He didn't move for a long time.
He stood at that basin with both hands gripping the edge, water still dripping from the tap, and he let it come. All of it. The memories that had been trying to reach him since he first opened his eyes — fragmentary, overlapping, two lives trying to occupy the same space at once.
His own first.
Feng Liang. CEO. Built from nothing the way his grandfather had taught him — through patience, through precision, through never letting anyone see what it cost. A life constructed deliberately, brick by brick.
And then the wine. The glass placed in front of him by a hand he had trusted completely. The warmth of it going down. The room tilting. The last clear thought he'd had before everything went dark.
Then the second set of memories came.
Li Feng. A man who had lost his job and decided the nearest people were responsible for it. A man who had come home night after night and poured his failure into a woman who had no way to leave and a child who had learned that silence was the safest thing she could offer. The idiot had drunk himself stupid enough to slip on the floor and crack his head open.
The two sets sat side by side inside him and then the weight of it landed all at once.
I am inside a dead man's body.
Which means I am dead.
He let out a small jagged laugh. It didn't sound right.
Wu Zhen. His assistant. Someone he had brought up from nothing, handed trust he had never given anyone else, opened doors for that most people spent their whole careers standing outside of. And he had sat across from him at that table and done it without blinking.
The great CEO Feng Liang. He looked at the stranger in the mirror. Dead over a glass of wine.
This body. His jaw tightened. The man who lived here before me deserves every single thing that happened to him.
He turned on the tap again and rinsed his face a second time. Stood there with the cold water on his skin.
Feng Liang is dead. I am now Li Feng.
He looked at the face in the mirror one last time. Hollow. Worn. The wreckage of a life someone else had lived badly.
Fine, he thought. We start from here.
He turned and walked out.
---
He moved back into the room. The two of them were still there, pressed together near the wall, the little girl half-hidden behind her mother's leg. He looked at them properly for the first time — really looked, now that his head had cleared and the shock had settled into something quieter.
*Beautiful.*
It was the first thing that came to his mind and he had no defense against it. He had met countless women in his lifetime. Boardrooms and banquets and every calibrated social occasion a man in his position attended. Not one of them stopped him the way this woman did, standing in a wrecked apartment in the flat morning light with her eyes red from crying and her jaw set like she was bracing for whatever came next.
Zhao Lihua stood still, staring back at him.
Li Feng looked away. Quickly.
*What the hell is wrong with me. This is not your first time seeing a woman,control yourself.*
He looked up. Looked at the floor instead. At the mess, the bottles, the scattered trash that covered every surface. Something to focus on. Something concrete.
"You can wait in the room," he said. "I'll clean up and make breakfast."
Zhao Lihua didn't answer. She stood there, and he could see it moving behind her eyes — the calculation, the wariness, the question she wasn't going to ask out loud. *What is he planning now.*
She picked up Li Xian without a word. The little girl didn't look at him. She turned her face into her mother's shoulder, and the two of them moved away from the living room into the other room, and the door didn't quite close all the way behind them.
Li Feng sat down on the sofa.
He let out a long slow breath.
*Life really isn't fair. What did a woman like that do to end up with a man like Li Feng.*
He sat with it for only a moment. Then he stood up.
---
He found a large bin near the wall and started with the floor, working his way across the room methodically, the way he had approached every problem in his previous life — section by section, no wasted movement. He picked up the bottles first, then the trash, then the things that had no reason for being where they were. It took a while. The room had not been cared for in a long time and it showed in every corner. But he finished it. He stood back and looked at what was left — bare and sparse, but clean. Livable.
He headed toward the kitchen.
Li Feng had lived a life of luxury. He would not pretend otherwise. But there was one thing he had always been quietly proud of, something that went back further than the boardrooms and the tailored suits and the corner office — he could cook. Really cook.
The kitchen door opened and he stepped inside.
It was no different from the room he had just cleaned.
He stood in the doorway and looked at it.
*I seriously have my work cut out for me.*
He stretched his hands out and got started, clearing surfaces, moving things that had no business where they were, restoring some basic order to the space. When it was done he opened the drawers.
Empty.
He checked the refrigerator.
Empty.
*Looks like I'll have to go get some groceries.*
He picked up the phone from the counter, checked the wallet beside it, and walked out of the apartment.
---
The door clicked shut behind him.
For a moment there was silence. Then Zhao Lihua came out of the room.
She stood in the middle of what had been, an hour ago, a disaster. She turned slowly, taking it in. The floor clear. The trash gone. The room — clean. Really clean.
She stood there looking at it and didn't move for a long time.
*Is he changing. Or is this a scheme. A new way to break me that I haven't seen yet.*
A tear moved down her face, slow and quiet. She didn't raise her hand to stop it.
"Mummy." A small voice came from behind her. Li Xian walked toward her on careful feet, her voice low the way it always was. "Is daddy gone?"
Zhao Lihua pressed her arm across her face. She tilted her head down and looked at her daughter.
She patted her gently on the head.
"Yes," she said. "He's gone. Don't worry. Mummy's here."
---
After a while the door opened again.
Li Feng came back carrying two white bags, heavy with groceries. He didn't stop in the living room. He went straight to the kitchen, set everything down on the counter, and began laying it all out.
He looked at what he had in front of him.
A small smile crossed his face.