The real young master thought he was hated by everyone

“I didn’t expect you to find your way here so quickly.”

Bai Ruan raised his eyes, halting his actions. His tone carried a hint of stiffness.

This time, he admitted defeat.

But next time, the outcome might not be the same.

He had already grasped Xie Duzhi’s weaknesses and soft spots.

Xie Duzhi didn’t answer, his gaze dark and intense. Bai Ruan straightened his collar and refastened the slightly loose cuff buttons on his wrist. With his head held high and an unchanged expression, he walked out of the room, brushing past him.

This was a hotel under the Bai family’s name. He could come and go as he pleased without needing anyone’s permission.

“You didn’t even call the police,” Bai Ruan paused as he passed him, speaking in a voice only the two of them could hear.
“Are you afraid?”

Xie Duzhi abruptly reached out, but it was as if Bai Ruan had anticipated his move and quickly retreated, evading him.

Standing a short distance away, Bai Ruan looked at him with smug amusement, silently mouthing the words:
“You’ve lost control.”

Xie Duzhi had lost control.

He stood silently at the doorway, taking a long time to suppress the worry and self-reproach in his heart before stepping into the room.

Li Heng called out to him softly, then fell silent. He bit his lower lip, hesitant to meet his gaze.

Xie Duzhi quietly untied the bindings on his hands and feet, his actions gentle. Other than an initial faint “hmm” in response, he didn’t say another word.

Li Heng’s hands and feet were numb.

He obediently followed behind Xie Duzhi, exiting the hotel and getting into the car. As the engine roared to life, he suddenly realized that he had been here before.

This was the same hotel where he had first met Bai Ruan—during a class gathering after the college entrance exams.

He had many things he wanted to say to Xie Duzhi, countless questions he wanted to ask, but every time he opened his mouth, another thought would hold him back. The words lingered on his lips, hesitating, only to be swallowed back down.

This was all too strange.

He didn’t know if it was the shock of today’s events, Bai Ruan’s half-truths, or something else entirely.

Sitting in Xie Duzhi’s car, he should’ve felt a sense of safety. Yet, like an overextension of that feeling, an overwhelming fatigue surged over him.

Xie Duzhi’s expression remained clouded, his brow furrowed in a frosty demeanor.

Li Heng wanted to break the silence in the car, but it was as if he had suddenly lost the courage to do so.

It was Xie Duzhi who eventually spoke first, breaking the oppressive stillness.

Switching the car to automatic mode, he said thoughtfully, “Your roommate is out of danger. He was found in time, and the surgery was successful.”

It was Wei Zhuowei who discovered Lin Mo and rushed him to the hospital. Thanks to the quick action and the soft shrubs outside the seven-story S University building instead of hard cement, Lin Mo had narrowly escaped death.

However, he would need a long time to recover—weeks, even months in the hospital, followed by extensive rehabilitation.

Xie Duzhi had arranged the best care for him, from hospital rooms to professional medical staff.

But it wasn’t out of guilt. The guilt he felt was for Li Heng and the other members of the Xie family.

Because, in the end, this was his oversight—his mistake.

“…That’s great,” Li Heng murmured, his lips trembling slightly.

Hearing that Lin Mo was out of danger, his eyes grew hot. It felt like a heavy stone had been lifted off his chest, allowing him to breathe more easily.

Yet, he found himself too drained to express genuine relief.

“He might take a leave of absence and re-enroll as a freshman after his full recovery.”

Xie Duzhi thought for a moment before continuing, “The school never expected something like this to happen.”

Ultimately, the decision would rest with Lin Mo. His advisor had contacted his family, and they were already on their way to S City.

“Can I visit him later?”

Li Heng’s voice was filled with worry. He wanted to check on him, but fear held him back.

He was scared of what Bai Ruan might’ve said during that phone call and didn’t want Lin Mo to misunderstand him.

But no matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t shake the feeling of responsibility.

If he had handled things better from the start or been more transparent, Lin Mo might not have ended up in the hospital.

“This isn’t your fault,” Xie Duzhi said softly.

Looking out the window, he suddenly felt the urge to smoke—a habit he didn’t usually have.

“This won’t happen again.”

“…But it’s not your fault either, Brother.”

Li Heng’s voice was low, reminiscent of their conversation in Xie Duzhi’s office. Back then, Xie Duzhi had taken all the blame upon himself.

“It’s Bai Ruan who’s too cunning.”

Hearing that name, Li Heng couldn’t suppress the wave of disgust that rose within him.

It was tightly entwined with memories he desperately wanted to forget. Just hearing the name brought back the slimy, snake-like sensation that made his skin crawl.

