The real young master thought he was hated by everyone - Chapter 108

Of course, Mrs. Xie ultimately dismissed the engagement proposal herself after thinking it over. She reasoned that announcing it during an engagement might give the impression of trying to cover something up.

In the end, they decided to exchange shares publicly and announce the news during the exchange. They planned to wait until Li Heng was in his second or third year of college—just enough time for things to settle before publicly acknowledging their relationship or announcing an engagement.

Li Heng understood this was a protective measure, but he couldn’t help feeling a bit amused and exasperated by it.

The shares exchanged between the two families were all under his name, essentially swapping what was in his left hand to his right.

However, this move certainly stirred up some buzz, especially when the press conference was held to make the announcement.

Even Li Heng, who was at school, received some probing questions—either from friends of Xie Sizhi or from relatives he would occasionally “run into” while out eating.

Among them were also the shocked reactions from his roommates, “So your brother isn’t your real brother?”

Even when he went to Xie Duzhi’s company, he noticed the employees’ gazes were more excited than usual—gossip-driven excitement.

“…They really know how to read into things.”

Halfway through a long article from a financial account, Li Heng put down his phone and rubbed his eyes. The article was analyzing the situation in detail, claiming that the exchange of shares between the two companies didn’t signify friendly relations, but rather symbolized a formal break-up, even involving the Bai family.

If it weren’t for knowing the truth, he felt like he might even be convinced by them.

He was currently in a villa in Linfeng Bay. His parents were away for a health checkup, so he decided not to return home. Also, his exams were next week, and Xie Duzhi was planning to head to G Province. They would be apart for at least ten days.

Xie Duzhi did have other places closer to S University, and he had asked him before if he wanted to move. But the villa in Linfeng Bay was closer to the company, making it more convenient for Xie Duzhi to commute, and it held significant meaning for both of them.

It was here that they had become more familiar with each other. More precisely, it was during their time living together in this villa that Li Heng got to know him better, forming a more three-dimensional and favorable impression of him.

“What?” Xie Duzhi, who had been reading, looked up at Li Heng’s question with some confusion.

“I was talking about the share exchange. They really know how to add fuel to the fire, finding all sorts of clues to support their assumptions.”

Li Heng had no doubt that when the news of their engagement came out, these articles would turn into yet another story about a “business marriage,” full of speculation about whether it was a strong alliance or a costly business deal. It would be the same pattern, just with a different topic.

“People’s relationships aren’t just about profit,” he muttered, unable to hold back his curiosity. “Duzhi, why are you suddenly interested in physics?”

Xie Duzhi’s reading list had recently shifted. The authors now included familiar names from his high school physics textbooks, and today’s book was even more outrageous. From the title, it seemed to come from a quantum physics perspective, trying to prove some Buddhist concepts of karmic entanglement.

The cover looked like something you’d find at a street stall.

Yet, he remained focused and serious, just like when he read Kant and Hegel.

Before clicking on an article link that Gu Mingyue had sent him, Li Heng pretended to focus and snapped a photo of the book, saving it in a dedicated album.

Xie Duzhi marked his page and closed the book, then admitted, “Physics can answer some of my questions.”

“There are a few unproven hypotheses I need to test before the research results come out.”

“What research results? Is it the one Mingyue mentioned?” Li Heng thought for a moment. “The quantum mechanics project that started about two months ago?”

He wasn’t sure of the details, but he knew that after he had shared the content of his dream, Xie Duzhi had invested a significant sum of money in several prominent physicists’ projects and had invited them to join a confidential project.

Xie Duzhi hadn’t told him anything specific, only saying it was a surprise.

Li Heng had only learned about it recently, when Xie Duzhi needed new funding. He casually mentioned an extra investment—ever since their parents had made their public announcement, Xie Duzhi’s finances had somehow all been transferred under his control.

He still earned his own money, but Xie Duzhi made sure to report every expense or investment he made.

Sometimes, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were already married, or had been for a long time—like an old married couple.

Gu Mingyue mentioned it because, strictly speaking, he was also a beneficiary.

