CHAPTER 98: CHAPTER 98; SHE BEGGED HIM

When Shen Xiao spiraled, Bai Zhi burned from the inside out.

Neither could truly hate the other. Because their bodies refused it.

They were tethered. Cursed and entangled endlessly and forever in this life.

The ritual ended in silence.

Ashes were scattered across the railway floor. The priest was gone. The woman in scarves vanished like mist. The only sound left was Bai Zhi’s uneven breathing and Shen Xiao’s trembling exhale against the crook of her neck.

He had stopped bleeding and she had survived.

But something inside her had begun to break.

They walked home that night under the shroud of streetlight and guilt. Neither of them spoke. He carried her part of the way and she didn’t protest.

She bled four days after. Cramping, fever, and dizzy spells. She thought it was a side effect of the ritual, a consequence of the tether. Shen Xiao sat by her side, every shudder she gave mirrored in his body like a curse.

Until the day it came.

A pool of dark blood on the bathroom tiles. Silent. It was so sudden and cold.

She hadn’t screamed, just stared in frozen horror at the tiny, undeveloped form slipping from her body like something stolen.

Her knees hit the ground.

Shen Xiao arrived seconds later, rushing in with panic carved into his face, only to stop dead.

It wasn’t just physical pain this time.

His chest exploded with a grief he couldn’t name. His knees buckled. He clutched his ribs, eyes wide, gasping like a man drowning on dry land.

And then he saw the blood.

And the truth hit him harder than the ritual ever could.

"No.... no no no, Bai Zhi..."

"What is that... what did you...?"

"What did we do?"

She didn’t speak, she just shook her head helplessly.

"I didn’t know," she whispered finally, defeated. "Shen Xiao... I didn’t know."

She was five months along and barely showing. A hidden life blooming quietly beneath the storm of everything else and now, was no more.

They had been so consumed with escaping, with saving each other that they hadn’t realized something else had grown from them.

And now it was gone.

The baby was gone.

A child made of two broken teenagers lost in the ashes of a forbidden ritual neither of them had fully understood.

He didn’t cry. Neither did she. But that night, as they burned everything in the basement furnace, the bloodstained sheets, the coat, the blade, something inside them both turned cold.

That night, they stopped being stupid

They became bound.

Not by romance.

But by loss, sacrifice, and a shared, irreversible sin.

Bai Zhi’s condition deteriorated over the next few days. The bleeding stopped, but her fever rose. Infection set in. Her body trembled, unable to fight anymore, the toll of their escape and the ritual too heavy a burden to bear. He had to rush her into the private clinic.

Shen Xiao sat by her side in the dimly lit private clinic nestled within their villa grounds, his fingers tightly wrapped around hers as if sheer will could anchor her to life.

Doctor Wu stood nearby, speaking in a low, grim voice about internal trauma, the onset of sepsis, and the irreversible damage to her uterus.

The sterile scent of antiseptic couldn’t cover the sharp, metallic tang of blood in the air. Shen Xiao barely heard anything beyond the words "too late" and "she may not make it through the night."

He didn’t hesitate.

That very night, he arranged for a discreet medical transport. With Doctor Wu’s help and a private jet on standby, Shen Xiao got her across the border without alerting anyone.

He pulled every string, used every connection he had, and by the end of the week, they were in Switzerland, under their real names, but shielded by the quiet power his family name could still command abroad.

But by the time they landed, Bai Zhi had slipped into a coma.

Two years.

She lay still in that white room for two long, silent years.

And during those two years, Shen Xiao never missed a month. He stayed in the same city, close to her hospital, visiting her every Sunday without fail.

He brought her fresh flowers, told her about the chaos back home, about the men who were still hunting him, about the lives they had burned behind them.

And when the doctors finally told him she would survive but never bear a child again, he stood in the hallway outside her room and smoked until his lungs ached, then walked back in and held her limp hand for hours.

That night, something in him broke again.

---

He returned to China later that year, colder, harder, angrier than before. The underground world had changed. His father’s empire was in jeopardy. Power plays were shifting.

He drank too much.

He stopped visiting temples.

He stopped believing anything could be redeemed.

And one night, drunk, alone, aching for something, anything, he slept with Yueyao.

He hadn’t meant for it to happen. She had been there. Familiar, beautiful, broken in her own way. She had clung to him, and he hadn’t pushed her away.

Weeks later, she appeared at his door with trembling hands and a pregnancy test.

Shen Xiao didn’t speak.

He just stared at the test and saw a thousand shattered futures pass before his eyes.

Then came the families.

Yueyao’s father had just been arrested for economic crimes. She was on the brink of scandal. Her company’s assets were frozen. Her mother was already in a serious condition but deteriorated when she heard her husband was arrested.

She begged him.

"Just... marry me for now. Just to get through this. I will sign anything. I won’t ask for anything else."

He didn’t answer immediately.

But that night, as he sat alone in the dark with a bottle in his hand, he thought of Bai Zhi, still in a coma, unable to give him the family they had once dreamed of and wished.