Chapter 7: Rule Of Survival In An Asylum

The Ninth Asylum was located in a beautiful area outside the Southern Fifth Ring Road.

On the way to the Ninth Asylum the following afternoon, Gong Siyu repeatedly looked back at the investigation report about Ji Younai. 

On the 24th and 25th of that month, she almost experienced the most painful and despairing blow of her life. 

She was forced to withdraw from school, her parents died in a tragic car accident, her family's assets were taken away by her relatives. She was now penniless and didn't even have the financial means to claim her parents' corpses from the morgue.

Gong Siyu did not know how hopeless, desperate, and grief-stricken a person must have been to choose to end their life in such a way at their prime. 

Her life was so tragic, he was very sympathetic towards her. 

He did not want to bother wondering how or why someone who had clearly died would come back to life.

Images of a pitiful-looking Ji Younai trying to hold her tears back as hard as she could kept appeared in his mind... 

There were also images of her ducking into the car, which was about to explode, to search for the cellphone without hesitation, and risking almost being blown up to hide from his assassins and stay by his side… 

Since they had formed a bond during that life-and-death situation, it had become an obsession in his heart that he could not abandon. 

She had become an orphan. 

So what if she was an orphan? 

He could keep her by his side, provide for her, pamper her, give her everything. 

No one would be allowed to bully, insult, or degrade her! 

There was a dim luster in his narrow eyes. He looked out of the window at the passing scenery, some thoughts beginning to form in Gong Siyu's mind. 

Gong Siyu saw Ji Younai once again in the event hall of the Ninth Asylum. 

With the company of Yang Zhi, a young and talented psychiatrist at the Ninth Asylum, Gong Siyu immediately recognized the slender figure near them. 

Yang Zhi was Gong Siyu's senior in high school. He was an extremely talented clinical psychology graduate from Harvard Medical School.

"Siyu, that's the person you're looking for," Yang Zhi pointed at a figure standing beside a square table not too far away.

Gong Siyu left his bodyguards, assistant, and entourage all trailing behind him, and walked straight towards Ji Younai. 

She had become much thinner within the span of a month ago. 

She was wearing a light blue hospital gown from Ninth Asylum and her long, thick, black hair was tied up messily behind her head. Her unusually fair skin was worryingly pale, the rosiness of her cheeks having disappeared, and her mouth, which was originally red and small, had also lost color. She looked extremely haggard.

She was a porcelain doll that was about to be shattered.

"One bamboo, peng! [1. 'peng' is said when a mahjong player takes a tile to complete a set of three.]"

"Two circles, discard!" 

Gong Siyu saw the barefooted Ji Younai squatting on a chair and playing mahjong around a square table with three other mental patients.

Ironically, there were no mahjong tiles on the table. There was nothing there at all. 

Two of the three patients who were "playing mahjong" with Ji Younai looked extremely abnormal.

One of them had crooked eyes and a twisted mouth. She drooled whenever she opened her mouth and had an absent smile. 

The other was incapable of speech, simply barking incessantly while licking her hands, her tongue hanging out.

The last one looked like a normal person. 

However, Gong Siyu soon dismissed those thoughts. 

That person suddenly stood up, ran to Gong Siyu's feet, pulled down his pants and defecated right onto the ground. He then grabbed the feces excitedly and stuffed it into his mouth.

Seeing that Gong Siyu was looking at him, he even asked hesitantly, "Do you want to eat it too? This is a treasure. It's essence! Eat it for longevity!"

Gong Siyu almost threw up. His expression became extremely livid when he noticed that the feces, also mixed with urine, had almost stained his shoes.

The man was soon tied up and carried away by two male nurses.

If Ji Younai was not there, he would have left right at that moment.

He felt much better when he shifted his gaze back onto Ji Younai. 

"Hi," he greeted her, stepping forward.

"..."

Upon hearing his voice, Ji Younai slowly turned to the side and met Gong Siyu's friendly gaze. However, she remained silent, as if she did not know him at all. 

Gong Siyu was stunned to see her response. 

"You don't know me anymore?"

Who knew? 

Ji Younai kept her eyes fixed on Gong Siyu's face for about 30 seconds before yelling into the event hall, "We're playing mahjong now, we're playing mahjong now! 10 thousand yuan per stake, we need an extra player!" 

As soon as she finished speaking, the event hall broke into an uproar. Dozens of mental patients swarmed towards Ji Younai's square table, vying with each other and trying to squeeze their way through. At one point, the scene became rather chaotic. 

Thankfully, Gong Siyu was "rescued" by the bodyguards. 

With an austere expression, he quietly followed Yang Zhi to his office.

'Why does she suddenly not recognize me?' he wondered.

"She has severe paranoia and identity dissociative disorder. When she was sent in last month, she cried every night and went on about having seen a ghost. On several occasions, she even tried to attack the nurses and doctors at the hospital with a syringe," Yang Zhi told Gong Siyu, informing him about Ji Younai's medical condition while looking at her medical history.

"When I met her a month ago, she was a normal person, and now you're telling me that she's mentally ill? And her condition is severe? Yang Zhi, I've heard that this hospital you work in can turn normal humans into lunatics. Surely it can't be that it's you people who have driven her crazy, right?"

Gong Siyu sounded rather sarcastic, making Yang Zhi feel awkward and somewhat scrupulous. 

He didn't dare anger the man in front of him, who was the same age as himself. He could not afford to provoke the Gong Family.

"Siyu, patients with dissociative identity disorder usually behave like a normal person most of the time. Their illness only acts up at certain times." 

Gong Siyu, however, could not be bothered to talk nonsense with him.

He stood up, walked over to the window, and happened to see Ji Younai squatting among the flowers in the garden outside.

Under the refraction of the bright rays from the sun and the changes in the light and shadows, she was shrouded in a layer of golden sunlight, looking like a little fairy in the middle of all those flowers.

She did not seem like the mental patient that Yang Zhi had described. 

"I'm going to take her out of the hospital," Gong Siyu stated, even more determined to take Ji Younai away. 

"Siyu, that's impossible, you have to know-" 

He was cut off by Gong Siyu ordering him, "I won't listen to this nonsense. Get Director Chen to come and see me."

Chen Baoguo was the current director of the Ninth Asylum. Logically speaking, he was supposed to personally receive Gong Siyu. Unfortunately, Director Chen had gone to the Medical Forum for an academic discussion today and had yet to return.

Yang Zhi quickly sent someone to invite Director Chen over.

While waiting, Gong Siyu dismissed Bai Feiran and the rest of his bodyguards before heading to the garden at the back of the asylum. 

Ji Younai was basking under the sun among the flowers when Gong Siyu squatted down beside her. 

He began to think of ways to reintroduce himself in an attempt for her to remember him 

It was then that the girl beside him, who seemed to have a dull gaze, asked softly in confusion, "Why are you here?" 

Gong Siyu was startled. He paused for three seconds before reacting abruptly, bursting into laughter. 

"So you remember me,"he remarked with a smile. Continuing, he asked, "Why did you pretend not to know me just now?" 

Gong Siyu began to find Ji Younai more and more interesting. He felt comfortable in her presence, feeling as if all the negative emotions in his heart had been dispelled. 

He sighed helplessly and cupped his cheek in his hand before talking to Ji Younai. 

"In this place, you have to pretend to be ill, even if you're not. If you want to live a better life, you have to act, understand?"