The Emperor’s Runaway Lover

Bai Mo felt slightly taken aback. “What do you mean?”

Fu Yucheng didn’t say a word. He fiddled with the little plastic cube silently, as if he hadn’t heard the question at all.

Just when Bai Mo thought he would not answer at all, the man spoke in a low voice. “I’ve only heard rumors about the messy dealings in the White Rose Palace. It’s all gossip from unknown sources, so of course there’s no real knowledge behind it.”

Bai Mo stared at him suspiciously. “But, you just clearly-”

“It’s too late for talking, it’s time to go to bed.” Fu Yucheng directly interrupted the other. He threw away the cube he was holding, and stretched his arms above his head. “Noob,1 turn on sleep mode.”

“Beep beep beep, sleep mode activated. Lights off, sound insulation on.”

The interior of the vehicle suddenly went dark, and the noise coming from the outside became muffled.

Bai Mo opened his mouth, still wanting to say something. However, he heard Fu Yucheng sigh and mutter, “Brat, don’t worry about the White Rose Palace. Go to sleep.”

He sounded disinterested and very tired.

Bai Mo was silent for a while. In the end, he didn’t ask anything, and only whispered, “Okay.”

He could feel that Fu Yucheng was lying. He definitely had a complicated relationship with the White Rose Palace.

However, if he didn’t want to talk about it, then, then fine.

After all, Fu Yucheng might not consider him close.

For some reason, the boy felt a bit choked up.

In the darkness, Fu Yucheng seemed to toss and turn for a while. “I will go to Fatty Wu’s to buy a roll of metal tape in a couple days. After you put it on, it’ll block the chip from receiving Rong’s instructions. In the future, should the situation ever arise, you will not be controlled by others and become their killing machine.”

“Alright, got it.” Bai Mo curled up under the quilt, sounding sulky.

The van was quiet and dark. After a while, Fu Yucheng’s breathing gradually evened out, and, in the calm atmosphere, it sounded calm and distant.

But Bai Mo couldn’t sleep.

The boy wrapped himself up in the quilt and turned over and over on the bed, unable to stop speculating about the relationship between Fu Yucheng and the Rong family.

Did he know the Rong family?

He seemed to be familiar with the Ecoregions, could he have grown up there?

Then why did he come to Earth? Was it to get away from the Rong family or was he forced by them?

Bai Mo’s thoughts ran wild. After who knows how long, he finally started to feel sleepy, but then his ear picked up the low sound of an engine.

In sleep mode, the sound insulation of the compartment was very good, but Bai Mo’s senses were extremely sharp so it’d be impossible for him to miss it.

A soft, but high pitched sound of brakes came from the outside, startling him, and he suddenly felt completely awake. He listened carefully. It seemed like a car had parked next to their off-road vehicle.

After the car stopped, the sound of a door opening followed, along with slow creeping footsteps, and something like a pipe was getting dragged across the ground.

The footsteps gradually moved  to the rear of their vehicle. The person was approaching the water tank at the back.

The boy pursed his lips and got out of bed, silently climbing down the ladder.

Gently, he walked up to the sofa, shaking the sleeping man. “Yu-ge, wake up, someone’s coming.”

“Fine,” Fu Yucheng muttered in a daze, rolling over as if he wanted to go back to sleep again.

Bai Mo had no choice but to push him hard once more.

This time he pushed against the other’s bare shoulders. Bai Mo’s body temperature was naturally low, and his hands were always cold. Fu Yucheng suddenly shrank under the warm bedding, freezing up for a moment before reluctantly opening his eyes at last.

“Why aren’t you asleep even though it’s the middle of the night? What, did you wet the bed?” He said weakly, mussing up his messy hair. “First of all, I don’t have diapers in the car.”

“…” Bai Mo paused, speechless, before whispering, “Someone just parked a car outside, and I heard someone get off and mess with the valve of our water tank. He might be trying to steal our water. Or poison it.”

“Oh, is that so?” Fu Yucheng rubbed his eyes slowly, seemingly not worried at all.

Bai Mo heard something again. He turned and walked to the window, gently pulling down the shutters to peek at the back of the car.

