Chapter 1275 - 1247: One Becomes Two, Two Become Three, Three Create All Things

Chapter 1275: Chapter 1247: One Becomes Two, Two Become Three, Three Create All Things

The first time Qian met Qio Yu Xuan was when she went with him to a private kitchen restaurant for a meal. Qio Yu Xuan pretended to be the chef and sent Qian a jar of wine. Even back then he already had a plan to get close to Qian and rack up goodwill.

The second meeting Mr Liu mentioned, Yu Minglang wasn’t there. He’d only heard Qian talk about how she once ran into Qio Yu Xuan at a psychiatric hospital—that was exactly the deliberate arrangement Mr Liu was talking about.

From then on, Aka was assigned to protect Qian at all times, and Qio Yu Xuan kept popping up again and again.

It echoed that saying: from one comes two, from two comes three, from three all things are born. After the third meeting, the whole series of events that followed was triggered.

Yu Minglang’s brain is wired a bit differently from other people’s; he’s especially good at piecing together tiny clues like this. He immediately assembled a picture, and the truth was almost bursting out.

"Mrs Liu, Qian once took part in an international competition. Do you still remember which year that was?"

Mr Liu gave a year, and Yu Minglang asked again.

"Was Qio Yu Xuan on the judging panel that year?"

"I remember he wasn’t, but at that level of competition he should have been paying attention. He himself said that was when he started noticing the capabilities of our little steel cannon."

A puzzle piece clicked into place! Yu Minglang finally straightened out the timeline, but now there was a question: how many children did Qio Yu Xuan actually have?

If we go by Qio Yu Xuan’s own story, Qian was the child he and her mother had in a moment of confusion—then who was the child that got buried?

"Mrs Liu, are you sure Mr. Qio had a child who passed away? Did you see it yourself?"

"Of course. I saw it with my own eyes. The child had a congenital disease, and with the medical level back then—never mind back then, even now it couldn’t be cured."

"Why were you there to see it? Twenty years ago you weren’t particularly close to Mr. Qio, were you?"

"Exactly, why was I there..." It had been a long time, and Mr Liu took a moment to recall.

"Right! I sneaked in! Back then, they said a team of foreign scientists had come, and Qi was the leader. They were supposedly researching some mysterious project. I was young then, and my studies weren’t that solid, so I was always trying to learn from these top people in the field. You know, our country was just getting started then, and whenever others had some secret project they weren’t willing to include us."

Back then Mr Liu had been a hot-blooded girl as well: no family backing, no patrons, relying only on her hunger for knowledge and a fierce belief that learning from others would help revitalize the motherland. She tried every possible way to get in, but the security around that kind of classified project was too strict, and she simply couldn’t slip through.

So she settled for second best and went to squat every day at the entrance of the guesthouse where Qio Yu Xuan’s group was staying, hoping for a "chance encounter" where she could talk shop with them. In the end she never got to discuss any academic topics, but she did see Qio Yu Xuan holding a funeral for his child.

"I watched the crematorium workers bring out a silk bag to put the child in. According to local custom, children that small couldn’t be carried in arms; they had to go into a bag. I saw with my own eyes how Qi cried as he snatched the child back and carried the body to the car himself, no matter what anyone said to him."

What kind of situation was this? After hearing it, Yu Minglang felt he’d fallen into a Rashomon. The truth of the matter was completely obscured. What Qio Yu Xuan said definitely mixed truth and lies—but which parts were true and which were false?

Yu Minglang had come hoping to ask Mr Liu to help Qian adjust her mood, but unexpectedly he stumbled onto this piece of information. For a moment his heart was a surging undercurrent, countless little angels of intuition rampaging back and forth into a kind of conspiracy rhapsody.

There had to be hidden stories in all this. Yu Minglang kept feeling he was standing at the center of the riddle, on the verge of grasping the truth, yet always short of that one thing.

"Mrs Liu, do you still remember what research direction Qio Yu Xuan’s team was working on back then?"

"No idea. But at the time, Qio Yu Xuan’s reputation abroad was already established. I was really there because of him. Still, I heard it was cross-disciplinary research; besides authorities in psychiatry, a lot of people from other fields came too. There was even a big-shot foreign philosophy professor who came to a university to pick assistants, and in the end he took two PhDs away. I just hated that he didn’t come to our school. If I’d been picked too, maybe I could’ve gotten a glimpse of what was really going on." Once she brought this up, Mr Liu sounded like a kid.

What sounded like a single resentful complaint actually made Yu Minglang connect it with something from before.

"Mrs Liu, that female PhD who got picked from that university—was her surname Chang by any chance?"

"It’s been too long, how could I remember... I just recall the name was very strange. I don’t quite remember it clearly."

It had been many years, and it wasn’t some major affair. All she could retain was a vague impression.

"Chang Xiangsi?"

"Yes! That’s it!" Mr Liu slapped her forehead as she remembered.

Other names might be forgotten, but this one was distinctive—it was the name of a poetic tune pattern—so as soon as Yu Minglang mentioned it, Mr Liu remembered.

Click!

Another puzzle piece snapped into place in Yu Minglang’s mind. It seemed that the ones who knew the truth back then were Qio Yu Xuan and Chang Xiangsi, and his intuition vaguely told him that Qian’s background was tied to that research group from those years. A lot of things in his mind were on the verge of coming out, yet he still lacked that single flash of insight.

For now Qian’s physical condition mattered most, so Yu Minglang brought Mr Liu home to see her.

Qian was holding a throw pillow and staring blankly out the window. Only when she heard the door open did she turn around, and when she saw Xiaoqiang bringing her teacher over, a bit of lively light finally appeared in her eyes.

"Teacher, you’re here!"

"I came to check on you. I hear you haven’t been in great spirits lately?" Mr Liu walked over, sat down beside Qian, and studied her carefully. She really was a bit thinner.

It had only been a few days since they’d last met, and the little chubby cheeks they’d worked so hard to plump up had slimmed down again. Sitting there, if you ignored the bulge of her belly, no one would guess she was pregnant.

Mr Liu’s heart ached for her student, and seeing Qian’s mental state was poor too, she shot a look at Yu Minglang. He made an excuse to go into work, leaving the space to Mr Liu and Qian.

Qian could more or less guess why Mr Liu had come. She didn’t like the state she was in either; the problem was that a person’s inner world is hard to control under certain circumstances, let alone when she’s pregnant and every emotion gets magnified many times over.

There were some things she couldn’t tell her teacher, such as her relationship with Qio Yu Xuan, or her past and present lives. Precisely because she was hiding too much of this, Mr Liu’s counseling wasn’t very effective; there were too many secrets in the way for her to get into Qian’s heart. Mr Liu was giving it everything she had, and Qian, afraid of disappointing her, pretended the sessions were working.

As soon as Mr Liu left, Qian’s little face collapsed again.

The beauty that had been sticking close to her all along saw how uncomfortable Qian was and affectionately snuggled up to her. Qian stroked its fur and let out a long, deep sigh.

"Why can’t I manage my own heart again? I don’t like being depressed, but those hateful fragments keep suddenly leaping into my mind when I least expect them. The harder I try to drive them away, the more miserable I feel."

Right now she definitely had signs of prenatal depression—she could feel that herself.