With a single cigarette burned down to the filter, the slight irritability dragged out from those messy, jumbled dreams by Xu Qingnan also dissipated into thin air.
However, the production crew’s rules dictated that no personal belongings of any kind could be brought on this trip. “Where did you get the cigarette?”
“I asked Huo Zheng to bring some back for me when he went out to buy things,” seeing Xu Qingnan’s mood soften, Ren Xubai smoothed his features into an expression of eager anticipation, fishing for praise. “Pretty thoughtful of me, right?”
Without even glancing at him, Xu Qingnan stubbed the cigarette butt out against a rock, tossed it casually into his pocket, and turned to walk toward the dark perimeter. “Keep up.”
Ren Xubai followed along in bewilderment.
Leading him to a secluded spot where the lights from the campsite could no longer reach, Xu Qingnan gave a slight lift of his chin, signaling for Ren Xubai to take a seat on a tree stump. “Sit down, take your shirt off.”
Ren Xubai’s eyes lit up as he hurriedly complied. The gauze on his back had already begun seeping blood, yet its owner wore an utterly oblivious expression. “Xu-ge, if you’re in a bad mood, you don’t have to force yourself. I’ll still pay you the full fee.”
Ignoring him, Xu Qingnan lowered his gaze to prepare the medicine Ren Xubai needed. When he stood back up and looked at Ren Xubai’s posture, with his back turned to the light source, he commanded, “Turn around.”
Ren Xubai obediently pivoted back around. The instant he was illuminated by the light, he felt a sweet warmth blooming in his chest, looking up at Xu Qingnan from below. “Is it because I’m afraid of the dark?”
Stepping forward, Xu Qingnan gripped Ren Xubai’s shoulders, forcing him to rotate another half-turn to ensure his own body wouldn’t block the light source while applying the medicine.
With practiced efficiency, he snipped away the gauze and peeled it back to expose the wound underneath. Hearing Ren Xubai let out a sharp hiss of intake, Xu Qingnan taunted, “With an attitude like yours, you’d succeed at anything you set your mind to.”
Ren Xubai shrank back slightly, a bead of sweat instantly popping out on his forehead, yet he kept his mouth running. “What about chasing after you? Will that succeed, too?”
Fixating the flashlight onto a tree branch, Xu Qingnan left the wound fully exposed. Ren Xubai’s regenerative capacity was astonishing; despite today’s frequent physical exertion, his condition was already vastly improved compared to the previous night. Another two applications of medicine should do the trick.
If only all money were this easy to earn.
With an expressionless face, Xu Qingnan sprayed the medicinal liquid directly onto the wound.
Ren Xubai let out a muffled grunt, pressing his lips together as his eyes darted around, searching for a way to distract himself. “Xu-ge, look how dark it is here don’t you think the two of us sneaking off to the woods counts as a secret rendezvous?”
“I don’t have any plans to beat you up just yet.”
“Tsk, what a killjoy,” Ren Xubai hummed. “When you were in school, didn’t you ever sneak off to the woods with anyone?”
Xu Qingnan answered casually, “I did. Every single time was to go start a fight.”
A tight knot formed in Ren Xubai’s chest, though his expression remained unperturbed as he smoothly picked up the conversational thread. “Xu-ge was pretty rebellious back in the day, huh? The boss who ruled the school?”
Without halting his movements, Xu Qingnan treated the wound with steady, precise efficiency. “The boss was usually the one picking a fight with me.”
“——” Ren Xubai instinctively steered clear of that hazardous branch. “Challenging authority?”
“No.”
“Then why pick a fight with you?”
Frowning as he tried to recall, Xu Qingnan replied, “Lots of reasons. Blocking the path, refusing to help them cheat, declining to run errands, refusing to pay protection money…”
Ren Xubai’s brows knit tighter and tighter, prompting him to ask involuntarily, “Didn’t you tell the teachers?”
“Where I grew up, a fist worked a lot better than a teacher’s words,” Xu Qingnan stated lightly. “Besides, they all got beaten into submission by me, so there was no need to bother a teacher.”
Mainly because bothering a teacher meant getting called in to see a guardian.
Xu Qingnan had no guardian.
