When asked about her profession, Mu Ning would shamelessly claim she worked in the business of crafting dreams.
In high school, she’d sneakily write short stories with a fountain pen in a hardcover notebook between heavy coursework, passing them around to close friends. In college, she tried her hand at a novel-publishing website themed in green, crashed and burned three times in a row, and her cultivation heart shattered.
Later, by a twist of fate, she landed in the gaming industry as a narrative designer for Oath of Eternal Night. An otome game with a Western fantasy theme, Mu Ning poured all her passion and blood, sweat, and tears into a vampire named Valerius.
But in the second year after the game’s launch, her “dream” began to crumble amid the cutthroat office politics: the narrative lead was poached by a major studio, and the new lead parachuted in from another department with her own cronies in tow. Not long after taking office, she started sidelining the veterans and promoting her own people.
Mu Ning’s main storyline writing duties were handed off to other writers. For two consecutive versions, Oath of Eternal Night was dragged through the mud on trending searches for out-of-character male leads, with the comment sections plastered with protest posters from the various “Border Lords.”
At the version retrospective meeting, the new lead and the operations team passed the buck back and forth, washing their hands of all responsibility.
Mu Ning rented an apartment near the tech park. The property manager sent a notice in the tenant group chat: Saturday equipment maintenance, power outage until 5 PM.
Waking up naturally, Mu Ning grabbed her laptop and headed to the W Stage café nearby—the café was currently running a collaboration event with Oath of Eternal Night, ending this Sunday.
She’d spent the past while cleaning up after the messes made by the other writers, and today was the first day she had time to check out the event in person.
On a gloomy afternoon shrouded in rain, the café was packed—half seeking shelter from the downpour, half there for the same reason she was.
Mu Ning usually preferred sitting by the window, but with the crowd today, the good spots were long taken. She scanned the room, found an empty small round table, set down her productivity tools, and went to the counter to order.
Five life-sized character standees stood in a row. Perhaps because Valerius was a character she’d crafted from scratch during the second beta test, no matter the occasion, he was always the one she noticed first among all the protagonists.
Mu Ning quietly snapped a photo of Valerius’s standee, then ordered a limited-time signature drink themed after his character: “Red Velvet Berry Latte.” The drink came with a cup sleeve printed with Valerius’s artwork.
For the next hour, Mu Ning sipped her hot latte, deftly toggling between job-hunting websites, WeChat chat windows, and a fanfiction document—a “room you can’t leave without doing XX” trope piece that was only 300 characters in.
Closing her laptop, Mu Ning stretched and got up to use the restroom.
The W Stage café was located on the ground floor of a shopping complex at a street corner, with the restroom on the second floor.
When Mu Ning returned, the café’s patrons had shifted to a new wave.
Walking back toward her small round table, her gaze unconsciously swept across the room.
The floor was perfectly level, yet for a split second, she felt as if she’d stepped into a hollow.
When had he arrived?
She stood frozen, momentarily stunned.
A window seat diagonally across from her had opened up at some point, and X was sitting there.
Broad shoulders filled out a loose black short-sleeved tee. In the gray, half-translucent daylight, the laptop screen cast a dim white glow across his face, his skin taking on an inorganic pallor.
Everyone in the tech park suffered from a bloodless look born of insufficient sleep and sunlight—X was no exception, yet it didn’t diminish his beauty one bit. He looked as if he’d been rendered on a separate layer.
He was the kind of heart-fluttering sight that manga artists would painstakingly adorn with screentones and decorative flowers, the kind of breathtaking moment an illustrator couldn’t resist capturing in a full two-page spread.
And clearly, his good looks weren’t visible to her alone—the women sitting nearby kept stealing glances his way. Whether they were whispering to their friends about mustering the courage to ask for his WeChat, Mu Ning couldn’t say.
At least she had that impulse every single time, but every time, it remained just an impulse.
Mu Ning sat back down in her seat.
She faced her computer screen, but her brain had already refused to process any information from gossip forums, job postings, or fanfiction.
Her gaze extended slowly through the space like tendrils, filtering out all external interference, creeping toward his position.
He typed at a steady rhythm, paused, picked up his coffee for a sip, then set it back down. The café offered five limited-time collaboration drinks, but he’d avoided them all—his cup was the store’s default white with black lettering.
