The sea breeze blew, and the sunlight shone clear and bright.
Waves crashed against the breakwater, exploding into tiny droplets. When a starship came into berth, the enormous machinery roared to life, and clouds of superheated white vapor swallowed the entire freshwater basin, turning it into a misty maze of steaming clouds and rosy haze.
When the secretary-general sent the assignment to the group chat, Yun Shui was slacking off in a little pop-up window, watching a drama.
The message icon shook so violently that she nearly hit the button for external audio.
She hurriedly closed the drama window. Just then, the secretary-general pushed open the door, tablet in hand and a grave expression on his face. He pointed at her from across the room.
“Yun Shui, take down every post I sent you. All of them. Quickly.”
Yun Shui nodded frantically. She immediately connected to the internal network and began deleting posts.
She stared at the ones her superior had forwarded to her:
**“Ten Signs Commander Jiang Has Suspected Sexual Dysfunction.”**
**“Why Are the Space Pirates Boldly Calling Him Out? The Real Reason Revealed.”**
The ability of modern netizens to follow clues and tease out hidden connections startled her so badly that she nearly dropped her mouse.
Some anonymous mole in the fleet had apparently leaked information portraying Commander Jiang Xie as the number-one merciless, emotionless fighting machine in the entire universe—and had gone so far as to maliciously insinuate that he suffered from a certain “condition.”
The posts were written with such convincing detail that, at first glance, they almost sounded credible.
And the repost counts were already frighteningly high.
The comments were even worse, each one more brilliantly ridiculous than the last.
By the time Yun Shui finished banning the posts, exhausted but unable to stop laughing, it was already quitting time.
Outside the window, several messenger pigeons were darting about in wild disarray.
Her gaze followed the anxious circling of the white birds.
She dawdled over shutting down her computer. One by one, her coworkers left the office on schedule, and the room quickly fell silent.
Fleet clerical work was wonderfully easy. The workload wasn’t heavy, the position was secure, and the pay was modest but so were the responsibilities.
Back when Yun Shui had taken the national civil-service exam, her score had been neither high nor low. In the end, she’d gone to university for a niche major. With the Alliance economy still recovering, she’d bounced around for a while after graduation before finally deciding to take the civil-service exam.
But the civil service was brutally competitive.
The fleet, on the other hand, required physical fitness tests and stationed its personnel permanently at fortresses where living conditions were hardly ideal. Somehow, Yun Shui had stumbled into the job by accident.
Her daily duties consisted of handling sudden public-relations crises for the fleet, writing combat reports for the fleet commander, drafting various ideological reports, and occasionally organizing activities.
The Alliance as a whole was peaceful. The region around the fortress saw only occasional outbreaks of small-scale space-pirate activity.
Yun Shui was still dragging her feet while tidying up when the communicator rang.
She stared at the three words flashing across the screen—
**Fleet Commander.**
With the grim determination of someone facing her own execution, she gave the screen a tiny swipe.
The communicator had been lying face-down on the desk. Yun Shui habitually swiped in one direction, and by the time she released her finger, the call button had turned red.
She froze.
Then, filled with immediate regret, she hurriedly called back.
A cool, puzzled voice came through the receiver.
“Yun Shui, did you just hang up on me?”
Just hearing that voice made cold sweat break out across Yun Shui’s forehead.
“No! I swiped the wrong way.”
There was a brief silence.
The fleet commander gave the foolish young university graduate a laugh whose meaning was impossible to decipher.
“Come over. Now.”
Yun Shui’s fingers unconsciously dug into her palm as she tried to summon her courage.
“General, it’s already quitting time.”
The fleet commander scoffed.
“I told you it’s overtime. There’s overtime pay.”
Normally, Yun Shui would have meekly agreed by now.
But today, for once, she resisted.
“Today… um, I’m not feeling very well…”
The fleet commander paused.
When he spoke again, the electronic distortion of the communicator lent his voice an oddly gentle quality.
“You’re really not coming?”
Yun Shui gritted her teeth.
“N-no. Probably not.”
“Reason for leave?”
Yun Shui braced herself and said, “I’m really not feeling well.”
A lie.
The real reason was that Yun Shui had recently begun to suspect that the fleet commander was flirting with her.
