Chapter 147 — The Long-Awaited...

"What are you doing—investigating my texts?" Seeing Yang Ce scrolling through her phone, Chen Shutang didn't mind, and asked with a grin.

"Just having a look—seeing if any admirers have been harassing you." Yang Ce set her phone back on the coffee table, feigning nonchalance.

"As if. I'm with you every day—even if I had admirers, you'd have chased them all off." Chen Shutang laughed.

To be continued

1022. Wei Jin Goes Mad

For the past few days Wei Jin had felt weak all over—aching limbs, headache and fever, chest tightness and shortness of breath. He'd assumed it was a cold and went to the hospital for a checkup, but there was no sign of any cold at all.

Then came the blood test, and he was stunned: he had AIDS. He was HIV-positive.

"Doctor, are you sure there's no mistake?" The result hit Wei Jin like a thunderbolt, and he sat there frozen in the hospital.

"No mistake. We're very careful with positive test results—we run them repeatedly with different reagents, and only conclude when the results match. There have been false positives reported internationally before, so we're always cautious." The doctor looked at Wei Jin and shook his head with some sympathy. The young man before him didn't look old at all, and yet he had this terminal disease. "Doctor, how could I possibly have AIDS? Could the test results have been mixed up?" Wei Jin still couldn't believe it. "I haven't done anything—how could I get this disease?"

"Sexual contact isn't the only way AIDS spreads. It can also be transmitted through blood—transfusions, drug use, all of these can cause infection," the doctor explained.

"But I don't do drugs, and I haven't had a transfusion. How could I get it?" Wei Jin clutched his head and shook it.

"Then I really couldn't say. I'm a doctor, not a detective—I can't investigate how you caught the disease. I can only determine the final result." The doctor gave a bitter smile.

"But—" Wei Jin still wanted to say something.

The doctor, however, was growing impatient. "If you don't believe me, then take the test again. But the odds of an error are vanishingly small."

"Fine, fine." Wei Jin nodded hurriedly—this was exactly what he wanted. Without another test, he simply could not give up hope.

Wei Jin had his blood drawn again and waited anxiously in the hospital corridor for the results.

He paid the rush fee, and an hour later the results came back: still HIV-positive. This time he was utterly stunned. How could this be? How had he gone and caught this disease?

Holding the lab report, Wei Jin was too distraught for tears. He carefully went back over everything that had happened in recent days, and there seemed to be no route by which he could have been infected.

For one, he had not been sleeping around; for another, he had never touched drugs; and for a third, he had never had a blood transfusion. So how had he caught it? Wait—Wei Jin gave a sudden start. Sister Gu.

In all this time, Sister Gu was the only one he had been intimate with. Could it be that Sister Gu—

The thought struck him like lightning. Wei Jin lingered no longer at the hospital; he drove straight to the Xianren Resort, determined to find Sister Gu and get to the bottom of it.

"Young Master Wei, you're here." Sister Gu had been surfing the web in her room; seeing Wei Jin come in, she rose hastily and said with some apology, "These past few days my body hasn't been feeling well—I think I've caught a cold."

"You've caught a cold too?" Wei Jin was instantly taken aback. He had assumed Sister Gu was the one who had infected him, but now it seemed she too had only just fallen ill.

Because the doctor at the hospital had told him that flu-like early symptoms appeared only shortly after infection, and that after a time the disease entered an asymptomatic phase.

"What, Young Master Wei, have you caught a cold too?" Seeing the strange expression on Wei Jin's face, Sister Gu asked, puzzled.

"A cold? Hah—if only it were a cold. The trouble is, it isn't a cold at all." Wei Jin slumped onto the sofa in defeat and said dejectedly, "Right now I wish with all my heart that it were just a cold."

"Young Master Wei, what on earth is wrong? What's happened?" Sister Gu looked at him and asked anxiously.

Wei Jin set a hospital lab report on the coffee table before him, gripped his own hair with one hand, and said, his face twisted with pain, "Sister Gu, see for yourself."

Sister Gu picked up the report suspiciously and looked it over. The moment she did, her scalp seemed to burst and her eyes went wide. She herself had come up from the ranks of working girls, so she understood these technical terms perfectly well; seeing the "HIV" result on the report, she froze on the spot, and only after a long while managed, "Young Master Wei, you're not joking with me, are you?"

"Joking? Would I joke about something like this? I'm not sick in the head." Wei Jin shook his head with a bitter smile. "Sister Gu, you should go get tested too."

"Me? Young Master Wei, you suspect that I infected you?" Sister Gu said, startled.

"Whether it was you or not doesn't matter anymore." At first Wei Jin had been furious, but over the drive here he had come to terms with it: this disease, once caught, could not be cured—it was for all intents and purposes a terminal illness.

So who was to blame no longer mattered. Every day he could live was a day gained; the rest of the messy troubles Wei Jin had no mind to consider. This AIDS, after all, was surely better than those bird flu bugs, wasn't it? With bird flu you could be dead in an instant—no time even to be saved. Sister Gu of course knew how grave this disease was; clutching the lab report with trembling hands, her heart in utter turmoil, her voice cracked: "My God, how could this be? How could it come to this?"

"Sister Gu, whatever the case, it's best you go get tested first." Wei Jin was calm now, and spoke mildly.

Sister Gu nodded. At this moment, going to the hospital was the only thing she could do.

Wei Jin took Sister Gu to the hospital, and the result was all but beyond doubt: Sister Gu too had been infected with AIDS. Her nerves collapsed almost in an instant, and sitting in Wei Jin's car, she wiped away tears without cease.

"There now, Sister Gu. Didn't the doctor say so himself? AIDS may be a terminal illness, but with proper treatment, living twenty or thirty years is no problem. For the rest of our lives, let's find some quiet place where no one knows us and live out our days in seclusion." Looking at Sister Gu's pitiful, delicate appearance, Wei Jin tried to console her.

"Young Master Wei—I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—this is all my fault." Sister Gu said, choking back sobs. "I think I've roughly figured out how it happened."

"How it happened?" Though Wei Jin had come to terms with much, hearing Sister Gu apologize and say she had worked out the cause made his heart clench, and he pressed her at once.

"It was Zou Ruoguang—it must have been him." Sister Gu ground her teeth and spoke with hatred.

"Zou Ruoguang?" Wei Jin was taken aback. "What does he have to do with it?"

"He raped me." Sister Gu had risen from working girl to madam within a few short years, and she naturally possessed outstanding wit and ability; her reading of affairs and human nature was penetrating beyond penetrating. So from the merest thread, she had hit upon the crux of the matter.

"What? He raped you? When?" Wei Jin's eyes went wide, a savage light in them.

"That day, at your class reunion." Sister Gu sighed and said faintly, "I figure he'd had that kind of relations with that Zhao Xiaoyu, but he didn't know she was sick—and afterward you brought the matter out into the open. I guess by then Zou Ruoguang had already finished with Zhao Xiaoyu; nursing a grudge, he raped me, trying to use me to pass the virus on to you. It's all my fault. I should have told you. But I was afraid that once you knew, you'd want nothing more to do with me."