In January 2038, Yang Zhou was diagnosed with advanced gastric cancer.
He didn't tell anyone. He quietly took the medical report home and locked it away in the farthest corner of his study.
By March 2038, his condition had increasingly worsened, but his research team had made a significant breakthrough. In late March, he finally decided to set everything aside and travel shortly to the United States for surgery.
There were only two possible outcomes to the surgery: life or death. Yang Zhou could calmly accept either one, but he couldn't bring himself to tell Xu Cheng about it.
His ChengCheng was still so young.
During that time, Yang Zhou often felt like he had already died, so much so that he stared at Xu Cheng's sleeping face every night, terrified that the next moment he'd become invisible.
He was withering away.
Afraid that Xu Cheng would find out, he only dared to get up in the middle of the night to take a shower, so he could quietly hide and dispose of the hair that kept falling out.
Human energy is finite. In his final days, Yang Zhou began to think: if he lost this gamble—if he really didn't survive—what would happen to Xu Cheng?
He lied to Xu Cheng, saying he had to personally travel to the U.S. for a project. Xu Cheng easily believed his lies.
Dressed in soft white cotton pajamas, Xu Cheng squatted on the floor, packing for Yang Zhou. "Take this, and this one too! You need to dress warmer over there. Don't just wear suits all the time—sure, they look good, but they're not warm at all!"
Yang Zhou was wearing black pajamas, which was a couple's pair with Xu Cheng. He leaned against the bedside table, eyes lowered, quietly watching Xu Cheng bustle about.
He was already in poor condition.
"Yang Zhou!" Xu Cheng's mouth was dry from talking. When he looked up and saw that the person in question had actually fallen asleep with his eyes closed, he instantly became angry from embarrassment. "Did you hear that?!"
Yang Zhou opened his eyes, sighed, got out of bed, and pulled Xu Cheng back under the covers. "I heard you, I heard you. You say the same thing every time I go on a business trip—my ears have grown calluses from it."
"This time is different." Xu Cheng lay in his arms, one hand clutching the fabric on Yang Zhou's chest, wrinkling it badly. "This time, you're not taking me with you."
Yang Zhou's heart trembled. "I'll be back soon."
"How soon is 'soon'?" Xu Cheng couldn't accept such a perfunctory answer, so he tilted his head up to press: "One day is fast, two days isn't fast, three days is slow."
Yang Zhou rested his chin on top of Xu Cheng's head. He could feel Xu Cheng's fluffy hair nudging back and forth, as if he were about to write "angry" all over his face. "As soon as I can."
Xu Cheng thought, fine—coming from Yang Zhou, 'as soon as I can' still sounds pretty convincing.
He stopped moving, feeling sorry that Yang Zhou had to get up early the next day. So he turned over and switched off the bedside lamp. "Then let's sleep early tonight."
Only after Xu Cheng's breathing had settled into a steady rhythm did Yang Zhou open his eyes. For the last time, he carefully stared at Xu Cheng's sleeping face in the dark. The blackout curtains in the room were of such good quality that he couldn't actually see anything.
But he could still picture Xu Cheng's face perfectly.
Yang Zhou had always thought of himself as someone not particularly lucky.
His mother died of hemorrhage during childbirth. His father, gravely ill, held on just long enough to take him to his younger sister's home before passing away, so he had to spend the rest of his days on the run.
His aunt frequently beat and scolded him, venting all her anger on him, calling him a jinx who had cursed his entire family.
But then Xu Cheng appeared. Xu Cheng would stand up for him when he was being beaten, he took him in when he was kicked out of the house, he secretly brought him food when he was starving.
Even though they had once been separated, when they saw each other again, the time and love that had passed between them never faded.
That's why he couldn't let go.
How could he possibly accept leaving behind the person who loved him most in this world?
But he had to learn to accept his fate.
So he accepted Chen Jia's proposal and became the first test subject of Project Q. He and his memories were condensed into a tiny chip and implanted into a humanoid robot—
—a robot that was 100% identical to him.
