Chapter 144: Ch 144: Get Gu Chengze’d

As the group settled back into an easy rhythm—Su Wanyan still needling Shen Guoxing about the finished ice cream, Shen Guoxing pointedly maintaining vocal rest by refusing all eye contact related to dairy.

Conversation drifted. Someone refilled a glass. Mo Yan remained asleep in the stroller with the absolute commitment of someone who had clocked out of the adult agenda hours ago.

Then two noisy individuals arrived.

"Yo!"

The call cut across the table with zero interest in subtlety. Heads turned in unison. A short distance down the path, Qin Yuran was already waving, one arm high, energy apparently undimmed by forest, bus aisle, or whatever unsupervised medical practice had filled the gap since anyone last saw her. Zhao Yichen trailed in her wake, looking marginally more travel-worn, slightly stained in places that did not invite immediate questions, and significantly less triumphant.

Song Meiyu’s face broke into a smile at once. Relief and fondness arrived together. She waved back and patted the empty space beside her with decisive clarity.

"Sit here."

Qin Yuran nodded as if the invitation were a mission briefing and jogged over. Without breaking stride she commandeered a chair from a neighboring table, spun it into the gap beside Song Meiyu, and dropped into it in one continuous motion.

The whole sequence was fast enough that the chair seemed to materialize rather than travel. It was less "finding a seat" than a tactical extraction completed before the environment could generate obstacles.

Zhao Yichen, left several paces behind by the sheer velocity of the operation, stopped dead and stared.

"What the fuck, Qin Yuran?"

The question held no real anger—only the bafflement of a man who had just watched advanced simping executed at competitive speed.

Qin Yuran only laughed and shot him a smug grin over Song Meiyu’s shoulder. No explanation. No humility. Pure results-based communication.

Zhao Yichen opened his mouth to expand the complaint into something more structured—then Han Jiho raised a hand from across the table and pointed at the unoccupied space beside him.

"Get your ass here right now."

The tone was the usual lazy drawl, stretched and unbothered. The order underneath it had no give at all.

Zhao Yichen’s expression reset instantly. Whatever lecture he had been preparing for Qin Yuran evaporated. He broke into a wide grin, jogged the remaining distance, grabbed his own chair from the same raided neighboring table, and planted it next to Han Jiho with considerably less elegance than Qin Yuran had managed. The second the chair took his weight he tipped sideways and deposited his head on Han Jiho’s shoulder like a man collapsing at the end of a pilgrimage.

"I’m so tired~"

Han Jiho shoved the head back without ceremony. The motion was efficient, practiced, and entirely lacking in sympathy for theatrical exhaustion.

"It’s hot."

Irritation sat plainly on the surface of the words. Underneath it—audible to anyone who had watched the two of them for more than a single filming day—was an exasperated fondness that refused to be fully disguised no matter how dry the delivery.

Zhao Yichen did not take offense. He straightened just enough to make eye contact and delivered the next line with full, disastrous commitment.

"I’m sorry if you’re feeling the heat. I know I’m way too hot for you."

Han Jiho looked at him. Deadpan. Unblinking. The silence that followed was cold and awkward.

"That’s disgusting."

Zhao Yichen clutched his chest as if the statement had been fatal, beating a fist lightly against his sternum while his face turned into pure stage-tragedy sorrow. "Straight to the heart, man. Straight to the heart."

He repeated the phrase once more for emphasis, in case anyone at the far end of the table had missed the scale of the injury. The performance was broad enough to be visible from the next occupied table.

Laughter moved through their own group in a wave, loosening the last residue of heavier atmosphere that had followed Su Wanyan and PD Xu Cui back from the alcove. Even the afternoon heat felt more manageable under the noise.

PD Xu Cui wiped at the corner of his eye, still grinning. "You’re so lucky the umbrella on this table is integrated."

Attention swung toward him. He smirked, clearly pleased with both the observation and the audience.

"Because if it weren’t, I think Han Jiho would have already pulled it out and smacked you with it."

Fresh laughter broke around the table. Zhao Yichen shuddered on cue, the motion large enough to rock his chair.

"Don’t give him ideas, PD!"

Han Jiho, for his part, only smiled—small, mysterious, and entirely too compatible with the mental image of a patio umbrella repurposed as a blunt instrument. He did not confirm the threat. He also did not deny it. The ambiguity was, if anything, more effective than a promise.

In response, Zhao Yichen put some distance between himself and Han Jiho after that. The umbrella threat had landed with just enough realism to override flirtation for a measurable stretch of time.

He eyed the integrated pole fixed through the center of the table, eyed the calm set of Han Jiho’s mouth, and shifted his chair a careful inch away—close enough to claim he had not truly retreated, far enough to survive a hypothetical swing.

The inch lasted three seconds.

Then the inch collapsed. He scooted back as if the intervening gap had been a formal risk assessment rather than a brief spasm of self-preservation.

"After thinking about it thoroughly....." he began, his face turning into something that aspired to be solemnity.

"Wasn’t that just three seconds?" Qin Yuran cut in from across the table, helpful and merciless.