Mu Ning had never been particularly lucky—at company annual parties, she could only ever win the participation prize. So despite working in the same tech park, she’d run into X only a handful of times—which wasn’t surprising, really, because in this 300-meter-square park, where walking from one end to the other took just three minutes, over 500 companies were housed, accommodating a total of more than 40,000 tech drones.
Running into someone here is about as likely as spotting one specific bee in a crowded hive of forty thousand workers.
Mu Ning would mark the day she ran into X as her lucky day.
Today was especially lucky, because she got to share a room with him for this long—not just a brush past each other between the shelves of a family convenience store, not three minutes waiting in front of an elevator, not ten minutes waiting for a ride at the campus gate on a rainy day.
Mu Ning allowed herself to steal glances at X for half an hour, until her thoughts were interrupted by a WeChat message in the tenants’ group.
It was from another tenant in the apartment, asking whose cat was in the living room, yowling miserably.
Attached was a video: the usually imposing American Shorthair was now cowering by the shoe rack, its cries hovering somewhere between “I’m scared, save me” and “Don’t you dare come near me.”
Mu Ning quickly replied: “Mine, mine! I must have accidentally shut it out when I closed the door. I’ll be right back~”
Afraid the cat might have a stress reaction if left too long, Mu Ning hurriedly packed up her things and left her seat.
Before leaving, she stole one last glance at X.
What a shame.
She probably wouldn’t go out again tonight. Mu Ning walked toward the door, then changed her mind and turned back to the counter, ordering a cement cake to have as dessert after tonight’s takeout.
The barista handed over the packed paper bag. Mu Ning took it and was about to turn around when her breath caught a faint, cool scent.
Smell is the sense most resistant to being shaken—it always maps precisely to someone, somewhere, some time, some scene, some object. This scent was highly associated with X.
Her breathing slowed instantly, her gaze following him from the corner of her eye.
X was holding a laptop, walking over to the shared power bank kiosk. He unlocked his phone and scanned the code. A moment later, a power bank popped out of one of the slots.
He pulled out the USB-C cable and connected it to his laptop.
His gaze moved up, paused at the top-right corner of the screen, and then his brow furrowed slightly.
Probably the power bank’s wattage was too low to charge the laptop.
X unplugged the cable and shoved the power bank back into the slot.
Mu Ning’s breath stopped for a beat. Then a courage she had never known before surged through her blood, pumping through her body and back to her heart, inflating it like a balloon suddenly blown up.
The moment X turned around, Mu Ning fished out the neatly coiled laptop charger from her bag at lightning speed and held it out in front of him.
X paused.
His gaze dropped, lingered on the charger for a moment, then lifted to her face.
Mu Ning pulled the corners of her mouth into a smile: “Looks like you need to charge your laptop? Mine’s the same brand as yours, so it should work.”
Helping each other out with work emergencies wasn’t uncommon in the campus area.
Perhaps because of that, X didn’t hesitate. He reached out and took the charger: “Thanks. I’ll return it to you once it’s charged.”
Until now, X had always been a silent male lead in a black-and-white comic.
The first time she heard his voice, it was clearer than she’d imagined—like pure water with ice cubes, served in a transparent glass.
“You’re welcome…”
“Which seat are you at?”
Mu Ning hesitated for a moment, then pointed to the small round table she’d been sitting at.
Perhaps the laptop battery was already at the critical point of shutting down, and he had something extremely important at hand. X said, “I’ll return it to you in a bit,” and walked back to his spot with the laptop.
The rain had already lightened; no need for an umbrella anymore.
A slightly cool breeze brushed her face, and only then did Mu Ning realize how hot her cheeks were.
The drizzle, fine as ox hair, left her hair damp and fluffy.
After a twelve-minute walk, Mu Ning returned to the apartment, carried the little cat “Xiao Wa” back to her room, opened half a can of food to soothe it, dashed into the bathroom to put on a light layer of makeup in record time, and then hurried back to W Stage.
The café was still bustling, not a single empty seat.
Mu Ning’s gaze immediately went to the window.
X wasn’t there anymore. The two seats connected to the neighboring table were now occupied by a couple.
And the small round table she’d sat at had new occupants too.
Mu Ning stood still in place, a sense of loss washing over her.
This was the eighth month of her secret crush on X.
Not only did she still not know his name, the company he worked for, or which floor he worked on…
She’d also lost an Apple charger to him.
Sigh.