The moon was a silent witness, casting a cold, sepulchral silver across the master suite of the Rothenberg Villa.
Bai Qi lay sprawled across the expanse of his bed—a monochromatic landscape of shadows and expensive German silk. He was shirtless, his torso a masterwork of sculpted alabaster and jagged muscle, catching the lunar light like a statue in a deserted museum. His damp, dark hair was plastered against his forehead, the remnants of a late-night shower he had taken to wash away the scent of bourbon and guilt.
To any observer, he was the pinnacle of masculine perfection, a monarch at rest. But beneath those long, obsidian lashes, a frantic electricity was pulsing. His fingers twitched against the sheets, his brow knitting into a furrow of deep, subconscious agony.
He was no longer in the Villa. He was back in the Wreckage.
In the dream, the world was a riot of crimson and shadow. Bai Qi stood in the center of a vast, ethereal field of roses.
They were beautiful, their petals fluttering like the wings of dying butterflies, but the air was thick with the copper tang of blood.
He tried to move, but the stems were a labyrinth of obsidian thorns. They caught on his skin, drawing thin lines of fire, anchoring him to a past he couldn't outrun.
She was there when I last saw her, he thought, his lungs burning with a frantic, desperate rhythm. She's just beyond the fog. Qing Yue.
He struggled through the thicket, ignoring the stabs of the thorns. He expected to find a grave, or a ghost, or a memory. Instead, he found a splash of leather on the grass.
The Journal.
Bai Qi's breath hitched. It was the book of secrets—the one that held the truth, He lunged for it, his fingers reaching for the truth that had eluded him.
The moment his skin brushed the leather, the journal dissolved into a cloud of black ash.
"Damnit!" Bai Qi hissed, the sound echoing through the dreamscape like a gunshot. "Why... why does it always get away?"
"Because you are looking for the wrong truth, Bai Qi."
The voice was like a chime in a ruined cathedral—melodic, distant, and devastatingly familiar.
Bai Qi spun around, his heart hammering against his ribs. Standing amidst the swaying roses was Qing Yue.
She looked exactly as she did in the photographs—ethereal, soft, and radiating a purity that made his eyes ache.
But her gaze was different. It wasn't full of the love he remembered. It was flat, clinical, and filled with a profound, icy disappointment.
"Qing Yue..." Bai Qi gasped, stumbling toward her. He reached out a hand, desperate to touch the hem of her dress, to anchor himself to the only light he had ever known.
She stepped back. The movement was sharp, a visceral rejection.
"Why are you walking away?" he pleaded, his voice cracking.
"You are wrong," she replied, her voice echoing. "You are misunderstood, Bai Qi. You have misunderstood everything from the very beginning."
Bai Qi straightened, his obsidian eyes flashing with a defensive fire. "What are you talking about? I am protecting your memory. I am honoring you."
"By falling for a copycat?" Qing Yue's lip curled in a mirror-image of his own arrogance. "By letting a scavenger wear my face and walk through your heart?
Bai Qi flinched as if he had been struck. He looked away, his jaw tightening into a line of granite. He couldn't find the words to defend the woman he had used to replace a ghost.
"And why," Qing Yue continued, her voice rising with a sudden, jagged anger, "are you pushing Gege away?"
Bai Qi's hands clenched into fists, the thorns of the dream-roses digging deeper into his palms. "Don't call him that. Shu Yao... he is the reason you aren't here. He is the one who let you die. He is the one who caused me to hate him to my very core."
"Enough!"
The word was a thunderclap. Qing Yue stepped forward, her eyes blazing with a fury that looked remarkably like Shu Yao's silent resilience. "He didn't let me go. It was my choice. It was always my choice."
"What do you mean?" Bai Qi roared, his possessive madness bubbling to the surface. "He was hiding! He was silent! I asked him thousands of times of what happened, but he looked at me with those disgusting, secret-filled eyes and said nothing! Because of his silence, I lost you!"
Qing Yue's gaze softened, a wave of profound guilt washing over her features. She looked away, her voice dropping to a whisper. So that day... Gege was sad too. He was always thinking about us. He never thought about himself.
She shook her head, looking back at Bai Qi with a look of pure pity. "No, Bai Qi. He wasn't hiding a crime.
He was hiding a sacrifice. He stayed silent because he loves you. He knew the truth would destroy you, so he decided to be the villain in your story just to keep your world from burning down."
"Loves me?" Bai Qi let out a laugh—a jagged, broken sound that vibrated with a dark, toxic denial. "I am I am the heir to the Rothenberg name. I am not... I am not some gay. Why would he love a man like me?"
Qing Yue didn't flinch at his outburst. She simply watched him, as if he were a child throwing a tantrum in a storm.
"I don't care what you call yourself," she said, her form beginning to flicker and fade like a dying candle. "I don't care about your labels or your pride. I just want you to love my Gege. He has bled enough for you, Bai Qi. He has been the wreckage so you could be the monument."
"You want me to love him?" Bai Qi whispered, his heart breaking in the silence of the dream. "The one who took away every piece of my happiness? The one who reminds me of everything I've failed to protect?"
