The CEO is domineering, the devil Boss is addicted to pampering

Chapter 1286 Yun Rui's Devotion: Similar to Love

As the night of London spread over the hotel windowsill, Qi Ruixiang sat at his desk, his fingertips hovering over the screen of his mobile phone for a long time.

The photo of the diagnosis report was lying in the photo album. Gu Yunxi's trembling handwriting when signing was like a thorn, making his eyes sore.

Finally, he opened Gu Yunqian's chat box, sent the photo, and added a short sentence: "She is not in good condition."

When the message was successfully sent, Gu Yunxi coughed in the corridor. He stood up and walked to the door. Through the peephole, he saw her wearing slippers to get water. Her figure was as thin as a piece of paper under the corridor light.

In the past half month, her medicine bottle has been empty and full, but she always stares at Lin Xu's paper late at night, rubbing the indentation where the author's signature is over and over again with her fingertips.

The phone vibrated. It was a video call from Gu Yunqian. Qi Ruixiang walked to the balcony and answered the call. The night breeze blew into his sleeves, carrying the moisture of the Thames.

Gu Yunqian on the screen was sitting in the study. Outside the floor-to-ceiling window behind him was the brilliant city night view, which formed an ironic contrast with his leisurely posture.

"I've checked it." Gu Yunqian's fingers tapped lightly on the table, and the emerald cufflinks glowed coldly under the light. "Ask the doctor to increase the dosage. If it doesn't work, return to China for treatment."

"Return home?" Qi Ruixiang's voice suddenly rose, but he lowered it for fear of waking up the people in the room. "In her current state, how can she withstand a long-distance flight? How long are you going to keep this a secret?"

Gu Yunqian picked up the teacup, the heat blurred his expression: "What are you hiding? Don't put everything on me."

"How dare you say you are innocent in this matter?" Qi Ruixiang sneered, his fingertips clenching the phone until it became hot. "What kind of accident would make a living person disappear out of thin air? Even the body cannot be found? Yunqian, you know how she got sick. Tell us Lin Xu's whereabouts. It will be better for everyone."

"Qi Ruixiang," Gu Yunqian put down his teacup, his tone suddenly turned cold, "Who are you to question me with? A friend? Or... a pursuer with evil intentions?"

These words were like an ice pick, piercing Qi Ruixiang's heart unexpectedly.

He looked at the pair of bottomless eyes on the screen and suddenly realized that this conversation was meaningless from the beginning.

Gu Yunqian didn't care about Gu Yunxi's condition at all, he just used it as a bargaining chip to restrain everyone.

"She's your sister." Qi Ruixiang's voice was hoarse with fatigue. "Do you really want to watch her collapse?"

"I know her better than you do." Gu Yunqian's mouth curled up with an ambiguous smile, "When she figures it out, she will naturally get better. But you,"

He changed the subject and looked at the hotel sign behind Qi Ruixiang.

"I heard that you asked Yang Xiaotang to investigate Lin Xu?"

Qi Ruixiang's pupils suddenly contracted. He had deliberately asked Uncle Zhang to go through several layers of connections, but he didn't expect that the news would still leak out.

"Yang Xiaotang is my connection, so you don't need to worry about my network."

"Does Yang Bin know?" Gu Yunqian slowly turned the teacup. "His daughter is just as nosy as he is."

Qi Ruixiang felt a chill on his back. He knew that Gu Yunqian's words were a warning, and Yang Xiaotang's intervention had touched his bottom line. "This matter has nothing to do with them, father and daughter."

"That's better." Gu Yunqian stood up, and the figure on the screen became tall and oppressive. "Give Yunxi my regards and tell her that the ginkgo trees at home are about to bear fruit, so come back early."

The phone was hastily hung up, and the busy tone echoed in the empty balcony.

Qi Ruixiang leaned on the railing, looking at the blurry shadow of the river in the distance, and suddenly felt powerless.