According to Gu Mingyue, it was the first time he had so sincerely and wholeheartedly thanked capital. He even joked about wanting to work for Xie Duzhi after graduation and becoming his “assistant.”

Though the invitation was for his mentor, who was only assisting with modeling and not a core participant, Gu Mingyue felt proud to have been involved. He felt it gave him bragging rights over many so-called “seniors” and solidified his standing above them.

Li Heng had also asked him what he had been busy with lately, but he remained mysterious, simply urging him to pay attention to the news.

He said he’d probably know by the time the Nobel Prize was announced next year. If not, it might be the following year.

Gu Mingyue made this remark in their small group chat, and when André saw it, he bluntly disagreed with him.

Gu Mingyue’s mentor was invited by his mentor to join the project; initially, he wasn’t on the list, and Gu Mingyue should really be thanking his own mentor.

He said he was being overly talkative.

The two of them exchanged barbs in the group chat, with most of their comments being jabs at each other’s academic fields.

Li Heng, after watching for a while, eventually muted the group notifications, letting them argue on their own. It wasn’t until several days later that he noticed André’s explanation.

He explained in detail the topic they were currently researching and its significance.

However, his explanation was long and filled with English terms and technical jargon. In the end, all Li Heng could remember was “quantum mechanics.”

—When in doubt, quantum mechanics.

This phrase became widely spread on the internet.

Xie Duzhi nodded. “The goal is to prove the existence of parallel worlds through the study of quantum entanglement and to experiment with ways to influence or access these parallel worlds.”

Li Heng thought he understood, yet didn’t fully grasp the depth of it. It seemed simpler than André’s lengthy explanation, but the amount of information was still considerable.

“Brother, how did you think of funding this?” Li Heng sat down on the couch next to him, blinking instinctively. This didn’t seem very much like Xie Duzhi.

Li Heng instinctively sensed this project was one where the cost far outweighed the potential benefits.

Leaving aside whether meaningful research results could be produced, the topic was so abstract that, even if proven true, it wouldn’t have much of an immediate impact on the real world.

Xie Duzhi didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he looked at him with a calm, gentle gaze.

Li Heng’s heart skipped a beat.

After a while, Xie Duzhi spoke softly. “…You have unresolved feelings.”

Li Heng was momentarily speechless.

“I also have unresolved feelings,” Xie Duzhi continued.

His unresolved feelings were caused by Li Heng’s, and could actually be disregarded.

But he couldn’t ignore Li Heng’s feelings, especially since he hadn’t yet come to terms with the idea of the other him in a parallel world. The extra memories hadn’t caused any noticeable impact.

That day, Xie Duzhi had asked him in his office, not just to help Xie Sizhi, but also for himself.

He concluded that Li Heng had moved on and could now approach the dream rationally, but he still held some lingering concerns.

He instinctively felt for the version of himself in the dream, feeling a sense of unfairness and injustice.

—Xie Duzhi didn’t want Li Heng to feel any injustice and didn’t want the situation to remain like a fishbone stuck in his throat—something that existed but could never be discussed.

Especially since Xie Sizhi had also dreamed of that parallel world.

Xie Duzhi wasn’t a gambler. He didn’t gamble that Xie Sizhi was particularly special, but as long as he kept it a secret, the rest of the family would never know that another Li Heng existed in a parallel world.

While they felt genuine pride for their children and their younger brother, the person who should also be cared for and compensated, in the parallel world at the same time, was unnecessarily suffering due to various reasons.

It was a cruel situation because they could see it, but couldn’t stop it from happening.

He perhaps could gamble that his father and older brother would remain calm and resilient enough to ignore any potential impact the dream could have. After learning about the parallel world, they would treat everything as normal.

But could he gamble with Mrs. Xie? Could he bet that his mother could accept this outcome?

She was essentially an extremely loving and soft-hearted woman. Li Heng had inherited most of his personality traits from her.

He wouldn’t deny that she was probably stronger than anyone in the family combined, but she was also a mother who loved her children deeply.

He doubted she could accept this or forgive herself.

