Chapter 430: Yu Xi Side Story (2)
Rejected 99 Times, the Aloof Campus Belle Comes On Strong
Boss Cutie
Yu Xi's bloodless lips parted slightly.
He had wanted to starve himself to death, but was dragged off and given a nutrient drip.
He had wanted to die, and had even tried, but couldn't go through with it.
Every time, the cuts that landed on his hand—one, two, three, even n of them—were all stitched up in the end.
He could even be pulled back from the gates of hell.
Just like now.
"Mm."
His nod had already expressed his attitude.
He was nothing but a golden canary with broken wings.
Other than staying in his cage, could he see freedom?
No, he couldn't.
From the moment he was taken from the orphanage by bad people and then used, he had already fallen into eternal damnation.
His beauty was the beginning of his sin.
Yu Xi wandered through despair in an endless cycle, until he saw the light.
"Are you willing to become someone else?"
The other party wore gold-rimmed glasses and a suit, standing before him.
Yu Xi's eyes widened. From the other's outline, he faintly saw a familiar figure.
"You don't remember me? We grew up together in the orphanage. I said I'd come find you one day." The other stepped forward and smiled at Yu Xi.
And so Yu Xi knew that this person was his childhood playmate.
His best friend, Xiaoran!
Yu Xi had lost his parents in an accident. No one had survived that accident except him.
At the orphanage, he met Xiaoran, who had gone through the same thing.
Xiaoran had always looked after him. When someone bullied him, Xiaoran would step in for him.
Life at the orphanage was awful, but Xiaoran healed him. The orphanage director and Sister Holy Mother both liked Yu Xi and gave him plenty of tasty snacks, which Yu Xi gave all to Xiaoran.
Who could have imagined that all that beauty would end on the day Xiaoran was adopted?
Xiaoran was the smartest, had the best grades, and wasn't bad-looking either.
Before leaving, Xiaoran rolled down the car window and said to the sobbing Yu Xi, "You wait for me, okay? When I grow up, I'll definitely find a way to find you. We'll share our fortunes and our hardships! We're best friends!"
"Okay!" Yu Xi smiled through his tears, watching the car leave.
Sister Holy Mother told Yu Xi that Xiaoran had been adopted by rich people and would live a very wealthy life from then on.
Yu Xi was so good-looking that he'd surely live a wealthy life too.
However, Yu Xi knew it would be hard.
Although Yu Xi was the best-looking, his beauty was too androgynous, and that beauty had become a burden to him.
Those parents all shook their heads in front of him: "This is a girl, isn't it? Too much of a porcelain doll, he can't do any work properly!"
"He's so pretty, he'll probably turn out gay, won't he? Our family just wants a normal child, and he doesn't have any manliness about him."
Pretty was a wonderful adjective, but on the face of an orphanage boy, it was a disaster.
Yu Xi could only quietly wait for fate to favor him.
He longed for a warm family love to descend upon him.
Just like his gentle parents, who had given him care and protection.
He prayed.
Perhaps God heard his prayer.
But God might have misheard, hearing only the second half and not the first.
What God arranged for Yu Xi was a pair of deranged parents.
The adoptive parents who took Yu Xi in were pimps.
Though they appeared to be plastic surgeons to the outside world, they engaged in illegal business, pushing Yu Xi step by step into the abyss.
As long as the money was right, they'd send Yu Xi out to serve.
Even though Yu Xi wasn't fully developed back then, for the sake of so-called profit, every one of them blinded their conscience and sent Yu Xi to those people's rooms.
Sometimes, it was several a day.
Men and women alike.
Even men and women together would do.
Yu Xi was nothing but a puppet they controlled. He had severe depression, and also Stockholm syndrome. When he was in danger, he could only develop a wrong understanding, comforting himself that he was just making sacrifices at home.
All he was doing was helping the family.
When Yu Xi's illness was at its worst, his adoptive parents, afraid of spending money, stopped treating him. They threw him into a dark room like garbage.
There, Yu Xi had to get used to the darkness, and even more, endure the torment of breaking down.
Time and again he numbed himself, telling himself he couldn't just sink like this, but living was an indescribable agony for him.
So when Yu Xi saw Huo Zhenghao, who appeared as Xiaoran, he thought Huo Zhenghao could save him.
"What does becoming someone else mean?" Yu Xi asked obscurely.
Huo Zhenghao's lips curled up, and he told Yu Xi everything he had in mind.
Yu Xi was astonished. He had never imagined Huo Zhenghao would have such an extreme and crazy idea.
"If I become him, isn't that becoming someone else?" Yu Xi shook his head and refused. "No."
"Even though you become someone else, you won't have to be yourself anymore." Huo Zhenghao narrowed his eyes and looked at him shrewdly. "You won't be used, despised, or even abandoned by others anymore. We're people from the same world, we know all too well how to play nice to protect ourselves. But if you become someone else, not only will your fate be in your hands, you'll be able to control others' fates too."