Gu Yunqian's perfunctory response was like an airtight net that concealed all the truth, and Gu Yunxi's illness was the heavy object hanging on the net, which could drag everything into deeper darkness at any time.

There was a sound of something falling in the room. Qi Ruixiang pushed the door open and saw Gu Yunxi squatting on the ground picking up scattered pills. Her hands were shaking so much that she couldn't even hold the medicine bottle. "What's wrong?" He walked over quickly and held her cold hand.

"It's okay," Gu Yunxi's voice was filled with tears, "It's just... I thought of something not so good."

Qi Ruixiang held her in his arms, feeling her body trembling. He didn't know how to comfort her, so he could only pat her back over and over again.

The moonlight from outside the window shines in through the gauze curtains, casting mottled light and shadows on the floor, like a broken puzzle, suggesting that there are more unknown secrets behind this entanglement.

The clock in the corridor struck seven. The dusk was climbing up through the gaps in the blinds, casting uneven shadows on the pages of the book, just like the unclear relationship between her and Lin Xu.

She never denied her admiration for Lin Xu.

The first time I saw his paper at an academic forum, his bold ideas about gene editing were like a sharp knife that cut through the dull texture of the academic world.

Later, he became her student. His sharp edge gradually honed into a gentle light. He would make hot cocoa for her when she stayed up late to revise her manuscript. He would be the first to stand up and refute her when she was questioned, but after the argument, he would blush and hand her a piece of lemon candy: "Professor, my tone was too harsh just now."

This kind of good feeling is like a vine in spring, climbing up the wall of my heart silently, but never crossing that line.

When Gu Yunxi adjusted her collar in front of the mirror, she would always subconsciously touch the ginkgo leaf around her neck - Qi Ruixiang said that this pendant was like a secret code, but only she knew that it was more like a reminder: to remind herself that she was his mentor, a senior who was much older than him, and a member of the Gu family who must maintain her sense of propriety.

"More than friends, but less than lovers," the young teachers in the department once joked.

Gu Yunxi smiled and shook his head every time, but he knew in his heart that the ambiguity that was misinterpreted by others was nothing more than the resonance found in the boring experimental data by two souls who equally loved academics.

Just like two travelers walking side by side in the desert, each is an oasis in the other's eyes, but neither has ever thought of taking this oasis for themselves.

Late at night in the hotel room, the drugs made sleepiness heavy.

When Gu Yunxi fell into the dream, he was standing under the ginkgo tree in Cambridge. Lin Xu was wearing the white shirt he wore when they first met, and holding a book on "The Ethics of Gene Editing" in his hand.

"Professor, look at this leaf." He held up a golden ginkgo leaf, the veins of which were as clear as a map in the sun. "Doesn't it look like your necklace?"

She reached out to take it, but her fingertips went through his palm. Lin Xu's figure suddenly became transparent, like smoke blown away by the wind: "Professor, I'm not far away, I'm right where you can see me."

"Lin Xu!" Gu Yunxi sat up suddenly, cold sweat soaking his pajamas.

The moonlight outside the window was pale, distorting the shadows of the furniture, just like the waves on the Thames on the day he disappeared.

She reached for the water cup on the bedside table, but knocked over the medicine bottle instead. The white pills rolled onto the carpet like scattered stars.

This is not the first dream about Lin Xu.

A few days ago, she dreamed that the two of them were sorting data in the laboratory. Lin Xu suddenly turned his head, half of his face immersed in the shadows: "Professor, they won't let me go back." His voice was filled with the noise of electricity, like a report on an old radio, "Don't look for it, it's useless to look for it."

Dreams are always a mixture of truth and falsehood.

Sometimes it’s footage of something that really happened – his eyes shining when he first asked the question, his eyelashes wet in the typhoon;

Sometimes it is an absurd splicing - he stood in the middle of the Thames, holding the ginkgo leaf necklace in his hand, the water flooded over his chest but never covered his eyes.