Man Yu had always been an honest, unassuming man who knew his place and never caused trouble for anyone.
He started primary school at the age of seven, entered middle school at twelve, and graduated from high school at eighteen. Following his parents’ advice, he went on to study education at a teachers’ college. A few years after graduation, his parents arranged a marriage between him and a second-generation rich man whose family possessed a modest fortune. After the wedding, he once again listened to both families’ wishes and resigned from his job, devoting himself entirely to managing the household.
Man Yu’s obedient nature and his exceptionally advantageous marriage had, for a time, made his mother the envy of all their relatives.
“Xiao Yu has always been such an obedient child. He’s so easy to look after and never gives anyone a reason to worry. Although he’s only a beta, he’s the one who married the best out of all of them.”
“He was always so quiet and well-behaved growing up. I’ve never even seen him get into an argument with anyone. If you ask me, rich people like our Xiao Yu precisely because he’s so honest and straightforward. You can tell at a glance that he’s a good, decent person with no ulterior motives.”
“Isn’t it difficult for a beta to have children? He really needs to hurry up and give birth to a child. Otherwise, those flirtatious people outside might get ahead of him and steal his husband away. Once Xiao Yu gives birth to the eldest grandson, wouldn’t the entire Sheng family fortune belong to us? Even Xiaojin’s factory could grow bigger and more successful!”
As everyone chimed in with their own opinions, Mother Man’s face gradually broke into a satisfied smile, her expression filled with longing for the future they described.
Just as they said, throughout the first twenty-eight years of his life, Man Yu had never once raised his voice at anyone. In fact, he had rarely even been given the opportunity to argue with another person.
Back in school, his grades had always been neither particularly good nor particularly bad. He was never among those who got reprimanded, but neither did he ever receive much praise. He simply existed somewhere in the middle, unnoticed by teachers and classmates alike.
He was always walking with his head lowered, quiet and taciturn, his shoulders hunched as though he were trying to make himself smaller. His half-long fringe nearly covered his eyes, while his thin body remained hidden beneath his oversized school uniform. He wandered around the various corners of the campus like a ghost, quietly minding his own business and diligently doing whatever he was supposed to do.
Whenever someone needed something from him, no matter how unreasonable the request might be, he had never once been heard saying no. He was even foolish enough to lend his umbrella to a classmate and walk all the way back to his dormitory in the rain himself, getting drenched in the process.
He was like a transparent little man made of cotton. Even if someone punched him, he would probably apologize to the person who had hit him. You could beat him with three sticks and still fail to get a single word out of him. With a person like that, who could possibly find a reason to quarrel with him?
Back then, when the news of his marriage first came out, his former classmates, from those who had gone on to university to those who were still in primary school, had racked their brains and still failed to remember what his face looked like.
And now, three years into his marriage, this very same spineless, honest man had somehow managed to become even more pathetic than before. He stood dejectedly in the middle of the living room, his head hanging low.
All because his husband’s white moonlight had returned to the country.
Meanwhile, the woman whom Man Yu could reasonably call his mother-in-law sat opposite him, ordering him to bring his husband back from that very white moonlight’s funeral so that he would not embarrass the family by making a spectacle of himself.
Man Yu had already been frightened out of his wits when he saw Chen Yanning. After hearing this devastating news, his legs trembled so badly that he could barely stand.
He was supposed to go and call Sheng Lin back from the funeral of his dead white moonlight?
White moonlight. Funeral.
Two words carrying such enormous significance had somehow ended up together in the same sentence, and now he was expected to get involved?
In the three years since their marriage, the number of times Man Yu had met Sheng Lin could be counted on one hand. Most of those encounters had happened because Chen Yanning had assigned him a task: to bring Sheng Lin home when he was already out fooling around or was about to go out and do exactly that.
Unfortunately, those missions usually ended in failure. Man Yu had neither the ability to keep Sheng Lin under control nor the skill to deal with Chen Yanning’s displeasure. Trapped between the two of them, he could only suffer from both sides, taking the blame no matter what he did.
Sometimes, Sheng Lin would even send him out to buy condoms for his own husband and his mistress.
Ever since the news of the white moonlight’s return had spread, Sheng Lin had been restless for three whole months in advance. His temper had grown increasingly volatile, and he had even cut off contact with all the people he used to fool around with outside.
The white moonlight had been so powerful even while alive. Now that he had returned lying down in a coffin, who knew how much more terrifying his influence would be?
And now Man Yu was supposed to stand before Sheng Lin’s white moonlight’s memorial tablet and, in his capacity as Sheng Lin’s wife, call him home?
How brave of him.
Sheng Lin would probably tear out three of his ribs on the spot.
He didn’t dare go.
But he didn’t dare refuse Chen Yanning, either.