Qing Yue shook her head, a final, sad smile touching her lips. She didn't offer a rebuttal. She didn't offer comfort. She simply began to dissolve into the moonlight.
"Fine," Bai Qi growled, lowering his head as the crimson roses turned to black ash around him. "If you don't want me to love you... then I'll stop. I'll stop pretending that I can love again. I'll be exactly what the world wants me to be. Cold. Empty. A Monarch of nothing."
The moonlight within the dream began to fracture, splintering into jagged shards of silver that pricked at the edges of Bai Qi's consciousness.
Qing Yue stood at the epicenter of the dissolving world, her form becoming translucent, like a sketch of a ghost. She leaned forward, her voice no longer a whisper, but a resonant command that seemed to vibrate within Bai Qi's very marrow.
"If you truly wish to know why you returned to this soil, Bai Qi... if you want the catalyst that dragged you back to China, you must find that journal. Whatever it takes.
Bai Qi's breath hitched, the copper scent of the dream-roses thick in his lungs. "The journal... what is in it that could possibly matter more than your memory?"
"Everything," she replied, a sad, knowing smile gracing her ethereal features.
"Within those pages lies the architecture of a soul you have spent months dismantling.
You will find everything Gege has protected—every secret, every bruise, every sacrifice he made even when he knew it meant his own destruction. Read it, Bai Qi. And only then... decide what you are."
"I have already decided!" Bai Qi roared, reaching out to grab her, to anchor her to the reality of his grief.
"It is fine if you believe you cannot love him," Qing Yue said, her voice fading as she drifted back into the deepening lunar haze. "But I will not accept your verdict until you have looked into that mirror. It is all up to you now. If you feel you cannot love him... yet you feel something... find that journal."
She vanished. One moment she was a pillar of white light, the next, she was nothing more than a memory escaping through the cracks of his mind.
Bai Qi collapsed to his knees in the dream-world, the field of roses now a graveyard of black ash. Above him, a sky he had never imagined—a vast, velvet canopy of stars that seemed to mock his singular focus—stretched into infinity.
"I am not gay," he rasped into the void, his voice cracking against the silence. "I cannot love him.
He looked at his trembling hands. The idea of loving Shu Yao felt like a blasphemy against his own identity.
"Me? Loving him?" A jagged, bitter laugh escaped his throat. "We are boys.
We were friends. And even that fragile bond has been incinerated.
I have broken him. I have stepped on the very friendship that sustained us.
How am I supposed to love a ghost of a boy I have personally ruined?"
He thought of Armin, with his rigid expectations and decades of loyalty to the Rothenberg name.
He thought of his mother, the Queen of fashion world, whose ghost would surely turn her back on such a deviation. The weight of his reputation was a mountain, and Shu Yao was, but a grain of sand beneath it.
"I can't do it," he whispered. "The world would laugh. I will be nothing but a jester."
But as the dream began to tilt toward awakening, a darker, more primitive instinct clawed its way to the surface of his heart. It was a cold, tectonic shift in his psyche.
If he could not love Shu Yao as a partner, he would possess him as an object.
"He is mine," Bai Qi hissed, his eyes flashing with a sudden, predatory obsidian light. "Not as a lover... but as a possession. He is mine to break, and mine to use. That is the only role left for him in this game."
The obsession with the journal mutated into a violent necessity. It wasn't about truth anymore; it was about the total subjugation of the Saint's secrets.
"If he refuses to tell me where it is... if he tries to hide behind that pathetic wall of silence again..." Bai Qi's fingers curled into claws. "I swear I will tie him down. I will bind him in silk and rope until he has no choice but to spill every word. I will make him beg for the mercy he thinks I still possess."
He reached out, grabbing a single, phantom rose that lingered in the fading light. He didn't pick it gently. He squeezed the stem, the long, serrated thorns piercing deep into the meat of his palm.
The pain was exquisite. It was a grounding wire in a storm of confusion. He watched the dark, dream-blood well up and coat the thorns, and for a fleeting, twisted moment, he felt a profound relief. The pain was real. The ownership was real.
Bai Qi's eyes snapped open.
He sat bolt upright in his bed, the luxury of the suite returning in a rush of cold air and expensive shadows. The dream had vanished, but the resolution had hardened into a diamond-sharp edge.
His jaw was clenched so tightly that the bone ached. He didn't look for the water on his nightstand; instead, he gripped the German silk sheets, his knuckles turning a stark, ghostly white.
"The journal," he muttered, the words tasting like iron.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, his bare feet hitting the cold marble floor. The shirtless "Monarch" looked toward the window, where the first gray fingers of dawn were beginning to peel back the night.
He remembered the dream-blood on the rose, and he looked down at his hand, almost expecting to see the wounds. There was nothing but the steady pulse of his own frantic heart.
He stood up, his tall, carved frame casting a long shadow across the room. He reached for a silk robe, wrapping it around himself like armor, his eyes fixed on the door.
"I'm coming for your secrets, Shu Yao. And this time, I won't be drunk. I won't be blinded. I will be the Monarch you fear."