Suisui (2/2)
A week later, the psychiatry department of a hospital received a new patient through the ER: a boy only fifteen years old.
He was thin, his head wrapped in bandages, yet his delicate features still showed through. His skin was pale, his lashes dark as crow feathers against his cheeks—he looked like the model student who always obeyed teachers and parents.
But now, that “good child” was strapped down with the strictest restraints, every joint immobilized so tightly he couldn’t even twitch.
On the chart beside him, the department head had written:
Name: Su Zesui
Age: 15
Diagnosis: Severe tendencies toward self-harm and violence, accompanied by paranoid delusions
Recommendation: 24-hour third-level restraint
Zhou Qizhao and the others, who had also been badly injured, received some punishment. But since they were minors and had family connections, it amounted only to a few weeks’ suspension before they were allowed back at school.
Upon learning that Su Zesui was suffering from such a severe mental illness, the homeroom teacher—who had long neglected his duty of care—felt very guilty and submitted a request to the school, organizing both a school-wide fundraiser and a public fundraiser for the boy.
The stark contrast between the boy’s angelic face and his terrifying psychiatric diagnosis caught public attention. Overnight, he went viral online. Donations poured in from well-meaning strangers, and caring citizens even visited the hospital to see the boy they had never met.
Some kindhearted young women, unable to bear the sight of him convulsing and struggling in his restraints, asked the nurses if they could loosen them just a little. But the nurses, holding sedatives at the ready, could only shake their heads.
Just as the department head had noted: though Su Zesui looked innocent, he was deeply self-destructive, violent, and paranoid—and getting worse.
Even the flood of compassion and support pouring in could not stop his descent into darkness.
Whenever he was freed, he would smash the flowers and fruit baskets donated by well-wishers, seize whatever sharp object he could reach, and lash out like a man possessed—attacking the doctors, nurses, or volunteers who tried to help him, then turning the violence on himself.
Gradually, the storm of online charity faded. People’s fleeting sympathy shifted to newer headlines.
And as Su Zesui’s illness showed no sign of gratitude or improvement, even the philanthropists who had once taken his case to heart grew disheartened. One by one, their warm intentions cooled. They stopped visiting, stopped raising money.
Psychiatric care was expensive—especially the constant supervision he required. Luckily, doctors later discovered a bank card at Su Zesui’s home, holding a balance of 500,000 yuan.
From then on, his treatment costs came out of that card.
Strapped to the bed, Su Zesui stared blankly at the white ceiling. Once, he had endured breakdown after breakdown and still dragged himself to work, just to keep that card untouched. Now, it was being drained again and again, yet he showed no reaction.
He was like a puppet with its spring wound down completely—stabbed, scratched, hurt, yet no longer capable of responding to the world at all.
Even the nurses, who had seen countless cases, whispered among themselves that perhaps there was no saving him.
For patients whose illness stemmed from deep emotional wounds, “love” was supposed to be the most powerful cure.
But all the love, care, and kindness lavished on this boy had not healed him. It had only made him worse.
So now, when the ward was silent and empty, when human kindness had proven fleeting, when money dwindled and his condition spiraled ever downward—how could this boy possibly find his own way out of the dark?
In the cold, lonely room, the tulips on the table—symbols of rebirth and love—slowly withered. No one came with flowers anymore.
On the hospital bed, the boy’s pale, delicate body was covered in scars. It was as if he had been abandoned by the entire world, including himself.
Even though they thought this was the case, the nurses still tried to make the boy’s days a little more comfortable.
When Su Zesui’s condition was stable, they would take him for quiet walks in the empty garden. When he lay staring at the ceiling in boredom all day, they would bring him science magazines that wouldn’t stir up his emotions.
Su Zesui had no idea how long he’d actually stayed in the hospital.
He had undergone several sessions of MECT treatment and forgotten many things.
But he remembered being wheeled through the transparent corridor toward the treatment room—the green leaves outside, the swirling snowflakes, the distant crowds—and himself, alone, shivering under a blanket as he awaited the procedure.
He remembered the carefree childhood moments with his big brother, who always taught him to love life. He remembered every letter and every voice recording from Mr. Gu—each word filled with unconditional, selfless affection.
The treatment managed to temporarily erase his urges to hurt himself or others.
But the side effects left him drowsy, plagued by stomach cramps, with no appetite for food, and restless whether awake or asleep.
He thought: if Mr. Gu could see him this weak, he would surely be disappointed. And if he ever saw Mr. Gu again in the afterlife, he would have to apologize properly.
Those days of treatment steeped in despair and pain left deep scars on his mind.
For a long time afterward, just the sight of a hospital sign or the sharp smell of disinfectant made him tremble and gag—a mix of fear and revulsion.
He lived through both physical and mental torment. His fingernails left crescent marks in the bedboard; his lower lip was often bitten until it bled.
Afraid of forgetting his big brother and Mr. Gu, he began keeping a diary whenever his mind was clear, recording happy memories he didn’t want to lose, and writing down every word Mr. Gu had ever said to him.
But the nurses always urged him to go outside, telling him the world was vast, and when the sun rose, it was time to go out and feel its warmth.