He saw a huge tank truck parked next to their off-road vehicle, and the bald Aaron, He Lei’s thug, holding a pipe in his hand, about to plug it into their vehicle’s water tank valve.

“It’s Aaron, the bald guy.” Bai Mo turned his head to look at Fu Yucheng. “He wants to steal our water.”

“It’s probably that boy, He Lei, getting frustrated and sending his thug here to pick a fight.” Fu Yucheng yawned, and with sleepy eyes he said, “Let him go ahead, don’t worry.”

Bai Mo was anxious, and involuntarily raised his voice. “No, they can’t be allowed to bully people like this! Even if you don’t care, I’m going to go down and teach him a lesson.”

Fu Yucheng glanced at him, amused. “Brat, that sounds fantastic. Exactly how do you intend to kill him and get rid of him?”

Bai Mo looked away and was silent for a long time, with a tense expression on his little white face.

“Ah, you brat, you’re a real pain in the ass.” Fu Yucheng sighed helplessly and motioned for him to come over. “Come here.”

Bai Mo, after hesitating, walked to the man.

Fu Yucheng looked at him, suddenly smiling slightly. For some reason, Bai Mo felt like the smile was very mean spirited.

“Little Mo, didn’t I tell you already that I modified this vehicle by myself? To put it simply, in this car, the locations of the clear water and black water tank are switched.”

Bai Mo had a frown on his face. “Switched?”

“That baldie, Aaron, wants to pump water from the clean water tank into his truck’s, but he has connected to the black water tank’s valve, heh. The black water tank doesn’t have standard wastewater, it has toilet water.”

He blinked. “So, you get it now?”

“…” Bai Mo stared at him, not knowing what to say for a while.

A low gurgling sound reached his ears. The poor baldie, unaware of everything, was pumping the water into his clean water tank, draining the bathroom.

“He was the one who wanted to steal water.” Fu Yucheng spread his hands with an innocent expression. “If anything goes wrong, don’t ask me, I know nothing.”

Bai Mo, looking at Fu Yucheng’s completely innocent expression, suddenly wanted to laugh for some reason. Even his gloomy mood from earlier had disappeared.

He put up a stern expression and nodded seriously. “Yes, I don’t know anything either.”

The two of them looked at each other for a moment, and suddenly laughed out loud at the same time.

Once they started, they weren’t able to stop. With the gurgling sound coming from outside the car, Fu Yucheng laughed so hard that he teared up, and Bai Mo so hard that his stomach hurt. For as long as he could remember, he had never laughed like that.

Clutching his stomach while laughing so much that he shook, he fell on the sofa, and Fu Yucheng caught his head and gave him a noogie.

The boy struggled faintly, to no avail. Suddenly, an idea struck and he reached out to poke his opponent.

“Shit, kid, you’re cheating hahahaha see if I don’t deal with you hahaha,” Fu Yucheng cursed, laughing so hard that his face was red, and attempted to fight back.

Bai Mo was surprised with his successful move. To think that Fu Yucheng, the man afraid of nothing, feared tickling and that it’d be his biggest hidden weakness.

After getting his hair messed up time and time again, he finally mastered the way to counterattack, beating the enemy into a pulp in one fell swoop.

The two rolled and quarreled for a long time, finally collapsing on the sofa, exhausted and gasping for breath.

“Okay, okay, since everything is fine, hurry and go to sleep.” After laughing so much, Fu Yucheng, slumped on the sofa, let out a big yawn and kicked Bai Mo. “Children have to hurry up and sleep. Otherwise, later, when you don’t grow tall and no girl wants you, it’ll be too late to cry.”

A few days passed, calm and uneventful.

The only news was that in a certain street nearby where the baldie’s tank truck was originally parked, there was just an empty spot for a long time. From time to time, idle people passing by would point it out and say, “I heard that Aaron’s RV broke down and was sent to the garage for repairs.”

“Wow, isn’t his car very good? Why did it break?”

