“Do you hate Lu Xun that much?” Lu Pei asked. “Do you have some kind of grudge against him?”
Yuan Que replied, “It’s fine. No, I don’t.”
“You seem awfully eager for something bad to happen to him. You even looked pretty happy when he got hurt.”
Yuan Que had initially intended to admit it openly. However, before he could do so, he glanced at Lu Pei’s expression and decided to play dumb instead.
“He’s my brother! My brother!” Lu Pei exclaimed. “You’re not allowed to think about killing him. You can’t hurt him and you’re not allowed to beat him up, either.”
Yuan Que looked puzzled. “Why?”
Lu Pei: “…”
“Treat my brother the same way you treat me. Got it?”
“Impossible,” Yuan Que replied.
“Why not?”
Yuan Que thought for half a second before answering, “He’s ugly.”
Lu Pei: “???”
Lu Pei was utterly shocked. The implication behind those words was unmistakable: Does that mean you’ve always thought I was ugly, too?
He sprang up from his own bed and jumped straight onto the blanket covering Yuan Que’s bed. Grabbing Yuan Que by the collar, he began shaking him back and forth. “Are you nearsighted? Or do you have cataracts? What part of him is ugly?!”
He had just finished taking a shower but his body wash had run out, so he had simply rinsed himself with water. Even so, as he moved closer, the damp, humid scent clinging to his body drifted straight into Yuan Que’s nostrils.
What a familiar smell.
It made Yuan Que feel slightly dizzy, as though his head were spinning. Lu Pei grabbed him and shook him several times and although the sound of his voice reached Yuan Que’s ears, he couldn’t understand a single word the other boy was saying.
Yuan Que’s pajamas had a loose, round neckline. The fabric was soft and roomy and the hollow at the base of his neck, where his collarbones formed a shallow depression, seemed to hold a small pool of shimmering water beneath the moonlight reflected into the room.
Almost as if possessed, Yuan Que lowered his head and tilted his face toward it.
He leaned closer until his face was pressed against that spot.
Then he sniffed.
It wasn’t the scent of a lake. It was more like a fluffy cotton cloud concealing a dose of sleeping medication. Wanting to confirm the exact nature of the scent, he took another couple of careful sniffs.
The soft, faint fragrance made his head spin.
Lu Pei: “…”
His brain had completely crashed.
For the moment, Lu Pei had no time to worry about whether he was ugly or not. Instead, he stared at Yuan Que in horror. “What are you doing?!”
“You smell good,” Yuan Que said. “Really good.”
“I don’t wear perfume!”
Yuan Que repeated himself with absolute certainty. “You smell good.”
Then he answered Lu Pei’s earlier question. “He’s ugly. You’re good looking.”
Lu Pei immediately retreated, his expression becoming indescribably complicated. “Uh, you… you’re not, ? The way you talk is way too GAY. Do you actually like men? I mean, like Mammoth and Ren Yao?”
“I don’t like them. No.”
Lu Pei fell into deep thought.
Yuan Que had said that he smelled good. Could he simply be stating a fact?
So far, the only information Lu Pei had obtained about himself was that he was the younger brother of Lu Xun, who had gone missing and whose whereabouts remained unknown. Could there be some hidden storyline involving him? For example, perhaps his blood had a special fragrance and could be used to make medicine? Was he a genetically modified human?
【Lu Pei had a penchant for indulging in some rather vicious flights of self importance. At this very moment, he had already forgotten that his elder brother’s physical fitness scores were off the charts, while he himself had spent his entire life struggling to survive physical fitness tests.
If there was a genetically enhanced human here, it certainly wasn’t him.】
Lu Pei: “…”
Damn spoilers, taking another jab at him.
Still, the reminder had brought something else to his attention.
“Oh, right. You were shot…”
Lu Pei suddenly looked startled. His gaze swept across Yuan Que’s chest, only for him to discover that the wound had already healed.
The same was true of his leg. The only remaining evidence of the bullets was the holes they had torn through his clothes. Beneath the damaged fabric, the skin had returned to its original, unblemished state, without even a scar left behind.
“When I pass out, I don’t get injured,” Yuan Que explained.
He showed Lu Pei an old scar on the outer side of his forearm.
“Did you get this injury while you were in your normal state?” Lu Pei asked.
“Mm.”
