Chapter 36 – The Collapse
When Xiao Xi finally lost consciousness in her hospital bed, the event was not a gentle fading, but a traumatic, violent collapse.
One second she was fighting to maintain lucidity, sitting upright and desperate, the next—
The monitor beside her blared wildly, an urgent, frantic BEEP—BEEP—BEEP! filling the quiet room as her vital signs plummeted.
Her body violently arched in pain, mirroring the immense, lethal stress on her mind.
Her internal landscape splintered into absolute digital static and white noise.
[SYSTEM FAILURE. CORE INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.]
[HOST BRAINWAVE INSTABILITY. SEIZURE IMMINENT.]
[UNAUTHORIZED CONTROL DETECTED. LETHAL OVERRIDE.]
"N–No—stop—!" Her voice emerged strangled, a raw cry swallowed by the noise.
Nurses rushed into the room, their initial professional calm dissolving into panic.
"Get oxygen!" one shouted.
"Call the doctor! She's crashing!"
"She's seizing!"
Her vision blurred into terrifying white streaks, and the world became a deafening cacophony of alarms and urgent human voices.
Miles away, Gu Yanzhou—who was still trapped in the sterile, infuriating environment of the hospital lobby, locked in a brutal, quiet argument with his mother about "priorities" and "scandal"—suddenly froze mid-sentence.
A gut-deep, soul-deep panic gripped him, a physiological certainty that bypassed logic and reason.
The crushing pain he'd felt when she collapsed earlier returned, multiplied tenfold.
"Something's wrong," he muttered, his jaw tight.
He didn't wait for his mother's inevitable protest or his assistant's explanation.
He didn't speak.
He just ran—a powerful, blind sprint that ignored everyone calling his name.
He ran past staff, past security, up the stairs, following the primal, agonizing pull toward her.
He burst into her hospital room, slamming the door against the wall as a terrified nurse tried desperately to hold Xiao Xi's flailing body down on the bed.
"Xiao Xi!" he roared, his voice raw with terror.
She was shaking uncontrollably, her face ghost-pale, her lips tinged blue from oxygen deprivation.
Her eyes, wide and dilated with fear, found him for a split second—a flicker of desperate, pleading recognition—
Then they went blank.
Her body went rigid before collapsing back onto the mattress.
Gu Yanzhou shoved past the nurse and gently gathered her fragile body into his arms, shielding her from the trauma of the seizure.
"Save her!" he choked, his voice cracking with the sheer force of his terror.
"Please, I don't care what it takes—save her!"
And for the first time in his life, kneeling in the heart of his greatest empire of power and wealth, the unshakeable CEO felt completely, devastatingly powerless.
The only thing that mattered was slipping through his grasp, and he couldn't use money or influence to stop it.