This kind of life continued until April. The dining table was eerily quiet, and Chu Lianxing tapped his porcelain bowl with some boredom.
It emitted a rhythmic thud-thud sound.
Even Li Yuanbai, who had the slowest reactions, sensed that something was wrong; he didn’t dare to use his chopsticks in the face of a table full of delicacies.
Buzz, buzz.
The phone Chu Lianxing had left on the table vibrated twice. Huo Ci had finally sent a message, causing everyone at the table to let out a long sigh of relief.
Huo Ci hadn’t returned yesterday, sending a message to say he wouldn’t be back for a while due to a project abroad that required a business trip.
From yesterday until now, this person who was usually like a piece of plaster stuck to him hadn’t sent a single message aside from that phone call.
Even a fool could tell something was amiss, and Chu Lianxing’s attractive brow furrowed.
He picked up his phone, shaking his head with a trace of disappointment as he saw it was just a push notification from Weibo.
Casually closing the phone, he called the nanny to push him back to his room. At night, the courtyard possessed a completely different charm from its daytime vitality under the warm lighting.
He listlessly scrolled through his phone messages, unconsciously tapping open the notification from just moments ago.
Last night, a flight from the capital to Country M crashed due to an undetermined cause.
Character after character swept past Chu Lianxing’s eyes. It was as though he had forgotten how to read; his heart was sliced into countless pieces, hurting so much he couldn’t bear it.
He didn’t know how his phone slipped from his hand and crashed onto the floor, a sense of helplessness pervading his mind.
“Stop, stop.” Chu Lianxing squeezed the words out one by one from his throat.
The nanny was newly hired and had never seen Chu Lianxing like this; thinking she had offended him in some way, she stopped in place at a loss.
She watched as the thin, sickly pale man in the wheelchair propped himself up by his arms, staggering toward the door while walking and making phone calls at the same time.
At two in the morning, the Chu family’s rescue team joined the relief efforts.
Although it was entering spring, the nighttime temperature hadn’t changed much.
Chu Lianxing was still wearing his thin pajamas when Uncle Zhao draped a coat over him and advised, “Young Master, go get some rest for a bit. Leave the watching to me. If you keep pushing yourself like this, even a body of iron won’t be able to hold up, let alone someone whose health isn’t good to begin with.”
That last sentence Uncle Zhao didn’t dare voice aloud; given his young master’s stubborn temperament, saying it would only achieve the opposite effect.
Chu Lianxing’s pale, delicate face had turned ashen from the cold wind. Having forgotten to bring his wheelchair in his hurried and unsteady departure, his figure swayed as if he might topple to the ground at any second.
“Found them, they’ve been found.”
Chu Lianxing’s eyes lit up instantly. Ignoring Uncle Zhao’s words, he continued walking forward on his own.
The plane had crashed in Country H, and for reasons unknown, the news was only being leaked now. The road was not easy to traverse, and Chu Lianxing walked both hurriedly and unsteadily.
Uncle Zhao watched him anxiously from behind, silently praying in his heart for Huo Ci’s safety.
Judging by his young master’s attitude toward Huo Ci, if anything truly happened to the man, he really would go mad.
Chu Lianxing walked up to the person in charge from the Chu family and asked, “Are there any survivors?”
His voice carried a tremor he hadn’t noticed himself; the survival rate of plane crash victims was only 10%.
The person in charge shook his head.
“Not a single one?”
“Director Chu, not a single survivor.”
No, impossible how could a curse live for a thousand years? Huo Ci couldn’t possibly die.
He pushed the other person aside and walked inside, but had not walked two steps before his legs went soft and he tumbled to the ground.
Ignoring the pain in his body, he got back up and continued walking forward.
Every single person brought out passed through his eyes before being sent away.
“Wang You, go contact the airline Huo Ci took. I want the passenger information for that flight yesterday.”
Afterward, he called Zhao Zhao and instructed her to check for news on Gu Jinyu.
Zhao Zhao immediately went to investigate after hanging up the phone. Just as Chu Lianxing had anticipated, Huo Ci had indeed met the Gu Jinyu couple at the airport.
If it had been plot manipulation in the past, it could now be confirmed: how could it be such a coincidence that a foreign project ran into trouble forcing a departure on that exact day, and how could it be such a coincidence that they ran into the Gu Jinyu couple?
As the very last person was carried out, Chu Lianxing still caught no sign of Huo Ci.
He stopped a staff member and asked, “Has Huo Ci been found?”
The staff member pointed to a corpse not far ahead and said, “Director Chu, Mr. Huo is that one over there.”
Chu Lianxing looked in the direction of the other’s gaze. The person was wearing the gray suit Huo Ci had worn yesterday, along with the matching watch; forget his face, even his head wasn’t intact.
Chu Lianxing walked over step by step. He lowered his gaze slightly, feeling for some reason that something wasn’t right.
WeChat sent another message. Chu Lianxing immediately clicked to open the list sent by Wang You from the airline. Chu Lianxing swiped through the photos one by one; many people’s faces were unrecognizable, and he could only roughly identify a few.
Suddenly, his hand stopped on a photograph. That person was wearing Huo Ci’s matching suit and wearing the matching watch.
In almost an instant, Chu Lianxing could determine that the corpse before his eyes was not Huo Ci.
There were seventy people in total on this flight; after carefully counting twice, Wang You had given him a total of sixty-three people when adding up the passengers, flight attendants, and pilots.
Immediately afterward, he held his phone up before Uncle Zhao. The person lying on the ground in the photo was displayed: “This person is not Huo Ci. Uncle Zhao, call the police my intuition tells me this isn’t a simple plane crash.”
Uncle Zhao was stunned for a moment, but immediately called the police while thinking to himself that Mr. Huo held such a high status in the young master’s heart; if he managed to return alive, he definitely had to treat him better.
Uncle Zhao had unconsciously replaced his casual reference to the Huo family boy with the respectful title “Mr. Huo.”
Chu Lianxing stayed there until dawn. That night, the police, alongside the Chu family members, combed through this patch of land, yet failed to find the whereabouts of the seven missing people.