—After all, she had once been depressed after Li Heng was kidnapped, blaming herself for focusing too much on work and not taking good care of her child.

Xie Duzhi thought this through and could almost predict how Mrs. Xie would react if she also dreamed of that parallel world.

She wouldn’t hide it like Xie Sizhi did, choosing to avoid the issue until she found a solution, because she was a mother.

She would feel guilty, regretful, and keep apologizing, trying to make up for the neglect of the other child, even though it wasn’t her fault and wasn’t fundamentally her responsibility. She would overcompensate by focusing all her attention on the current child.

Even though she knew this would add pressure, she wouldn’t be able to control herself.

—And then, she would burden Li Heng, tightening the knot in his heart that he had hidden so well, perhaps even making it worse.

This was Xie Duzhi’s conclusion.

Besides Li Heng, he loved the current family atmosphere and the relationships with his family, which was also a crucial reason.

He had gradually understood the concept of family after being adopted.

Before that, he had never been capable of loving anyone.

“But I feel like this doesn’t really make sense,” Li Heng subconsciously pressed his lips together, his tone complex. “You know, I didn’t… feel differently about Dad and Mom because of that dream…”

His unresolved feelings really shouldn’t be called unresolved feelings.

“It does make sense,” Xie Duzhi’s voice was soft. Unlike the confusion in a teenager’s tone, his voice and expression were steady and resolute. “Have you thought about it, or even hoped that he could be like you?”

“That’s the meaning.”

And for Xie Duzhi, it was very important.

Li Heng lowered his gaze and didn’t continue responding.

It took him a long time to calm the emotions that surged within him, to stop the inexplicable acidity from flooding his nostrils.

But when he finally spoke to Xie Duzhi, he couldn’t hold back, inhaling deeply.

“When you said you liked me, your tone wasn’t as serious as just now, and you didn’t look at me like that.”

Xie Duzhi was momentarily stunned and pretended not to notice the faint moisture in Li Heng’s eyes. “…Can I say it again now?”

“No way, you’re out of time.” Li Heng replied loudly.

Feeling that his emotions had stabilized, he continued questioning Xie Duzhi about the investment project.

“So, hypothetically—just hypothetically—what if quantum entanglement cannot be proven?”

When Xie Duzhi mentioned that he cared, Li Heng felt that the subtle discomfort he had buried in his heart had mostly dissipated. Asking this question was purely out of curiosity.

He had spoken so confidently about this research; how could he be so sure that quantum entanglement would definitely be proven and that the experiment would succeed?

“What has been proven once can be proven again,” Xie Duzhi replied.

“…Huh?!”

Li Heng froze, eyes widening. He instinctively reached for his phone on the coffee table, his mind swirling with confusion.

Had parallel worlds already been proven? When did this happen? It couldn’t have been during high school, could it? Back then, he didn’t recall encountering anything like this among essay topics or trending hot news.

Could it have been in middle school? Or even earlier, when he was in elementary school?

Before he could speculate further, Xie Duzhi added, “The first time it was proven, no one knew about it but me.”

“That proof is tied to my secret.”

What kind of secret could it be?

Li Heng didn’t ask.

Secrets are secrets because they aren’t easily spoken aloud.

And he trusted Xie Duzhi. If he hadn’t told him this secret yet, it must be for a reason.

He naturally shifted the topic. “Oh, right, I’ve already packed the items you might need for your trip to Province G next week into that black suitcase.”

Xie Duzhi was briefly taken aback.

He had prepared himself to lay bare his secret, to make himself entirely open and sincere before Li Heng, holding nothing back.

“Aren’t you curious about my secret?” he asked, his tone layered with a mix of emotions.

“But if you wanted to tell me, you’d definitely let me know,” Li Heng said with clear eyes, “just like how I told you about that dream.”

Hearing this explanation, Xie Duzhi’s mood remained complicated. “Maybe I was just teasing you a little, waiting for you to ask me.”

Li Heng noticed the slightly pressed line of his lips. He lacked his usual assertiveness and seemed a bit aggrieved, making him want to laugh.