Chen Yanning did not even look at him. Instead, she admired the freshly manicured nails she had just gotten done. Although she was already fifty years old, Omegas who had been born with a silver spoon in their mouths always seemed to age more slowly than ordinary people. She looked no older than someone in her thirties. Still admiring her beautiful nails, she said to him, “Darling, you really need to stop being so nervous all the time. I know you came from the countryside, and that sort of lowborn nature is difficult to change, even if you wanted to. Your education and appearance are nothing special, either. It would be strange if A’Lin actually took a liking to someone like you, wouldn’t it? People like you don’t have much dignity to lose anyway. If he gets angry, just let him take it out on you a little. It’s not as though he’ll beat you to death. Why are you being so delicate about everything?”
She always spoke in a soft, gentle voice, her tone even more coquettish than that of an ordinary Omega. She never used vulgar language, and her voice was so tender and pleasant to the ears that anyone listening might have mistaken her for the gentlest person in the world. Yet Man Yu was always frightened whenever she spoke to him. Her words seemed to pierce straight through him, striking at the shame he had buried deep in the bottom of his heart.
When Chen Yanning frowned, Man Yu feared she was about to say something else. He hurriedly forced a muffled response out of his throat. “Mm, mm…”
Her expression softened considerably. “That’s more like it. You’re such a well-behaved child. Your mother even told me herself that, given your circumstances, you wouldn’t have been able to dream of marrying into our family, even in your wildest dreams. You were so happy when you found out that you practically fainted from excitement. You must never forget where you came from. People who forget their roots won’t get very far in life. You should know how to repay the kindness you’ve been shown, understand?”
Man Yu was so ashamed and resentful that he wanted to die. He felt humiliated hearing Chen Yanning so openly exaggerate and proclaim to everyone how overjoyed his mother had been at the prospect of him marrying into the Sheng family.
It was true that he had been both shocked and delighted at the time, but he had not actually fainted. He had simply never imagined that someone like him would ever catch the attention of the Sheng family. At the same time, he couldn’t help wondering what, exactly, they had seen in him that made them choose him.
Carrying these complicated feelings in his heart, he had entered the marriage with trepidation, feeling both apprehensive and full of hope.
Unfortunately, reality had turned out to be even worse than he had pessimistically imagined. It was true that nobody in the Sheng family liked him. Sheng Lin had been deeply dissatisfied with the forced marriage from the very beginning, and it had taken less than three months for his attitude toward Man Yu to progress from indifference to occasional verbal humiliation.
He really was an unlikable person. In just three months, his situation had somehow grown steadily worse instead of improving. If it had been his younger sister or younger brother in his place, perhaps their cleverness and ability to read a room would have been enough to win Sheng Lin’s favor.
At long last, he had given up on his fantasies. He no longer expected someone to inexplicably develop a fondness for him for no particular reason. Even after racking his brains and searching through every corner of his mind, he genuinely couldn’t find anything about himself that might make another person want to like him.
All Man Yu wanted was to do a little better, to behave a little better, and to become just a little more worthy of attention, so that Sheng Lin might finally notice him.
His mind was a tangled mess of thoughts. He desperately tried to come up with something pleasing to say, hoping to win a little favor with his words, but his tongue felt as stiff as a frozen popsicle. He couldn’t even manage to bend it properly, let alone produce anything clever or flattering. In the end, he could only lower his head and hurriedly murmur two anxious acknowledgments, agreeing with everything she had said.
Having handed the task over to him, Chen Yanning rose from her seat and prepared to leave. As she passed by Man Yu, she lightly covered her nose, as though she had caught an unpleasant smell. “Oh, I’ve told you so many times already. Stop calling me Mom all the time from now on. It would be better if you called me Madam Sheng instead.”
Her small gesture filled Man Yu with another wave of embarrassment. His back, which had already been bent submissively, hunched even lower. Remembering the matter of the marriage certificate, he hurriedly summoned the courage to speak up. “Madam Sheng, the… the marriage certificate…”
They had been married for three years, yet since last year, his marital status on the internet had suddenly changed to unmarried. He had asked many people online about it, and quite a few had replied that their own marital statuses had continued to show as unmarried for years despite having been married for a long time. Apparently, it was a system bug. Even so, Man Yu couldn’t put his mind at ease and wanted to confirm the matter one more time.
Madam Sheng looked impatient. “Didn’t I already show it to you? Why do you keep asking about it over and over again? Your marriage certificate is with me. There’s no need for you to see it.”
When her footsteps had finally faded away completely, Man Yu wiped his forehead with one hand, only to discover that he had broken out in a heavy sweat.
His face flushed red with embarrassment. He hurriedly took out a handkerchief and carefully wiped his face and neck, making sure to clean every last trace of sweat from his skin.
