Late at night, in a men’s dormitory in the west district of A University’s campus, only five minutes remained before the 11:00 PM lockout.
A figure vaulted over the low wall at the back of the campus and began hurrying toward the men’s dormitory building.
Yet the ground floor of the dormitory, which should have been deserted at this hour, had several young people gathered around, chatting with the dorm supervisor.
Whether intentionally or not, they casually blocked the supervisor’s line of sight, surrounding him completely so that the person outside went unnoticed.
When Jian Yue reached the bottom of the dormitory building and saw this scene, he instinctively lightened his footsteps.
He saw that among the group chatting with the supervisor, someone was quietly glancing in his direction, tilting his chin to signal him to hurry inside.
Jian Yue quickly walked into the building and down the corridor. Only after confirming the supervisor hadn’t seen him did he quietly nod toward the other person.
Only after doing all this did he slowly calm the racing heartbeat from his sprint.
Panting heavily, he climbed the stairs slowly.
He could even hear the group behind him saying goodbye to the supervisor, their chatter growing louder as they headed upstairs. Ignoring the supervisor’s angry shouts telling them to keep it down, they climbed up with the youthful energy unique to their age.
The distance between the two groups gradually closed.
Though those few had been laughing and chatting the whole way, their pace was anything but slow. Within a few steps they caught up to Jian Yue, who had deliberately slowed down, and on the landing their eyes met.
Upturned, bright fox eyes, sharp and tilted like almonds yet still rounded. The stairwell’s overhead light spilled over the young man, and where it fell on his fair skin, it revealed a bright, translucent glow.
A beautiful face appeared before them.
His features carried a hint of cold, aloof elegance for a moment, he looked like an exquisite, serene piece of porcelain under a spotlight.
The air fell briefly silent.
Jian Yue blinked. Faced with several people staring at him inexplicably without saying a word, he had no choice but to break the ice himself: “Thanks for just now.”
Only then did the few he thanked snap out of their daze, though their gazes visibly darted away.
It wasn’t until one of them stepped forward and casually brought up why Jian Yue had come back late that the atmosphere among the group livened up again.
“So, you work the night shift every day at that bubble tea shop near the campus gate?” they concluded after hearing the whole story from Jian Yue.
“Mm. So if it weren’t for you all this time, I wouldn’t have gotten into the dorm. Thank you.”
“…Huh? Ah, it’s… it’s nothing.”
Under the young man’s sincere thanks, their expressions went blank for a moment. Their eyes kept darting about, carrying a subtle… unfathomable complexity of emotion.
It wasn’t until the young man in the group mentioned that they had reached his dorm floor and parted ways with them one by one that the few young men finally stopped walking beneath their feigned nonchalance, quietly watching the young man’s retreating figure, each wearing a different expression.
‘So, tell me, which of the three little vixens called those kids down? I’ll spoil him rotten for a whole second.’
Jian Yue, walking down the corridor with his back to them, was speaking expressionlessly to the system in his head.
The system, watching its host maintain a perfectly composed, politely cold-beauty facade the entire time, had its image shattered in an instant by the host’s inner thoughts, its filter crumbling to pieces.
But he was only a new system.
A new system had no right to demand that a gold-badge veteran speak seriously.
And so, maintaining as businesslike and indifferent an attitude as possible, he answered Jian Yue’s question: [Based on the details in the script, two people in that group just now matched the corresponding descriptions. Analysis indicates they are a first-year student who recently joined the student council, and several others beside him whom I’ve determined through University A’s dorm surveillance to be his roommates. In summary, there is an 80% probability that the ‘little vixen’ you speak of is Shen Yu, the student council president, one of your redemption targets.]
‘Shen Yu, huh…’ Jian Yue thought of his roommate, the student council president with his gentle demeanor and courteous manner. He mused inwardly: ‘Little Shen really is far more likable than the others…’
The system coldly regarded its host, who for some inexplicable reason had adopted the tone of a middle-aged corporate executive, its gaze lingering on that beautiful face for a second before it could no longer bear to look.
