“Ah…!”
Qin Xin woke up after a deep inhale. There was a very clear sense of pressure on his ribs, and the next breath almost failed to catch up. In front of him was an entire stretch of starry sky, with countless stars flickering on and off in intermittent light.
But at the edge of the sky, a mass of ominous dark clouds drifted in, intensifying the moisture in the air.
“…Fanxing,” Qin Xin called out unconsciously.
No one responded. Only the stars blinked back at him.
The dark clouds rolled in, carrying massive static electricity generated by friction within them. Sections of the cloud layer lit up intermittently, as if determined to compete with the stars above for dominance.
“Fanxing?”
Qin Xin slowly sat up. On his chest lay the same notebook he’d been using for the past five years. No wonder he couldn’t breathe properly… the weight of it when opened was comparable to a dictionary.
Thunder rumbled endlessly, pressing down on the sky. The dark clouds responded in their own way. Just moments ago, there had been lightning and thunder; now, violent winds rushed in, forcing the sycamore trees in the courtyard to bend and give way.
The air was filled with the mixed scent of water and earth. Ions and water molecules clashed and fought around him.
“Fanxing!”
After the third roll of thunder, Qin Xin was completely crushed by pain from both body and mind.
Lin Fanxing was dead.
He… he himself was dead!
But then what was this?!
Hadn’t he jumped off a building? What was going on?
In panic, Qin Xin looked down at his hands and feet. They were intact, without a trace of blood. If this were a dream, it would not feel so real. The sensation of weightlessness from falling still lingered in his body, like a hidden thief playing at ambush.
But if this wasn’t a dream, then how could he…
Qin Xin touched his ribs. The moment of his body crashing into the asphalt replayed in his mind like a montage. He clearly remembered how he hit the ground, how the excruciating pain of full-body fractures made him lose consciousness in an instant.
And at this moment, his skeletal structure felt like it had just been pieced back together.
If it was real…
The notebook in his hands seemed to remind him of something. He flipped it open at random, and what he saw was beyond horrifying. Inside were densely packed records of his life over the next two years. The handwriting was unmistakable; it was written by his own hand, stroke by stroke.
That’s right.
He had been reborn.
Back to the age of twenty.
Qin Xin had no time to think further. He only needed to know one thing:
What date was it today?!
He subconsciously looked at his watch, and the dial showed: June 6th. Just that single glance was enough. Qin Xin’s normally clear sclera seemed as if it would burst with dozens of capillaries in an instant, staining the white of his eyes red.
He flipped out of bed. It was the rooftop terrace of his home. Every night, he would lie here to stargaze, but just as he turned over, another wave of dizziness struck him.
It had all been a dream-like ordeal, and it seemed like fate was playing a cruel joke on him again. Rebirth was rebirth, but why had he been thrown back into his most fragile, powerless state?
At this time, he was twenty pounds lighter than he was two years later. Dressed all in black, he looked just like a streak of thin black ink drawn under early morning light.
With stars practically exploding in his vision, Qin Xin gasped like a broken bell, his hands trembling uncontrollably. He forced himself to walk forward before the stars in his vision had even fully faded.
He could wait for the dizziness to pass, but Fanxing could not wait any longer.
Fanxing would be in danger today!
Barely supporting his frail body, Qin Xin rushed downstairs. But even in his urgency, he did not forget something important, locking his notebook inside the bedroom safe.
The combination dial turned again and again, as cold sweat covered his forehead. His hands and feet were also ice-cold.
Only one thought kept striking the depths of his consciousness:
Find Lin Fanxing.
If… if he had truly come back, then there were still many things that could be changed in time… And with that, the shock in his chest was instantly replaced by overwhelming joy.
He pinched his thigh hard, and pain confirmed that this impossible situation was real.
He was alive.
He had come back two years ago.
A jump from the 35th floor had not killed him; instead, it had sent him back to the node of fate.