The tissue rubbed roughly against his neck, leaving two red marks on his otherwise pale skin.
Man Yu had heard bits and pieces about the story between his husband and that so-called white moonlight. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as the story of a notorious young master and the devoted lackey who had spent his life desperately chasing after someone he could never have.
He didn’t want to describe them that way. After all, they were husband and wife, and the idea of putting it so bluntly made him feel terribly embarrassed as well. But no matter how he thought about it, he simply couldn’t find more suitable words to describe their relationship.
Unable to fit into Sheng Lin’s circle of friends, Man Yu could only piece together the image of that legendary white moonlight from scattered fragments of conversations he had overheard. From those few words here and there, he gradually came to understand what sort of person the other man had been: a flamboyant, intelligent, domineering, self-centered, and utterly capricious Enigma.
Enigmas were a seventh secondary gender that emerged through the second differentiation of Alphas. The probability of an Alpha undergoing this transformation was roughly one in a hundred thousand. Compared to betas, who could be found practically everywhere in society, Enigmas were born to stand out from the crowd and naturally became the center of attention wherever they went.
Not only did they possess physical strength and intelligence far beyond that of ordinary people, but their pheromones also gave them an innate ability to suppress both Alphas and Omegas.
However, this extraordinary advantage came with its own drawbacks. Enigmas were more susceptible to the influence of pheromones and consequently tended to be more aggressive.
If her husband, Sheng Lin, was a young master who had grown up with a silver spoon in his mouth, then this white moonlight was the very center of the world around which all those pampered young masters revolved.
On the surface, the Sheng family appeared prosperous, surrounded by wealth and splendor, but in reality, their cash flow was tight. Compared with the Lu family, whose immense fortune placed them on an entirely different level, the Sheng family was hardly worth mentioning.
According to rumors, when Sheng Lin was still in high school, the center of the world had once hung him up and beaten him like a spinning top for two whole hours. From that day onward, Sheng Lin had fallen hopelessly in love with him, becoming so infatuated that he could never extricate himself.
Man Yu had even spent some time wondering whether Sheng Lin might fall in love with him, too, if he were to hang his husband up and beat him for two hours.
The thought had crossed his mind repeatedly, only to be dismissed just as many times. For one thing, he really was too spineless to possess the courage to do something like that. For another, before he could even manage to hang Sheng Lin up and beat him, his own parents would probably hang him up and beat him first.
The mobile phone lying on the table had continued to light up with incoming messages, one after another. Every single message contained a voice recording that lasted a full sixty seconds. Man Yu had no friends, and he had long since lost contact with his former colleagues. Apart from his mother, there was nobody else who would send him so many messages in such an urgent and persistent manner.
His palm grew damp with nervous sweat as he hurriedly tried to finish converting the voice messages into text. Before he could even get through them all, the other party had already lost patience and called him directly.
“Why aren’t you replying to my messages? I sent you so many voice messages, so why haven’t you replied to even a single one?”
“Mom, I… I was just… just busy with something…” After spending three years at home in near-total isolation, Man Yu’s ability to communicate had deteriorated at an alarming rate. Even a simple sentence became a stammering mess whenever he was nervous, and the words that should have come naturally seemed to get stuck in his throat.
“You stay at home all day long without even having a job, so what could you possibly be busy with? Do you really have to make me wait for your reply over and over again? Can’t you respond the moment I send you a message? Do you even know how to show other people the slightest bit of respect?”
“J-just now, Madam… Madam Sheng came…” The more nervous Man Yu became, the more severely he stammered. It took him quite some time before he finally managed to explain the entire situation and how everything had happened.
Once Xu Lan learned that the matter concerned the Sheng family, she finally stopped berating him. Her anger gradually subsided, and her tone softened considerably as she began giving him instructions instead.
“Look at you! You can make such a tiny matter sound so long-winded, stumbling over your words and stammering like that. Even listening to you makes me irritated. From now on, you must make sure you speak as little as possible in front of the Sheng family, understand? Don’t give them a reason to get annoyed with you. Think about it. You had such a hard time getting married into the Sheng family in the first place!”
Even though the other person couldn’t see him through the phone, Man Yu obediently nodded his head. “I… I do try to speak less.”
Hearing his familiar, submissive, and sensible response, Xu Lan finally let out a long sigh of relief on the other end of the line. There was a hint of weary exhaustion in her voice, as though she had finally been able to relax after carrying a heavy burden for far too long.
“Xiao Yu, there are four children in our family, but you’re the most sensible, the most obedient, and the most filial of them all. You’ve never made your father and me worry about you. It’s all thanks to the fact that the Sheng family took a liking to you back then that our family’s life has become so much better. Your older brother’s company was built up with the Sheng family’s support, and your younger siblings are too mischievous to be relied upon. Your father and I don’t expect anything from them anymore. Business isn’t doing well these days, so you absolutely must secure your position in the Sheng family. Our entire family is depending on you now.”
