Chapter 294: HIS IMMORALITY!?

Guiying’s fingers gradually tightened around the phone until the hard edges pressed painfully into his palm. Yet, he seemed entirely unaware of it as his eyes remained locked on those few words, reading them over and over despite already knowing exactly what they said.

It wasn’t the rumor itself that made his chest tighten.

It was the way a nightmare had been rewritten into a love affair.

Xue Peng had never been his lover, nor had he ever willingly shared a bed with him, yet a few carelessly written sentences had erased every ounce of violence from that night, twisting something unspeakably ugly into nothing more than another scandalous romance while quietly placing the blame upon the victim instead.

Before Guiying even realized what was happening, memories he had spent years burying surged violently back to the surface, bringing with them the suffocating smell of alcohol, the sound of a door locking behind him, the crushing weight that had pinned him down no matter how desperately he struggled, and the overwhelming terror of discovering that screaming accomplished absolutely nothing when no one intended to save you.

His breathing became uneven.

The phone slipped lower in his grasp before he instinctively caught it again. However, his hands had already begun trembling so violently that even holding onto something so light felt strangely difficult, while the words lodged inside his throat refused to come out no matter how hard he tried to force them free.

"...That’s not..."

The sentence broke apart before it could be finished.

Fu Pei had been watching him from the very beginning, expecting anger, curses, or perhaps the sound of a phone shattering against the floor, yet none of those things happened.

Guiying hadn’t reacted to the lies about Shen Zihao, nor had he cared about the fabricated pregnancies or the insults directed toward his birth.

Only this single sentence had managed to tear straight through the calm expression he’d worn until now, leaving behind a face so pale that Fu Pei felt his stomach sink almost immediately.

Without another word, he stepped closer and lowered his eyes to the screen, following Guiying’s line of sight until the very sentence that had stopped the scrolling entered his own view.

He read it once, then a second time, and by the time he slowly lifted his head again, the usual sarcasm had disappeared completely from his face.

"...Guiying." His voice had become noticeably quieter than before, carrying none of the teasing or profanity that usually accompanied it. "Talk to me... what part of that isn’t a lie?"

The question lingered unanswered between them. Because Fu Pei suddenly realized something far more terrifying than a trending Weibo post.

Someone hadn’t simply fabricated a rumor.

Someone knew enough of the truth...

To twist it into something far crueler.

Fu Pei waited, expecting Guiying to laugh it off the way he always did whenever ridiculous rumors surfaced online.

Yet the seconds stretched into something strangely oppressive as the silence in the bedroom deepened, broken only by the phone’s constant vibration in Guiying’s hand.

At the same time, fresh notifications continued pouring onto the screen one after another.

The numbers climbed so rapidly that every refresh buried the previous wave of comments beneath another, dragging thousands more people into a discussion that had already slipped far beyond speculation, because somewhere along the way strangers had stopped asking whether the accusations were true and instead begun arguing over which one disgusted them the most.

@EntertainmentTeaV: According to several anonymous insiders, there are still more revelations waiting to be released.

@LuxuryFashionDaily: Brands should suspend all collaborations immediately while the investigation continues.

@MelonEatingKing: Poor Liu Liuxian. Imagine spending your whole life building an empire only to marry someone like that. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

@Reply: An empire can be rebuilt. His dignity can’t.

Before Fu Pei reached the bottom of the page, another flood of comments overtook the previous ones, every refresh replacing one set of accusations with another until the entire comment section resembled a courtroom where nobody cared about evidence because every spectator had already appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner.

@MorningTea: Sleeping with your own cousin? That’s beyond disgusting.

@Passerby: No wonder he changed his identity.

@CloudWalker: Birds of a feather flock together. Shen Zihao wasn’t the only rotten one.

@JusticeNow: If this is true, every brand that keeps him deserves to go bankrupt.

Fu Pei had watched enough scandals erupt across the internet to understand how terrifying public opinion could become once it gathered enough momentum.

Rumors no longer belonged to the people who created them after reaching a certain point because everyone who repeated them added another layer until the lie gradually became larger than the truth itself.

At the same time, those attempting to question the story’s authenticity disappeared beneath thousands of insults accusing them of defending immorality.

@LittleFox: Victims don’t hide things for years. Stop insulting real survivors.

@ReplyingToLittleFox: Exactly. If he really suffered, why wait until now?

@Anonymous557: He probably enjoyed it and only started crying after getting exposed.

@FashionCircle: Throw him out of the industry.

@Moonlight: People like him don’t deserve second chances.

His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly as his eyes moved across one comment after another, each sentence somehow more vicious than the last despite being written by people who had likely never met Guiying in their lives.

It took only a few careless keystrokes for them to decide whether another human being deserved sympathy or condemnation.

Once enough people echoed the same opinion, the person at the center of the storm quietly stopped being seen as a person at all.

Only then did Fu Pei finally drag his attention away from the screen, intending to curse the anonymous account a few more times before figuring out how to handle the situation, but the words never reached his lips because Guiying hadn’t moved once since the phone had been placed in his hand.

He remained standing exactly where he was, his gaze fixed upon the glowing screen.

At the same time, his fingers tightened around the phone so gradually that the joints beneath his skin had already begun to turn pale, each incoming notification vibrating against his palm without eliciting the slightest reaction, as though the outside world had slowly faded into something too distant to reach him.

Fu Pei knew Guiying better than most people realized.

He knew the subtle smile that appeared whenever Guiying planned to mock someone, the impatient sigh reserved for people who wasted his time, and the calm expression he carried into almost every confrontation no matter how unreasonable the accusations became.

Even facing the Xue family hadn’t shaken him like this, because Guiying had always possessed an infuriating ability to remain composed precisely when everyone expected him to lose control.