“Young Master Qin, it’s time for your medicine,” a gentle male voice reached his ears.
The person entering the room was the Qin family’s private doctor, Fang Bo. He was already over fifty years old, and time had settled into his face in the form of knowledge and composure. Even his white coat carried his sense of medical duty.
Qin Xin was taking traditional medicine for recovery, and Fang Bo was holding a bowl of bitter medicinal soup when he collided directly with the rushing young man.
Although physically weak, Qin Xin was still half a head taller. Like a gust of wind, he knocked the old doctor off balance. Fang Bo’s shoulder hit the doorframe, and the medicine spilled all over his hands and body.
“Young Master Qin! Where are you going! It’s about to rain outside! You can’t just run out!”
The hot medicinal liquid scalded Fang Bo’s hand slightly, and yet, he still firmly grabbed Qin Xin’s wrist, trying to stop him. Qin Xin had been in poor health since childhood. After the age of fourteen, his condition worsened year by year… his wrist so thin it could be fully encircled.
But this time, he did not listen.
With a sharp motion, he shook Fang Bo off. The old doctor could have easily caught up with him if he had taken a couple of steps, but in the end, he stopped.
He simply watched as that unsteady figure ran into the curtain of rain, as a strange feeling rose in his heart.
Why was Qin Xin acting so… odd today?
Normally, at this time, after taking his medicine, he would already be asleep, so deeply that he would not want to wake up again.
So what was going on today?
……………..
Outside, heavy rain poured down, and raindrops the size of beans slammed into the ground. Lightning tore the night sky apart, illuminating everything without the need for streetlights.
It was enough to clearly reveal Lin Fanxing’s face.
He stood just inside the doorway, with a mirror on his left, reflecting his face perfectly. But how could that face even be described?
Despair, misery, fear…
Every emotion was carved into it. Pale as a sheet of paper.
His entire body trembled. Even though not a single drop of rain had touched him, his shirt on the back was already completely soaked with cold sweat.
His life was truly hell on earth.
Why… why, even after rebirth, was he still at this moment?!
Lin Fanxing had never imagined life could start over, but his memory of death was too clear, which was why he believed he had truly been given another life.
He had clearly been lying in the intensive care unit of a critical hospital, his entire body filled with tubes, as the sound of medical equipment beeping echoed in his ears.
Nurses moved back and forth around him. He wanted to speak, but his throat felt as if it had been cut open, a breathing tube inserted inside.
His last impression of the world was a horrible headache, endless darkness, and coldness.
His car had fallen from the overpass into the water. After suffering a heavy impact to the head, Lin Fanxing had already lost his vision while lying in the ambulance. He could see nothing.
The cold water soaked his body as the forgotten him slowly sank downward.
It should have been fragments of the windshield that pierced his eyes… Those bright, star-like eyes of his will never open again.
He still remembered the final moment before his heartbeat stopped.
It was said that a person’s hearing is the last sense to disappear. Lin Fanxing believed this without doubt.
His strength was fading. His consciousness came and went intermittently, but his hearing remained painfully sharp, etching every sound into that final instant of death.
“Such a pity… His eyes are completely destroyed. I actually quite liked him before.”
“What’s there to pity? Even his younger brother has been arrested! I heard he was still using drugs when they caught him, mixing with a group of rich second-generation kids without any clothes on, completely out of his mind! Who knows if the two brothers were both involved?”
“How could that be? He looked so clean.”
“Clean? His brother looks clean, too? Let me tell you, in their line of work, there’s no such thing as clean people. He and his brother are the same, drug users, just used by those rich kids as tools to vent.”
No!
I didn’t!
Lin Fanxing wanted to scream at them.
Then Lin Fanxing’s younger brother appeared in his mind again. No matter what, that was his brother… Five years younger than him.
Only twenty-one this year.
When they were children, he would timidly look at him, offering him the best things in the family with both hands. When their parents bought him a birthday cake, Lin Fanxing was always the first to be offered the first bite.