“I underestimated him,” Xie Duzhi admitted. “He knows a lot about the Xie family—its inner workings, even secrets of some high-level executives. He’s planted people within our ranks.”

He hadn’t realized the extent of Bai Ruan’s cunning, nor had he imagined how adept he was at exploiting commercial vulnerabilities. That lapse had allowed Bai Ruan to evade the private investigators and sneak into S City unnoticed amidst the chaos.

“…”

Li Heng fell silent, a possibility crossing his mind.

Bai Ruan’s knowledge of the Xie family might not stem from exceptional business acumen. It was likely because he had genuinely been close to the family’s core, granting him access to such information—and even leverage over certain individuals.

As much as he found Bai Ruan despicable, even revolting, he couldn’t deny that in the dream, Bai Ruan had gotten along remarkably well with everyone.

The other party was always adept at reading people, manipulating minds, and exploiting others’ weaknesses to ensure their compliance. It was no surprise that at critical moments, things could go wrong under such circumstances.

Xie Duzhi pressed his lips together, the curve of his mouth dipping low. No matter how one looked at him, he seemed deeply affected.

“Dad and Big Brother are still managing the aftermath. Overall, it’s beneficial to the company’s future development,” he said after a moment of silence.

After another pause, Xie Duzhi continued from where he left off, “It also helped us clear out some long-standing issues.”

But you’ve been hit hard.

Li Heng couldn’t help but think this.

He didn’t understand much about corporate operations, but from a layman’s perspective, the speed at which Xie Duzhi and his elder brother had handled the situation—leaving only some follow-up tasks—was already incredibly impressive.

If he had to describe it, it was like a crisis had just emerged, barely noticeable and not yet widespread. Before people could even begin to panic, they found out the crisis had already been resolved.

But thinking it through, it seemed reasonable for Xie Duzhi to feel upset and disheartened.

After all, he was Xie Duzhi—the one who had never made a mistake in decision-making since childhood, nicknamed “Reincarnated God of Wealth” by partners, and secretly discussed among peers as if he had the cheat codes of a reborn genius.

Anyone would be upset when they stumbled over an unexpected obstacle in their area of expertise.

Li Heng wanted to comfort him, to explain that this was merely Bai Ruan exploiting unfair tactics and not a matter of Xie Duzhi misjudging Bai Ruan’s abilities. Bai Ruan could never measure up to him.

… But such an explanation would inevitably lead to that dream.

He had never mentioned the dream to anyone.

That dream was perhaps the greatest secret of his life, one he intended to carry to the grave.

“You haven’t told Dad and Mom about being kidnapped by him, have you?” Xie Duzhi asked, sensing Li Heng’s aversion to Bai Ruan’s name and opting to use a neutral pronoun instead.

The chaos caused by the freshman’s suicide had overwhelmed the school, leaving the counselor with no time to notice another student taking a half-day leave under the guise of family matters.

The connection between Lin Mo’s romantic involvement and Bai Ruan’s conflicts with them—critical pieces of the puzzle—was known to very few. These incidents hadn’t been linked.

Xie Duzhi’s words were both a reassurance and an inquiry.

“… Should we tell them?” he asked.

If Li Heng preferred not to involve their parents, Xie Duzhi would seal the information completely, ensuring it could never leak.

He would treat Bai Ruan’s kidnapping and threats as if they had never occurred.

If they decided to inform their parents, he would gather all the evidence he had—security footage, dashcam recordings, and Bai Ruan’s previous dossier—and arrange a formal discussion with them.

No matter the choice or the reasons behind it, he was ready to fully support his decision.

“I’ll need some time to think. I haven’t decided yet,” Li Heng replied, his tense posture gradually relaxing.

Leaning into the soft car seat, he seemed absent-minded, not thinking about the question but zoning out instead.

“… I’m sorry I came too late.”

Suddenly, he heard Xie Duzhi apologize, surprising him enough to turn and look at him.

The young man’s eyes were lowered, long lashes veiling his gaze. He wasn’t looking at Li Heng, his lips pressed even tighter than when admitting his mistake earlier.

In fact, he had wanted to apologize the moment he stepped through the door.

Yet such a simple sentence was delayed, layered with hesitation, as if he needed to build up the courage to say it.

When he finally did, he realized he had been afraid of disappointing someone.

“You weren’t late,” Li Heng said suddenly, a smile tugging at his lips.

He did smile, seriously shaking his head at him. “You arrived just in time, and you looked very dashing.”

He dared not imagine what might have happened if Xie Duzhi had been even a little later.

“Are you feeling unwell?”

Noticing his frown, Xie Duzhi reached to open the car window.

“… Maybe I’m just a little hungry.” Li Heng slumped slightly, avoiding mentioning that Bai Ruan had licked his tears and kissed his eyes.