His host truly had a gift for making people who formed illusions based on his face collapse on the spot, while being utterly unable to do anything about it.
Let’s reintroduce him properly.
Jian Yue, male, a gold-badge employee of the Quick Transmigration Bureau.
According to his own claims, due to accumulated stress and other reasons, he had proactively applied to his superiors for a department transfer, which was how he ended up in the Romance Division, taking on the relatively bottomless genre of captivity fiction.
At the time, the newly hired, upstanding system had assumed his host took on this job out of a noble “if I don’t descend into hell, who will?” mentality.
But only after actually binding with his host… did he discover that this beautiful host, who looked every bit the genuine cold beauty, had come here with the intent of releasing his desi/res.
He heard that right. His host had indeed, explicitly and clearly, confessed his desi/res to him inside his own head.
A rough summary of the host’s lines at that time would be: “Where else am I going to find a mission where I bear no responsibility and get to play as hard as I want, hard enough to satisfy what I have in mind?”
That day, the system was silent for a long, long time.
But in any case, Jian Yue was a gold-badge employee.
A battle-hardened, highly experienced gold-badge employee, at that.
And so the system always harbored a peculiar yet trusting sentiment toward this host, and watched with gratification as the host took a part-time job of his own accord in order to maintain his character’s persona and the story’s plausibility.
Alright, back to the present.
Jian Yue, returning to his dorm after a long day of work, considerately lightened his footsteps, but the moment he opened the door, he was still struck speechless by the glaring brightness of the lights still on in his dorm room.
And by the time he came back to his senses, he found himself face to face with his roommate, who far from having gone to bed early, was inexplicably half out of his shirt.
The first thing that met his eyes was a patch of evenly toned, handsome wheat-colored skin.
The man’s shirt, half-hitched up to his chest, revealed a lean, powerful waist. The smooth, flowing lines of muscle, the clearly defined abs, that line running from top to bottom slid from the swell of his chest down to his waist and stomach, finally disappearing into the waistband of his pants, carrying a kind of barely-concealed eroticism.
But it was over quickly. The man glanced in his direction, then nonchalantly picked up the pajamas draped over the back of a chair, hiding his upper body once more beneath that loose fabric.
His voice carried a hint of mockery, just as cold and proud as that handsome but unkind face.
“Back already? Looks like you got lucky, didn’t get caught by the new dorm supervisor.”
Jian Yue rolled his eyes internally, but on the surface he remained calm and distant, all the ‘humor’ of his wild inner monologue gone, his whole attitude written over with reserve and indifference: “Someone helped me.”
With that, the young man tossed his shoulder bag onto the wooden desk at the foot of his lower bunk, showing no intention of explaining anything further to Mu Yansheng. Instead, he pulled back the curtain and stepped inside to change.
Watching that curtain, Mu Yansheng snorted a laugh and withdrew his gaze.
The dorm room abruptly fell into silence.
The sound of page-turning from the person in the upper bunk also stopped abruptly upon hearing the zipper moving from behind the curtain below.
Only the sound of running water from the last person in the private shower still rang out inconveniently, but it couldn’t keep the others in the room from noticing that rather obvious… sound of fabric rubbing against skin.
The bed curtains that came with the dorm bunks stretched from the top of the upper bunk all the way down to the wooden desk of the lower one, but they couldn’t completely cover the gap of a single lower leg between the floor and the curtain.
The young man’s voice came from the chair, followed by what sounded like fabric being slipped off.
And in the gaze Mu Yansheng unconsciously cast over, he could see, beneath that curtain, Jian Yue’s fair lower leg exposed to the air.
It was only for an instant.
But the sight of that long, straight leg briefly revealed was truly hard to ignore and hard to forget.
His Adam’s apple bobbed involuntarily.
Mu Yansheng’s eyes held a trace of something subtle and restrained. After a long moment, he pretended nothing had happened and withdrew his gaze, only to happen to lock eyes with that other guy in the upper bunk who was putting on an act of his own.