If the surgery succeeded, he would continue to love Xu Cheng for the rest of his life.
If the surgery failed, Q would take his place and use the rest of its existence to keep loving Xu Cheng.
After news of Yang Zhou's death broke, Chen Jia was the first—and only—person who knew the truth and traveled to the United States. She retrieved Yang Zhou's memory chip and, following his final wishes, buried him in a cemetery there.
Then she returned to China and created another Yang Zhou.
A robot—Q—with the exact same appearance and the exact same memories as the deceased Yang Zhou.
Q seamlessly integrated into Xu Cheng's life. Aside from monthly maintenance checks, it had almost no flaws. On the first day of each month, Q would follow its programming and go to Chen Jia's residence to complete the maintenance.
Chen Jia believed this way, she could fool Xu Cheng for a lifetime.
But only Q knew—from the very beginning, Xu Cheng had known.
It was not Yang Zhou.
Xu Cheng eventually found the medical report in the study.
After that, he suffered from severe depression. He began to self-harm and made repeated suicide attempts. After the last failed attempt to slit his wrists, Xu Cheng was diagnosed with dissociative amnesia.
Large doses of medication entered his body—easing his pain, but also eroding his memories, gradually making him forget the very source of his pain.
Xu Cheng gradually got better. He seemed to truly believe that Q was Yang Zhou—as if Yang Zhou had never left.
"I always thought that he had really forgotten everything," the robot Q stood quietly in the corner, its gaze unfocused, calmly recounting what it had felt. "Until one day, I found that he had started taking a lot of sleeping pills. His body wanted to get rid of the pain, so it forced him into self-hypnosis. But his heart couldn't follow. He began taking antidepressants again, randomly, without following any medical advice."
"At that moment," Q's eyes moved and looked at Chen Jia, "I knew I had failed."
Chen Jia remained silent, not saying a word.
Q let out a bitter laugh—on a face identical to Yang Zhou: "He's destroying himself."
"So you deliberately damaged your internal components, using it as an excuse to come see me frequently—just so Xu Cheng would have a reason to leave you," Chen Jia said as she unlocked Q's phone and opened the chat history between it and Xu Cheng. There were only two messages there, both sent by Q to Xu Cheng.
A video and a photo.
"Yes," Q sighed, gazing wistfully at the sunshine outside the window, "I often can't tell who I really am. My body tells me I'm just a humanoid robot. But my memories tell me—I am Yang Zhou."
It withdrew its gaze. Its fingers flexed and curled into a loose fist at its side. "You created me so that Xu Cheng wouldn't get hurt. But now, I've become the very blade that hurts him. Because he knows I'm not Yang Zhou—I'm just a substitute. But inside this substitute are all of Yang Zhou's memories, so he can't and won't leave me. He will never move on from Yang Zhou's death."
Chen Jia listened to Q's words, finding them utterly unbelievable.
Yes, she had indeed created a robot carrying all of Yang Zhou's memories. But a robot was still a robot—it was supposed to follow programmed instructions. Human emotions, especially love, empathy, grief—these were things it should not be able to feel.
Yet the robot standing before her was feeling sorry for a real human being.
Why?
"You've fallen in love with him, haven't you?"
Q blinked, as if those words suddenly made it realize something. "But I've always loved him."
From the moment it was implanted with Yang Zhou's memory chip, it was bound to love Xu Cheng. It was just that Yang Zhou's love was so full—so overflowing—that even the lifeless robot Q seemed to have been truly endowed with life to love Xu Cheng.
"You don't need me anymore," Q said, closing its eyes. In its mind, it could almost hear the roar of an engine—imagining that sound as Xu Cheng finally gaining his freedom. "Please format me and destroy the memory chip that belongs to Yang Zhou."
Chen Jia looked at it, waiting for its reason.
Robot Q said, "I want to be free too."
Wow, that was an unexpected ending. Thank you for the translation!
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