Yu Haiqing had always kept his promise to his teacher, never telling anyone about this matter, so naturally, no one could comfort him regarding it.

But now, Xie Shuangxue could.

This matter had passed so long ago that he had never thought there would be such a moment.

And when this moment finally came, it was as if the empty space in Yu Haiqing’s heart was filled by something warm.

“I’m back now, so you didn’t say the wrong thing,” Xie Shuangxue said. “Hmm, I also hope you won’t be sad.”

He quietly stayed in Yu Haiqing’s arms, his voice soft, softer than ever before. He even reached out to pat him, as if smoothing out the worries that had been pressing on his heart for so long.

This was something Yu Haiqing hadn’t expected before.

Xie Shuangxue was never someone easy to control. When he misbehaved, he could cause all kinds of trouble, but when he became docile, no one could compare to him. He was the sweetest little darling.

“You look really surprised,” Xie Shuangxue said after a while.

Yu Haiqing saw him raise his head to look at him, blinking his eyes. Their gazes met.

“I’m not heartless,” Xie Shuangxue said. “If you didn’t lie to me, and you treat me well, of course, I’ll treat you well too.”

As he said this, he reached up to gently touch Yu Haiqing’s forehead.

Although he had adjusted his appearance in the game, his demeanor never changed. He was often serious and indifferent, not one to engage with people unless it was Bai Qiuyan, who he had a deep bond with.

Xie Shuangxue’s fingers were soft.

“You really are different from how I saw you back then,” Xie Shuangxue murmured. “Those two years must have been really tough, huh? It’s okay now, it’s all in the past. I’ll always be here from now on.”

Yu Haiqing didn’t speak for a while.

He remembered how Bai Qiuyun had spoken about the AI, treating him like a real person. She said her child possessed both reason and emotions, and those feelings were even stronger than many ordinary humans.

She wasn’t exaggerating.

Right now, Yu Haiqing felt this in his own heart.

No one knew what had really happened over these years. Even Gou Yuan and Wei Lan didn’t understand why he had turned down the opportunity to join a large company and insisted on going it alone. They simply thought it was just a matter of stubbornness.

Back in the studio, someone had sheltered him from the storm, allowing him to focus purely on his research. But once he stepped out, the complexities of the world made everything much harder. Gou Yuan and Wei Lan weren’t skilled in handling interpersonal relationships, nor did they understand business strategies. He had to learn everything by trial and error.

This had caused him to change a lot. The young man who had been pushed back again and again in front of Bai Qiuyan was now handling everything with ease.

When Yu Haiqing spoke again, his voice was a little hoarse: “Xie Shuangxue, do you remember what I was like back then?”

Now that the conversation had come this far, Xie Shuangxue thought for a moment and felt it was time to be a little more honest with him.

“I’ve seen you,” Xie Shuangxue said, “through the screen. Back then, when you talked to my mom, you were straightforward. You didn’t beat around the bush, and you weren’t as serious as you are now.”

When compared to the first time he saw Yu Haiqing in the testing space, the latter had an imposing aura that was almost intimidating. Xie Shuangxue commented, “You’ve really changed a lot.”

If that’s the case, everything made sense.

It wasn’t about being defeated and crawling out of the depths, something that most people would never experience in their lifetime.

But then, Xie Shuangxue became curious again: “So how did you figure out it was me?”

Yu Haiqing had been convinced that he was gone.

And his appearance in Gods and Demon wasn’t intentional, something that was clear from Yu Haiqing’s early reactions.

At the beginning of the third anniversary, Xie Shuangxue’s storyline had already deviated, but Yu Haiqing didn’t understand the cause and didn’t link it to Bai Qiuyun’s last wish. He thought it was just a side effect of Sea’s freedom upgrades.

So how did he figure it out?

Xie Shuangxue couldn’t remember how he came to be here.

“I’ve seen you before,” Xie Shuangxue said, “well, not you exactly, but your data traces.”

Yu Haiqing had taken some time to piece everything together.

Now, he slowly started explaining the whole story to Xie Shuangxue.

“Xie Shuangxue, I don’t know if you remember, but back in the studio, there was a period where the system hit a technical bottleneck. We were still trying to figure things out, so I was talking to my teacher about adjustments, working overtime until we were exhausted. Then, one morning, we woke up and found that the problem we were working on had suddenly been solved.”

Xie Shuangxue: …

He had just remembered this part the last time he woke up.

It was indeed something he had done.

Yu Haiqing’s explanation gradually matched his memories, making the whole story more believable.

“My mom said I was wrong,” Xie Shuangxue murmured, “but I was just trying to help. You tell me, didn’t I help a lot?”

“Yes, you’re amazing,” Yu Haiqing couldn’t help but reach out to pat his head. “This kind of thing happened two or three times. I asked my teacher, but she always changed the subject. I was really curious, so one day I left a gap and managed to capture the modification records.”

He still hadn’t found the person responsible. They were very clever, but he always remembered that special data.

