Chapter 49: “The Blood-Red Sanatorium” Part 1

“Why hasn’t your manager been urging you to rush back home amid all the media frenzy back in China?” Li Qiao asked Kong Liyuan.

The setting sun bled red across the sky, casting a dense patch of shade over Kong Liyuan. She wore a brand-new set of pure white patient scrubs from the sanatorium, the outfit oversized and baggy.

It was like an icy shell, ruthlessly cutting off the air around her.

Li Qiao glanced at her a few extra times, confirming that she hadn’t gotten the size wrong. When Kong Liyuan had first slipped into the scrubs earlier, Li Qiao had double-checked the fit. This new batch of patient uniforms at the sanatorium this year wasn’t any larger than the previous ones.

The clothes were the standard size—it was Kong Liyuan who had grown even thinner.

She was crouched on the ground, her back hunched halfway over as she bandaged the leg of a little kitten that had limped down from a tree.

The pure white patient scrubs draped over her, her jet-black straight hair spilling down her slender back, her skin ghostly pale, a roll of white gauze clutched in her hands.

She looked like a black-and-white photograph from the last century, devoid of any color.

Even her lips, which used to always curve in a smile, were utterly bloodless.

~~~

She seemed like a fragile stalk of bamboo that would snap with a single twist, her bones unnaturally delicate.

“In this state, going back would only stir up even more of a bloody storm,” Kong Liyuan said calmly. Then, with deliberate care, she wrapped another loop of gauze around the fragile little kitten.

“Fair enough.” Li Qiao shifted her gaze away from Kong Liyuan, only to squint as the overly bright colors of the surroundings stabbed at her eyes.

“If you showed up at some airport back home right now, people would swarm you in no time. They might even slap you with fresh headlines like ‘Kong Liyuan’s First Public Appearance After Bird Abuse Scandal,’ ‘Kong Liyuan Spotted at Airport Looking Pale, Rumored to Be Treating Mental Illness Abroad,’ or ‘Kong Liyuan’s Unstable Emotions—Bird Abuse Claims Might Be True After All’…”

Halfway through, Li Qiao let out a “Tsk,” eyeing Kong Liyuan, who was still crouched on the ground with her back turned. “I’m throwing all this alarmist talk at you, and you don’t even react?”

“Is this what you call alarmist talk?”

Kong Liyuan set down the balled-up kitten in her hands and tucked away the remaining gauze. Lowering her eyes, she watched without turning her head as the little injured cat limped crookedly out of the shade.

After a long moment, she pushed herself up on legs gone numb and sore. Glancing back at Li Qiao standing behind her, she smiled just like she always did.

“Others have said far worse things than you. At least you’re kind-hearted enough to throw in words like ‘rumored’ or ‘might.'”

Her pale hand extended straight out, palm showing faint blue veins beneath the skin, fingertips stained with blood from bandaging the kitten.

Li Qiao spritzed it with disinfectant alcohol and handed over two moist wipes.

Kong Liyuan took them and slowly walked out of the dense shade, her steps a little unsteady. The pure white scrubs blended completely into the blood-red sunset.

She leaned her frail back against the bench by the flower bed and lazily wiped the bloodstains from her fingertips, as if nothing in the world weighed on her mind.

~~~

Outside, the air was thick with conflict, yet this woman brimmed with energy, calmly bandaging a stray kitten that had crossed her path.

Kong Liyuan’s mild manic phase had arrived.

This was an extremely secluded sanatorium in Los Angeles—not a professional psychiatric hospital.

It offered containment services exclusively for patients with certain psychological issues from families of particular status.

Like Kong Liyuan’s mother, Jiang Man, and, after Jiang Man’s death, Kong Liyuan herself, who entered a mild manic state every year just before the summer solstice.

Most of the people living here had some form of psychological disorder, while a small portion were simply feigning illness to escape the world’s chaos.

None of their conditions warranted compulsory inpatient treatment, nor could they be housed alongside severe psychiatric patients.