“Hmm, I didn’t catch on. That’s on me.”

After thinking for a moment, he decided to offer Xie Duzhi a genuine suggestion. “Next time you want to tease me, you can do it like this—it’ll be more obvious.”

As he spoke, he leaned closer, repeating what Xie Duzhi had said earlier, elongating the last word “ma” with an upward inflection.

“And you need to have a sort of expectant yet nonchalant look in your eyes, like how I’m looking at you now.”

Li Heng stared at him intently.

In Xie Duzhi’s eyes, he saw his own reflection. He felt that his demonstration might have been overly eager.

He coughed and was just about to adjust when he heard a sigh beside his ear.

Then, Xie Duzhi ruffled his hair.

“…Noted for next time,” came the helpless reply.

He couldn’t help but laugh.

“I can teach you again next time,” he responded cheerily. “But I’ll charge extra tuition—you’ll have to kiss me.”

“So, what’s your secret?” Worrying that Xie Duzhi might turn the tables on him, he quickly asked before he could respond.

“Duzhi, you’re not seriously like what Second Brother guessed, having some kind of old grandpa or system in your dreams, are you?”

“…”

Xie Duzhi silently added another tally to the mental score he kept against Xie Sizhi before answering, unhurriedly.

Instead of immediately defining his time travel, he began by apologizing to Li Heng for keeping it a secret before.

When he told Li Heng that the dream might be linked to parallel worlds, he had lied, claiming he was likely in another country or region in that dream and thus left no trace.

But the truth was different.

“So you’re saying… in that parallel world, you don’t exist?”

Li Heng found it hard to believe.

How could Xie Duzhi know he didn’t exist? Had he also dreamed something?

But on closer thought, he had to admit that it might be true.

Otherwise, Bai Ruan wouldn’t have been adopted.

“I should count as a time traveler,” Xie Duzhi said calmly, dropping a bombshell.

“In my original world, quantum entanglement had already been proven several years ago.”

Li Heng was so shocked that he couldn’t speak for a long time, taking a while to process what he had just heard.

Even if Xie Duzhi was four years older than him, based on when he was adopted, he would have been very young when he time-traveled.

When he was eight or nine years old and in elementary school, he would get secretly upset over seeing a dead bird on the roadside.

A teacher had once told them in class that sparrows were very social creatures.

When one sparrow died, its relatives would be so heartbroken that they would stop eating, eventually dying one after another.

If Xie Duzhi had time-traveled when he was in elementary school, would he have missed his family and friends from his original world?

Li Heng recalled how calm he had seemed that time in the car, talking about being ostracized by other children at the orphanage. He suddenly felt even more heartache.

He suddenly thought he hadn’t been good enough to Xie Duzhi.

He could have treated him even better.

“…Did you miss home a lot back then?”

He asked cautiously.

He wanted to comfort Xie Duzhi and tell him that they were a family now—not just with their parents and brothers, but the two of them were a family too.

His friends could also be Xie Duzhi’s friends.

“No,” Xie Duzhi shook his head, still composed. “When I traveled here, I found myself back at eight years old.”

“I grew up in an orphanage in my original world too.” He tried to keep his explanation brief.

It wasn’t the key point, just a trivial detail.

“Because of certain traditions,” he skipped over the complex entanglements of inheritance and family disputes. “In the year I got into college, my family appeared and handed me several evaluation forms.”

“I was the most outstanding among them, so they placed their bets on me and supported me as the heir to the family business.”

Hearing this, Li Heng felt even more distressed.

He even thought it was a good thing that Xie Duzhi had time-traveled because his original family couldn’t be called a family at all.

They treated him as a tool, merely using him. They loved the benefits he could bring, not Xie Duzhi himself.

Li Heng tugged at his hand, then hugged him, burying his head in his chest. He stayed like that, refusing to let go.

He thought that more than words, Xie Duzhi might need a warm hug.

At least, that’s what he believed.

Xie Duzhi lowered his lashes slightly, intending to explain that he didn’t actually mind.

