When they got home, Qiu Yu yawned, took off her coat, and headed for a shower.
She didn't pay attention to what Chen Ce Bai was doing. Usually, at this hour, he was either remotely mentoring other researchers from the living room or lounging on the couch reading.
Print media was nearly extinct. Most people used ultra-thin paper-like readers that perfectly mimicked the feel of real paper—if not better.
But Chen Ce Bai never used them.
He only read physical books.
He seemed to be farsighted. He rarely wore glasses while reading, preferring to rest the book on his knee, gazing down at it from above—almost like he was scrutinizing it. With his cold, sharply defined features, the angular joints of his fingers, and the subtle prominence of his wrist bones, he could read for hours—while Qiu Yu watched him for just as long.
Sometimes, it made it hard to resent his coldness.
He was cold in just the right way, hitting every note of her particular kink.
After her shower, Qiu Yu dried her hair, flopped down onto the bed, and considered browsing the web. But her neural chip had already been shut off, and she was too lazy to grab her tablet, so she simply closed her eyes and let her mind drift.
Just as she was about to doze off, she felt something press down on her waist.
Chen Ce Bai had climbed into bed too, one arm circling her waist.
In a drowsy voice, nasal and soft like she was almost pouting, Qiu Yu murmured, "Going to sleep this early?"
His arm suddenly tightened.
And then she felt his cold lips press against hers.
Every time Chen Ce Bai kissed her, she was hit by a jarring contradiction—his tongue was ice-cold, yet his kisses were hot and indulgent.
He kissed like he was devouring something—pressing hard against her lips, sucking slowly, almost obscenely. Only when their mingled saliva threatened to spill did he reluctantly pull back, swallowing loudly.
Qiu Yu flushed bright red from the kiss.
Then, his cool voice brushed against her ear: "Today, when I accessed your chip—what did you think I was trying to do?"
Up close, his voice sounded even deeper, rougher. The bass sent a tremor through her ears.
Qiu Yu snapped fully awake. Her breathing lost all rhythm.
But since he was the one who initiated it… she didn't intend to hold back.
Maybe she wasn't his equal in intellect. Alright, maybe not even close.
But in this—this particular domain—they were evenly matched.
Qiu Yu tilted her head, exposing the interface behind her ear.
She had a sweet, slightly rounded face. If her eyes had been big and droopy, she would've looked childish and perpetually youthful.
But her eyes were long and sultry, with upward-sweeping corners, adding a seductive charm that offset her otherwise innocent appearance.
Every time Chen Ce Bai met those eyes, it felt like a hook yanked his heart.
He couldn't bear to look.
Every glance made him want to grab her hair and hold her head still so she couldn't ever look away again.
He knew the thought was brutal, borderline deranged.
So he always avoided her gaze—or at least fought to suppress the feral hunger in his own.
Qiu Yu wasn't surprised. She didn't meet his eyes either.
Even right after a kiss, he could instantly pull back, wearing the cool, detached expression of someone verifying lab data.
He knew exactly what this relationship was, and so in moments like these, he never looked into her eyes.
Because eye contact could create the illusion of love.
Qiu Yu thought, Typical genius. Even in intimacy, he's more composed than I am.
Thankfully, she wasn't in too deep either.
She grabbed Chen Ce Bai's hand and guided it to the neural port behind her ear.
The port connected directly to her central nervous system. If someone forcefully jacked into it and flooded her brain with garbage data, it would burn out her neurons instantly—she'd be dead on the spot.
In other words, she had just handed her most vulnerable point directly to him.
Chen Ce Bai's fingers twitched.
Qiu Yu turned her head, looking at him with those clear, slanted eyes, lips parting slowly.
Like she was whispering a maddening incantation.
She said, "Link in."
·
Qiu Yu swore she'd never say those words again in her life.
The neural chip could modulate brain activity, stimulating dopamine release to mimic euphoria. That was the "other" kind of chip-sharing.
She had assumed it was just double the dopamine. What was there to be afraid of?