Given the sensitivity of their identities, their families—or they themselves—chose this method to shield them during their episodes and avert unnecessary risks.

Li Qiao had thought Kong Liyuan wouldn’t come this year, just as she’d assumed there would be no deviation in her mild manic phase. But this year, there had been a deviation.

At six o’clock in the afternoon on June 21st, Los Angeles time—the summer solstice had already passed in Beijing time—Li Qiao received a sudden call from Kong Liyuan. On the line, Kong Liyuan said only one thing:

“I might still need to come by this year after all.”

At noon on June 22nd, Li Qiao picked up Kong Liyuan upon her arrival at the sanatorium.

In the hours before that, when Kong Liyuan was likely still twelve thousand meters above the earth’s surface, Li Qiao saw the news breaking from China.

About Kong Liyuan’s bird abuse scandal.

Li Qiao found the whole thing bizarre. She even downloaded Weibo herself to check out the situation.

No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t connect the words “bird abuse” with this frail woman who had just been bandaging a kitten’s injured leg.

But the video posted by the whistleblower was shot from a truly sneaky angle—basically a voyeuristic view from the bushes, complete with rustling grass sounds.

The protagonist in the video was Kong Liyuan—or rather, her twenty-four-year-old character, Li Yi—from five years ago.

She wore a threadbare dark green hoodie, the collar heavily frayed and open over a tight white tank top, her long hair messily pinned up behind her head, exuding a vibe of decadent rebellion.

She was squatting by the roadside, a battered sparrow covered in wounds and bloodstains lying on the ground.

The pixelation from five years ago was blurry, but both the woman and the bird were still clearly identifiable.

And in those ten-odd seconds of footage, Kong Liyuan held a small rusty knife in her hand.

Sharp-eyed viewers recognized it as the utility knife Li Yi carried everywhere in the movie Winter Storm—the very key piece of evidence the police could never find.

The clip was short, but it zeroed in on the most shocking frames.

Combined with the inherently gloomy, deranged aura Kong Liyuan brought to Li Yi, it was primed to spark negative associations in the public.

Though Kong Liyuan’s agency had issued a swift denial, the whistleblower was clever enough not to include any explicitly accusatory text, denying the agency a chance to send a cease-and-desist letter.

This person knew full well that simply posting the video would draw in all sorts of players to muddy the waters.

Without them saying a word, those big influencers would churn out titles like “Angle Analysis of Kong Liyuan’s Bird Abuse Video,” “Is Kong Liyuan’s Bird Abuse Video Real or Fake?,” “The Truth Behind Kong Liyuan’s Bird Abuse Scandal,” and “Actors Going Method into Psychos: Pitiful or Just Lacking Talent?”—funneling all eyes onto the drama. Forget the haters who already despised Kong Liyuan; even the casual gossip-mongers who didn’t care about facts would blow it up into a massive frenzy, steering public opinion straight to its current pitch:

—Wasn’t it Fang Mo who taught Kong Liyuan to do this to get into character?

—No footage of her actually hurting it, but who knows if the leaker’s holding back aces for negotiations with her agency? That’s entertainment biz for you.

—Reminds me—didn’t Jiang Man have postpartum depression after giving birth to Kong Liyuan? Is this hereditary? I hear severe depression can lead to destructive urges…

—Forget Jiang Man—talk about Kong Yan. Wife with depression, daughter a sadist… poor guy’s got it rough.

—Agency, just stop defending her. Keep stonewalling and what if real proof drops? Lololol (Hurry up and drop it, I can’t wait anymore, dammit!)

—Sitting on five-year-old footage to drop now? Playing the stock market with it, waiting for her value to peak before cashing in? Offer enough and claim they couldn’t get solid proof?

—Whether she’s a real psycho playing crazy or went too method and turned psycho, this is scary as hell. I’d rather see her caught kissing a woman like Wen Shijia than earn a sadist rep.

—Winter Storm crew’s screwed. Just wrapped, director gunning for awards? And now Kong Liyuan implodes.