Simply put, Yuan Que was still a normal person under ordinary circumstances. However, once he entered a comatose state, he seemed to acquire an extraordinarily powerful healing ability along with an immense degree of aggression. It was almost like an automatic self repair mechanism that took over whenever he lost consciousness. No wonder he could take poison without dying.
Lu Pei fell into thoughtful contemplation. He needed to come up with a reasonable, well supported explanation that he could give Wei Lang and the others to account for the abnormalities in Yuan Que’s body.
Yuan Que suddenly asked, “What’s your real name?”
Lu Pei replied, “Oh.”
He picked up a sheet of memo paper and a ballpoint pen from the bedside table and wrote down his full name. “My name is Lu Pei. The ‘Pei’ in my name means abundant, like luxuriant water plants. It means flourishing and flourishing means having a lot of something.”
Lu Pei hadn’t expected Yuan Que to remember his name. All he hoped was that the next time they met, Yuan Que wouldn’t point at the character ‘Pei’ and pronounce it as ‘Shi’ instead.
However, Yuan Que glanced at the paper, took the pen from him and actually managed to write those two characters himself.
He copied Lu Pei’s handwriting almost as if he were making a rubbing of the original. He even imitated Lu Pei’s distinctive habit of writing the water radical with three separate dots, reproducing the tiny details with remarkable accuracy.
Lu Pei exclaimed, “You learn really fast!”
“It’s simple,” Yuan Que replied.
Lu Pei wrote down the name ‘Lu Xun’ next. “This is my brother’s name.” He tore off a fresh sheet of paper and held it out to Yuan Que encouragingly. “Come on, write it once.”
“I can’t.”
Lu Pei stared at him. “You just said it was simple!”
“It’s difficult.”
Yuan Que genuinely disliked Lu Xun, although Lu Xun didn’t like him either. Lu Pei could only feel helpless about the situation. He had hoped that the two of them would be able to get along peacefully but sometimes, when it came to human relationships, people could decide whether they liked or disliked someone at first sight. All he could do was hope that their attitudes toward each other might change someday.
He suggested, “Since you’re awake now, let’s go back to Sunny Hospital. It’s really lively over there at the moment.”
The following day.
The Upper District, Warm Sun Main City.
Inside a luxurious villa, game controllers and data cables lay scattered across the carpet. Five or six young men lounged lazily on the sofas, looking thoroughly relaxed after what appeared to have been an extended gaming session. With the screen projection turned off, the television had returned to broadcasting the news as usual.
Reports about Sunny Hospital and Lu Xun were being replayed across one television station after another, as though the entire media industry had become caught in an endless loop.
“Midnight Atrocity! Drug Addicts Attack Sunny Hospital in the Lower District in Search of ‘Psilocybin’… We cannot help but question whether psilocybin itself…”
Beep. The channel changed.
“Just as the bloody chaos threatened to escalate, the situation took an unexpected turn. Former Alliance Major General Lu Xun subdued five violent assailants, ensuring the safety of more than a hundred patients at Sunny Hospital…”
Beep. The channel changed again.
“What Mr. Lu Xun accomplished single handedly was equivalent to a flawless operation carried out by an entire tactical squad…”
“Fuck!” Rong Yao, who was holding the remote control, exclaimed irritably. “Why is Lu Xun everywhere I look?”
The purple haired young man sitting beside him chimed in, “It’s like he just won’t leave us alone.”
“Great. I’m going to get another lecture when I go home.” Wan Lü, who had a head of green hair, took a sip of his cola and imitated his father’s voice, lowering his tone into a stern, disapproving growl. “‘If you had even one tenth of Lu Xun’s excellence and self discipline, we would have so much less to worry about! You should learn from him!’”
Rong Yao gave a disdainful snort. “Learn from him? You mean learn how to get himself thrown into Shencheng Prison?”
Everyone present had grown up in Lu Xun’s shadow, so the moment Rong Yao said that, the entire group burst into delighted, schadenfreude filled laughter.
“Hey.” Wan Lü suddenly spoke up. “Look at that person. Doesn’t he look a little like Lu Pei?”
On the television, a reporter was interviewing the bystanders gathered outside the hospital. The camera panned across the crowd from an elevated angle.
Among them stood a young man with long black hair who was particularly tall and conspicuous. Beside him was a young man whose hair had been dyed in a gradient of different shades, while his skin was so pale that it resembled a patch of snow illuminated by a lamp.