When their parents raised their hands to hit him, little Fan Xing would spread his thin arms and even shout, “If you hit my brother, you’ll have to kill me first!”
Even… even his university tuition had been paid for with Fan Xing’s saved red envelopes and pocket money.
When did it start to change? Who had led Fan Xing astray?
At the final moment, Lin Fanxing could not figure it out.
Just as he could not understand why Qin Xin had driven him to utter destruction.
He had actually… considered their secret relationship a humiliation.
And just like that, resentment and unwillingness became Lin Fanxing’s final emotions. Blind at the end, he shed tears as he took his last breath.
His soul began to drift upward, slowly detaching from his shattered body.
If he had known their secret relationship would end like this, he never should have folded that paper airplane for that boy back then. He was so beautiful that just sitting there, he seemed to glow like a divine sculpture.
But he had never expected his heart to be so vicious, so ruthless that it held not a trace of humanity.
When his soul fully left his body, Lin Fanxing looked down from above at the corpse that had once been him.
He saw two streaks of blood tears at the corners of his eyes, tears that had soaked through the layers of white gauze covering his eyes, staining them into two absurd patches of deep red.
His eyeballs were completely destroyed, leaving only tear ducts… was that only so he could cry properly before dying?
Lin Fanxing did not know how he came back.
He only knew that when he opened his eyes again, he was standing in front of this familiar door. His right hand was gripping the metal doorknob, turning it clockwise.
The door had already cracked open, and it could no longer be closed. The motion-sensor light on the porch had gone out, leaving only darkness. But a flash of white lightning streaked outside, illuminating rows of terrifying debt-collector faces.
He had actually gone back to June 6th!
A day Lin Fanxing would never forget. Two years ago, on June 6th, he lost sight in one of his eyes.
Lin Fanxing turned and ran immediately.
It had been too long since he had experienced clear vision, as he had long since become accustomed to only his right eye. Everything within the range of his left vision felt unfamiliar to him now, and even maintaining balance had become difficult.
But he had to run.
Even though the room was dark and no lights were on, Lin Fanxing fled as if running for his life, rushing straight toward the bedroom. The people outside were not electricians at all, like they claimed to be… they were thugs he could not afford to provoke!
Two years ago, Fan Xing had no idea who he had offended, but he knew the other party had a powerful background. Lin Fanxing had no money on him at the time, so he took out a loan to help his little brother. He missed the interest payment by just one day, and people came knocking at his door.
It was a group of vicious, ruthless thugs, completely devoid of humanity.
Lin Fanxing clearly remembered how he had been forced to kneel on the ground and bang his head, and how they had recorded humiliating footage of him begging for mercy. His desperate pleas rose higher and higher.
“Don’t… please, don’t touch my face, don’t hurt my face! I make a living with my looks, don’t…!”
“I’ll pay it back! I’ll go out and film, I’ll earn money, please let me go!”
“Don’t! Don’t!”
Amid his piercing cries, Lin Fanxing was pinned to the ground. They grabbed his chin and forced him to raise his face, and that was the last image in his memory where both of his eyes could still see.
Immediately after that, his bloodied left eye socket lost all function. The entire left side of his vision in life was extinguished just like that.
They had wantonly destroyed Lin Fanxing’s left eye.
Run!
Lin Fanxing’s entire body trembled.
T.N: Just to not create misunderstandings in the future, I decided to use Fan Xing for the little brother, and I will use Fanxing/Lin Fanxing for our MC. Just know that if the name is written in two words, as Fan Xing, I’m referring to the little brother, not Lin Fanxing. It’s confusing in English, I know. In Chinese, it works because they are written with different characters, but in English, I don’t see a better alternative to not confuse the two of them (a better alternative will come in about 10 chapters, but until then, he’s Fan Xing)
T.N: If you like his novel, you can read up to chapter 12 on my Patreon, with new updates coming every week!
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