Page 48

On the coffee table before him lay several things that should not have existed.

Ye Mingzhao set down the ice pack and asked knowingly, [What is this?]

[Chu Hengyi: A small apprenticeship fee.]

Ye Mingzhao looked at the photo, opened it, and saved it.

[Chu Hengyi: There are videos too. Do you want them?]

Ye Mingzhao replied, [What do you want?]

Ye Mingzhao had thought Chu Hengyi would continue asking about Hua Rui. To his surprise, the typing indicator at the top of the chat window appeared and vanished repeatedly. In the end, Chu Hengyi only sent a baffling message.

[Chu Hengyi: Do you really like blue?]

The Ye Family's adopted son, Ye Mingzhao, had many hobbies that others could not understand. This was something Chu Hengyi had secretly noticed when he had first been brought back to the Ye family.

For instance, on nights of raging blizzards, he liked to fish on frozen lakes. He would pitch a tent on the snow-covered ice and hang a fishing lamp that swayed in the wind.

Yet he did not like staying inside the tent. Instead, he preferred to carry a sleeping bag out onto the ice and lie there.

The biting wind howled beside his ears, while frost and snow stretched endlessly before his eyes. The dark sky reflected off the frozen lake, making it impossible to tell where the heavens ended and the lake began. Only a blue sleeping bag lay quietly amid the wind and snow, soon buried beneath thick layers of snow.

Chu Hengyi had once thought Ye Mingzhao genuinely liked that kind of scenery, because Ye Mingzhao had said that the view was broader from inside a sleeping bag.

He did not like the tent's cramped space, nor the oppressive feeling of being able to touch its roof just by raising a hand. It made him feel as though he could not breathe.

A lifetime later, as Chu Hengyi recalled that scene once more, he suddenly realized that what had trapped Ye Mingzhao had never been that tiny tent, but a nightmare from more than twenty years ago.

Chu Hengyi had once been deeply confused. He could not understand Ye Mingzhao's actions. Why did he fuss over him and take such meticulous care of him on one hand, while plotting against him, targeting him, and forcing him out of the Ye family on the other? After all, he had never considered Ye Mingzhao an enemy, nor had he thought Ye Mingzhao's existence had taken his place in the Ye family.

—He knew the full story of Ye Mingzhao's adoption by the Ye family, and he understood how Ye Linyuan and his wife had felt when they adopted Ye Mingzhao.

During the first few years after returning to the Ye family, Chu Hengyi had even regarded Ye Mingzhao as a confidant he could entrust with his secrets. He had treated Ye Mingzhao like a brother and shared every secret with him, only to receive Ye Mingzhao's betrayal in return.

Even in the very second before his death, Chu Hengyi had not known why Ye Mingzhao had treated him that way.

But he had sworn that if there were another life, he would never let Ye Mingzhao go.

He would make that utterly hypocritical bastard pay the price. He would destroy everything Ye Mingzhao cared about. He would leave Ye Mingzhao abandoned by everyone and with nothing, just as Ye Mingzhao had done to him.

And then, he really was reborn.

[Do you really like blue?]

Looking at the message Chu Hengyi had sent, Ye Mingzhao fell silent for a moment.

[Hua Rui should have evidence that the Chu family concealed the truth and deliberately abused you.]

The next morning, Ye Mingzhao arrived at the set just after finishing his makeup and heard Yu Mingze's loud, flustered voice.

"Who did this?"

"What kind of person stays up in the middle of the night to graffiti a wall? Isn't this just causing trouble?"

Ye Mingzhao made his way through the tightly packed crowd and immediately saw a section of wall painted sky blue. In one corner of the wall sat a very familiar-looking lounge chair—

The blue-and-white chair had been entirely painted blue. Large sunflowers bloomed across the backrest, clustered together in brilliant profusion, while emerald leaves and vines spread all the way toward the armrests and seat.

From afar, it looked as though golden sunflowers were flourishing beneath a bright sky, striving to bloom toward the heavens.

The sunflowers should have stolen the show, yet they only made the blue backdrop appear even clearer and more radiant.