“People say that there was a problem with the water tank, and it had to be disassembled and repaired, a real mess. I saw Aaron’s face when it happened, it was so ugly. He was pissed.”2

“Hasn’t he been so unlucky recently?3 Let me tell you, Liu San’s family’s mother’s side does fortune telling,4 it’s very useful, tell him to go there and get his fortune read.”

When Fu Yucheng came back from Fatty Wu, he heard two aunties merrily gossipping as he walked past baldie’s parking lot.

Holding back a laugh, he looked down and hurriedly made his way back.

When he reached the street where his own RV was, he spotted Bai Mo’s figure in the distance. The boy was squatting on the front of the car, struggling with something.

Suspicious, Fu Yucheng walked over and leaned forward to take a look. “Little Mo, what are you doing?”

Bai Mo was holding a small brush in his hand, a slightly awkward expression on his face. “I was trying to see if I could fix it, but it doesn’t seem to be working all that well.”

It turned out that, when Fu Yucheng left the house early in the morning, Bai Mo was left alone with nothing to do. So he’d gone and borrowed a small bucket of paint from Aunt Zhou next door, wanting to fix the small piece of car paint that He Lei had burnt off.

It was a shame that, after working for a long time, the patch still remained visible.

Fu Yucheng smiled and rubbed the boy’s head. “Little Mo, that’s not how it works. To hide it completely, you’d have to paint the whole car. If you work on a small patch, there will be definitely traces left behind.”

“Oh, I see,” Bai Mo replied, disappointed.

He threw the brush aside casually and, in a daze, he stared at the patch, feeling a little depressed.

Why was he unable to do even such a small thing?

Fu Yucheng could guess what the boy was thinking. He had discovered long ago that the boy was a clean freak, practically a perfectionist. Someone like this was likely to obsess over things when they went wrong.5

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” He patted Bai Mo on the shoulder, and raised the paper bag in his hand. “Look, I had to sell a kidney to buy this tape.6 Do you want to put it on yourself, or should I do it?”

The tape Fu Yucheng mentioned was the metal tape that could block mind control orders.

Back in the car, Bai Mo carefully cut a piece of the tape. This thing wasn’t cheap. A small roll had cost 120 coins. Fu Yucheng almost had a heart attack.

The boy tilted his head, carefully trying to look left and right in front of the bathroom mirror. However, he was afraid of putting it on crooked, and kept hesitating about it.

Fu Yucheng watched Bai Mo work on it for a long time without getting anywhere. He got really impatient and, walking behind the boy, he grabbed the tape with his hand.

“Yu-ge, you-” Before Bai Mo could react, he felt a slightly cold sensation on the back of his neck. With a small ‘pa’, the tape covered the rose brand.

“Alright.” Carefully, Fu Yucheng smoothed out the edges. “From now on, you will have nothing to do with the Rong family. You are free.”

Bai Mo, hesitating, stretched out his hand and gently touched the cold metal tape on the back of his neck.

He thought to himself, I’m free.

I’m a free man.

For a long moment, the boy stared at himself in the mirror, then slowly turned around. He looked at the man behind him and said, “Thank you, Yu-ge.”

With a complicated expression, Fu Yucheng looked down at the other’s serious little face.

After a long time, he gently shook his head. “You don’t need to thank me. Everyone should be born free. You deserve that right. And if someone tries to take it away from you, kill them.”

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Footnotes

The quantum brain’s name was previously translated as Xiao Bai meaning little white, but it also means newbie/noob/dummy, which given Fu Yucheng’s personality seems like a plausible choice and it’s not like a robot has a name + surname. More importantly, I realized it might get mixed with Bai Mo… so I’ve retroactively translated all instances of Xiao Bai as Noob. If anyone spots any I might have missed in previous chapters, drop me a note pls!铁青 literally iron blue, it can mean angry, or scared, or sick, but mostly seems to mean angry.In the raws 水逆 literally mercury retrograde, it means having bad fortune.刘三娘家那口子，算命特灵 I hope I interpreted this line right, I’ve been told it sounds very grandma-like.Original 钻牛角尖, in a sense of refusing to move on when something doesn’t go your way.Not literally, it sounds equally dramatic in Chinese 大出血.