visible ghosts, they wouldn’t deliberately come up and touch him.

Suddenly being able to remember dreams also didn’t explain anything.

Moreover, he had asked Song Lianzhou before, and Song Lianzhou had said that the phenomenon of seeing ghosts when touching people had happened before, but it wasn’t common.

Since he wasn’t a special case… then the problem shouldn’t be too big?

The more Xu Huai thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed.

It was six o’clock, the peak time for dinner, and many people were queuing up in the hospital cafeteria. Xu Huai took advantage of the queuing time to take a picture of the menu and send it to Xie Jing. Xie Jing quickly circled a few dishes.

Following the checkmarks above, Xu Huai discovered that Xie Jing’s tastes closely resembled his own. The dishes he selected were essentially all spicy.

Not bad, his employer had excellent taste, just like him.

Considering that Xie Jing was still receiving an IV drip, Xu Huai removed some of the spicier dishes and ordered two relatively bland meat dishes symbolically.

Cafeterias like this are always noisy. It just so happened that someone was talking behind Xu Huai, and their voices were loud. He inadvertently heard two sentences of their conversation.

“I heard from my employer that the son of the Xie family next door died a few days ago. Right in this hospital. I don’t know why, it was just inexplicable.”

“The person was just gone, without even a chance to be rescued. They said it was a heart attack.”

Another male voice immediately chimed in.

“Oh, oh, I remember. The last time I went to that villa to clean, I saw that young man. He looked like he was only in his twenties, named Xie something, two characters.”

The person in front of him finished paying, and the cashier, seeing that the next person was tilting his head and not coming forward, said impatiently, “Hey, it’s your turn. Don’t block the people behind, okay? Where do so many rude people come from every day?”

Xu Huai turned his head, his face expressionless, stepped forward, and handed over the payment code on his phone.

Working in this crowded cafeteria in the stifling weather was already frustrating, and the occasional uncooperative customer would cause the accumulated resentment in their hearts to boil over.

The cashier, who already had a bad temper, was about to say a few more words, but when she met the customer’s eyes, the coldness in the other person’s eyes ran from her head to her toes, and she couldn’t say a single word.

It wasn’t until the next customer came forward that the cashier vaguely came back to her senses. When she turned her head again, subconsciously wanting to find that person, she realized that the person had already left.

…

When Xu Huai returned to the ward, Xie Jing was holding his phone, unaware that the door had opened. He didn’t know if he was replying to a message or doing something else, but he was very focused.

It wasn’t until Xu Huai opened the lid of the lunch box and the aroma of the dishes filled the ward that Xie Jing shifted his gaze from the screen to Xu Huai, who had been busy all along:

“Thank you for your hard work.”

Xu Huai paused in the action of breaking the chopsticks, and after a second, he said, “You’re welcome. It’s not good to eat too much spicy food while you’re sick, so I took the liberty of ordering two bland dishes to balance it out.”

Is that how you use “balance out”?

Xie Jing looked at the green pepper stir-fried pork and boiled cabbage in the lunch box, put down his phone, and chuckled softly, as if joking: “Is Boss Xu so considerate to every employer?”

Xu Huai’s face didn’t change, and he answered quickly: “Of course not.”

In fact, it was roughly the same. The quality of service was determined by the amount of money the employer paid.

But he was also quite picky. If he encountered employers with bad attitudes who were uncomfortable to get along with, he wouldn’t consider other things like he did with Xie Jing.

Otherwise, Song Lianzhou wouldn’t receive so many complaints every day.

Xu Huai hadn’t eaten lunch either, and he was indeed hungry at this point. But even with the food in front of him, he was still a little absent-minded.

He could clearly hear the conversation between the two people behind him as he was paying earlier, but it was cut off at a crucial moment, prompting his brain to fill in the gaps automatically.

It shouldn’t be like this.

Xu Huai realized once again that he might have a problem.

He actually had the bizarre thought of “Is it possible that Xie Jing isn’t alive?” because of the sentences the people behind him were chatting about.

Xie Jing was so vibrant, had a human temperature, got sick, and even felt hungry. There was nothing strange about him that could make him suspicious.

But at that moment, that’s what he thought.

That’s bad.

Xu Huai’s expression was solemn.

Has his mysterious, sixth-sense-like thing completely broken down? Is this related to seeing ghosts everywhere?

Will it affect his future work? No, he truly needs to find the thing clinging to Xie Jing as soon as possible and ask it.

While Xu Huai was racking his brains, the other patient in the ward, who didn’t look like a dead person at all, was looking at Xu Huai sitting next to him with great interest.

Noticing the coldness in Xu Huai’s eyes that was almost dripping, Xie Jing raised his eyebrows.

Oh, he ran into something when he went out and came back all fierce.

Kind of cute.

–

At the same time, Song Lianzhou, who had packed up his things and was preparing to leave the department, received a message from Xu Huai.

[Xu Huai: I not only saw a ghost, but my sixth sense is also inaccurate.]

Song Lianzhou lowered his head to read the message, then let out a snort. How could a couple in the honeymoon phase have an accurate sixth sense?

As for seeing ghosts, the ghostly stupid things he did when he was head over heels in love back then still made him cringe when he thought about them now. Xu Huai was still too young.

[Song Lianzhou: I don’t even want to talk about people like you.]

[Song Lianzhou: Alright, I’m busy.]

Stop pretending. Bro knows that your hormones are surging in the honeymoon phase. You can’t vent your inner emotions because the other person is in the hospital, so you’re coming to show off your love in front of Bro. Bro will tolerate your little mischief, but that’s enough.

[Xu Huai: ?]

Song Lianzhou overlooked the fact that the question mark Xu Huai typed appeared both confused and pale, expressing helplessness.