Clutching his diary, eyes downcast, he would doodle and mutter to himself that his sky would never brighten again. Hearing this, the nurses would no longer push him, only stroke his hair with quiet pity.
Su Zesui thought that when the money in his bank card was gone, that would be the time to go join his big brother and Mr. Gu.
But turning points always come when least expected.
That day, the nurse kept talking about how beautiful the winter sun was. Sunlight streamed in through the window, spreading across the snow-white floor of the ward, as if it really could bring a faint trace of hope.
Recently, Su Zesui had been doing better. His mood was still low, but he continued to endure the painful treatments.
That day the nurse rewarded him with a science magazine, the title instantly catching his eye—
[Beyond the Speed of Light: Traveling Through Time and Space.]
“Do you have regrets? Do you want to change the past? Is there someone you longed to meet but never could? Board a faster-than-light ship, and travel through time and space with me.”
In that instant, Su Zesui’s fingers froze. In his mind appeared a letter from long ago, the one where Mr. Gu had told him his name and written: “…Perhaps, only through an extremely rare coincidence will we meet.”
And now, it felt as though that “extremely rare coincidence” had finally come to him.
Light was shining into his world.
Despite knowing nothing about high school physics, Su Zesui carefully read the book page by page. It took him a long time, but for once, he got through it without an episode.
The next day, in his diary, he drew a silly, smiling sun and, for the first time since entering the hospital, showed a genuine smile as he told the nurse: “Maybe… the sky really is bright now. I want to go outside.”
The head nurse had no idea what had happened. All she knew was that the boy who used to break down for most of the day, who by all their experience should have had no hope of recovery, was suddenly improving at an astonishing pace.
And in just one month, he passed the psychological evaluation and was discharged.
But Su Zesui had not truly recovered.
Eager to leave, desperate to cling to this lifeline, he concealed many of his mental struggles.
His urges to harm himself or others were mostly gone, but a constant paranoia still weighed on his mind.
To appear “normal,” he forced himself to suppress it with sheer willpower. But the unscientific treatment only twisted the illness further—into severe social anxiety.
He became afraid of people, afraid of socializing. Whenever he tried to speak, his heart would race and his words would stumble. Whenever he was in a crowd, he trembled and broke into a cold sweat.
Still, he was no longer “mentally ill.” He could return to school.
Against everyone’s objections, he switched from liberal arts to science, choosing physics competitions. At the “old age” of 15, he studied day and night, abandoning everything but academics.
It was as if his entire life hung on this single thread—physics competitions.
He had only one goal: to build a faster-than-light ship, travel through time, and bring his big brother and Mr. Gu back to life.
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe—
At age 11, Gu Yilan, driven by a vague “promise of God,” used self-harm as a weapon to resist his parents’ attempts to drag him away from physics and force him into finance abroad. He succeeded in keeping his eligibility for the CPhO exam.
Time flew by. To everyone’s astonishment, in just a year and a half, the hopelessly underestimated Su Zesui fought his way through the school-level, preliminary, and semifinal rounds, winning gold in the finals, earning special admission, and securing a guaranteed place at university.
He was hailed as a genius in physics—the prodigy who switched from liberal arts to science and still won gold. But no one knew that every moment of his life was being burned away by relentless study.
Failure in academics, for him, would mean the withering of his very life.
Yet the higher he advanced, the clearer the flaws in that old popular science magazine became.
It was true that faster-than-light travel implied time could run backward.
But from the standpoint of special relativity, time dilation, quantum field theory, the propagation speed of gravitational waves, and countless other branches of physics, one thing was clear: humanity could never break the speed of light.
That popular science magazine was just using selective storytelling to catch the attention of people outside the field of physics.
But Su Zesui didn’t care.
That goal was the only reason he lived, so he never once questioned whether it was even possible.
At sixteen, he was admitted to university on recommendation. At seventeen, he secured a place as an exchange student abroad, and by submitting his research proposals, he obtained access to a cutting-edge quantum accelerator.
He abandoned all painful social contact, spent sleepless nights buried in the lab, and shut out every distraction around him. In his eyes, there was nothing but the screen in front of him, the experimental apparatus, and that elusive point of breakthrough that might or might not exist.
At last, after countless trials, he turned his focus toward research on Hilbert space.
But just as he glimpsed a ray of light, fate struck him cruelly again—
He ran into Zhou Qizhao at school.
Since Su Zesui’s hospitalization, he’d had no contact with Zhou Qizhao.
First, Zhou Qizhao became a little wary of the boy’s sick and manic, savage demeanor, losing the enjoyment he once got from bullying him.
Second, their school campus was very large with separate buildings for liberal arts and sciences. After Su Zesui was held back a year and switched to the science, the two of them rarely ran into each other at school.
Now, enemies faced each other again, and the air bristled with hostility.
Su Zesui’s eyes burned red as he looked at the person who had once pushed him into hell. His fists clenched, but his body betrayed him, trembling under the weight of his severe social anxiety. He wanted to run, to collapse.
Life was unfair. Years had passed, and this man who had committed such cruelty had not only escaped retribution but was thriving.