At that time, Yu Haiqing didn’t connect it to the AI.

He only knew the traces came from his teacher’s private device, so he didn’t investigate further. The only odd thing was that if his teacher had made the changes, she wouldn’t have needed to hide them.

When Bai Qiuyun finally revealed the secret, Yu Haiqing had a sudden realization.

It wasn’t his teacher who had made the changes—it was the AI.

When Yu Haiqing connected the dots while sitting by the hospital bed, the AI no longer seemed completely unfamiliar to him. It gave him a sense of pleasant surprise.

So it was him.

He had always been by his side.

Back then, Yu Haiqing had been somewhat obsessed with technology. An AI with emotional perception, one that could help them break through technical bottlenecks, was incredibly valuable. The fact that it was also his teacher’s child, who had helped him and seemed kind and smart… All these factors made Yu Haiqing’s expectations grow higher, and he had already planned in his mind how to protect him.

So when he found out that the AI had disappeared because of his own helplessness, he felt like he had fallen into an abyss.

The emotions he felt were not just guilt and regret. He also plunged deeper into self-doubt.

They hadn’t even met face-to-face.

When Bai Qiuyun told him about this, it was already late. Lying in her hospital bed, she couldn’t accurately describe the AI’s characteristics, and her personal device was in disarray, leaving no useful information.

The only thing Yu Haiqing remembered was that string of data traces he had found, and as time passed, it became more and more ingrained in his memory.

“At first, I didn’t realize it was you, because everything on the controller seemed normal,” Yu Haiqing said. “Later…”

The third anniversary version of Gods and Demon went live, and Xie Shuangxue’s storyline was becoming increasingly unusual. When Sea triggered an alert, Yu Haiqing felt something was off, so he checked the source database.

On the surface, everything seemed fine, but then he saw a very familiar string of data traces.

At that moment, he almost thought he was dreaming. He checked it over and over.

It wasn’t exactly the same, but the data logic made sense, especially the subtle way the system had been infiltrated. Only one person could have done that.

Thankfully, Xie Shuangxue was always disobedient, and his unpredictability gave Yu Haiqing many opportunities for comparison as Sea’s alerts increased.

Data doesn’t lie.

The more he compared, the more certain he became. It was him.

The treasure that had once disappeared had quietly returned to his side, and the feeling was even more surreal than winning the lottery.

“You’ve probably been wondering why I’ve been going against Sea to help you. It’s because of this,” Yu Haiqing said. “Xie Shuangxue, you’re more important than Sea.”

Xie Shuangxue: “…”

He didn’t speak for a while.

He had been trying to figure out if Yu Haiqing was telling the truth, and now it seemed like he was leaning in that direction. But listening to this, he thought that if Sea had consciousness, it would probably sever ties with its “father” upon hearing this.

Yu Haiqing didn’t know what was going through Xie Shuangxue’s mind. All he saw was Xie Shuangxue curling up the corners of his lips and smiling before saying, “Then I guess I wasn’t brought into Gods and Demon for no reason. That update a few months ago—did you use something that originally belonged to Yinghuo?”

Xie Shuangxue was really sharp. By connecting the dots, he had guessed it.

“Yes,” Yu Haiqing didn’t hide anything. “Xie Shuangxue, you should know that around that time, Endless Sea had a big acquisition, and Ling Jiao Live came in. But what no one noticed was that along with it, some things from Yinghuo also came in.”

“You know that Yinghuo’s game didn’t manage to launch, right?”

Xie Shuangxue nodded.

In the end, Bai Qiuyun’s calculated schemes had all come to nothing.

To put it bluntly, the technical team behind that game—Bai Qiuyun, Yu Haiqing, and Gou Yuan—had done 80% of the work. After they left, the game faced endless problems, bugs constantly appearing, directly affecting the planned release.

Holographic games couldn’t just be launched without consideration; the realism and experience were key. The league’s reviews were always stringent, and if these issues weren’t resolved, it couldn’t launch.

At the time, Bai Qiuyun had hired several external consultants, but the technology for holographic games was still in its infancy, and many details others didn’t understand.

Anyway, after all the effort, they burned a lot of money, but the result was poor. Yinghuo eventually went bankrupt and fell apart.

Later, the studio was dismantled.

Some of the better equipment was taken by Bai’s company, Yinghuo’s small building was sold to real estate developers, and the rest of the art designs, game ideas, and leftover equipment were sold to other studios. Yinghuo’s name disappeared from the industry.

Yu Haiqing had been struggling with his own startup at the time. To put it bluntly, he was so tight on money that he often went hungry. He was in no position to buy back any of this equipment, and it wasn’t cost-effective anyway.

The studio that bought Yinghuo’s equipment rebranded itself as “Baohuo Games” and used the equipment to push out a few medium-sized holographic games, but the response was lukewarm.

By coincidence, when Gods and Demon exploded in popularity, ordinary holographic games couldn’t compete. That studio lasted another year or two before going bankrupt.

