The Fleet Commander's expression returned to its usual impassiveness. Yun Shui probed cautiously, "General, do you remember anything from the earthquake?"
The Fleet Commander shook his head.
Despite his amnesia, he merely closed his eyes briefly, appearing perfectly composed. "If we can find my old communicator, the photo album and message history should help me recall something." Unfortunately, the communication terminal was likely completely destroyed in the earthquake.
He suddenly looked at Yun Shui. "Do you have any photos of me from before? Or of my work environment?"
Yun Shui blinked. "No."
The Fleet Commander, sharp-eyed as ever, let out a cold laugh. "Impossible. You answered too quickly, Yun Shui. You're feeling guilty."
Every time the Fleet Commander called her by name, Yun Shui always got the unsettling feeling that he'd caught her red-handed at something. And here he was with a wound the size of a gaping hole in his abdomen, still managing to be insufferably arrogant. Annoying.
Yun Shui slowly backed away as she spoke. "I need to look for them. I don't remember clearly."
The Fleet Commander lifted his chin. "Look for them here."
Yun Shui let out an "oh" and looked around for a chair, finally dragging over a small stool from the corner and sitting on it with a look of grievance. The Fleet Commander, looking down at her from above, directed her to sit within his line of sight.
"General, a communicator is a modern person's private property," Yun Shui attempted to resist. "Sacred and inviolable."
Jiang Xie curved his lips by a single pixel, then straightened his expression into stern authority. "Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures."
Yun Shui held the communicator, hesitating to unlock it, her hands trembling with nerves. There wasn't really much in her photo album anyway—just some landscape shots, cat photos, dog photos, food and drinks, the occasional embarrassingly silly selfie, and tourist photos that were too terrible to keep but too precious to delete.
Yun Shui thought it over and figured she wouldn't lose too much face. Thank her brilliant self—all those incriminating photos were safely tucked away in the hidden album.
Yeah, right.
The communicator was a traitor. With just one tap of the screen wake button, it instantly recognized her face and unlocked itself.
The Fleet Commander's bandage-wrapped hand pointed through the air, insisting that Yun Shui tap the photo icon.
Yun Shui tapped it open with the resolve of one facing certain death.
The first several photos were all of breathtaking sunsets—blazing fire burning across the sky like pink tides.
Great. Now she looked like the honest type.
She swiped past them quickly, but the Fleet Commander said coldly, "Wait."
That mummy-like hand drifted into her field of vision, swaying unsteadily. The Fleet Commander spoke with authority. "Second row, second photo. Where is that?"
The photo showed rosy clouds outside a window, with the glass reflection revealing the pattern on Yun Shui's communicator case. The composition was absolutely terrible—not a single level line, like it had been snapped carelessly.
Yun Shui pressed her lips together and said quietly, "The office."
"Impossible," Jiang Xie adjusted his sitting position, his voice low. "Yun Shui, you're being very strange. What are you hiding?" He stared at the trembling lashes of the person beside him, condemning her with that tone of someone who had everything under control, looking down from on high. "You're lying."
The Fleet Commander said calmly, "There's no desk reflected in the glass. No clerical worker would have an office that large. Where exactly is this?"
Yun Shui suddenly grew clever and shot back, "General, please stop interrupting me." She was blatantly lying through her teeth. "I was going to say 'the corridor outside the office'—I hadn't finished speaking yet."
Jiang Xie let out a cold laugh and leisurely replied with an "Is that so?" before mercilessly adding, "I saw it. Your communicator's default capture mode is Live Photo. Press and hold it, and let me see."
Yun Shui was like an unfortunate rabbit caught by the ears and hoisted into the air—her bluster extinguished in an instant. She gave an awkward chuckle. "General, I was wrong. I just have a bad memory. Um, let's move on to the next one…"
"Do as I say," the Fleet Commander said without mercy.
Yun Shui paused, her brows twitching with extreme unease. She took a soft breath and, under the Fleet Commander's unyielding gaze, reluctantly pressed and held the photo.
The Live Photo on the communicator began to move. Starting from the cover frame—the sunset visible through the corridor window—the person taking the photo was walking with great urgency, the lens shaking violently, accompanied by a faint, barely audible sound of panting.
Soon, the lens shifted away from the sunset with absent-minded haste, sweeping forward at lightning speed and carefully catching what lay ahead. The corridor was bathed in flowing crimson light, and a figure stepped into the frame up ahead—tall, with broad shoulders and long legs, the hem of the uniform fluttering as they strode briskly. The Live Photo even captured the echo of military boots striking the floor.
Yun Shui: "…"
Fleet Commander: "."
This was the first time she'd seen a photo taken with such an obvious ulterior motive!
The Fleet Commander said with composed ease, "If you wanted to photograph me, you could have just done it directly."
Yun Shui refused to admit it through gritted teeth. "Oh, that's just how Live Photos work. I pressed the shutter button, but it always records a little extra. It's not user-friendly. I'm planning to get a new communicator."
The Fleet Commander responded with a light laugh that wasn't particularly warm. He didn't argue, but it seemed he'd silently acknowledged something.
Yun Shui remembered now—that day, she'd only captured a back view. But she was cunning, deliberately opening the Live Photo and setting the cover frame to the very first shot of the window.
That way, when she opened her photo album, everything still looked uniform and innocent.
Not user-friendly at all.
Yun Shui felt mortified and quickly tapped to go back.