“He really does look a bit like him.”
“Should we switch back and take another look?”
They didn’t even need to change the channel again. The reporter had apparently noticed the two young men as well and was already moving toward them with a microphone.
“Hello.”
Lu Pei had been standing on tiptoe, trying to peer through the hospital entrance. When the reporter suddenly addressed him, he looked somewhat bewildered.
Even through the horizontally stretched footage, with its poor lighting and distorted proportions, his facial features remained remarkably unchanged. The dim camera image captured him without a word yet the subtle movement of his eyes was enough to reveal his confusion at being approached so unexpectedly.
It was a face that everyone sitting in the villa knew very well.
The instant his face appeared in a close up, the entire group was stunned.
“May I ask you…” the reporter began.
Lu Pei pointed at his own throat and shook his head with a smile.
“Ah, you’re a mute? I’m terribly sorry for disturbing you,” the reporter apologized.
“Why the hell is he pretending to be mute?! He’s so damn dramatic! That’s him, isn’t it?!” Wan Lü exclaimed in shock. “Since when did Lu Pei go to the Lower District? Wasn’t he supposed to spend a few days in the Reeducation Center?”
“He probably went down there with his brother.”
“Where else could he show his face in the Upper District now? And look at that ridiculous grayish white, multicolored hair of his. It doesn’t even look like a proper color. What a joke.”
As they exchanged these snide remarks, the young men kept sneaking glances at Rong Yao, secretly watching his reaction.
They all knew that Rong Yao and Lu Pei were sworn enemies. Moreover, their conflict wasn’t limited to the two of them alone. Rong Yao’s elder brother, Rong Yue, was also a political rival of Lu Xun’s. The two families had never gotten along.
There was simply too much history between Rong Yao and Lu Pei. Now that he had learned Lu Pei had fallen so far as to end up in the Lower District, Rong Yao would undoubtedly want to take advantage of the situation and kick him while he was down.
Sure enough, Rong Yao let out a satisfied laugh. “Heh.”
“I’m going to pay him a visit.”
Lu Pei had deliberately gone to the hospital for two reasons. First, he wanted to watch the commotion and confirm that everything was unfolding according to the plan he had devised. Second, he needed to find Lin Qiuge.
Lin Qiuge had been working the night shift in the hospital’s pharmacy department and had only finished at six in the morning. After working through the entire night, he looked like a wilted cabbage. His complexion had turned sallow, dark circles shadowed his eyes and he seemed utterly devoid of vitality.
When he saw Lu Pei and Yuan Que approaching, he let his shoulders droop and struggled to raise one hand in a perfunctory greeting.
Lu Pei asked, “Why do you look so lifeless?”
Lin Qiuge answered in a barely audible voice, “Exhausted…”
Lu Pei took the sampling device out of his pocket.
The moment Lin Qiuge saw it, his eyes, which had been almost completely obscured by his dark circles, lit up with a sudden, dazzling gleam.
Lu Pei said, “All right, then. Go and get some proper rest. We can talk later.”
“No, no, no, no!” Lin Qiuge immediately protested. “There’s no problem at all! I’m full of energy! We can do it right now!”
His back straightened, his head lifted and all traces of his earlier listlessness vanished. Bursting with renewed energy, Lin Qiuge stretched both hands toward Lu Pei, his eyes filled with an almost unparalleled longing.
Lu Pei casually toyed with the sampling device. The transparent liquid inside the container rolled back and forth as he turned it in his hands but he showed no intention of handing it over.
“I heard from Gray that you used to research brain computer interfaces and human body chips. You were a senior researcher at Pseudo Tech. You only ended up working at a hospital in the Lower District after you got into trouble and were fired,” Lu Pei said.
Lin Qiuge replied, “…Yes.”
Lu Pei continued, “Why did you suddenly become so interested in getting your hands on psilocybin?”
“Research purposes.”
Lu Pei slipped the sampling device back into his pocket. “That’s not a good enough explanation to convince me.”
“You promised me!” Lin Qiuge hurriedly reminded him. “I gave you the access key and helped you with the surveillance. In exchange, after you infiltrated the place, you were supposed to give me…”
“First, tell me about the progress of your research and its purpose. Everything. I want to know all of it.”