Yu Mingze's furious voice came from nearby. "Pull the surveillance footage! I want to see who the hell did this. The paint hasn't even dried yet—are we filming today or not?"

Ye Mingzhao slowly walked up to the wall, then suddenly turned around. In his line of sight stood the main villa farther away.

A cold wind swept past. The bedroom window on the third floor stood wide open, its white gauze curtains snapping in the fierce winter wind.

That was the room where Ye Mingzhao had rested the night before.

If he had gone to the window after waking up that morning and looked outside, he would have seen the graffiti from an even broader vantage point.

"Ah-choo!"

Dagger looked at Chu Hengyi, who could not stop sneezing, and asked with concern, "Brother Chu, did you catch a cold?"

"I'm fine." Chu Hengyi handed Dagger an address. "Didn't Ye Mingzhao ask you to investigate Hua Rui before? Keep looking into it. Report directly to me."

Dagger took the note and stared at the blue paint on Chu Hengyi's fingers. Curious, he asked, "Brother Chu, what have you been doing?"

Chu Hengyi silently rubbed his fingers together. "Nothing."

"Just repaying a favor."

"The production is closed to the public during filming. Please stop trying to force your way in..."

"If you continue disrupting the production without regard for anything else, we'll call the police..."

"These paparazzi really get everywhere!" During a break in filming, Yu Mingze held a tablet and plopped down beside Ye Mingzhao, saying gloomily, "This is the fourth group of paparazzi we've caught today, isn't it?"

"The internet is full of trending topics about this too. Your biological mother is really something. She put on a pitiful act in front of the reporters, never mentioning why she abandoned you back then, and kept accusing the Ye family of stopping you two from reuniting as mother and son. Now she even wants to do a television interview. What exactly is she trying to do?"

Watching from the sidelines, Yu Mingze had always felt there was something strange about Ruan Cuimei. "When she came last night, Jiang Shangyun went out to receive her. I thought she was there to visit Jiang Shangyun on set. Who knew that the moment she came in, she said she was your biological mother and asked where you were... You have no idea how chaotic it was. The entire crew was stunned... When Uncle and Auntie heard the commotion and came out of the lounge, she dropped to her knees the instant she saw them. She kept saying she had been wrong back then and hoped the Ye family would return her child to her. I was scared stiff at the time..."

After recovering from the shock, Yu Mingze had immediately gone to find Ye Mingzhao. "She's weird too! The two of you have never met, and you haven't even taken a paternity test. How can she be so certain that you're her biological son? What if she got the wrong person?"

"She didn't get the wrong person." Ye Mingzhao smiled. "Zhou Yueze may be a little rash in his actions, but he would never dare make a mistake over something this important."

Yu Mingze, who had been chattering nonstop, froze. "Huh?"

Only then did Yu Mingze realize. "Wait, was Zhou Yueze behind this too?"

"You two—what kind of grudge did you form without me knowing?"

Yu Mingze was practically going mad. "He even found your biological mother for you. Isn't that way too much?"

Wasn't this just forcing Ye Mingzhao to leave the Ye family? Yu Mingze could not understand why Zhou Yueze would do such a thing. What did whom Ye Mingzhao acknowledged as his parents have to do with someone from the Zhou family?

"Dad, don't you think the Zhou family's hostility toward Zhaozhao has gone a little too far?"

At Ye Group, the Ye father and son sat in the chairman's office after a group meeting, chatting casually.

Ye Mingchen had noticed how strange the Zhou family was as well. He placed the information he had recently investigated before Chairman Ye. "Before, Zhou Yueze insisted on promoting Chu Qingyi as the male lead. Uncle Zhou said Zhou Yueze was young and impetuous, bewitched by a minor celebrity, which was why he kept targeting Zhaozhao."

"This time, he's gone even further." On one hand, he was driving a wedge between Zhaozhao and Mingyi; on the other, he had gone to great lengths to find Zhaozhao's biological parents.

No secret could stay hidden forever. Ruan Cuimei had suddenly appeared, aggressively given media interviews, and was even planning to appear on a television program. As for the unseen hand behind it all, Ye Group only needed to make a few inquiries to follow the trail.