"Little Fish!" Lu Mingxu cried out.
Duan Mufeng was the first to help the person on the ground up. He was about to carry him on his back when the weight in his hands made him pause.
So light...
With no time to think about it, he simply scooped him up and ran straight into the house.
[Bunny Baby, aaaaah!!!!]
[Holy shit, why did he pass out?]
[He was out in the rain for so long, and the wind was so strong. He's probably got a fever.]
[Lol, isn't he a guy? His constitution is pathetic. What weird attention-seeking persona is he putting on now?]
[Uh, Wen Yanyu was looking for a child, after all. Is there any need to be so hostile?]
[He wasn't the only one who went up the mountain. Why play the victim? Lol.]
[???]
[Are you an idiot? Why have the comments been so weird these past two days?]
A violent buzzing rang through his head as Wen Yanyu lay weakly beneath the covers.
Countless memories kept surfacing in a whirl inside his head. The colors on his retinas gradually faded, and his breathing grew weaker and weaker.
His memories were utterly confused. He couldn't hear anything or tell where he was.
Amid the surging agony, only the thought of going home remained overwhelmingly strong, keeping him from passing out completely.
Jiang Wanrou turned the thermometer in her hand beneath the light. Though she had been prepared, the number on it still startled her.
41.
His long hair lay strewn messily across the pillow. His exquisite face held a sickly, decadent beauty, his cheeks abnormally flushed, while his lips were so pale they seemed almost transparent.
His gaze at the people beside the bed was hazy and bewildered. His nearly shattered fragility made their hearts ache.
Jiang Keyan stroked the boy's head. "Yanyu, are you feeling really awful?"
Wen Yanyu barely reacted. His gaze had no focus as he stared blankly at her.
Even his eyes seemed to have lost their color, turning gray.
Jiang Keyan bit her lip and couldn't help craning her neck to look outside.
"Why isn't the doctor here yet?"
Duan Mufeng kept biting his nails nervously until Lu Mingxu snapped, "Keep biting and you won't have any nails left."
Only then did Duan Mufeng finally stop.
The children had all run out of their rooms when the adults returned. Now they stood quietly in the room, each watching the person on the bed with worry.
Wang Jianhua, who had been tasked with watching the children, waved them over and took them back to their respective homes one by one.
[Waaah, my wife, waaah. Don't fall asleep, waaah! Shitty production team! Why didn't they prepare a medical team?!]
[The village chief went to get a doctor.]
[Huh? He's actually sick? I thought it was scripted.]
[His face is burning up like that and you're still calling it scripted? Everything you watch is scripted, huh?]
[Damn it! This miserable high school senior just got home from school. How did my bunny end up like this? Waaah, bunny, waaah, my bunny, aaaaah.]
[At 41 degrees, something bad could happen if he doesn't get an injection soon.]
Just then.
Wang Youdao walked in through the door, followed by a middle-aged man carrying a medical kit.
The man went straight to the bedside without another word, opened his kit, took out a small syringe, and drew up the medicine.
"Roll up his sleeve."
"Yeah, okay, I'll do it." Duan Mufeng stepped forward first, helped him up, and pulled up Wen Yanyu's sleeve.
He was about to pull it higher, but the instant his eyes landed on the forearm, Duan Mufeng's mind went blank and his movements visibly froze.
"Hurry up. Let me give him the injection first," the doctor urged.
Jiang Wanrou turned to look, her pupils contracting sharply in shock.
Horrifying scars left by stitches stretched across the boy's pale arm.
Just above his wrist, the skin was covered in suture marks, one after another, crisscrossing each other. The messy stitching offered a faint glimpse of how deep the original wounds had been.
His entire arm looked as though it had been completely taken over by some kind of insect.
The doctor looked up after preparing the medicine, his eyes widening slightly at the sight. "Has this boy been having thoughts of ending things?"
A deathly silence fell around them.
Lu Mingxu stared at the scars for a long time. An indescribable heartache surged up from deep inside, hurting so much he could barely breathe.
[...]
[What the hell!]
[Baby! Baby, what did you do?!]
[Those scars look so old. So back then, when he was in the mountains, it really wasn't because of Fu Hanchuan.]
[Suddenly remembered how he held that shard at noon, looking completely unafraid of pain. I thought he wasn't sensitive to pain, but it turns out he's... used to it? This is kind of a dark joke...]
[That's terrifying. Why do those wounds look so strange?]
[Self-harm, probably...]
[I don't think so. Self-harm wouldn't go this far. I'm not joking, judging by that stitching, if he really did it himself, he'd probably have cut through a third of his arm. It looks like someone else did it.]
The doctor finally managed to find a spot, quickly disinfected it, and was about to insert the needle.
As if sensing something, the person on the bed let out a terrified scream.