Ren Xubai asked instinctively, “The educational environment on Silver Frost Star shouldn’t be that bad, right?”
“It wasn’t Silver Frost Star. Silver Frost Star came later,” finishing the treatment, Xu Qingnan wrapped the wound back up in clean gauze. “The planet I was born on was far more backward than you can imagine.”
Probing step by step toward the finish line, Ren Xubai asked, “So earlier… were you dreaming about those things?”
“What, you just wanted to ask about that?” Letting out a chuckle, Xu Qingnan gave a prompt, straightforward reply. “No. I didn’t suffer a loss either, so what’s there to care about?”
Ren Xubai turned his head back to look at Xu Qingnan.
The man’s tall, imposing figure stood right behind him, one foot propped up on the tree stump he was sitting on. When his gaze leveled forward, his line of sight landed right around a metallic belt buckle. Gazing upward at Xu Qingnan from this perspective, a formidable sense of oppression washed over him.
A heavy thud echoed in Ren Xubai’s chest.
It felt as though the battlefield had shifted; beneath the cover of the inhibitor patch, the scent gland at the nape of his neck broke out in a feverish, trembling heat known only to its owner, pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat.
Ren Xubai felt as though the air right in front of him had grown somewhat scorching.
His train of thought ground to a complete halt.
Until Xu Qingnan lowered his leg, stepped back, and raised a hand to unhook the flashlight from the tree branch.
As the blinding white beam swept past him, Ren Xubai instinctively averted his gaze. A cool breeze brushed across his face, and his wildly racing, out-of-rhythm heart finally began to gradually normalize.
Xu Qingnan was already walking back with the flashlight in hand. Hastily pulling his shirt on, Ren Xubai hurried to keep up. “Was it Ye Yuyao who pissed you off again?”
He made connections quickly.
Yet Xu Qingnan rarely experienced emotional fluctuations over people anymore.
Even with an anomalous presence like Ren Xubai, Xu Qingnan was fully capable of maintaining normal interactions.
Thinking Xu Qingnan’s silence meant agreement, Ren Xubai had been filled with boiling fury and self-reproach over his own powerlessness when he heard about Xu Qingnan’s past being bullied. But now that he was already woven into Xu Qingnan’s life, he would never let history repeat itself.
As Ren Xubai turned around with the intent of striding toward the tents, a heavy hand pressed down onto his shoulder, pinning him in place. “Get back here.”
Forced to reroute, Ren Xubai frowned and pressed the issue. “Did he really piss you off?”
“Mind your own business,” Xu Qingnan casually tapped the back of Ren Xubai’s head. “Stay put and behave.”
“Xu-ge, I can afford the breach-of-contract penalty, and I have a rough guess about Ye Yuyao’s background. If you’re being bullied, you have to tell me.” When Ren Xubai spoke this time, his entire demeanor transformed; the lazy, cheeky persona vanished, and something far deeper surged to the surface.
“Stop tossing yourself about; I don’t need you.” Withdrawing his hand, Xu Qingnan offered no reaction whatsoever to Ren Xubai’s alternative side.
Blinking, Ren Xubai’s voice softened back down. “And yet you wouldn’t tell me.”
Xu Qingnan had zero intention of letting Ren Xubai pick a fight with Ye Yuyao over him, nor did he plan to play along with any damsel-in-distress rescue tropes. Flashing through his mind were the rambling sentences Ye Yuyao had muttered in his ear earlier even though he hadn’t caught every word—
“He apologized to me.”
Yet Ren Xubai reacted with a sharp sense of disharmony. “Apologized?”
The tone sounded exceedingly strange. Giving a single affirmative hum, Xu Qingnan asked, “Sounds like you’re not satisfied?”
Although Ren Xubai didn’t know the names of the other individuals, the prominent planets in the prosperous star sector only numbered a handful, and Ren Xubai possessed a general understanding of the notable family surnames on each of those planets.
The Ye family was gradually allowing the eldest son to participate in several key projects, which meant the person appearing here could only be that legendary, brilliantly capable second young master.
For the second young master of the Ye family to participate in a dating reality show at such a critical juncture—Ren Xubai easily deduced his underlying motives. He had initially figured it had nothing to do with him; after all, he had no personal stake in it, and Xu Qingnan gained nothing from getting involved.