—Where’s Kong Yan? Why no statement? He must’ve known all along.

Soon after, a bunch of supposed old acquaintances of Kong Liyuan popped up, claiming she had a hobby of collecting bird corpse specimens. One self-proclaimed high school classmate said she’d personally witnessed Kong Liyuan killing a kitten back in school.

In short, it was a full-scale, premeditated PR war.

Recalling the Weibo comments she’d seen earlier, Li Qiao realized Kong Liyuan was right—every link in this opinion storm, every word, came at her with ferocious intensity.

Compared to those, the casual headlines Li Qiao had tossed out were child’s play.

“Be honest—doesn’t seeing all that hurt?” Li Qiao asked. “People’s hearts are made of flesh and blood, after all.”

“Uncomfortable?” Kong Liyuan countered, as if she thought Li Qiao was joking. She leaned lazily back against the chair’s backrest, her pupils soaked in the bloody hues of the sunset, and gave her a truly dismissive smile.

“Whether I’m uncomfortable or not is the least important thing here.”

Elevated mood was a key symptom of mild mania.

But Kong Liyuan’s symptoms were much lighter. She just seemed more generous and free-spirited than usual, even able to describe the incident so effortlessly.

This woman had always been like that, treating everything that happened to her with an air of indifference. Even outside her manic phases, she was the same.

That was what Li Qiao thought as her gaze fell on Kong Liyuan’s habit of rubbing the bloodstains from her fingertips over and over.

With a sigh, she asked, “Aren’t you worried, then?”

“Worried about what?” Kong Liyuan replied absentmindedly. Her thoughts weren’t focused.

She was already mulling over what her manager had said on the phone—how many advertisers wanted to terminate their contracts because of this.

Even if she truly hadn’t done it, there were never short of people in this industry who turned with the wind.

She had felt fed up with it more than once, so she gave a straightforward response.

“If they want to cancel, let them. Handle the breach-of-contract fees for me. Just take it from my personal account.”

Overnight—on the day after her twenty-ninth birthday—the name “Kong Liyuan” had become burdened with more and more negative buzz, all because of one ambiguous video. She was even directly labeled an “abuse fanatic” and “psycho bitch.”

Yet Kong Liyuan herself seemed to have no real sense of the mounting storm bearing down on her.

By the time she saw the news, she was already at the sanatorium in Los Angeles, ten thousand miles away from the uproar back home.

There were no dark camera lenses or blinding flashes trained on her here. No one was hounding her into a corner like they had five years ago.

She knew it wasn’t true, and she knew how quickly the tides of public opinion in this industry could shift.

She wasn’t the lonely twenty-four-year-old Kong Liyuan from her debut days anymore. She wouldn’t be cornered by one piece of fake news and a smear campaign, trembling and too afraid to step out.

Her management team was already seeking the best PR strategy. They had asked her for Fang Mo’s contact info and were reaching out to every staff member from the Winter Storm production before that, hunting for ironclad evidence to debunk the rumors.

As for how she felt when she read those words—it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. That was the least important thing—she kept telling herself that, and she truly believed it.

She felt no emotions at all. She wasn’t stung, and she didn’t see the incident as some insurmountable mountain.

She was no longer the Kong Liyuan who had been besieged on all sides.

The current Kong Liyuan had no weaknesses, no helplessness.

She would calmly review everything from the past few days, calmly read the words that nearly pierced her back, calmly coordinate with her manager from abroad call after call to handle it all, and calmly accept the arrival of her mild manic phase.

Everything was going smoothly for her. What was there to worry about?

“The news has blown up so much, and the person you don’t even dare tell about your mild mania condition…”

Li Qiao’s voice drifted through the air, mild and gentle, yet it struck like a sharp dagger right at the vital point Kong Liyuan had deliberately ignored and hidden away.

“She’ll see those words too.”

Kong Liyuan leaned against the wooden backrest, dyed red by the light until she resembled a thin silhouette.

She sat there quietly, as if about to sink below the horizon, her breathing drowning out, unable to offer any response.