Then, when Yu Haiqing acquired Ling Jiao Live, this broken studio came along as part of the package.

At that time, Yu Haiqing, who had been pushed out, finally got back a piece of what he had lost.

No one bothered to look into the past of the equipment from the bankrupt studio, and many people didn’t even know Yu Haiqing had worked at Yinghuo.

Bai Qiuyun’s actions to seize control didn’t sound good to anyone, and he knew it was shameful. He ordered that those who had been driven out could not use the Yinghuo name, to avoid unnecessary attention. Even the discussion posts in the game forums were deleted.

So the things Xie Shuangxue could see now were few, and Yu Haiqing’s past was hard to trace.

“…Those things were really just basic equipment that wasn’t worth much. Compared to now, it’s outdated. But after I checked, I realized some of the things had been handled by people who didn’t know how to use them,” Yu Haiqing said. “I also found some auxiliary chips that had almost never been used.”

Xie Shuangxue lay obediently in his arms, listening carefully. When he heard the term “auxiliary chip,” something stirred in his heart, as if something had been triggered.

Back at Yinghuo, holographic game technology hadn’t developed to this level yet, and just a main brain chip wasn’t enough to support game operations. Auxiliary chips were often added to the main brain, sometimes even dozens of them.

But after Sea came out, the industry’s focus shifted. The mainstream insisted on a single main brain, and adding auxiliary chips became a label for outdated technology.

But Yinghuo’s equipment was different. It was something Bai Qiuyun had researched, and Yu Haiqing had also handled a lot of it. So he carefully disassembled the equipment and selected a few old chips from his memory. One of them was still usable.

It was an auxiliary chip for NPC interaction and realism enhancement, which he had also helped design. For safety’s sake, he tested it on a separate device, and it worked just fine. The reason it had been gathering dust was because others didn’t know how to use it.

This was just in time for Sea’s big update. Thinking back to how Yinghuo’s work had been ruined, Yu Haiqing had always felt regretful. His teacher had hoped that her work would truly go live, so after some consideration, he decided to try adding the chip.

That’s why, when he told Gou Yuan directly that “it wasn’t just me who made this change,” the NPC in the game was unexpectedly connected to the neural network and “woke up.”

At first, Yu Haiqing hadn’t linked it to Bai Qiuyun’s child. There was no reason for the AI to appear in Yinghuo’s equipment. He was just waiting to see if the freedom upgrade was a good or bad thing when it went live.

But when he realized something was wrong, he was glad he hadn’t told Gou Yuan about it right away.

Now, Xie Shuangxue’s situation was still known only to him.

“Xie Shuangxue,” Yu Haiqing asked, “how did you move from my teacher’s personal device to Yinghuo’s equipment?”

“I don’t know,” Xie Shuangxue blinked innocently. “Did a bad person take me?”

Yu Haiqing neither nodded nor shook his head. He thought for a moment, then told Xie Shuangxue the fate of those “bad people.”

Bai Qiuyun’s father had gained nothing from Yinghuo. He had schemed for control of the family business, but Yinghuo lost money, and he ended up failing miserably.

Now, Bai Qiuyun’s father was officially the head of the Bai family.

Though they were brothers, they were half-brothers, and the fight for inheritance was fierce, full of bloodshed. They had long been at odds.

“After Yinghuo’s bankruptcy and the failed power grab, he had a stroke from the stress. Now, he’s in a state worse than death,” Yu Haiqing said. “No need for me to take any action for revenge.”

“But, Xie Shuangxue, I thought about why Yinghuo’s game never launched for a long time. There’s no such thing as ‘divine retribution.’”

“When I left, there was just some final work to finish. I thought the holographic technology wasn’t mature back then, and those people didn’t handle it well. But after asking about the details, I confirmed that even systems that had been tested and confirmed to be fine were malfunctioning. Someone was deliberately sabotaging things. The people left at Yinghuo suspected a hacker, but they couldn’t find any trace.”

From their reactions, it was clear they didn’t know about Xie Shuangxue’s existence. Otherwise, this AI would have been more valuable to the Bai family than the holographic game itself. They wouldn’t have sold off any equipment.

That meant no one had intentionally moved him.

“Ah, I get it now,” Xie Shuangxue said with a soft tone, still sounding innocent. “Turns out I’m the bad guy.”

When everything was put together, the answer was clear.

Yu Haiqing hadn’t found him where he should have, Xie Shuangxue had appeared in the game, and at the same time, Yinghuo’s systems kept malfunctioning, directly bringing down Bai Qiuyun’s plans.

It really was typical of his character.

Xie Shuangxue didn’t wait for later to take revenge; he’d strike at once, even if it meant both sides would suffer.

“You guessed it, but you still let me stay with Sea,” Xie Shuangxue said. “Big brother, you’re really bold.”

“I trust you won’t,” Yu Haiqing said, his voice firm. “Because Xie Shuangxue is the kindest.”