Chapter 619: Gu Tongtong

"Bone marrow transplant?" I looked at the thin paper in my hand. "Isn't this used to treat leukemia?"

Skimming it, I felt a little disappointed. This was just a simple donation commitment letter.

Gu Bei's mother promised to donate his bone marrow to Gu Tongtong to help her fight the disease, and Gu Bei himself had no objections.

At the very bottom of the page were two signatures, likely belonging to Gu Bei's father and mother.

"A scrap of paper from twenty years ago is more important to the kidnapper than five million?" I examined it repeatedly, but there were no hidden codes or anything else. It was just an ordinary piece of white paper.

Folding it up and placing it back in the wooden box, I lightly kicked the despairing Gu Bei and set the box down next to him.

"I gave you the commitment letter. I did everything you said. Where is my daughter? I want to see her!" Gu Bei clutched his stomach and scrambled up from the floor. Knowing he was no match for me, he grabbed the wooden box and backed far away.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Gu. I am not the kidnapper, I didn't kill your wife, and I have no idea where your daughter actually is." Taking off the Good and Evil Asura Mask to reveal the ordinary-looking Human Skin Mask underneath, I waved at Zhang Heng and Chen Mo, calling the two dumbstruck guys inside. "They can vouch for me."

I had only posed as the kidnapper to see the commitment letter. With my goal achieved, it was naturally time to clear up the misunderstanding.

Empty words were no proof, so why would Gu Bei believe me? Likely traumatized by how convincing my acting had been just moments ago, he stood against the wall without a word, refusing to make his stance clear.

I had Chen Mo and Zhang Heng take out their notes and explain why the three of us had come here, along with some of the things we had encountered earlier.

Talking as we walked, it took several full minutes to finally make Gu Bei understand.

Receiving death-threat notes and being forced to break a curse in an abandoned hospital sounded ridiculous. Yet the moment Gu Bei saw the handwriting on the notes, he believed Chen Mo and Zhang Heng's story.

He must have seen that handwriting somewhere before. He might even know the person who wrote it.

"I believe the two of you, but not him." After hearing us out, Gu Bei finally stated his position, pointing a finger at me.

"Not me?" My earlier performance had probably been a little too dedicated, leaving Gu Bei with deep psychological trauma. His gaze darted away when he looked at me, carrying a hint of lingering suspicion.

I didn't bother explaining further. The live broadcast tonight would inevitably evolve into an individual battle by the end. With other live show streamers intruding, there was no one who could be entirely trusted anyway.

Under Gu Bei's intent stare, I shrugged nonchalantly. "Tell us everything you know. I'm very curious about your past. Why would a kidnapper demand something as strange as a commitment letter?"

The room was incredibly quiet. Gu Bei stared dead at my face, stubbornly refusing to say a single word.

"Xia Chi, watch your tone. Since we know Gu Bei isn't on the monsters' side, we should treat him as a friend and teammate. After all, another person means more strength." Zhang Heng stepped up to smooth things over. He lowered the DV in his hand and turned to Gu Bei. "Brother, the three of us laid all our cards on the table. It wouldn't be very appropriate for you to keep your own matters a secret, would it?"

Gu Bei withdrew his gaze. After hesitating for a moment, he opened the wooden box and pulled out that twenty-year-old commitment letter.

"Actually, this is the reason for everything." He sighed and stared blankly at his wife's corpse, beginning to recount the events of twenty years ago.

Gu Bei didn't originally have the surname Gu. He had taken his mother's surname and was called Lu Bei. His father was the first heir of a major financial group in Central China, a man named Gu Tiancheng.

Gu Bei's mother was just one of Gu Tiancheng's many mistresses—the luckiest one, and also the most unfortunate.

Gu Tiancheng was already married. His wife, rumored to be the daughter of a powerful figure, was named Yan Rui. The two had been married for years but had never been able to conceive a child. Because of this, Gu Tiancheng's wife turned a blind eye to her husband's philandering outside, pretending not to notice.

It was precisely this unrestrained indulgence that led to the later tragedy.

Gu Bei's mother became pregnant. Sensing a threat, the powerful figure's daughter absolutely refused to let the child be born. Left with no choice, Gu Bei's mother left alone, secretly hiding in the countryside to give birth. Terrified of retaliation, she didn't even dare let her child take the surname Gu.

By all rights, the matter should have ended there, but fate had other plans.

A few years after Gu Bei was born, the powerful figure's daughter unexpectedly became pregnant as well. She gave birth to a beautiful baby girl with skin so pale it was almost transparent, naming her Gu Tongtong.

The Gu clan finally had an heir. They threw grand banquets for their guests, but the good times didn't last. Before she was even a month old, the baby girl was diagnosed with congenital leukemia. The doctors said that even if they found matching hematopoietic stem cells and continuously performed surgeries, the girl wouldn't live past the age of ten.

The news was like a bolt from the blue, casting a thick, dark cloud over the entire Gu clan.

She wouldn't live past ten. Before Gu Tiancheng's wife could even recover from this devastating blow, more bad news arrived.