Sorry.
She knew it was an incredibly presumptuous thing to think, and she didn’t want to think that way either.
She was just an extremely ordinary girl.
But with the fleet commander’s face and that physique, Yun Shui wasn’t confident she could guarantee herself against making a mistake.
She didn’t want to be one of those people who were convinced everyone secretly had a crush on them, either—people so self-important that they assumed someone from an entirely different social stratum harbored improper thoughts about them.
It was undignified.
But the fact remained that the fleet commander had really, truly been acting strange lately.
The fleet commander always wore a perfectly fitted uniform, every button fastened with meticulous precision. His eyes were normally as cold as frost, yet whenever he looked at her, there was always some inexplicable softness in them.
Different.
He really was different with her.
The fleet commander was naturally sharp-tongued. Sarcasm and cutting remarks were his favorite expressions. The entire fleet had been scolded by him so thoroughly that they were practically a flock of quails too frightened to raise their heads.
His tactics were as vicious as his temper.
He only had to lift his chin, and his tongue was so poisonous that if he licked it himself, he’d probably ascend to heaven on the spot.
And yet he hadn’t insulted Yun Shui in a very long time.
Not only had he stopped insulting her, he had even developed a strange sort of patient tolerance toward her.
It was deeply suspicious.
A year ago, when Yun Shui had first joined the fleet, she hadn’t yet adjusted to fortress life. The entire secretarial office revolved around the fleet commander, and as a clerical employee who wasn’t a technical specialist, Yun Shui had been buried under a mountain of miscellaneous work.
When things were quiet, there was nothing to do.
When manpower was short, however, she was also expected to double as one of the fleet commander’s assistants.
Whenever she had to write a report, she’d cautiously approach him with some idiotic question, only to be met with a cold laugh.
“Yun Shui.”
The fleet commander had glanced at her name badge and called her by name without expression.
At the time, she had secretly peeked at his monitor and seen an email he was sending to the Logistics Department. The wording was breathtakingly arrogant.
“You write the report. You’re responsible for explaining it. So why are you coming to ask me?”
He didn’t even look at her.
“Does the secretarial office and the adjutant’s office employ you all simply so I can spend every day looking at a group of people wearing that intellectually deficient expression while begging for a meal?”
Yun Shui stared at the almost cruel line of his lips.
Back then, she had been a psychologically fragile rookie, fresh out of university, still naive and painfully innocent. She hadn’t yet learned how to withstand such blunt mockery.
All she could do was mumble an explanation.
“The emergency jump needs approval, but, General, you didn’t—”
“Miss.”
The fleet commander no longer looked at her.
His tone was flat and matter-of-fact.
“If I’d left the warship sitting in pirate fire waiting for the Operations Department to approve it, I’d be holding my own urn right now while writing my obituary.”
He paused.
“I believe your current assignment is to use bureaucratic prose to patch up my report. I want to see the first draft by the end of today.”
The man stopped.
His exceptional eyesight caught the helpless look in the girl’s eyes.
His gaze swept over Yun Shui’s dark circles, left behind by staying up the previous night watching low-calorie short videos, then dropped to her nervously twitching leg.
His vision was sharp enough to make out a little pig’s snout printed on the socks peeking out above her ankle.
He gave her terrible taste a look of utter disdain and sent her away.
It was the first time in years that Yun Shui had been so close to him.
Her misty little feelings from adolescence had suddenly been exposed like the coordinates of a cruiser left sitting beneath a space pirate’s guns.
One moment of distraction, and they were blasted to ashes.
She had scurried away like a dejected little animal.
She was neither particularly intelligent nor blessed with much emotional intelligence. Her personality was bland, and she simply didn’t possess the natural advantages necessary to emerge victorious in the brutal competition of romance.
Instead, as the little voice inside her grew louder and louder, telling her to retreat, she had single-handedly buried the crush she’d had in her youth.
She refused to let anyone notice even the slightest hint of it.
Fortunately, the fleet commander looked down on everyone equally.
He came from a prestigious family and stood head and shoulders above ordinary people.
Yun Shui figured that if everyone else looked like ants to him, then, in his own mind, he must be some magnificent, strutting rooster.
But then, a month ago, the exacting fleet commander changed.
He was still imposing.