Lin Qiuge: “…”
Lin Qiuge had come from the Upper District. He possessed an outstanding academic background and had once worked for a top tier technology company. Obtaining a residential certificate for the Sunlight Zone, something You Rulan could only dream of, would have been an easy matter for someone like him.
So why had he abandoned such a comfortable life and hidden himself away in the Lower District?
Lin Qiuge remained silent, torn between conflicting thoughts as an internal battle raged in his mind.
Then Lu Pei took out another sampling device, this one even smaller than the first, with a capacity of only two milliliters.
However, the liquid inside it was a deep purple.
It was concentrated psilocybin solution.
“You’ve already managed to get your hands on it?!” Lin Qiuge exclaimed in astonishment. “That quickly?!”
Lu Pei replied, “I never let an opportunity pass me by. It was just a little something I picked up along the way.”
Lin Qiuge recalled that before Wen Tiannan had smashed the original vial, it had passed through Lu Pei’s hands.
Even before Lin Qiuge had met him, this guy had already secretly retained a sample for some future contingency.
Although they hadn’t known each other for very long, Lin Qiuge had already seen enough of human nature to recognize that Lu Pei was an exceptionally calculating individual. No one could tell when he had started making preparations or how far ahead he had planned. He was the sort of person who could devise countless ways to make others act according to his wishes.
“…Fine.” Lin Qiuge finally admitted defeat. “I’ll take you there.”
Lin Qiuge’s secret ‘base’ was located about twenty kilometers east of Sunny Hospital, somewhere along a residential street lined with apartment buildings. It was an underground research facility.
The entrance consisted of nothing more than an ordinary sheet metal door. It looked exactly like the cellar doors commonly found in ordinary households, where people stored ingredients and jars of wine. There was nothing remarkable about it at all.
The metal door was less than 1.9 meters tall, forcing Yuan Que to lower his head slightly to avoid knocking it against the frame.
Lu Pei had assumed that the space below would be just as shabby and unremarkable as the entrance. What he discovered instead was completely beyond his expectations.
Beyond the metal door were three additional doors. The innermost one opened for them after an iris recognition scan.
The main hall contained a towering, suspended matrix that stretched from the floor all the way toward the ceiling. Metal objects resembling microchips floated weightlessly within an antigravity field, suspended in the air as though the laws of gravity no longer applied to them.
“Come in,” Lin Qiuge said.
Lu Pei looked around in amazement. “Wow. This place is pretty hardcore.”
Farther inside, a long corridor lined with animal enclosures stretched toward the experimental area.
Snakes, birds, frogs, reptiles…
Every animal looked vaguely familiar yet there was something strangely unfamiliar about each of them, as though they resembled ordinary species without quite being the same. Lu Pei’s gaze passed over them one by one and gradually, he understood.
“Are all of these species excluded from the approved safety list?” Lu Pei asked.
Lin Qiuge replied, “Yes. The ones out here are my pets.”
Yuan Que asked, “The safety list?”
Lu Pei explained, “He smuggles prohibited plants and animals from outside the city. It’s illegal.”
The animal enclosures at the end of the corridor were somewhat larger than the others. Inside them were small felines.
When Lu Pei turned his head, he noticed two large, fluffy gray cats confined in a glass enclosure on the left. The male had its teeth clamped around the back of the female’s neck, holding her firmly beneath its body.
The two cats were in the middle of mating, putting on quite a show.
“Wow, things are getting intense,” Lu Pei remarked. “It’s winter right now. Can they still go into heat?”
“These two belong to a newly discovered feline species. Their fur is fluffy and grayish white, resembling mist, which is why they’ve been named ‘mist cats,’” Lin Qiuge explained. “Under certain conditions, the bodily fluids of a male mist cat have a ‘forced estrus inducing’ effect. They can forcibly induce a female into heat. As a result, mating is a normal occurrence for them throughout the entire year, regardless of the season.”
“‘Forced estrus induction’ has already been observed in many species. It’s an evolutionary adaptation in reproductive genes that has emerged as a result of ecological pollution.”
“Their bodily fluids alone can induce estrus?” Lu Pei asked. “If humans had this ability, would that mean that if a man liked someone, all he would have to do was kiss that person? Even if the other person didn’t like him back, they would still end up feeling all dizzy and confused and then proceed to do something indescribable?”
Lin Qiuge replied, “Exactly.”
Lu Pei sighed with feeling. “That’s downright shameless!”