Based on the public reputation held by the second young master of the Ye family, the two of them ought to have maintained a wide berth and minded their own business.
Thus, the moment Ye Yuyao suddenly directed hostility toward Xu Qingnan, Ren Xubai had felt that something was amiss. Now, hearing that Ye Yuyao had actually apologized, that lingering sense of wrongness crystallized entirely into a sharp spike of crisis. “Xu-ge, have you gone and exerted your charm again?”
“…” Xu Qingnan immediately reached out with a hand, accidentally landing a direct smack right against Ren Xubai’s tender, fragile wound.
“Ow, ow, my bad, my bad,” scalp tingling from pain, Ren Xubai scrambled to beg for mercy. “Then why were you unhappy?”
That stubborn persistence felt eerily familiar, as if he wouldn’t rest until he dug up the root of the matter.
Fundamentally, this kind of intense delving into someone else’s past was labeled by some as “curiosity about the person you like,” but in Xu Qingnan’s eyes, it was nothing more than a manifestation of a desire for control. “You really want to know?”
“I dreamed of some things from the past.”
Xu Qingnan’s casual, offhand tone would lead anyone to believe it was no big deal.
Yet he had clearly been in an exceedingly terrible mood just moments ago.
“Very unhappy?” Pondering for a moment, Ren Xubai offered, “I have a kind of medicine that stops people from dreaming. I’ll bring it to you the next time we log on.”
“No need,” Xu Qingnan replied with casual indifference. “Think about it a few more times, and it stops bothering you.”
Xu Qingnan had always been this way.
Past events that stirred his emotions needed to be chewed over and over again until they could no longer torment him by even a fraction.
Hearing this, Ren Xubai paused, his brows knitting together. “Is it about… what you mentioned happened after Silver Frost Star?”
“Mn.” Xu Qingnan’s tone was exceptionally flat.
His thoughts spinning at lightning speed, Ren Xubai suddenly chimed in, “Actually, saying it out loud would probably have an even better effect, right?”
“What effect?”
“The desensitization therapy you’re applying,” Ren Xubai curved his eyes. “I’m an exceptionally good listener, you know.”
Surprise flickered across Xu Qingnan’s face as he glanced at Ren Xubai. “You actually understand that.”
“…” Ren Xubai raised an eyebrow. “I’m not an idiot.”
Narrowing his eyes, Xu Qingnan fixed a piercing gaze on him. “Are you trying to help me desensitize, or are you simply looking for some cheap entertainment?”
Shaking his head with a curved smile under the dim shroud of night completely oblivious to the subtle shift in Xu Qingnan’s tone Ren Xubai answered, “I just want to understand the past of the person I like.”
Carrying a hint of delicate self-assurance, as if taking it for granted that Xu Qingnan would surely agree.
“Tsk,” Xu Qingnan looked away, his gaze turning cold and distant. “Same exact rhetoric.”
“What?”
“Someone else said those exact same words to me once before,” Xu Qingnan proactively brought up that “ex” yet again. A tremor ran through Ren Xubai’s heart as a terrible premonition arose, and Xu Qingnan’s thin lips parted to deliver the final blow: “Later on, he said he regretted it.”
Ren Xubai’s expression went entirely blank.
The chiming vibration of his wristband stood out exceptionally loud in the stillness, but Xu Qingnan didn’t look at him again. “Your time is up.”
To Ren Xubai’s ears, those words carried a double meaning.
Struck as if by a bolt of lightning.
He had heard Xu Qingnan state more than once that he resembled that person, yet he had never directly argued against it because words always lacked persuasive power; he possessed the full confidence to make Xu Qingnan recognize the differences in him.
Yet right now, Ren Xubai suddenly felt utterly helpless, reduced to grabbing Xu Qingnan’s arm and blurting out a defense that sounded pale and hollow even to his own ears: “I’m not like him.”
Xu Qingnan effortlessly shook him off.
Xu Qingnan had made it clear from the start that he wasn’t here to fall in love, which was why he hadn’t responded to anyone’s advances.
Rejecting Ren Xubai simply came with one extra reason, that was all.