She hadn't expected it to be like this.
Cold and heat.
A flickering neural network map lighting up in sync with her brain.
Chen Ce Bai's sculpted jawline, his throat bobbing as he swallowed.
Synthetic sensation. Real sensation.
One second she was drowning in digitized waves, the next she was dragged to the surface, shivering as real-world temperature shocked her skin.
Her vision blurred. She couldn't even distinguish reality from simulation.
She reached out—and grabbed Chen Ce Bai's cold, slender cheek.
Even in the simulated world, the warmth of his skin burned her fingers, making her gasp.
By the end, Qiu Yu nearly cursed aloud: Who the hell came up with this tech?
Sick bastard.
She didn't know how much time passed before she finally came back to herself, out of the whirl of flickering signals and crashing sensations.
She felt like she'd been fished out of the ocean—hair soaked with sweat, body trembling, breath shallow.
Reaching out instinctively for him, her hand came up empty.
Chen Ce Bai had already left.
Without hesitation.
Even with all the filters Qiu Yu had built up in her mind, she found herself genuinely irritated by this behavior.
She grabbed a soft towel to wipe off her sweat, trying to steady her breathing and cool down before heading to the shower.
Modern life was inseparable from the internet. She had managed to resist checking her chip for a few hours, but finally gave in and reactivated it.
Just checking messages, she told herself. No big deal.
People who are used to being spoiled often harbor the illusion that hurting themselves somehow also hurts the people who care about them.
As the most pampered of pampered flowers, Qiu Yu felt a gleeful, guilty satisfaction the moment she switched her chip back on—like she was deliberately defying Chen Ce Bai.
Then, she got a voice call from Pei Xi.
Qiu Yu hesitated, then picked up.
"You home?" Pei Xi asked with a smile in his voice.
"Of course," she laughed.
He chuckled. "Now that we're not face to face, you can open up. What's going on with you and him?"
Qiu Yu didn't like talking about Chen Ce Bai behind his back. It felt disrespectful. If he were talking about her to another woman, she'd be furious—no matter if he spoke kindly or critically.
…but tonight, she felt an unusual urge to talk.
Maybe it was Chen Ce Bai's cool, clinical exit. It had pissed her off.
Pissed her off enough to break her own principles and talk to Pei Xi.
After a moment's thought, she tiptoed out of bed, shut the slightly ajar bedroom door, checked the bathroom—he wasn't there—and whispered like a thief, "...Can I ask what you all think about me and Chen Ce Bai?"
Pei Xi paused for a moment. "Can I be honest?"
"...Go ahead."
"I don't think it'll work out."
It wasn't a surprising answer, yet it still made Qiu Yu feel a little deflated.
Pei Xi added, "Of course, I'm biased. But seriously, Qiu Yu—think about it. When did you start learning how to invest? How much do you spend on a dress? On a meal? And before he got into biotech, how much could he afford in a month?"
"If he hadn't gotten lucky—if he hadn't gotten into our school, hadn't happened to develop the neural-blocking drug—he'd only ever see someone like you on TV."
Pei Xi paused again. His tone darkened.
"Qiu Yu, to be blunt—marrying you served two purposes for him: one, to climb the career ladder; two, maybe to satisfy some filthy, twisted desire to desecrate something beautiful."
"Before you, after you—you were, and are, completely out of his league. I don't believe that love can grow from such a blatant power imbalance."
Qiu Yu regretted opening up to him.
Pei Xi was like most people in her circle—arrogant about their status, looking down on people like Chen Ce Bai who came from poverty.
If it weren't for poor people learning biology, they'd probably be preaching about how "high-status humans" were evolving reproductive isolation.
Qiu Yu hated that mindset.
But her reason for hating it was embarrassingly simple—almost laughable.
—Because after their compatibility test ended, she and Chen Ce Bai kissed.
It wasn't even romantic. More like a strange resonance—like visiting a place from a book you've read, feeling a weird sense of familiarity that makes you think you understand it better than anyone else.
Even if the book's story and your life are worlds apart.