Still lofty.
Still untouchably above everyone else.
Only now, whenever he faced Yun Shui, it was as though someone had whacked him over the head with a frying pan.
He stopped speaking harshly to her.
Instead, he became almost… pleasant.
If the sun hadn’t continued rising in the east every morning, Yun Shui would have thought she was dreaming.
Or hallucinating.
Or the victim of some elaborate conspiracy.
The conspiracy had lasted an entire month.
When Yun Shui handed in a report, the fleet commander’s temple twitched.
He was clearly restraining himself from making a sarcastic remark.
He narrowed his eyes slightly and scrutinized the document’s automatically generated red and green underlines with an extremely critical expression.
After a full year of training, Yun Shui’s reports had finally become just barely acceptable.
So he let her off.
He told her to send it to his inbox.
Then he informed her that there was an auction banquet that evening.
That was where the recent strangeness had begun.
During her entire first year, Yun Shui had never attended one of those extravagant military receptions.
The Alliance still generally advocated frugality. As a low-ranking civil servant, Yun Shui had no idea what she was supposed to do at a banquet like that.
She couldn’t hold her liquor.
She couldn’t produce an auspicious phrase even after three sentences of conversation.
She was, in every respect, the quintessential bottom-rung office worker.
All she could do was stare blankly at the gilded decorations and count the candles on the enormous chandeliers.
Before they left for the banquet, the fleet commander even took some high-tech wrist device of his—whatever it was—and fiddled with it together with her phone.
The whole thing made Yun Shui deeply uneasy.
It felt as though they were about to go on some kind of undercover spy mission.
The adjutant had followed the fleet commander for years, so he must have understood him quite well.
Yun Shui had tried probing him indirectly once or twice, asking in the most tactful way she could manage.
Unfortunately, the adjutant had a face that radiated pure innocence, while being plainly more cunning than a monkey.
He knew Yun Shui was someone he could offend without consequence.
So he merely gave her a mysterious smile and, in an act of apparently heartfelt kindness, comforted her with brutal directness.
“It’s fine. Don’t overthink it. There’s nothing about you worth coveting.”
Yun Shui: “…”
It was true.
Yun Shui possessed neither extraordinary talent, wealth, nor beauty. All she had was one thoroughly ordinary body of flesh and blood.
Surely the fleet commander wasn’t an organ trafficker.
He was probably just squeezing the last bit of value out of his overworked office donkey.
Even the suit she wore to the banquet had been given to her by the fleet commander.
Every time she attended an event, he gave her a brand-new one.
The fabric was exquisite and clearly expensive, accompanied by a pair of shoes, a brooch, and cufflinks that didn’t look remotely cheap either.
This particular suit was white, with a subtle cinched waist.
Yun Shui accidentally dripped tea on it.
It felt like the sky had collapsed.
She tried using image search in the restroom, but the shopping app couldn’t identify it. She frantically switched back and forth between various apps, until she finally found something similar on a social-media platform.
The price nearly knocked her unconscious.
The tea stain wouldn’t come out.
So she secretly made a post asking for help.
The title was:
**“What do you do when a lowly office drone spills tea on a white suit while accompanying her boss to a formal dinner?”**
She received twelve likes and two comments.
One was a question mark.
The other was a candle emoji.
Yun Shui silently blamed the useless netizens and hid the post.
In the end, she took off the suit jacket and casually draped it over the crook of her arm, pretending she was simply too warm.
She wore only her shirt.
Fortunately, the air-conditioning was powerful enough that she didn’t catch a cold.
This was her first time working overtime off-site.
She was so uncomfortable she could barely sit still.
She’d only had time to appreciate ten minutes of the fleet commander’s waistline, the elegant contours of his clothes stretched beautifully over his chest, and the faint, polite, professional smile he wore while casually making conversation with various military officials.
The fleet commander was devastatingly handsome when he smiled like that.
He looked every inch the polished gentleman.
And yet just a few days earlier, Yun Shui had heard him insulting the superior sitting across from him.
“His brain is the size of an almond.”
“The decision-making document has been soaked in his cerebral fluid until it’s swollen.”
She was still staring blankly into space when—
**Ding.**
A crisp notification chime rang out.
The auction was about to begin.