Whenever someone asked Mu Ning what she did for a living, she would shamelessly answer that she worked in the business of making dreams come true.
Back in high school, despite her heavy workload, she would secretly write short stories in a hardcover notebook with a fountain pen. She would then lend the notebook to her close friends so they could take turns reading her work.
When she entered university, she tried to make a name for herself on a certain novel website known for its green theme. Unfortunately, three consecutive novels failed to gain popularity, leaving her confidence as a writer completely shattered.
Later, through a series of unexpected circumstances, she entered the gaming industry and became a scriptwriter for Oath of the Eternal Night.
It was a Western fantasy romance game aimed at female players. Among all the characters, the vampire named Valerius was the one Mu Ning had poured her heart and soul into. She had invested all her passion, effort, and creativity in bringing him to life.
However, by the game’s second year, her dream had gradually begun to fall apart amid the harsh realities of workplace politics.
The original head of the writing team had been recruited by a major gaming company. The new team leader arrived from another department with several trusted subordinates in tow. Not long after taking office, the new leader began pushing out the old employees while promoting people from their own circle.
Mu Ning’s responsibility for writing the main storyline was handed over to other writers.
For two consecutive game updates, Oath of the Eternal Night had been dragged into trending discussions because the male lead’s characterization was so inconsistent with his established personality. The comment section was flooded with angry posts from players who called themselves the “Border Lords,” demanding justice for the characters they loved.
During the post-update review meeting, the new team leader and the operations team kept blaming each other. Everyone was eager to shift responsibility, and no one was willing to admit fault.
Meanwhile, Mu Ning was left cleaning up the mess.
She rented an apartment near the technology park where she worked. One Saturday, while she was still enjoying her sleep, the apartment manager sent a notice to the tenants’ group chat. The building’s electrical equipment would undergo maintenance that day, and the power would be shut off until five in the afternoon.
After waking up naturally, Mu Ning grabbed her laptop and headed to a nearby café called W Stage.
The café was currently collaborating with Oath of the Eternal Night, and the promotional event was scheduled to end that Sunday.
She had spent the past few days fixing problems caused by other writers. Today was the first time she had managed to visit the collaboration café in person and take part in the event herself.
It was a gloomy afternoon, with rain falling heavily outside. Despite the weather, the café was packed. Half the customers were there to escape the rain, while the other half, like Mu Ning, had come to participate in the promotional event.
Mu Ning usually preferred sitting by the window. Unfortunately, all the good seats had already been taken.
After looking around, she found a small, unoccupied round table. She put down her most important work tool—her laptop—and went to the counter to place her order.
Five life-sized character standees stood in a row.
Perhaps because Valerius was a character she had personally developed from scratch during the game’s second closed beta, Mu Ning always noticed him first, no matter how many other characters were standing beside him.
She quietly took a photo of Valerius’s standee.
Then she ordered a limited-edition drink inspired by his character: a Red Velvet Berry Latte. The drink came with a complimentary cup sleeve printed with Valerius’s official illustration.
For the next hour, Mu Ning sipped her hot latte while switching skillfully between three things on her laptop: recruitment websites, WeChat conversations, and a fanfiction document she had barely started.
The fanfiction was a self-indulgent story with the rather questionable premise of A Room You Can’t Escape Unless You Do Something… She had written only the first three hundred Chinese characters.
Eventually, Mu Ning closed her laptop, stretched, and stood up to use the restroom.
W Stage was located on the street-facing corner of the first floor of a commercial building, while the restrooms were on the second floor.
By the time she returned, the customers in the café had already changed.
As she walked back toward her little round table, her gaze casually swept across the room.
The floor was perfectly level, yet for a split second, she felt as though she had stepped into an unexpected dip in the ground. Her foot seemed to miss its footing, and she stopped abruptly.
When did he get here?
She stood frozen, slightly dazed.
At some point while she was away, a window seat diagonally across from her had become available.
And now, X was sitting there.
His broad shoulders filled out a loose black T-shirt. Beneath the dim gray daylight, the pale glow from his laptop screen fell across his face, giving his already fair skin an almost unreal, porcelain-like pallor.
Everyone working in the technology park seemed to suffer from a lack of sleep and sunlight. Their complexions often reflected the exhaustion of people who spent their days working under artificial lights. X was no exception.
Yet none of that diminished his appearance.
He was so handsome that he seemed to exist on a completely separate layer of the world.
He was the kind of heart-stopping male lead who would be carefully illustrated in a manga using screentones and decorative patterns. An artist would probably devote an entire two-page spread to capturing the moment he raised his eyes, lingering over every detail until the reader forgot to breathe.
And clearly, Mu Ning wasn’t the only one who noticed his looks.
The women sitting nearby occasionally glanced in his direction. Sometimes, two of them would lean close and whisper to each other.
Were they discussing whether they should approach him and ask for his WeChat contact?
Mu Ning had no way of knowing.
What she did know was that she had felt the same urge countless times.
And every single time, she had stopped at the thought.
She returned to her seat.
Although she was facing her laptop screen, her brain had apparently decided to stop processing information. Gossip, recruitment advertisements, and her fanfiction all became meaningless.
Instead, the little feelers of her attention began stretching slowly through the space around her.
She shut out the distractions of the outside world and quietly directed all her attention toward his corner.
X typed at a steady rhythm. After a while, he paused, picked up his coffee, took a sip, and set it down again.