Zhao Yichen raised a hand to stop her without looking over. "Shut up." He turned fully toward Han Jiho, posture straightened, voice dropped into the register people used for vows and bad decisions. "After thinking about it very hard and thoroughly, I concluded that I don’t mind being the first alpha to suffer from domestic abuse, as long as you let me stay by your side."

The line landed with absolute commitment. No wink. No retreat. Han Jiho’s eyebrow climbed in slow disbelief. Whatever reply had been forming behind that deadpan expression never made it into the open.

Qin Yuran had already reached across, taken the empty Biscoff tub from Su Wanyan’s hands, and thrown it.

The plastic connected squarely with the side of Zhao Yichen’s head. A hollow tok marked the hit.

"Ouch—!" He snapped upright, one hand already pressed to the spot, and glared across the table. "What was that for?!"

Qin Yuran settled back into her chair as if she had merely returned a borrowed item. She lifted two fingers in a neat peace sign. "Sorry. My hand moved on its own."

Zhao Yichen threw the tub back. She caught it one-handed without shifting in her seat.

"Nice pass," she teased, and laughter broke around the table again—relief and secondhand embarrassment mixed in equal parts. Qin Yuran flicked him a second peace sign, eyes bright with something that was not an apology at all. "I’m just kidding. That was a warning that you were about to be Gu Chengze’d."

The phrase hung in the air, fully meaningful to two people and completely opaque to everyone else.

Zhao Yichen understood it at once. The memory of the bus aisle, the gauze, the peroxide, the systematic removal of Gu Chengze’s ability to move his own hands—all of it arrived in a single rush. He burst out laughing hard enough that he nearly folded forward onto the table, palm slamming the wood for balance as the sound tore out of him.

"You psycho—you want to wrap me up like that too?"

Qin Yuran laughed with him, wiping at the corner of her eye with the back of her wrist. The shared joke was airtight between them and baffling to the rest of the table. Smiles had begun to fade into open confusion.

"Give us context, guys," Su Wanyan said, voicing the collective request.

Qin Yuran turned, unlocked her phone, scrolled once, and held the screen up for the group.

The photo was thorough in a way that suggested planning rather than panic. Gu Chengze’s head and face had been wrapped until almost nothing recognizable remained—layer on layer of gauze and tape, sealed with a commitment that went well beyond first aid.

Only the dark ovals of his nostrils had been left open, two small proofs that the person under the bandages was still expected to breathe. Both hands rested on his abdomen, bound together so completely that the arrangement looked less like medical caution and more like a deliberate decision to retire the option of gesture, protest, or escape.

For a full second the table produced no sound at all.

Then the struggle began.

Laughter shoved up against clenched teeth. Shoulders shook in small, traitorous waves. Eyes watered from the effort of not giving in. Song Meiyu’s face went pink first; the containment cost her visible effort. She reached over, took the phone cleanly out of Qin Yuran’s hand, and set it face-down on the table with the finality of someone removing a hazardous object from a shared surface.

"What was that for?" Qin Yuran whined, already half-reaching to reclaim it.

Song Meiyu only shook her head, still breathing carefully through her nose. "No-nothing." The word trembled on the edge of collapse. She took another deliberate breath, gathered every scrap of performance training she owned, and turned toward Qin Yuran with a stern expression that was aimed at least half at the two children whose posture had gone noticeably attentive.

"Hey. Teacher Gu was incredibly injured today. You shouldn’t take advantage of his weakness like that."

The tone was exemplary—measured, adult, morally upright. The sincerity underneath it, however, was absent.

Qin Yuran received the signal without missing a beat. She nodded with matching gravity, glanced once to confirm that Shen Guoxing and Leilei’s ears were fully engaged, and adjusted her story to fit the audience.

"We weren’t making fun of him." A discreet pause. "We just wanted to make sure he was really safe when he woke up. In case he started throwing a tantrum."

The excuse was an ethical disaster. Several adults at the table felt a simultaneous urge to put their faces in their hands. One of them—Han Jiho—settled for a long, blank stare at the face-down phone. Unfortunately, from a children’s-education standpoint, the lie worked.

Shen Guoxing nodded with total seriousness, the way she nodded when adults explained rules that would later be tested on the playground. "I see. So that’s the reason why." She turned to Leilei, already cross-referencing. "Leilei, do we have any playmates that throw tantrums?"

Leilei considered the question with equal care. "Yeah. It happens often." The examples were clearly available—minor inconveniences escalating into full theatrical collapse, toys becoming diplomatic incidents, the ordinary friction of childhood rendered at maximum volume.

Shen Guoxing nodded again. Behind her eyes something practical and slightly alarming had already begun to assemble itself: materials, methods, the question of how much gauze a playground emergency might reasonably require, and whether the village store sold tape in bulk.

Unbeknownst to anyone at the table, that quiet stretch of childish problem-solving would eventually be remembered as the earliest documented origin of a nickname the local children had not yet earned for her.

The mummy maker.

But that was still a story for a much later day—one involving fewer cameras, more unsupervised craft supplies, and at least one playmate who would learn too late that "tantrum prevention" could be interpreted with devastating creativity.

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Guys, I apologize if there are some mistakes. It’s currently 3:38 AM here right neow, and I’m already sleepy as hell T-T!