Just thinking about it was distressing enough, let alone saying it out loud.

He was also afraid of how Xie Duzhi might react, using some indescribable expression he absolutely didn’t want to see.

In silence, Xie Duzhi fished out a piece of candy from his pocket and handed it to him. “I ordered food. It’ll arrive just as we get home.”

The car headed toward Linfeng Bay. When Li Heng took the candy, he hesitated for a moment.

Because the candy was chenpi-flavored, sweet with a hint of tartness, something he liked.

Xie Duzhi knew him well, knew what he liked.

And without realizing it, Xie Duzhi had referred to their destination as home.

Unwrapping the candy, he popped the citrus-scented sweet into his mouth, letting it sit under his tongue. The nausea subsided strangely fast.

When only a sliver of candy remained, he crunched it between his teeth and swallowed before speaking seriously, “Third Brother, I plan to tell Dad and Mom about this.”

“But before that, there’s something else I want to tell you.”

He wanted to share the dream with Xie Duzhi.

Not out of impulse or to make him feel better by exposing Bai Ruan’s “cheating.”

He simply wanted to tell him about it.

“… What is it?”

Xie Duzhi’s grip on the steering wheel tightened, bracing for the worst.

During his confrontation with Bai Ruan, while successfully issuing a warning, Bai Ruan had learned his secret.

And he had likely shared that secret—during Xie Duzhi’s frantic search.

To him, affection was a deeply personal matter.

He had never planned to let Li Heng know, unless one day Li Heng confessed he was sure of liking men. Only then might he reveal a hint of his feelings.

In short, his feelings were akin to a secret crush.

Having that crush exposed by the object of his affection? A little mortifying.

Because he didn’t know how to explain the origin of this emotion or argue its rationality, it had nothing to do with the excitement of taboo or thrill.

He also wasn’t sure if, after revealing the truth, they could still get along as comfortably as before.

This was a problem that neither reason nor emotion could resolve—a matter they even subconsciously avoided confronting.

“Um, it might take a while to explain, and it’s pretty complicated,” Li Heng said, his subtle nervousness unnoticed as he pondered how to make it sound less absurd.

“Let’s talk about it when we’re home…” He couldn’t hold back a yawn and realized he was unexpectedly drowsy.

“…Let’s discuss it then.”

Xie Duzhi turned up the car’s air conditioning slightly to ensure Li Heng wouldn’t catch a chill while dozing off.

Li Heng mumbled an acknowledgment, nodding vaguely as his eyelids grew heavy.

The mental strain from dealing with Bai Ruan earlier and the subsequent worries after Xie Duzhi found him had thoroughly drained him.

He was genuinely exhausted.

Once he fell asleep, Xie Duzhi dared to glance at him again.

Only after a long, conflicted pause did he reluctantly look away.

When Li Heng woke up, he found himself lying in his bed.

It was his own room, with the air conditioning still on. Looking out the window, he noticed the sky had already turned dark.

The sun always set earlier in autumn and winter, so he wasn’t sure what time it was—his phone was dead.

He remembered he should check or perhaps replace his phone entirely. During his earlier unconsciousness, Bai Ruan had unlocked it using his fingerprint and might have reset his password or gone through his messages.

Xie Duzhi wasn’t in the room but downstairs, reading on the living room sofa. When he went down, he deliberately glanced at the clock and realized it was already close to 8 p.m.

“You’re awake?” Xie Duzhi noticed him immediately, closing his book and standing up almost instinctively to head to the kitchen for the dishes.

“Come eat.”

The young man said this simply.

He had been waiting for him to eat.

In the meantime, he had even asked the restaurant to deliver fresh dishes again—despite using a food warmer, the batter on the squirrel fish would go soggy after a while.

Li Heng wasn’t particularly hungry, but Xie Duzhi kept adding food to his plate, and before he realized it, he had eaten quite a bit.

“Third Brother, the thing I wanted to tell you is related to a secret.”

After setting down his chopsticks, Li Heng carefully tried to organize his words. “Though it sounds unbelievable, I feel it might have really happened.”

“The reason I never told anyone before is that it seemed too absurd.”

“What is it?” Xie Duzhi asked, surprised, but realized he wasn’t entirely shocked.

“The night before I was brought back to this family, I had a long dream.”

He glanced cautiously at Xie Duzhi’s reaction. “In that dream, the person named Xie Duzhi was actually Bai Ruan.”

Xie Duzhi was startled but found himself oddly unsurprised.

Based on probabilities alone, Bai Ruan was indeed the most likely candidate to have been adopted by the Xie family back then.

It was just that he had intervened at the last moment.

