Liao Xing had known, from a very young age, that he was different from other boys.
He didn’t like roughhousing. He wasn’t into action games or mech anime or superhero shows.
Instead, he shared far more in common with the little girl next door—dressing-up games, dollhouses, even pink or white dresses. He had even tried wearing them.
At first, his parents thought it was fine—quiet kids were easier. He wasn’t noisy, didn’t bother them. They were happy to let him be.
But as time went on—especially once he started elementary school—things didn’t get better. They got worse.
The other boys began to exclude him for being “weird,” and the teachers started voicing their concerns.
“There’s something strange about your child…”
At parent-teacher meetings, the teachers would frown as they spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Liao. “He doesn’t share the same interests as normal boys.”
That was the moment when Liao’s father, always busy with work, finally noticed his son’s “problem.” He exploded on the spot, shouting at his wife—
“You didn’t even bother raising him right! I work my ass off outside every day—can’t you do your part?!”
Liao Xing’s mother snapped back without the slightest restraint. “You go out to work—do you think I don’t work? I still have to do housework every day. I’m exhausted to death, you know!”
Liao Xing’s father shot back, “How much money can a woman like you even make? Don’t you still rely on me to support this family—”
“Bullshit! I earn no less than you! All you do all day is eat, lie around, and play on your phone—”
The two of them erupted into a fierce argument and stormed off, ending on bad terms.
Yet they still paid little attention to their son. At most, they would toss out a few perfunctory verbal reminders.
And so, stumbling and scraping along, Liao Xing made it into middle school. It was also there that he made his first ever same-sex friend.
That friend was Wang Fan.
Wang Fan’s family was extremely open-minded. Not only were they not repulsed by Liao Xing’s interests and hobbies, they would sometimes even join in with great enthusiasm.
For Liao Xing—who had gone more than a decade without a single friend—this was a joy he had never experienced before. The two quickly became inseparable, talking about everything under the sun, becoming each other’s best friend.
Even when others continued to look down on him for his feminine appearance and mannerisms, he no longer cared.
But happiness never lasted long.
After the high school entrance exams ended, during the summer after graduating from ninth grade, he and Wang Fan went out together to attend a comic convention.
Because Liao Xing had a small frame and delicate, pretty features, although he hadn’t worn women’s clothing again as he got older, under his friend’s strong encouragement and eager anticipation, he finally agreed to do a cross-dressing cosplay this time.
“That’s awesome! You’re gonna look insanely good in cosplay!” Wang Fan couldn’t wait—he immediately bought the costume and props. That very day, he cosplayed another character himself and dragged Liao Xing along to the convention.
What they didn’t know was that the convention venue was right next to Liao Xing’s father’s company.
Liao Xing’s father saw his son dressed in women’s clothing.
“Get out here!”
His face livid, he charged out, grabbed Liao Xing by force, and dragged him away—so violently that Wang Fan almost mistook him for a human trafficker.
The moment Liao Xing saw his father, terror flooded his face. The thing he had hidden for so long had finally been exposed.
That very day, Liao Xing’s father notified his wife, telling her that their son had been wearing women’s clothes out on the street.
Liao Xing’s mother rushed home immediately, forcibly kicked open his bedroom door, and began searching everywhere.
By then, Liao Xing’s whole body had gone ice-cold—but he still clung to a sliver of hope, until…
His parents dug out all the pretty jewelry, charms, and bags he had hidden for so long. Even the pink stickers and pencil cases were found and thrown onto the floor.
At the sight of those things, the couple leapt up and started beating him, each blow harder than the last.
“You’re mentally ill—you’re a pervert!” Liao Xing’s mother screamed hysterically as she vented her rage.
Liao Xing’s father, grief-stricken, said, “How can you be so shameless, wearing women’s clothes?!”
The parents who had once been merely indifferent now showered him with vicious abuse, cursing him with filthy words he had never heard before, as if he weren’t their biological child at all.
The child they had never seriously raised—once he deviated even slightly from their expectations—was met with nothing but disgust.
Even now, the couple continued pushing responsibility onto each other, unwilling to shoulder any blame.
Liao Xing’s face was deathly pale as blows rained down on him, a piercing pain boring straight into his heart.
His parents didn’t understand him…
The once quiet, outstanding child was now reduced, in the eyes of his parents, to nothing but a source of shame.
If Liao Xing had been younger—eleven or twelve—he could have gone to live with his grandparents, who were still alive then. If he had been older—eighteen or nineteen—he could have moved out and simply not come home anymore.
But there were no ifs.
He could only stand there, motionless, enduring the beating and abuse.
“There’s no saving him, no saving him—what do we do?” Liao Xing’s mother panted, exhausted from hitting him. “This lunatic isn’t my child!”
Thinking about how this might spread and lead to ridicule from his coworkers, Liao Xing’s father hardened his heart. “Send him to a detox center. Haven’t you seen the ads?”
The so-called detox center was something they had once seen advertised on a utility pole. It might not be legitimate, but it was the perfect place to dump this “mentally ill” child.
Family shame must never be made public.
These two selfish parents, having reached the height of their egotism, made what they believed to be the perfect choice.