He had always been emotionally distant, far more so than most people. While those so-called family members were using him, he was also using them.

These words lingered on his lips but ultimately transformed into a sigh, light as smoke and barely audible.

Perhaps he didn’t care much. But someone else might dwell on it, feeling he deserved the best treatment this world could offer.

In the face of such genuine care, he found himself unable to speak as indifferently as before, uttering sharp words about self-interest and human nature.

He decided to skip over the topic of his identity and instead began explaining why, as a businessman, he was interested in physics-related fields.

He saw a business opportunity in it.

Even though this opportunity seemed far off for now, he believed that, with the pace of scientific progress, it would transform into immense wealth within his lifetime.

However, he hadn’t expected to travel through time—without facing an assassination attempt or an accident like a car crash.

At 26 years old, he had simply fallen asleep and awakened to find himself as an 8-year-old in an entirely different world.

This world was almost identical to his original one, except it lacked a few familiar names and the family he once had.

Moreover, time here was several years earlier.

“If my second brother knew, he wouldn’t be able to handle it,” Li Heng remarked thoughtfully after hearing the story. “…He’d rather believe you had one of those ‘systems’ from a novel.”

Whether before or after the time travel, Xie Duzhi remained so outstanding that even most geniuses couldn’t hold a candle to him.

But Xie Sizhi would never know.

This was a secret shared only between the two of them.

“Duzhi, compared to before, aren’t you technically making a loss now?”

Another strange question popped into Li Heng’s mind.

Xie Duzhi had never done anything unprofitable before. “I mean, this research doesn’t seem to be about making money.”

Instead, it seemed driven by a fleeting wish—a tiny possibility he wanted to explore.

Li Heng tried to calculate how much of his assets, aside from those tied to Xie Duzhi, he could use to make up for any losses.

He was investing in quantum entanglement experiments; Li Heng decided he would invest in him.

That way, Xie Duzhi wouldn’t lose out.

Li Heng thought he might have to sell his large farm in the Americas.

Or maybe he could ask André someday if he had friends interested in becoming farm owners.

Some of his gemstones could also be sold.

Xie Duzhi listened quietly as Li Heng counted his assets, suppressing a smile only after he finished.

“No losses,” he said firmly, his tone serious. “This is an investment that will make you happy.”

Li Heng felt his ears heat up.

His cheek was still pressed against Xie Duzhi’s chest, and he could clearly feel the faster rhythm of his heartbeat as he spoke.

“Then I’m not losing out either,” he replied, mimicking Xie Duzhi’s tone. “…Because my investment is conceptual. Boyfriends can’t make losses.”

Xie Duzhi let out a muffled laugh, clearly trying to suppress it.

Li Heng heard him murmur something softly and quickly.

“I think my investment judgment is excellent, too,” he muttered, lightly pinching Xie Duzhi’s arm.

“But I didn’t pay much attention to dates in the dream,” Li Heng said, thoughtfully. “…If the dream truly had a precognitive element, and the parallel world’s timeline aligns with ours, then the other me should not have been kicked out of the family yet.”

He recalled that the dream version of himself had spent New Year’s at the Xie family estate and visited relatives afterward. However, a particular incident left him alone in the Xie family’s villa for several days.

During those days, he made dumplings for himself.

If he remembered correctly, he was likely kicked out after spring, either in March or no later than the end of April.

Later, he celebrated his birthday alone.

He bought a small cake in his rental room, sang “Happy Birthday” to himself, and then opened an email he had been eagerly awaiting—only to find another rejection.

Unable to find work in S City, he had sat by the roadside in despair until a long-haul truck driver, an old acquaintance from his hometown, offered him a free train ticket back north.

However, things didn’t go well even after returning north. His mental state was terrible at the time, and he eventually fell ill.

Thinking about all this, he couldn’t help but feel a tug at his heart. He suddenly hoped that the project could yield results sooner.

Even if the modeling and the instruments to capture magnetic field changes sounded almost mystical and the possibility of communicating with a parallel world was uncertain, it could at least bring some closure to his concerns.