There were five limited-edition drinks in the café’s collaboration menu. He had avoided every single one of them.
The cup in his hand was the café’s regular design: a white cup with black lettering.
Mu Ning had never considered herself particularly lucky.
At the company’s annual party, she always seemed to win only the consolation prize that everyone received.
Although she worked in the same technology park as X, she had encountered him only a handful of times.
That wasn’t surprising.
The technology park was only about three hundred meters across, and walking from one end to the other took just three minutes. Yet more than five hundred companies operated there, employing over forty thousand exhausted tech workers.
Running into one particular person in such a place was like spotting a specific honeybee inside a cramped hive filled with forty thousand buzzing worker bees.
For Mu Ning, every encounter with X was enough to make that day her lucky day.
And today was an especially lucky one.
She could spend such a long time in the same room with him, instead of merely brushing past him between the shelves of a FamilyMart convenience store, waiting three minutes together in front of an elevator, or standing near the entrance of the technology park for ten minutes on a rainy day while waiting for their rides.
Mu Ning allowed herself to sneak glances at X for half an hour.
Then a message in the tenants’ WeChat group interrupted her daydreaming.
Another resident had asked whose cat was in the apartment’s common living room. The animal had been crying loudly without stopping.
The message came with a video.
The cat was a handsome American Shorthair who usually carried himself with the confidence of a little king. Now, however, he was crouched beside the shoe rack, looking utterly miserable.
His cries seemed to alternate between I’m terrified! Somebody, please save me! and Don’t you dare come near me!
Mu Ning immediately replied.
“Mine, mine! I probably didn’t notice he was outside when I closed the door. I’ll be right back!”
Worried that her cat might become too stressed if left alone for much longer, she quickly packed her things and got ready to leave.
Before walking out, she stole one last glance at X.
What a shame.
She probably wouldn’t be going out again that evening.
Mu Ning headed toward the entrance, but then she changed her mind and returned to the counter. She ordered a slice of cement cake, planning to enjoy it as dessert after her takeaway dinner that night.
The staff member handed her a paper bag containing the cake.
Mu Ning took it and was about to turn around when a faint, cool fragrance reached her nose.
Of all the senses, smell was perhaps the most difficult to shake. It could become closely connected to a particular person, place, time, scene, or object.
And this particular fragrance was unmistakably associated with X.
Her breathing slowed at once.
Out of the corner of her eye, she followed his movements.
X was carrying his laptop as he approached the cabinet containing the café’s shared power banks. He unlocked his phone and scanned the QR code.
A moment later, one of the compartments popped open, revealing a power bank.
He took it out, pulled out the Type-C cable, and connected it to his laptop.
His eyes moved to the upper-right corner of the screen.
He paused, then frowned slightly.
Perhaps the power bank’s output was too low to charge the laptop.
X unplugged the cable and returned the power bank to its compartment.
Mu Ning held her breath.
Then, for the first time in her life, a kind of courage she had never experienced surged through her body.
It traveled with her bloodstream, rushing through every part of her before returning to her heart and filling it until it felt like a balloon suddenly inflated to its limit.
The moment X turned around, Mu Ning moved with lightning speed.
She reached into her bag, pulled out her laptop charger, which she had carefully wrapped and secured with its cable, and held it out to him.
X stopped in his tracks.
His gaze dropped to the charger and lingered there for a moment before he raised his eyes to look at her face.
Mu Ning managed to pull the corners of her mouth into a smile.
“It looks like you need to charge your laptop. Mine is the same brand as yours, so the charger should work.”
In a technology park where everyone was busy with work, helping a colleague out of a difficult situation was nothing unusual.
Perhaps that was why X didn’t hesitate. He reached out and accepted the charger.
“Thank you. I’ll use it for a little while and return it to you.”
Until that moment, X had been nothing more than a silent male lead in a black-and-white manga.
Hearing his voice for the first time, Mu Ning discovered that it was even clearer and more refreshing than she had imagined.
It reminded her of pure water served in a transparent glass with ice cubes floating inside.
“You’re welcome…”
“Which table are you sitting at?”
Mu Ning hesitated for a moment before pointing toward the little round table where she had been sitting earlier.
Perhaps his laptop battery was dangerously close to shutting down, and he still had something extremely important to finish. After telling her, “I’ll return it to you in a bit,” X carried his laptop back to his seat.
By then, the rain had weakened enough that she no longer needed an umbrella.
A cool breeze brushed against her face as she stepped outside.
Only then did Mu Ning realize just how hot her cheeks had become.
The drizzle was as fine as strands of silk, leaving her hair slightly damp and fluffy.
She walked for twelve minutes before returning to her apartment.
As soon as she arrived, she picked up her cat, whom she had named Xiao Wa, and carried him back to her room. She opened half a can of cat food to calm him down.
Then she rushed to the bathroom, applied a quick, light layer of makeup, and hurried straight back to W Stage.
The café was still lively, and every seat was occupied.
The first thing Mu Ning did was look toward the window.
X was no longer there.
The two seats beside his former spot, which had been joined together, were now occupied by a couple.
And the little round table where Mu Ning had been sitting earlier had also been taken by someone else.
She stood there, staring at the empty space, unable to hide her disappointment.
This was the eighth month of her secret crush on X.
After all this time, she still didn’t know his name, which company he worked for, or even which floor his office was on.
And now, on top of everything else, she had practically given away an Apple laptop charger for free.
Sigh.