Chapter Two: The Whole World Betrays His Secrets

[I bought the debt because I was afraid she'd do what she did seven years ago—sell the last thing she owned to save a stranger.] Xu Zhi stopped. Seven years earlier, at nineteen, she had found a bloodied young man beneath a bridge during a storm. He refused a hospital, saying someone was hunting him. She had sold the gold bracelet her mother left behind to pay a private clinic's deposit. By morning, he was gone. Only half a broken obsidian cuff link remained. She had thought of it as a storm without an ending. Gu Yanchen slowly closed his eyes. The world had finished his confession for him. "It was you," she said. "Yes." "Then this contract was never fair. You knew who I was. I knew nothing about you."