Listening to his mother’s heartfelt words of praise, Man Yu felt as though his heart were being gently warmed in a pot of hot water. A tender, aching softness spread through his chest, accompanied by a faint sense of pride. He was an ordinary person who had never accomplished anything particularly remarkable, yet among all four siblings, he was apparently the one his parents could rely on the most.
“Mm, I… I’ll try my best.”
Xu Lan immediately seized the opportunity to press her advantage while he was still listening obediently.
“Now that the person A’Lin likes has died, this is the perfect opportunity for you! You need to comfort him properly and be a little gentler with him. I’ve already had some traditional Chinese medicine prepared for you. Try drinking it. It’s supposed to help betas get pregnant. You’re not like other betas, either. If you can give birth to a child sooner rather than later, everything else will be much easier to discuss.”
Give birth to a child?
Man Yu and Sheng Lin had barely exchanged ten proper sentences with each other, let alone shared the sort of intimacy required to conceive a child. Madam Sheng looked down on him so much that she probably wouldn’t even allow him to give birth. Perhaps the reason she had chosen him in the first place, apart from his obedient and honest nature, was that she had wanted to avoid the possibility of choosing an Omega who might give birth to a child of uncertain circumstances.
“What do you mean, ‘I…’ this and ‘I…’ that? If he doesn’t want to get close to you, can’t you try seducing him a little? All Alphas have their susceptible periods. You need to seize the opportunity when it comes!”
Man Yu’s face flushed bright red. He was frightened by the suggestion and felt so embarrassed that he could barely bring himself to respond, yet he still stammered out an agreement.
Xu Lan continued to give him a few more instructions before finally ending the call. When the line went silent, Man Yu remained holding his phone, listening to the dead air for a little while longer, reluctant to hang up and still feeling somewhat unwilling to part from the sound of his mother’s voice.
He put down his phone, clearly realizing that he could no longer afford to delay the task he had been given.
Out of respect for the occasion, Man Yu went to change his clothes. He chose a white shirt and a pair of black trousers, the very same outfit he had purchased shortly after passing his examinations and securing his first job. Back then, buying the set had cost him a staggering amount equivalent to half a month’s salary, and he had agonized over the expense before finally making the purchase. It was the best outfit he owned, the one he was most confident wearing. At the time, his colleagues had praised him, saying that the clothes made him look much more spirited and gave him the appearance of a proper teacher, someone who truly looked the part of an educator.
He had returned home wearing the outfit in high spirits, only for his mother to stare at him with a frown for quite some time before expressing her disapproval. “You look as though you’re dressed to attend a funeral. You spent so much money, and this is the only outfit you managed to buy?”
There had been no way to return the clothes, and Man Yu couldn’t bear to throw them away, either. In the end, he had carefully folded the outfit and tucked it away at the bottom of his suitcase, where it had remained for six whole years. Now, at long last, the clothes had finally found a use.
He stripped off his old clothes one piece at a time, and the reflection of his young body gradually appeared in the mirror.
His skin was very pale, and his body was thin and frail, with a slender, almost emaciated frame. Even his waist and abdomen were little more than a thin expanse of flesh. The delicate contours of his bones stood out clearly beneath his pallid skin, which had so little color that it seemed almost bloodless. Only the faint bluish tint of the veins beneath the surface gave any indication of life, adding to the impression of fragility and vulnerability that surrounded him. The red marks left on his neck by the tissue were the only vivid splashes of color anywhere on his entire body.
He looked almost exactly as he had during his school days. If anything, his shoulders seemed to have become even more hunched than they had been back then. His head remained slightly lowered, as usual, and his overgrown hair fell forward to obscure his eyes, leaving only his forehead, dry lips, and sharply pointed chin exposed.
Man Yu hurriedly glanced at his own eyes in the mirror. The moment he caught sight of them, he immediately looked away as though frightened by his own reflection, then quickly pulled on his clothes.
As expected, the outfit that had fitted him reasonably well three years ago now hung loosely from his frame. The shoulder seams had slipped downward by a full two inches, making the clothes look oversized and ill-fitting. Instead of making him appear more presentable, the expensive outfit only emphasized how lacking in vitality he looked. Even with such costly clothes on his body, he couldn’t manage to look dignified in the slightest.
What a withered, shriveled body he had.
Anyone who looked at him would find it difficult to feel even the slightest interest in someone so lifeless and unremarkable. And yet, with a body like this and such a dull, uninteresting personality, was he really supposed to seduce his own husband?