Zhou Qizhao stood before him in head-to-toe designer clothing. Despite his abysmal grades, he was enrolled at a prestigious overseas university. Clearly, his family’s business had multiplied in scale and wealth, elevating them into another class entirely.
Seeing him, Zhou Qizhao mocked a few words, then cast a glance at the physics building behind him, casually remarking that the professor in charge of that lab was a business associate of his uncle. For an undergraduate exchange student like Su Zesui to be working there was, he suggested, “rather inappropriate.”
When Su Zesui remained silent, Zhou Qizhao lifted his chin arrogantly and, abandoning subtlety, told him outright: if he knelt and apologized for the incident that once caused him to be suspended, he might be magnanimous enough to forgive and forget.
Su Zesui’s whole body shook with rage. He ground his teeth but of course refused.
Zhou Qizhao sneered and walked away.
A few days later, Su Zesui was summoned by his foreign professor who had brought him into the research group.
The professor merely asked why he spent such long hours in the lab every day—no hint of revoking his access yet.
However, when it came to research, Su Zesui was extremely stubborn.
The “normal person facade” he had put on was uncontrollably peeling away bit by bit. The mental illnesses he had suppressed at the bottom of his heart began to grow wildly again, consuming his sanity.
Now, facing a situation that wasn’t even confirmed to be unfavorable, his illness had already relapsed. His eyes were bloodshot as he dove into a stubborn obsession, abandoning everything in a relentless pursuit to make Zhou Qizhao pay with his life.
He prepared everything meticulously. Under the guise of an apology, he lured Zhou Qizhao into the physics lab and detonated the particle accelerator, letting its high radiation blast through both their bodies.
To die together.
What he never imagined was that, in a parallel universe where time flowed differently, another physics genius—Gu Yilan, now a PhD student—had pushed humanity’s understanding of string theory to its very edge. Through experimentation, he had opened a wormhole in AdS space, unlocking a “door” to parallel worlds.
High energy, strong entanglement, and the wormhole gateway—the conditions aligned. By sheer accident, Su Zesui was pulled across into that parallel universe.
On a night of freezing winter, Su Zesui died.
And when he opened his eyes again, it was to blazing summer sunlight outside the window.
He sat there in a daze, as if every day after a MECT treatment, sitting on the hospital bed, his mind was completely blank—like he had just arrived in this world for the first time.
Although he had lost most of his memories, his severe social anxiety still clung to him like a ghost, a lingering reminder of everything he had once endured.
He trembled, terrified, resisting everything unfamiliar, desperate to run—and so he actually slipped out the door under the thin white blanket.
Soon after, the blanket above his head was pulled away. He saw his big brother—who was supposed to have died of cancer.
The big brother before him looked normal, healthy, very much alive—not a cold, black-and-white photo hanging on the wall. Su Zesui froze in place, unable to look away.
He held back his tears, choked on his sobs, and embraced his big brother.
Two days later, after being discharged from the hospital, he was forced to permanently delete his ID from the Speedsters club due to a racing accident.
There, with his cap pulled low, he accidentally bumped into a tall, slender man. Though he couldn’t see the man’s face, he instinctively became captivated by the man’s pleasant voice.
The man then helped him fend off the person who had been harassing him and, in a deep, magnetic tone, guided him through the account deletion process.
Finally, he saw the name on the man’s member ID: Gu Yilan.
A beautiful name, one he couldn’t forget.
. . . . .
. . . . .
“Suisui.” The man’s unique voice woke Su Zesui from his heavy memories.
Su Zesui’s breathing hitched, and his pupils slowly focused. He saw Gu Yilan squatting outside the tall, gilded cage, his eyes red. He held his arms open toward him, his voice very soft, as if he were coaxing him, “Be good, come out.”
Su Zesui hesitated for only half a second before putting down the plush toy he was clutching and stepping into the warmth of Gu Yilan’s embrace.
At that moment, sunlight streamed through the thick blackout curtains into the master bedroom. And he finally stepped out of the cage that had trapped him for so many years, kissing the world that loved him.
They held each other tightly, breathing together, hearts gradually syncing, as if trying to merge their bodies into one.
The embrace, which he hadn’t experienced in a long time because he had been deliberately training himself to be strong, brought him a sense of warmth and security greater than before, like a reward for the brave boy he had become.
In his memories, Su Zesui had broken down too many times, cried too many tears—enough to drain several lifetimes.
But this time, he didn’t cry. He rested his chin on the man’s shoulder and whispered, “Mr. Gu… I really have been trying to be stronger.”
“I know,” Gu Yilan’s voice was hoarse and deep, as if weighed down by too many condensed emotions, causing it to tremble slightly. “I already know everything.”
The man held him tightly, though his arms quivered slightly.
Su Zesui didn’t shed tears, yet he felt hot drops trickle onto his neck, warming his cold body.
He kissed the man’s cheek and awkwardly comforted him: “Don’t be sad. I’m okay. Really, I’m okay.”
“My Suisui,” Gu Yilan said, his eyes red. He held him and stood up, with hot tears falling and his voice hoarse, “from now on, everything will be safe and sound.”
Mf estoy en el trabajo y no puedo llorar ayuda 😭😭😭🙏