George didn't wait for another word.
CRA-A-CK.
The sound of the slap was sharp, echoing through the clinical room like a whip-crack.
George's movement had been a blur—a skillful, disciplined strike delivered with the full weight of his frustration. Bai Qi's head snapped to the side, his dark hair falling over his eyes as his entire body stilled.
The assistant gasped, nearly dropping the laptop. Shu Yao's hand froze in mid-air, his eyes wide and brimming with sudden, terrified tears.
George stood his ground, his chest heaving, his breathing heavy and ragged. "You left me no choice," he whispered, the authority in his voice final. "You needed to be reminded that you are not a god but a Godamit Demon."
Bai Qi remained motionless for a long, agonizing minute. Slowly, he raised his fingertips to his cheek. The skin was already beginning to bloom into a fierce, angry red. He turned his head back slowly, his gaze lifting to meet George's.
The shock in Bai Qi's eyes was visceral. No one had ever struck the Monarch. No one had ever dared to challenge his divinity with a physical correction.
"You actually... slapped me," Bai Qi murmured, his voice hollow, stripped of its usual bite.
"To push some sense into that hollow skull of yours," George replied, his voice regaining its icy composure. "I did. And I will do it again if you treat him like an object one more time."
The fire in Bai Qi didn't go out; it retreated into the shadows. He looked at Shu Yao, seeing the glassy eyes and the tears that were finally beginning to spill over the oxygen mask. The sight of Shu Yao's weeping seemed to do what the slap couldn't—it made him falter.
Bai Qi clenched his jaw, the red mark on his face a brand of shame. He didn't look at George again.
"Follow me," Bai Qi muttered to the assistant, his voice sounding strangled and small.
He turned on his heel, his stride no longer monolithic, but hurried. He vanished through the door, the substitute assistant scurrying after him like a frightened rodent.
The room fell into a deafening, ringing silence.
George stood in the center of the room, the adrenaline slowly draining from his limbs. He turned his head toward the bed, and his heart lurched.
Shu Yao was weeping silently. The tears tracked down his pale cheeks, disappearing into the edges of the plastic mask. He looked shattered, caught between the fury of the man who claimed to protect him.
"I... I am sorry, Shu Yao," George said, his voice cracking with a sudden, raw vulnerability. He moved to the bedside, his hands wanting to reach out but fearing they were too stained by the violence.
"I just... I didn't want to break our promise. I didn't want him to take you. That brat... he wouldn't listen until I brought him to his senses."
Shu Yao averted his gaze, his voice a broken whisper of disbelief.
The tears were no longer just tracking down his face; they were a flood, soaking into the white fabric of his pillow. But these were not tears of relief. They were not the tears of a victim finally saved from a tyrant.
His heart felt as though it had been physically lanced. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw it again: the sharp snap of Bai Qi's head, the bloom of angry red on that perfect, obsidian-eyed face, and the look of shattered shock in the eyes of the man he had spent his entire life trying to shield.
"Why..." Shu Yao's voice was a broken, jagged rasp against the plastic of the mask. "Why did you do that, Mr. George?"
George stepped closer, his emerald eyes shimmering with a dangerous, protective light. He misread the trembling. He misread the tears. He thought he was looking at a bird finally freed from its cage, unaware that for Shu Yao, the cage was the only place where the sun—no matter how cold—still shone.
"He was going to hurt you further, Shu Yao," George said, his voice a low, soothing hum. "He was going to treat you like a piece of cargo. I had to stop him. I had to show him that you are not his to break."
Shu Yao shook his head with a sudden, violent desperation. He tried to sit up, his shattered ribs screaming in protest, but the physical pain was a dull hum compared to the visceral ache in his soul.
"You don't understand," Shu Yao gasped, the monitor beside him beginning to beep a frantic, staccato warning.
Ting-ting-ting-ting.
"I didn't... I never wanted this. I never wanted anyone to lay a hand on him."
George stilled, his hand stopping inches from Shu Yao's shoulder. "What are you saying? He has been nothing but a shadow over your life. He has exploited your loyalty, bruised your spirit, and left you to wither in this room."
"But he is my Bai Qi!" Shu Yao's voice broke into a sob that tore through his throat.
Deep down, beneath the "Saintly" exterior, lived a vow that George could never comprehend.
Shu Yao had positioned himself as a human shield for the Monarch. He had accepted the coldness, the "efficiency," and the cruelty as a price for simply being allowed to stand in Bai Qi's shadow.
To see that shadow struck, to see the man he worshipped as a god be humbled and shamed by a slap—it made Shu Yao feel like the ultimate failure.
"I am the reason," Shu Yao whispered, his eyes glassy and unfocused. "I am the reason he was hurt. If I weren't so weak... if I weren't here... you wouldn't have struck him. I have become the very harm I promised to protect him from."
The realization was a tincture of pure poison. Shu Yao looked at George's hand—the large, capable hand that had just delivered the blow—and recoiled as if it were a serpent.
"Please," Shu Yao breathed, his voice small and hollow. "Just leave. I don't want to see... I don't want to see anyone right now."
