Transmigration; Married to My Ex-Fiancé's Uncle-Chapter 267; Lu Zeyan

"Goodnight, Shuyin," he murmured into the darkness.

She didn’t answer, already lost in dreams of ancient seas and forgotten kingdoms.

Lu Yuze closed his eyes, one arm wrapped around his unusual wife, and let himself drift into sleep.

Tomorrow would bring its own challenges, demanding family members, complicated business dealings, and questions about his sudden marriage.

But tonight, there was only this: the warmth of the woman in his arms, the knowledge that the children were safe and happy down the hallway, and the quiet contentment of a house that finally felt like a home.

— — — — — —

The deterioration accelerated after midnight.

Dr. Chen made his rounds at 1 AM and found Lu Zeyan sitting up in bed, staring at his hands with the fascinated confusion of someone seeing them for the first time.

"Mr. Lu?" The doctor approached cautiously. "How are you feeling?"

Lu Zeyan looked up at him. His eyes were unfocused, vacant in a way they hadn’t been hours before. His mouth opened.

"I love you, Shuyin," he said, but the words came out flat now, mechanical. Like a recording playing on loop without any understanding of its meaning.

"Can you tell me your name?" Dr. Chen asked, pulling out his penlight.

Lu Zeyan blinked at the light, pupils contracting appropriately. But his expression remained blank.

"I love you, Shuyin," he repeated.

"What’s your mother’s name?"

Nothing. Not even the compulsive phrase this time. Just empty eyes staring at the doctor like he was speaking a foreign language.

Dr. Chen felt a chill run down his spine. "Mr. Lu, can you understand me?"

Lu Zeyan’s gaze drifted away from the doctor, back to his hands. He lifted one, turning it over slowly, examining it with childlike wonder. Then he tried to put his fingers in his mouth.

"Mr. Lu, no...." Dr. Chen gently pulled his hand away.

Lu Zeyan made a sound, not words, just a confused whimper. His face crumpled, and suddenly he was crying, tears streaming down his cheeks, but not the desperate, aware tears from earlier. These were the helpless tears of an infant who didn’t understand why something had been taken away.

"Get me a neurologist," Dr. Chen said to the nurse in the doorway, his voice tight. "Now. And run another CT, full MRI, everything. Something is catastrophically wrong."

By 2 AM, the medical team was in crisis mode.

The scans still showed nothing. No tumors, no bleeding, no strokes, no physical explanation for the complete cognitive collapse they were witnessing.

But the evidence was undeniable.

Lu Zeyan could no longer speak beyond that single phrase, and even that was becoming less frequent, less coherent. He couldn’t follow simple commands. Couldn’t identify objects. Couldn’t perform basic tasks like holding a cup or using utensils.

When the neurologist tested his reflexes, Lu Zeyan giggled, actually giggled, at the sensation of the reflex hammer, like a baby discovering a new ticklish spot.

"This is impossible," the neurologist said, studying the charts. "You don’t go from fully functional adult to this level of cognitive impairment overnight. Not without massive physical trauma. Not without something showing up on imaging."

"But he has," Dr. Chen replied grimly. "So what do we tell the family?"

The family. The Lu family had been notified and were on their way once again after leaving the hospital vicinity. Along with, apparently, half the city’s social elite, all desperate to know what had happened to Lu Zeyan.

In the room, Lu Zeyan sat on the bed, hospital gown askew, playing with the IV line in his arm with fascinated concentration. A nurse had tried to stop him three times, but he kept returning to it, pulling at the tape, mesmerized by the way it stuck and unstuck.

His thoughts, what remained of them, were formless. Shapes without meaning. Colors without names.

He didn’t remember who he was. Didn’t remember the concept of "self" at all.

The face that sometimes appeared in his mind, beautiful, cold, triumphant, meant nothing to him now. Just an image without context, like a picture in a book he couldn’t read.

When he was hungry, he cried. When he was uncomfortable, he cried. When he wanted attention, he cried.

The words "I love you, Shuyin" still formed sometimes, muscle memory in his mouth, but they were just sounds now. Meaningless noises his throat made, no different from any other babbling.

A nurse brought him light, soft foods, easy to manage. She tried to hand him a spoon.

Lu Zeyan looked at it blankly. Turned it over in his hands. Tried to put the handle in his mouth.

"No, sweetie," the nurse said gently, her professional demeanor cracking slightly. She’d seen stroke victims, dementia patients, and traumatic brain injuries. But never anything like this. Never someone who’d been completely functional twelve hours ago reduced to... this. "Like this."

She demonstrated, scooping some congee onto the spoon.

Lu Zeyan watched with mild interest, the same way a toddler might watch a butterfly. When she brought the spoon to his mouth, he accepted the food, but immediately tried to grab the spoon with both hands, getting congee all over his gown and the sheets.

"It’s okay," the nurse murmured, though her eyes were bright with unshed tears. "We’ll figure this out."

But she didn’t sound like she believed it.

Lu Zeyan’s mother arrived soon after.

She swept into the room in full designer armor, Chanel suit, perfect hair, the bearing of someone who’d never been denied anything in her life. She took one look at her son, sitting on the bed with food smeared on his face, making soft babbling sounds, and stopped dead. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

In accompaniment was her husband and Lu Zeyan’s siblings and other family members.

"What..." Her voice was barely a whisper. "What happened to him?"

Dr. Chen, who’d been waiting for her, stepped forward. "Mrs. Lu, perhaps we should speak in my office...."

"What happened to my son?" Her voice rose sharply, all her careful composure shattering. "He was just fine when we left here. You said his condition was stable... He was doing fine!"