Chapter 145: HE FELT FREE
He thought of Junning’s voice note, too cheerful to be true.
Of Xiaohe’s message: there’s a clinic fee. Sorry. It’s okay if you can’t.
Of his mother’s face, serene in a way that had nothing to do with peace.
There was no door.
Only the hand on his wrist.
Only the money he could not stop needing.
Why?
Why does the world take and take until breathing itself becomes a conscious act?
He had done what was asked of him. He had held his family together with bleeding hands.
And still it came. Still it asked for more.
Where was the pause?
Where was the voice that said, enough. Let him breathe.
He had no faith.
Faith was for people who still had something left to spend.
But desperation makes philosophers of us all.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, as if he could push the seeing out of himself. When the crying thinned to something dry and hollow, he let his hands fall.
He straightened in the chair because collapsing would mean admitting there was nothing left to straighten.
He looked at the ceiling and breathed, each inhale a negotiation with a body that wanted to stop.
In the dim light of Room 11, Ren Hao spoke to the void.
"Please," he said, and his voice was wrecked.
"Lord, if you’re there — I don’t know if you are. I don’t know if anyone is."
The machines breathed.
"I can’t keep living like this. I’m begging you. Every day I wake up with less of myself. I don’t know what’s left. I’m not asking for much. Just one door. One way out."
His throat closed. He forced it open because silence felt like surrender.
"I’m so tired. I don’t want to live like a ghost anymore. Please... if you can hear me... help me."
The last word fell like a stone into a well.
The machines breathed.
His mother’s face did not move.
The room held his words and gave nothing back.
Afternoon light shifted slowly across the floor.
Ren Hao let his hands go loose in his lap, because holding on had cost him more than letting go.
He sat there, hollowed out, silent.
He remembered a line he’d read once, half-forgotten: Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the Shadow.
He was living in that shadow now — neither dead nor living, neither free nor bound, just suspended.
And in that suspension, the oldest question rose again:
If a man loses himself by degrees, day by day, until nothing remains but the motion of survival —
was he ever alive at all?
The room did not answer.
But for the first time in months, Ren Hao asked it out loud.
He lowered his eyes from the ceiling and looked at his mother’s face.
The monitors beeped steadily around her.
He leaned forward and took her hand in both of his. Her hand was cool, as it had been for five years. He held it the way he had when he was small, when she was his whole world and nothing had yet gone wrong.
"Mum."
She did not stir. She never stirred.
"I’m going to kill myself," he said quietly, without flinching. He spoke the way a person speaks after crossing to the other side of a decision and simply reporting it. "I’ve made up my mind."
The monitors beeped.
"I promised you I would raise them," he said, and his thumb moved once across her knuckles. "I promised you that Junning and Xiaohe would be okay. I promised I would hold everything together until you came back." He paused. "I’m sorry, Mum. I can’t keep that promise."
"Please watch over them," he said, his voice dropping lower. "From wherever you are, please watch over Junning and Xiaohe. They’re good children. They deserve far better than what I’m leaving them with."
He sat with her a moment longer in the beeping quiet of room 11, holding her hand and saying nothing more because there was nothing left to say.
Then he stood. He picked up his jacket from the chair. He bent down and pressed a long kiss to her forehead, closing his eyes and breathing her in one last time.
"I love you," he said against her skin. "I’m sorry I couldn’t be filial until the very end."
He straightened, took one last look at her face, and walked out without looking back. The door clicked shut behind him.
-
Outside, the afternoon was unremarkable in a way that felt almost cruel. People walked past. A vendor called from the corner. The city moved through its ordinary rhythms with no awareness that anything was ending, and no awareness that a person stood on the pavement having just said goodbye to the last thing that had ever mattered to him.
Ren Hao stood and looked up at the window of room 11 for a long time. He lowered his gaze only when his neck began to ache.
Li Bai once wrote that we float through this life as though passing through a dream, and asked how much of it was ever truly joy. The ancients said a man’s life was like morning dew—present before the sun had fully risen, gone long before the world thought to mourn it. There was no wall between living and dying, no door, nothing solid to push against and feel resistance. There was only a thread, thin as the space between one heartbeat and the silence that followed it.
Ren Hao had been holding that thread for months with both hands, and he decided he was ready to let go.
He smiled, and the tension left his shoulders for the first time in years.
He turned toward the road and looked at the traffic moving past.
When he saw the car coming, he did not step back.
He stepped forward, and his body moved into the path of the oncoming car.
---
The car caught him on his left side. The force lifted him clean off the ground before dropping him hard onto the pavement. Pain detonated through his ribs, his hip, and his left leg, and all of it arrived at once. He lay on his side with his cheek against the cold ground. His breath came in shallow, broken pulls. The warmth of his own blood soaked through his shirt and spread beneath him in a slow, dark pool.
He did not feel guilty.
Lying there with the city noise filtering in and out around him and his vision softening at the edges, he searched himself and found no guilt, no regret, and nothing that resembled either. What was there instead, underneath the pain and the cold and the blood, was something he had not felt in so long that he had nearly forgotten what it was.
He felt free.