George felt a cold, hollow vacuum open in his chest. He looked at the boy he had just "saved" and realized he had only succeeded in breaking him further. He saw the way Shu Yao's gaze drifted back to the door, yearning for the very man who had just threatened to drag him away in chains.
"I just can't let that brat hurt you, Shu Yao," George insisted, though his voice lacked its previous iron certainty.
"No," Shu Yao replied, turning his head away to stare at the crimson roses. To him, the red of the petals now looked like the mark on Bai Qi's cheek.
You know that hurting him is the only thing that truly kills me."
George stood frozen at the bedside, the morning light catching the gold of his hair and making him look like a tragic statue of a forgotten era. He looked at Shu Yao's averted face, at the delicate brown hair he had longed to touch, and at the fierce, irrational devotion the boy held for a man who didn't deserve a single drop of his blood.
He didn't speak. He couldn't. The words he wanted to say were too heavy, too jagged to be uttered.
George leaned in one last time, his emerald eyes softening into a gaze of profound, devastating longing. He didn't touch the boy, but his presence hovered over him like a final, silent benediction.
I would tear down the world for you, Shu Yao, George thought, the words a silent scream in his mind. For someone like you—someone so beautiful, so shattered, and so impossibly pure—a slap is only the beginning of what I am willing to do.
I will become the monster you fear if it means the Monarch can never touch you again. Even if you hate me for it. Even if your heart breaks for him... I will be the one who stands between you and the abyss.
George straightened his back, his face returning to a mask of crystalline, German resolve. He looked at the roses one last time—the vibrant red a mockery of the pale, weeping boy on the bed.
"For now Rest, Shu Yao," George said softly, his voice a velvet blade.
He turned and walked toward the threshold, his silhouette casting a long, monolithic shadow over the room. The door clicked shut with a muffled, final thud, leaving Shu Yao alone in the ringing silence.
Shu Yao curled into a ball, He closed his eyes and prayed—not for his own recovery, but for the sting on Bai Qi's cheek to fade, and for a forgiveness he was sure he didn't deserve.
Then slowly, and painfully the weeks bled into one another, a monotonous cycle of sterile dawns and hollow twilights. In Room 43, the calendar was irrelevant; time was measured only by the rhythmic hiss of the ventilator and the unbearable silence of a doorway that remained stubbornly empty.
Shu Yao was a ghost inhabiting a recovering body. Though the bruising on his ribs had faded to a faint, yellowish memory and the oxygen mask had been replaced by a thin nasal cannula, his soul remained fractured. He sat propped against the pillows, his frame looking skeletal and ethereal in the morning light.
His eyes—heavy with the leaden weight of a thousand sleepless hours—never strayed far from the door. Every footfall in the corridor, every squeak of a nurse's cart, sent a jolt of pathetic electricity through his spine.
Is it him? Has he returned?
But the door only ever opened for the doctors, the nurses, or the golden shadow that refused to leave his side.
George entered the room with a tray of fruit and a fresh book, his presence a constant, gilded reminder of the sanctuary Shu Yao didn't want. He watched the boy's gaze snap to the door and then dull into a profound, aching disappointment the moment their eyes met.
"He hasn't called, Shu Yao," George said, his voice a low, somber vibration. He set the tray down with a deliberate click. "And he isn't coming today. Rest. Stop martyring yourself for a man who treats your devotion like a line item in a ledger."
Shu Yao didn't answer. He didn't have the strength to argue. He reached for the "gift" that felt more like a tether to a ghost. His thumb, trembling and translucent, swiped through the call logs.
Outgoing Call: Bai Qi (No Answer)
Outgoing Call: Bai Qi (Missed)
Outgoing Call: Bai Qi (14 seconds... Cancelled)
He had called dozens of times. He had sent messages that remained "Delivered" but never "Read." Each ignored ring was a fresh lash against his spirit.
"I have to tell him I'm sorry," Shu Yao whispered, his voice a dry autumn leaf. "The slap... he was hurt. I saw it. I saw the mark you left on him, Mr. George. It was my fault. Everything is my fault."
George's jaw tightened, his emerald eyes flashing with a sharp, protective fury. "The slap was an act of justice, not a crime. You are not his sin-eater, Shu Yao. Stop begging for the chains to be put back on."
Shu Yao only turned his head away, his eyes fixing once more on the door. He wouldn't stop. He couldn't. His heart was a compass that only pointed toward a North Pole of ice and obsidian.
Across the city, nestled in the glass-and-steel sky-fortress of the Rothenberg headquarters, the atmosphere was a sharp contrast to the hospital's despair.
Bai Qi sat behind his monolithic obsidian desk. The office was silent, save for the hum of the air conditioning and the occasional chime of a stock ticker. He lifted a porcelain cup of black coffee to his lips, the steam curling around his sharp, aristocratic features like a shroud.
On the corner of the desk, his personal phone vibrated.
The screen illuminated with a name that had appeared a hundred times over the last fourteen days: Shu Yao.
Bai Qi didn't reach for it. He didn't even look at the screen directly. He watched the reflection of the vibrating light in the polished wood of his desk, a cruel, dark smirk beginning to carve itself onto his face.