He forcefully wrenched his restrained hands free, his momentum sending him rolling toward the wall beside the bed, where he curled into a tiny ball.
His glasses were knocked off in one blow, startling the village doctor.
Jiang Wanrou leaned in, trying to pull Wen Yanyu out. "Yanyu! Yanyu! Don't be scared. Come out, Yanyu. The doctor is giving you an injection. Come out. You'll be better once it's done."
In stark contrast to his earlier quiet obedience, Wen Yanyu curled in on himself, his body trembling uncontrollably as he screamed in a breakdown, "Don't touch me, don't touch me! I won't have an injection! Don't touch me! Don't touch me!"
"I want to go home! Don't touch me! I won't have an injection! I don't want it!"
Everyone was stunned by the sudden turn of events. Once they recovered, they all reached for him and barely managed to pull him out.
Wen Yanyu refused to cooperate at all, struggling desperately and using all his strength to break free of their restraints. The entire room instantly descended into chaos.
"Yanyu! Don't be scared!"
"Little Fish, stop moving! This is to treat you!"
Already delirious with fever, Wen Yanyu couldn't recognize anyone around him. The bodily memories branded into him by fear had been fully awakened.
His legs trembled nonstop, tears covering his face as he screamed until his voice nearly broke. "No, don't! I want to go home! Don't touch me! Please let me go! Help me! It hurts! Let go of me..."
Wen Yanyu shook his head unconsciously, crying harder and harder, his gaze flicking toward the small knife used to open the medicine.
Wen Yanyu reached out and grabbed the knife, suddenly pressing it to his neck, then raised his hand to stab down.
"Wen Yanyu!" Lu Mingxu's pupils contracted sharply. Without a thought for anything else, he wrenched the knife away and flung it aside.
"Hiss." The blade sliced across his palm, and Lu Mingxu sucked in a breath of pain.
"Lu!" Sang Yu hurried forward, only for him to push her away.
"I'm fine."
Duan Mufeng and Lu Mingxu barely managed to restrain Wen Yanyu, one pinning his legs and the other his hands, holding him firmly against the bed.
"Let... me go home... It hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts. Help, ah, I want to go home, home, ah..." Wen Yanyu trembled all over as he cried, struggling and begging for mercy, his voice so hoarse it had completely changed.
"Hurry up and give him the injection!" Duan Mufeng turned and called to the stunned doctor.
The medicine was finally injected into his body.
His head hurt as though it would explode. He had completely lost the ability to distinguish reality from memory.
All color drained from his retinas. The faces around him blurred together, and their worried cries twisted into a strange nursery rhyme.
"Little bunny, be good, open the door. Hurry and open it, I want to come in."
The eerie male voice and the sound of chains striking the floor seemed to ring right beside his ears.
"Little bunny, be good, don't shed tears."
In his blood-red vision, the song rang out as a pair of leather shoes stepped over countless pieces of flesh and blood, approaching him unhurriedly.
The man gave a short laugh.
Overwhelming agony struck. Every bone in his body felt as though it had been shattered by the energy of a backlash. Terror and physical pain swallowed him completely.
Wen Yanyu's lips parted shakily, and a sound spilled uncontrollably from his throat, like a rabbit's final scream before death, terrified and despairing.
None of them knew what had happened. Just hearing it made their hearts tremble.
"Yanyu, don't be scared. It's okay, it's okay. It's just an injection. Be good, Yanyu." Jiang Wanrou pulled the violently shaking boy into her arms, soothing him over and over. "Don't be scared. No one's hurting you. Don't be scared, Yanyu."
Holding back tears, Jiang Keyan suddenly spotted the cameraman still filming and shoved him out.
"Stop filming!"
The cameraman stood in silence for a while after being pushed outside and didn't go back in. The livestream remained black.
[Holy shit, what exactly happened?]
[This... looks like a PTSD episode.]
[What's that?]
[Post-traumatic stress disorder. Usually, someone has suffered serious physical or psychological harm, and then a similar situation or a particular trigger causes a series of panic responses. I feel like that's probably what's happening to Wen Yanyu. It really looks like it.]
[He's not acting, right?]
[If he's acting, he deserves Best Actor. I saw his legs and hands spasming and twitching. If they'd kept filming, he probably would've developed respiratory alkalosis. He's already having physiological reactions.]
[God, watching that just now made me feel like I couldn't breathe.]
[It's just an injection! Isn't that a bit much?!]
The village chief saw the doctor out after the injection.
Sang Yu was pushed out by Lu Mingxu.
Jiang Keyan, who had been hauled out by Duan Mufeng, wore a dark expression. She turned and punched him, then went back inside.
Just as everyone in the livestream thought today's broadcast would end like this, the screen lit up again, and the camera inside the room began running.
Before you continue