“I dreamed Bai Ruan was you,” Li Heng continued, pausing to bite his lip. “In that dream, after I was brought back to the family, he treated me well on the surface but secretly targeted me.”

“When I first came home, he stood on the stairs, waved at me, then deliberately fell down and accused me of pushing him.”

Xie Duzhi suddenly recalled their first meeting, when he found Li Heng even more frail than the information suggested. On impulse, he had slipped him some pocket money.

At that time, he had indeed looked momentarily dazed. Then, when going upstairs, he had shown a fleeting yet unmistakable wariness and panic when he reached out his hand.

…So that’s why.

It also explained the caution and, at times, fearfulness that seemed to shadow him when he first came home.

Regret welled up in Xie Duzhi.

He had noticed from the start that Li Heng didn’t quite match the self-confidence described in the documents he’d read.

But he had naively attributed it to the shock of his return to the family.

He hadn’t realized that deep down, Li Heng had been terrified all along, walking on eggshells, afraid that the dream, with its almost prophetic undertones, would come true—that he’d be rejected.

“Bai Ruan probably had the same dream as I did,” Li Heng added, his tone a bit muddled as he avoided looking at Xie Duzhi. “He must have used it to cheat somehow, which explains the unexpected obstacles he created later.”

What Li Heng didn’t know was that, to his competitors in the business world, Xie Duzhi himself was also “cheating.”

Not just through talent and the advantage of living another life but also with time and the industry’s development trajectory.

Compared to Li Heng’s bizarre but imprecise dream, Xie Duzhi truly understood and seized the future.

“I thought I was the only one who had the dream, but Bai Ruan’s actions made me certain he did too.”

And the dream probably came to Bai Ruan later.

At first, he used to call him “Heng Bro,” but later, it became “Heng brother” or just “brother.”

Li Heng speculated that when Bai Ruan called him on the phone, he hadn’t yet had the dream. It wasn’t until much later, when he had almost forgotten about him, that he must have dreamed it too.

“Third Brother, was that dream really just a dream?”

If it wasn’t a dream but something akin to a previous life or reincarnation like in certain online novels, that didn’t seem quite right either.

The dream hadn’t started in his childhood, nor had he had it when he was very young.

It had abruptly begun with a luxury car stopping in front of him and ended with him lying on a bed at a construction site.

“I feel like it’s contradictory,” he admitted. “I dreamed I had died, but Bai Ruan’s behavior seems…”

“…Strangely confident?” Li Heng had successfully confused himself. “Like, not what you’d expect if I had died.”

Even though he didn’t think Bai Ruan would mourn his death, his reaction in the dream had indeed been odd.

Xie Duzhi’s expression shifted from solemnity to helplessness, and eventually, there was even a faint hint of amusement.

Especially when Li Heng repeatedly emphasized, “I think I must have died,” only to immediately add, “I mean, I think, but maybe not.”

“Could it be that I didn’t die, but it hurt so much that I passed out, and then when I woke up, I thought I had died?”

Before this, he hadn’t questioned whether the dream’s version of himself had truly died.

After his ramblings, Xie Duzhi quickly and lightly spat several times, expressionless, as if spitting away the bad luck.

“Third Brother, why are you acting superstitious like Mom?” Li Heng, seeing his deadpan demeanor, was both speechless and amused.

He thought Xie Duzhi wasn’t the type to do such things.

Xie Duzhi didn’t answer the question about superstition—mainly because he didn’t know how to respond.

“There’s also the possibility that it’s a parallel world,” he finally said, trying to address Li Heng’s confusion. “Let’s consider your abduction and subsequent loss as a crossroads.”

“Dad adopting me is Route A, adopting Bai Ruan is Route B, and adopting someone else or being blocked by Mom is Route C.”

“You just happened to glimpse what happened at Route B because of some resonance with a parallel world, caused by magnetic fields or other factors.”

Li Heng pondered, raising another issue. “But in the dream, I wasn’t kidnapped—just lost. And Aunt Luo never returned to China.”

Would parallel worlds have such differences?

“Besides, Third Brother, you’re so outstanding. It doesn’t make sense for me to have never heard of you—you were originally named Xie anyway.”

Of course, the last point was what he instinctively cared about most during his contemplation.

Xie Duzhi also couldn’t provide an answer.

He wondered what would have happened in Route B if he hadn’t been reborn—if Bai Ruan had been adopted instead.

After a long pause, he spoke again, affirming Li Heng’s speculation. “The differences in parallel worlds might extend beyond just one area… It’s possible I was in another city or even developing my career abroad.”

As he said this, he was already contemplating using less-than-honorable methods to deal with Bai Ruan and extract more pieces of the puzzle from him.

He didn’t see this as misdirected anger or revenge.