She landed lightly after vaulting the wall once more, and Gu Xianwang let out a long breath. Only then did she manage to suppress the restless anxiety that had been churning in her heart since parting.
The hall was lit only by a dim night-light. It looked like Master hadn’t returned to the residence tonight. She twisted the door lock gently, easing it open with a faint creak. Her eyes darted left and right, confirming no one was around, before she slipped inside. With a soft click, she had flawlessly completed today’s—no, yesterday’s—bizarre adventure.
The antique clock on the wall showed the hour hand at two. Even Nanny Chen would be deep in slumber by now. Gu Xianwang paused for a moment, then tiptoed toward the storeroom.
She had a question she needed answered.
The storeroom lay in the basement, its iron shelves neatly organizing daily necessities and tools into categories. At the far end of the large front room, a life-sized oil portrait stood in the corner, draped in a cloth. Sliding the painting aside revealed a small iron door concealed behind it, secured by a code lock.
001113. A few soft beeps, then a click—the door swung inward automatically. Gu Xianwang glanced back instinctively to ensure she was alone, then crouched down and slipped inside.
The hidden chamber beyond was just a few square meters, as if it had been carved out deliberately during the renovations. Three curio racks lined three walls, crammed with an array of colorful antiques—handheld curiosities, display pieces, all manner of oddities whose collective value was impossible to guess. The rack on the side held wearable trinkets: prayer bead strings, collar clips, cufflinks, pipe stems, and cane knobs. Tucked in the bottom corner were her things, stored in a small wooden frame: a rubber band, a broken plastic red cord, a few torn book pages, a cartoon character sticker, and the items she’d brought back from Guizhou.
Hm? The phone card was there too.
Gu Xianwang’s face lit up with delight. She slipped the card into her pocket and rummaged carefully through everything, but the Snake Spirit Pearl was nowhere to be found.
Hadn’t Master said it was kept in the storeroom? Had he simply misremembered?
She scoured the curio racks from top to bottom, leaving no stone unturned, but came up empty. Her brows furrowed tightly. It all felt too coincidental. She’d brought the Snake Spirit Pearl back from the sinkhole, only for Master to declare it a fake. Then the Flower Fair auction featured a strikingly similar item—indistinguishable as fake or real—and now, the one she’d retrieved had vanished.
They looked alike, both fakes… Could it have come full circle, with the pearl Long Li had bought being the very same one she’d taken from the sinkhole?
Unlikely. Long Li was far too sharp not to recognize an item she’d once procured herself.
It seemed she’d have to wait for Master to return and probe him indirectly.
~~~
Back in her room, Gu Xianwang washed up and changed into fresh clothes. Her phone sat on the vanity. She hesitated for a moment, then opened the chat app. She typed and deleted repeatedly before finally sending: Arrived at the hotel?
Long Li replied almost immediately: Yes, don’t worry. Get some rest.
Gu Xianwang’s cheeks puffed out slightly, and the corners of her mouth curved up without her realizing it. She deliberately waited two beats before replying: Mm. Good night.
Only now did she truly relax.
She pulled the phone card from her pocket. It looked undamaged. Though she rarely used social media, the card held the numbers of her few key contacts—especially those at the nursing home. She swapped in the old SIM.
The screen lit up as the phone powered on, immediately erupting in a flurry of dings. Within moments, a flood of missed call notifications and text messages poured in.
Her heart lurched, a spark of panic igniting. No one contacted her with such frantic urgency unless something terrible had happened.
She didn’t even glance at the details before dialing Auntie Jiang’s number. The ringtone was upbeat and rhythmic, each note stabbing at her nerves like a knife. It was already past two-thirty in the morning. She had no idea what consequences her two-day delay might have wrought. One minute, two minutes—she switched to another number. On the third try, someone finally picked up.
“Who’s this?” The voice on the other end sounded groggy, as if the speaker had just roused himself and checked the caller ID. He quickly corrected himself. “Little Gu! Thank God you’ve finally seen the messages! We’ve been worried sick—especially your Auntie Jiang—”
“Uncle Jiang,” Gu Xianwang said urgently, “what happened? How did my mom end up in the emergency room all of a sudden?”
Uncle Jiang said, “Oh dear, I only know a bit about it myself. Auntie Jiang said it seemed to be some kind of organ failure—it came on so suddenly. Your mom was perfectly fine that morning, but at noon she suddenly lost her appetite. You know how much she loves noodles. Auntie Jiang was afraid she’d go hungry, so she specially cooked up another batch. But not long after she ate them—well, around yesterday afternoon—she started acting off.”
He rambled on without getting to the point. Gu Xianwang didn’t want to interrupt and risk wasting time, so she held her breath and listened. “She couldn’t catch her breath, like it was stuck in her chest. Then she had a nosebleed and vomited up her lunch. By evening, she wasn’t very lucid anymore. Luckily, Auntie Jiang has experience and called the medical office right away. Doctor Zhang was on duty. He took one look and had her rushed to the hospital, saying she was on the brink. It scared the life out of us.”
Gu Xianwang was terrified now too, her eyes reddening as her voice trembled uncontrollably. “Wh-what was the outcome of the rescue?”
“Good thing your Master had put in a word with the Dean ahead of time, and we got her there fast. The hospital handled it well. She’s stable now, but still in the ICU under observation. If you’ve wrapped things up on your end… do you want to come take a look?”
He phrased it delicately, knowing how filial Gu Xianwang was. Otherwise, with a crisis this severe and no sign of her anywhere, anyone would think she was an undutiful daughter who’d forgotten all about her mother.