They sent their fifteen-year-old underage child to an unlicensed black hospital.
Liao Xing still didn’t know that this marked the beginning of his descent into hell.
***
At first, he was the only patient in the hospital. The doctors watched him around the clock, confiscated his phone, forbade him from going outside, and fed him endless brainwashing slogans.
“I shouldn’t like skirts. I shouldn’t like pink. I should like sports, like cars, like blue. I should do everything a normal man should do…”
Liao Xing was forced to repeat these lines over and over.
Shoulder-length hair made boys look more feminine, so his was shaved clean down to the scalp.
His old clothes, shoes, accessories—even his collections—were all burned to ashes in one go.
The “hospital’s” doctors and nurses fed him medicine. After taking it, he would lose consciousness; when he woke up again, his head would feel like it was splitting open, so painful he wanted to smash it against the wall.
But even that wasn’t enough.
Later, more parents sent their children in. Some children sent their parents in; some older siblings sent their younger brothers or sisters in.
The moment anyone showed even the slightest hint of dislike or aversion toward the place, they were mercilessly electrocuted, force-fed drugs, or even beaten at random by the doctors—patients in this hospital had no human rights whatsoever. At best, they were toys for the doctors’ amusement.
Yet there was no way for them to send messages to the outside world. All contact had been cut off, and those parents were either deceived—or simply didn’t care.
And so, the hospital grew bolder and bolder, eventually beginning to use patients for human experimentation.
It was also during this period that some patients failed to survive the experiments and died in the laboratory. But they were all labeled as “suicides” or “missing persons,” erased completely.
It was then that Liao Xing learned how to lie low.
“Let me die from this world. Let me remain in dreams, becoming the filth beneath a butterfly’s feet.”
He wrote these words, burying all his interests, passions, temperament, and true self beneath layers of heavy disguise, turning himself into someone entirely different.
It looked as though the hospital’s “treatment” had been remarkably effective—he was already “normal.”
But it was precisely at this point that Liao Xing’s father and mother stopped coming to see him altogether.
He had been abandoned.
***
It took Liao Xing a long time to finally understand that, to his parents, he was nothing more than a burden.
What the family needed was a well-behaved, obedient child—one who required no effort from their parents and could grow up on his own into an outstanding student. Not someone like him, with a soft, feminine appearance, a gentle temperament, and interests that were even somewhat “unspeakable.” The family would never allow those deviant behaviors, so they chose not to want him anymore.
After his parents stopped paying the fees, the hospital’s attitude toward Liao Xing grew even worse.
They no longer bothered to put on a façade in front of him. Instead, they brazenly dragged him into experiments as well, using all kinds of drugs to keep his consciousness blurred and muddled for long stretches of time.
Liao Xing could feel time slipping by, little by little. More and more patients were brought in.
And more and more of them… died.
Finally, one day, he sensed the wailing of wronged souls. He felt himself gain a special power—he seemed able to drag the entire hospital into another spacetime.
Liao Xing tilted his head sluggishly, his brain eroded by drugs as he tried to think.
He wanted revenge.
If he was going to take revenge, he had to drag the doctors and nurses in with him. In that case, he might as well drag an entire building in.
After doing all this, he felt a little tired. He let the wronged souls set the spatial rules themselves, then found a place to sink into sleep.
What he hadn’t expected was that the insane director refused to give up. He stubbornly held on, waiting until every doctor and nurse had turned into monsters—and he even controlled them.
The souls of the deceased patients, meanwhile, were restricted once more, forced to repeat everything they had experienced in life.
Didn’t that make his revenge utterly meaningless?
Fortunately, it was at this time that those who called themselves “players” arrived.
These players occasionally managed to awaken Liao Xing, but more often than not, they were unable to help him at all—worse still, they were wiped out entirely, not a single one successfully “clearing” the instance.
Time dragged on longer and longer, so long that Liao Xing nearly gave up, nearly stopped holding onto any hope at all.
Until the group who broke into the fifth floor on the very first night appeared.
They didn’t just awaken Liao Xing—they awakened his memories as well. Back then, he had sent his diary out the door without any hope of a reply, and for all this time he had received nothing. Only now did he realize that, all along, Wang Fan had been searching for him, never once giving up.
So it turned out he hadn’t been abandoned by the world after all.
Outside, there was at least one person waiting for him. At least someone still remembered him.
His thoughts gradually cleared. Little by little, his past memories returned, and he began to use his home-field advantage to cooperate with this group of players.
They were very capable—helping him find the director who was hiding, opening the sealed doors.
Liao Xing was still a little dazed.
How wonderful. The hospital burned down, and his sun—Wang Fan—had come to take him home.
It was real. No longer a hallucination from wandering the hospital halls, nor a dream from his long sleep—it was real.
At last, he left the hospital that had trapped him for so many years and returned once more to the sunlight.
He was a star—but the sun was willing to stop for him.
***
The moment he returned to reality, a song was playing through streets and alleyways alike.
Which rose blooms without thorns,
The best revenge is—beauty, the most beautiful bloom is—counterattack,
Don’t let anyone change you,
You are you—whether ‘he’ or ‘she’ is fine,
There will be someone who loves you… with all their heart.