The Fleet Commander's nature was hard to change, and he was thoroughly wicked. "Yun Shui, if you let me look a little longer, I might be able to recall it."
A nurse came in to change his dressings and immediately said with concern upon entering, "Yun Shui, why is your face so red? Your neck is red too. Are you feeling unwell? Could you be running a slight fever?"
Yun Shui abruptly stood up. "Ah—I—I do feel a bit dizzy."
She didn't want to deal with the Fleet Commander at all anymore. She felt like she was bubbling with foolishness, as if she'd personally sliced open the fish and delivered it to the chopping block and the butcher's knife. Her stupidity was beyond words.
She lowered her head and rushed out. "I'll go wash my face."
The nurse looked after her retreating figure, puzzled. Turning back, she wondered if she'd seen wrong—she could have sworn that this usually gloomy patient seemed to be in quite a good mood, with a trace of lingering smile at the corners of his brows and eyes.
Then, that faint softness was stirred by the wind and vanished like flowing water, sinking into a calm coldness.
Yun Shui went to move supplies and sweep the floor, busying herself all morning. Lunch was instant noodles with braised beef flavor. She'd actually grown a bit tired of them over the past few days, listlessly squeezing the seasoning packets into a disposable bowl. Spotting Bai Mingyi, who also looked dejected, she waved him over.
The two of them sat together. Yun Shui sighed softly. "We've been without the internet for three or four days now. I can't believe it."
Bai Mingyi felt the same way. "The Alliance dropped the ball. They've been fixing it for days and still haven't gotten it back up."
Yun Shui's dramas and anime had reached their update days, yet she couldn't watch them, leaving her spirits low. On top of that, the casualty reports these past days had been far from optimistic, casting the entire base under a shadow of gloom. Yun Shui forced a smile. "I downloaded some songs to my device earlier. Want to listen?"
Bai Mingyi's eyes lit up. "I've downloaded some too. Let's swap playlists."
Yun Shui was the type to feel a strange shame about sharing her hobbies—she never liked letting others know what songs she listened to or what shows she watched. There was always this odd embarrassment about exposing her interests.
But being stuck in this isolated place, like a group of aquatic creatures trapped in a glass fishbowl, was unbearably dull. Especially today—she had already reached peak levels of humiliation and awkwardness, so her skin had thickened to the point of being as tough as a city wall.
After their little song-sharing session ended and they finished their instant noodles, Yun Shui quietly slipped into the ward, not caring whether she smelled like braised beef flavor. The Fleet Commander was resting with his eyes closed, meditating—she couldn't tell if he was asleep or not. Hopefully, he was asleep.
She had just finished her noodles, and while listening to music, she had frantically scrolled through her photo album, locking away photos from her holiday outings, random selfies, and strange-angle shots she herself had nearly forgotten about into an encrypted folder. Time was tight and the task was heavy—thousands of photos, and she scrutinized each one carefully, hoping she hadn't missed any.
She turned around stealthily, only to find Jiang Xie's eyes already open. The afternoon sunlight streamed in, casting a beam of light across Yun Shui's right eye, making it gleam like a clear, lustrous black pearl.
Trembling. Bright.
Jiang Xie stared at her with no warning, almost bewildered, silent for a few seconds.
The Fleet Commander said, "Aren't you going to bring it over? You've been stalling for so long."
Yun Shui forced herself to act nonchalant. "Oh. Okay. Have you eaten?"
The Fleet Commander: "IV nutrition today."
Yun Shui dawdled back to the small stool. The child next door was asleep, so she lowered her voice. "Go ahead and look."
The scene was both tragic and comical. Yun Shui hesitated like a guilty scoundrel, harboring ulterior motives, facing the person inspecting her communicator as she unlocked and opened her photo album.
The Fleet Commander also lowered his voice to match hers. His voice was naturally magnetic and pleasant to hear—low, usually carrying a cold, hard edge. But perhaps because he needed to whisper now, it held a faint trace of warmth, like a woodpecker tapping against Yun Shui's wooden ears.
Her earlobes uncontrollably grew hot.
"Where is this?"
Yun Shui stumbled over her words. "The k-kitchen… oh no, it's the dining table. At my place. This is the tomato beef noodle soup I cooked."
The Fleet Commander: "I've been to your home."
Yun Shui: "Uh, no, you haven't."
The Fleet Commander: "Why?"
Yun Shui looked up, confused, her brain struggling to keep up. "Maybe because… my place is too small?"
What a pair of utterly bizarre people!
She continued swiping.
The Fleet Commander: "And this?"
Yun Shui: "This is the succulent in my office. It's been blooming recently—the flowers are actually green. Very cute."
The Fleet Commander: "Mm."
He held back, but still commented, "What a dirty dog."
Yun Shui: "They're the stray dogs near our neighborhood. I don't know if they bite, so I took the photos from a distance. It seems to have a baby… uh, a puppy? I've seen them together."
As she spoke, she hesitated, then said tentatively: "Actually, I'm a bit afraid of dogs."
Fleet Commander: "Cowardly."
After talking for a while, Yun Shui felt something was off—the Fleet Commander had never seen these photos before, so what memories could they possibly awaken?! This was nonsense!
She hurriedly said, "Wait, General, looking at these is useless. Look at something else."
She quickly swiped upward, but the hand wrapped like a mummy reached over again to stop her: "Are you the one with amnesia, or am I? I think it's useful as long as I say so. Yun Shui, don't scroll randomly. Look at them one by one."