Stable. Those three words echoed in Gu Xianwang’s mind. Her heart pounded wildly, waves of numbness crashing over her forehead. She replied flatly, “Okay. I—I’ll come first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Alright, good, good. It’ll be a relief once you’re here.”
After hanging up, Gu Xianwang sat frozen for a long moment, staring blankly as she scrolled back through the earlier text messages one by one. There were official alerts from the nursing home, private updates from Auntie Jiang and Uncle Jiang, and several missed calls likely from the hospital’s main line. Together, they painted a picture of a frantic race against death that she had completely missed.
So close… Her fingertips turned ice-cold as she clutched her phone, sitting numbly on the edge of the bed. Maybe she should have listened to her Master. If she hadn’t gone off to Guizhou on her own whim, and spent that time at her mother’s side instead, perhaps none of this would have happened. All her frantic efforts had led nowhere—tangled up in some mess that had nothing to do with her, without uncovering a single useful clue.
“Personal grudges…” she sighed hollowly.
She sat there until the faint light of dawn crept in, mingled with birdsong and the swish of bamboo brooms sweeping the grounds. All the everyday bustle of life, so distant from her now, slowly stirred into motion.
Gu Xianwang changed into her outdoor clothes, slung her shoulder bag over one shoulder, and headed down to the living room. Her Master still hadn’t returned, and Nanny Chen had only just risen. Seeing her like this, Nanny Chen guessed immediately.
“Is something wrong back in Suzhou?”
Nanny Chen’s question made Gu Xianwang’s throat tighten, but she forced it down. She replied as steadily as she could. “Yeah… Mom’s not well. I need to go to the hospital.”
Nanny Chen was a few years older than Gu Mama and grasped the situation from those few words. She asked no more, set down her rag, and hurried over to pat the back of Gu Xianwang’s hand. “Do you have enough money? I’ve got a card here. Your Master probably won’t be back today—take it and use it for now. Bought your ticket yet? I’ll have Xiao Zhao drive you to the airport.”
Gu Xianwang couldn’t meet her eyes and just nodded at the floor tiles. “No need, Nanny Chen. I’ve got money, and I booked the earliest flight.”
“Alright.” Nanny Chen knew her temperament and walked her to the gate. “Call Nanny Chen if anything comes up. Don’t bottle it all up by yourself, understand?”
Gu Xianwang nodded and climbed into the car. Even after they drove out of the neighborhood, glancing back, she could still see Nanny Chen waving.
She still had a home, she thought—no matter what, she still had a home.
~~~
After the plane landed, Gu Xianwang called the nursing home first. They assured her they had someone stationed at the hospital with her mother around the clock. This level of one-on-one care was reserved for only a handful of VIP clients even at the Cadre Sanatorium. Without Shang Ruyun’s connections, there wouldn’t have been any bedside attendant—not to mention getting through the admission review on her own.
After the long journey, she reached the hospital in the afternoon. Fearing she might get lost, Auntie Jiang waited right at the entrance. “Little Gu!”
Gu Xianwang’s eyes were shadowed with exhaustion as she hurried over to join her. “Auntie Jiang, how is she now?”
Auntie Jiang led her toward the ICU building. “Your Uncle Jiang probably filled you in, right? She’s still under observation inside. The doctor said that episode was pretty rare—something to do with her heart. But there’s good news too. Today’s scans showed the shadow in your mom’s abdomen has shrunk even more than yesterday. Doctor Han called it a miracle. He’s never seen anything like it.”
“The shadow has shrunk some?” Gu Xianwang frowned. She suspected that “heart-related cause” meant sudden cardiac death. She vaguely remembered reading a popular science article about it somewhere—most unexplained sudden deaths in medicine ended up chalked up to cardiac issues.
“Yeah, that’s the gist of it. The tumor in her belly seems to have absorbed itself. Probably benign.”
That made it even stranger. Even benign tumors didn’t visibly shrink from day to day. Gu Xianwang’s heart hung in suspense until she met the attending physician, Han Yong, and heard the full rundown of her mother’s condition. Only then did she finally believe Auntie Jiang.
It truly was a miracle, as if her mother had drunk some divine elixir. Doctor Han pulled up the nursing home scans alongside the fresh ones from that morning. In his more than a decade as a doctor, he’d never encountered anything like it. He said frankly, “From a scientific standpoint, for all our modern medical advances, there’s still so little we can actually do. Most diseases have to rely on the body’s own immune system to heal itself. In your mother’s case, honestly, if I weren’t her attending physician handling it firsthand, I’d say it was the work of gods and Buddhas.”
Gu Xianwang thanked him profusely before stepping out of the consultation room.
Doctor Han recommended keeping her in the ICU for observation another couple of days before transferring to a regular ward, unless money was tight. She had no objections. Anxious as she was, she didn’t dare try hands-on caregiving herself, terrified of jinxing the woman who had only just clawed her way back from Ghost Gate Pass.
Auntie Jiang bought her a boxed lunch and asked with a beaming smile, “Feeling a little better now?”
Gu Xianwang had no appetite but didn’t want to brush off the gesture. She took the meal and said, “Yeah. You’ve been a huge help these past few days.”
“No trouble at all. Your mom and I go way back.” She gave Gu Xianwang’s shoulder a gentle pat. Once they settled into the nearby waiting chairs, she suddenly leaned in and murmured, “Little Gu, there’s one more thing I have to tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“On the ambulance ride to the hospital, your mom had a moment where her mind suddenly cleared up.”
Gu Xianwang froze. Then she listened as Auntie Jiang went on, “She said… she’d left a will. She wanted me to contact her lawyer. She has something to leave to… to her adopted daughter.”