Huo Zhenghao tempted him: "Isn't that better than living like a walking corpse now? Anyway, if you stay as this identity, you won't meet someone who truly loves you. Could your wife not mind that you've accompanied so many people? Could your child accept that their father has a dark history? Or are you confident you can escape your adoptive parents' control?"
Yu Xi's heart clenched hard.
He knew destroying someone else's life was wrong.
But wasn't his own life being destroyed too?
Wasn't it just like Huo Zhenghao said—how could someone like him live a normal life? His past alone was a layer of darkness that swallowed him whole, leaving him powerless to fight back.
"What… should I do?" Yu Xi's voice was hoarse.
He wanted so badly to become someone else.
Oh, he should say he wanted so badly to walk from the darkness into the light.
So Yu Xi did as Huo Zhenghao said and threatened his adoptive parents.
He won.
It was a victory he had never had before.
He no longer had to be pushed around—in fact, the roles had reversed. He was going to push others around.
Yu Xi got on the operating table for plastic surgery. It could be said he was truly hacked to pieces. The first surgery wasn't quite successful, and his whole face looked too stiff.
But the reconstructive surgeries that followed made Yu Xi's adjustments more and more successful.
When the bandages were removed, Yu Xi looked at himself in the mirror and burst into tears on the spot.
It was a very unfamiliar face.
It couldn't compare to his former looks—not exquisite, but not rough either.
Just right.
It also meant Yu Xi was saying goodbye to his dark past, piece by piece.
With his new face, there was naturally no way for him to attract those sponsors' interest anymore.
After all, what those people craved was Yu Xi's former looks—beautiful and stunning, indistinguishable as man or woman, able to spark interest.
Not to mention that once Jiang Muye became famous, who would dare lay a hand on Yu Xi? They'd all fear Yu Xi was Jiang Muye's twin brother, and that they'd end up becoming a thorn in Jiang Muye's side.
During the period of his plastic surgery and recovery, Yu Xi deliberately imitated Jiang Muye's voice. Huo Zhenghao found people at the hospital to record quite a few samples for him.
Yu Xi was completely indistinguishable from Jiang Muye—at least, standing there, many people couldn't tell real from fake.
So Yu Xi took the money he had extorted from his adoptive parents and transferred to West City University.
Yu Xi's task was naturally to first make Jiang Muye taste the pain of loss.
Especially since Leng Ruoli was the heiress of the Leng Group, which was very helpful to both Yu Xi and Huo Zhenghao.
For Yu Xi, using a beauty scheme was easy. After all, he'd spent all these years dealing with those sponsors and big shots.
As long as he won over Leng Ruoli, he'd have a stable backer, and after that, replacing Jiang Muye would be a breeze.
But Yu Xi had never imagined Leng Ruoli was immune to both soft and hard tactics.
Leng Ruoli had no interest in looking at him at all, and could even recognize his identity at a glance.
That disrupted the rhythm of Yu Xi's plan. Time and again his schemes were foiled, and instead Leng Ruoli and Jiang Muye's feelings grew even stronger, completely unaffected by anything from the outside world. This left Yu Xi somewhat dispirited, tasting the bitterness of defeat.
It wasn't until Huo Zhenghao gathered information about the accident Leng Ruoli had six years ago, and learned what the truth was that the Leng Corporation was desperately suppressing, that Yu Xi went so far as to injure his right shoulder and apply special-effects makeup to make it look like an old scar.
After Yu Xi saw Leng Ruoli believe it, he felt as if he could already see the dawn of victory. Who could have imagined things would turn around?
Leng Ruoli actually still went back to Jiang Muye's side.
His impersonation was still discovered by Leng Ruoli and Jiang Muye, and Huo Zhenghao's identity was exposed as well.
When he learned that after all his scheming and desperate efforts, what he got in return was still being crippled, he went mad, and despaired. Especially after learning that Huo Zhenghao had betrayed him and was only using him and toying with him, he felt he had to end everything himself.
He died.
And he had to drag Huo Zhenghao down to die with him.
He didn't want to be a good person, but he hadn't wanted to be a bad person either.
All he could say was that the world was too cruel to him, so before he died, he'd do one more bad thing.
At least there'd be someone to accompany him on the road, so he wouldn't be lonely.
When the flames surrounded Yu Xi, Yu Xi closed his eyes in satisfaction. He seemed to feel that the scorching heat of the flames wasn't hot—his skin seemed to have lost all sensation.
The heart-rending screams in his ears were, to him, the most comforting melody.
Friendship lasts long and forever, so it would never scatter.
Who said he had no friends? Look, now he had a friend to leave with him.
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