The baby girl's blood type didn't match either Gu Tiancheng's or his wife's. It was an extremely rare blood type—the p phenotype.

According to the hospital, the p blood type was a rare phenotype within the P blood group system. It was recessively inherited, and its gene frequency was incredibly low.

This blood type was exceptionally rare. Out of Huaxia's population of over 1.4 billion, only nine people were registered as having the p blood type. It was known as "diamond blood."

Treating the leukemia would require chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant.

Setting aside whether an infant could endure the agony of chemotherapy, even if she managed to pull through, they couldn't find a blood type match for Gu Tongtong in all of Central China.

The hospital gave a blunt recommendation, advising the patient's family to give up.

As a new mother, Yan Rui threw a massive fit at the hospital. She begged her father for help, demanding that the baby girl be saved no matter the cost.

The Gu clan had money, and the Yan family had power. But even with wealth and authority in their hands, they couldn't alter fate.

They sent Gu Tongtong to Jianghu Cancer Research Hospital, which possessed the most cutting-edge medical capabilities at the time, and scoured the entirety of Central China for someone with the same blood type as their daughter.

Endless searching brought endless disappointment. Just as they were about to pass the optimal window for surgery, a doctor told Gu Tiancheng that the P blood group system exhibited second-generation mutation phenomena. They could try looking for a match among his other offspring; the chances might be slightly higher.

Hearing the doctor's words, Gu Tiancheng and Yan Rui immediately thought of the illegitimate son, Gu Bei. After bringing him to the hospital, he passed the initial screening. The secondary check confirmed it: a perfect match!

Heaven had played a joke on the Gu clan. The situation they now faced was that they had to use this illegitimate son's bone marrow to save their legitimate daughter.

Bone marrow donation required a guardian's consent. Gu Tiancheng and Yan Rui simultaneously sought out Gu Bei's mother, the woman surnamed Lu.

There wasn't a mother in the world who didn't love her child. This was true for Yan Rui, and equally true for Gu Bei's mother.

She laid out a few conditions: her child had to be allowed to live openly and honorably in the Gu clan from then on, and he had to become a legal heir to the family.

With a life on the line, the Gu clan agreed to these terms. They drew up legal documents, and Gu Bei's mother signed the commitment letter.

Everything was moving in a positive direction, but unpredictable winds and clouds gather in the sky; unexpected misfortunes occur without warning.

Just as the surgical treatment was pushed to the final deadline, Gu Bei's mother suddenly took him and left.

Yan Rui, who had gambled everything, was met with this result instead. The infant Gu Tongtong didn't hold on for much longer. After enduring several rounds of chemotherapy that treated the symptoms but not the root cause, she ultimately died in the Central Operating Room of Jianghu Cancer Research Hospital.

With her daughter dead at an early age, a delirious Yan Rui later got into a car accident. In that very same year, Gu Bei's mother took the legal documents she had tricked them into signing before the surgery and sent Gu Bei to the Gu clan.

Gu Bei didn't say much about what happened after that, only briefly mentioning one thing: he felt that his younger sister had never left. She was always lurking around him, demanding to know why he had backed out.

Gu Bei's story was long. By the time he finished, we had already completed our search of the second basement level and entered the third.

The further down we went, the gloomier it became. The air grew damper, carrying a faint stench of rot.

Zhang Heng and Chen Mo were still sighing over Gu Bei's story. It was practically a roller-coaster of a drama.

I had also been listening carefully from the side. With this story as background, many of my doubts were easily resolved.

"Gu Tongtong..." Walking at the back of the group, I looked at Gu Bei, who was speaking in low tones with Zhang Heng, and reached out to press down on his shoulder.

"What are you doing?" Gu Bei forcefully swatted my arm away. It was obvious from this action that he thoroughly despised me.

"Your story is very convoluted, but there's one thing I don't understand. Your sister who died twenty years ago was named Gu Tongtong. That name has become the nightmare of your life. You said yourself that you feel like she's always around you, that you're terrified of her, that you loathe her. Since you hate the name so much, why would you name your own daughter Gu Tongtong?" I looked at him, waiting for his explanation.

Giving the person you loved most a name that you despised and feared—that wasn't something a normal person would do.

The moment I finished speaking, Gu Bei's face instantly darkened. "Do you think I wanted to?"

His expression turned fierce as he reached into his suit pants pocket and pulled out a few pieces of paper.

"What is this?"

I looked down. The paper was ordinary, but its contents were startling: it was entirely filled with vicious curses and threats. What surprised me even more was that the handwriting was exactly the same as the writing on Zhang Heng's notes. The crooked, slanted strokes looked like venomous snakes slithering across the page, sending a chill down the spine of anyone who read it.

"What's the meaning of this? You received notes too?" Zhang Heng snatched the pages from my hand, his eyes widening.

"No, these are just things my daughter casually scribbled," Gu Bei replied very calmly, but one could hear the deeply repressed agony in his voice.

"Your daughter wrote this? How old is your daughter?" Zhang Heng suddenly realized the implication, yanking the yellowed note from his own pocket. He waved it frantically. "Wait! Are you saying the handwriting on this was written by your daughter?!"