That's how Qiu Yu felt.
Because of that one kiss, she foolishly believed she knew Chen Ce Bai better than the others.
Not wanting to continue the conversation, she made a few vague noises of agreement, changed the topic, chatted briefly, and then hung up on Pei Xi.
Chen Ce Bai showered in the guest bathroom.
Technically, he didn't have to switch rooms. But the air in the master bedroom was too thick—an overwhelming tangle of sweat, tears, saliva, contraceptives, and that cloying-sweet trace of her blood, all woven into a dense, suffocating net that made the veins in his forehead bulge. He had to escape it.
Under the spray, he forced his eyes shut and mentally reviewed every detail of today's experiments—step by step, variable by variable. Only that level of focus could keep her—those long, beguiling eyes—from creeping into his mind.
Because even a single blurred image was enough to reignite that terrifying drive.
That overwhelming urge to hunt and destroy.
He didn't even have much sexual experience, and yet his threshold had already been stretched to something monstrous.
The ordinary didn't even come close to satisfying him anymore.
More than once, he'd nearly grabbed her by the jaw, forced her to tilt her head back and bare her throat.
He could've done it.
She would never have known that what he really wanted was to bite.
His fingers had even grazed the vein in her neck—lightly, almost absentmindedly—mapping it.
It wasn't just hunger for her blood.
It was instinct. The kind of primal drive embedded in the bones of predators.
Just like birds born with hooked beaks are compelled to peck, like beasts with fangs are made to bite.
For some predators, love and hate trigger the same reflex—to pounce, to tear.
And what he felt for Qiu Yu went far beyond anything as simple as love.
It was obsession.
Pathological.
He knew that if Qiu Yu were asked to describe herself, "innocent" wouldn't even make the list.
But she was. Utterly, dangerously innocent.
In her mind, reading widely, traveling often, and walking into a slum about to be swallowed by toxic floodwater counted as "worldly."
But she was naïve—fatally so. She didn't understand that seeing wasn't the same as living.
Words in books, no matter how raw or brutal, were still just words. You couldn't touch them. Couldn't smell the rot or feel the hunger.
And just because you set foot in a place didn't mean you understood it.
When she decided to visit that slum—the one teetering on the brink of chemical disaster—she had no idea that the area had been swept clean less than ten minutes before her arrival.
Landmines cleared. Robotic hounds deployed in sweeping grids. All homemade weapons confiscated. Every able-bodied person—man or woman, young or old—was forcibly removed.
Snipers were stationed on rooftops, in case something went wrong.
Everything she saw had been staged.
Curated by her parents to show her only what they wanted her to see.
She thought she wasn't sheltered. In reality, she was so naïve it was terrifying.
Otherwise, she never would've married him.
Chen Ce Bai turned the water to its coldest setting—so cold that the air in the already air-conditioned room filled with curling threads of frost.
Finally, the wild, near-psychotic impulses that had been clawing at him began to quiet.
He braced one hand against the tiled wall, raked the other through his wet hair, and exhaled deeply before shutting off the water.
That's when he heard Qiu Yu speaking with Pei Xi on the phone.
His hearing had been enhanced hundreds of times over—he could even hear the slight gulp in her throat as she hesitated.
…
"No matter in the past or in the future, you'll always be someone out of his reach. I don't think it's possible for real love to grow in the shadow of such a blatant power imbalance."
…
Chen Ce Bai froze.
Then he turned the water back on.
Icy jets slammed against his skull.
It took several long minutes for the storm of violence and bloodlust to ebb.
The moment he heard that sentence, he'd wanted to walk out of the bathroom and tell her everything.
Yes—he knew she was someone far out of reach.
It didn't matter if she'd never love him.
But she shouldn't have said it.
Not in front of him.
And especially not right after lying in his arms, flushed and breathless.
That—that—made him want to kill.
His mind spun with twisted visions. Every unthinkable method he could use to force her to love him.
Every violent, deranged fantasy flashing like lightning in his neural pathways.