A rich blend of white tea and orange blossom aromas merged together, creating a scent that was both elegant and sweet, filling the entire room.
The relationship between Hua Sheng and Zuo Xingyun had undergone a substantial change.
During the half-hour Hua Sheng spent in the shower, Zuo Xingyun sat outside in a state of restless anxiety. First, he put his own clothes back on, then cleaned up the room that had been thrown into complete chaos. In his heart, an indescribable elation mingled with jittery unease.
Recalling the process of sinking his teeth into the scent gland and injecting his pheromones inward, recalling Hua Sheng’s trembling voice and labored breathing, recalling that frail body swaying violently amidst a torrential storm.
Zuo Xingyun couldn’t help but cover his heart.
What would Hua Sheng say to him when he came out? What kind of expression would he wear? In the face of those words he had just spoken, would Hua Sheng hate him or was there some other meaning behind it all?
His heart rate had yet to drop a single beat, his mind entirely filled with scenes of cloud and rain with Hua Sheng. He had never experienced such a blissful and ecstatic moment before.
He even felt that if he were to die at that very second, he would have no regrets. Possessing Hua Sheng was enough to offset all the hardships he had suffered over the past few years.
He stood right beside the bathroom door, listening to Hua Sheng washing up inside. With the sound of running water pattering away, pattering away, he closed his eyes, thinking of the way Hua Sheng had shed tears just moments ago, feeling a tangled mix of emotions in his chest.
Hearing the dog by the door whimper a few times, Zuo Xingyun opened the bedroom door.
The moment he opened it, two fluffy, bulky bodies collapsed against his feet.
Looking down, he saw the Border Collie and Labrador that Hua Sheng kept.
The Border Collie reacted first. Upon seeing a stranger, its fur stood completely on end, and it bared its teeth as it barked viciously at him. Woof woof woof woof woof woof!
Baizhu’s reaction was the exact opposite, wagging its tail as it rubbed back and forth against his legs, whimpering and acting coquettishly.
Zuo Xingyun lowered his gaze to look at the Border Collie. Overwhelmed by the fierce aura in his eyes, the Collie barked as it backed away. Even though it was terrified, it didn’t forget to let out a warning growl.
As expected of a dog raised by Hua Sheng, its personality was just like Hua Sheng’s.
Thinking of Hua Sheng, his expression softened a fraction. He reached out to gently stroke the Labrador’s head. Baizhu.
Baizhu raised its head to look at him, and upon hearing its name, excitedly lunged at Zuo Xingyun, resting its two front paws on his thighs while panting and hanging its tongue out, its two dark, glossy eyes staring straight at Zuo Xingyun.
Baizhu was already a thirteen-year-old elderly dog, usually eating much and moving little, so performing this action was slightly taxing.
Its tail wagged excitedly, thumping rhythmically against the Border Collie beside it. The Collie gave it a plaintive look, then quietly retreated outside the bedroom door.
He didn’t look like a bad guy either, and since the big boss hadn’t said anything, the Collie stopped barking, tilting its head to watch Baizhu and Zuo Xingyun.
Zuo Xingyun squatted down, and Baizhu affectionately licked his face. Zuo Xingyun hesitated for a moment, but didn’t dodge. After such a long separation, he didn’t want to interrupt Baizhu’s enthusiastic display of longing.
Zuo Xingyun gave a bitter smile. You remember me better than he does.
Behind him, Hua Sheng hadn’t finished showering yet; the pattering sound of water still drifted from the bathroom, pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat.
In a daze, Zuo Xingyun was pulled back to a summer six years ago, that gloomy, overcast rainy day.
If you don’t have a home, then come with me.
Covered in filth and grime, suffering from hunger and cold, his hair unwashed for half a month emitting an unpleasant odor, wearing short sleeves inappropriate for the season that failed to keep out the chill, Zuo Xingyun sat hugging his knees, squatting beside a dumpster in a deep alley. Because of his posture, the weeping wound on his knee split open once again. He stared numbly at the gaping brown scar as fresh red beads of blood welled up one by one from the afflicted area.
His lips were crusted over and devoid of color, and whip marks of varying depths covered the skin exposed on his arms.
So cold. Is it winter already?
He had no concept of time and couldn’t remember what day it was anymore.
In a strange city, he couldn’t find his way home. Pedestrians passing by hurried along, holding umbrellas and walking briskly past his side, casting glances back at him filled with disdain or mockery.
Or perhaps helpless pity.
He had drifted all the way through various cities in the south, seeing countless people coming and going, and long since forgot where his home was.
This time, they had brought him to City C.
They broke his leg and made him beg for alms in the busiest streets and alleys. He was unsellable dead stock; he watched peers around him replaced batch after batch until he became the oldest one left.
He had lost his competitive edge, and his only value was begging along the streets to win sympathy, extracting more money to avoid brutal beatings.
He was weak and alone. In unseen corners, those people watched his every move. In his earlier years, he had once run into a police station to report that he had been abducted by traffickers and wanted to find his biological parents.
The moment he ran inside, they followed right behind him, holding his hands and crying tears to the police, claiming the child was disobedient and had run away from home.
His defiance earned him nothing more than a lecture and a scolding, after which they led him back home and beat him with various instruments of torture.
Covered in bruises, his skin torn and bleeding.
Zuo Xingyun had been locked away in a dark, sunless woodshed or perhaps a basement, a place where only rats and bugs existed. He lasted two weeks before he couldn’t take it anymore, temporarily abandoning the thought of returning home.
They took him to meet all kinds of buyers, telling him every time that they had found his mommy and daddy.
Yet the result was being rejected time and time again. Those buyers were unwilling to take home a skinny, small child with a gloomy personality; knowing they were doing dirty work, they didn’t even dare stare straight into Zuo Xingyun’s lifeless eyes.
As he grew older, he became harder and harder to sell.
Zuo Xingyun remembered that he used to have a home.
When he was seven years old, he got lost and was taken away by a woman with an approachable appearance. By the time he realized something was wrong, it was already too late to run. This child-trafficking ring operating year-round in the south had around a dozen members, mostly robust, middle-aged men.
The people who kept him locked up were a couple, his so-called adoptive parents. Zuo Xingyun didn’t understand the financial dynamics between them; he only knew his adoptive mother was driven solely by profit while his adoptive father had a volatile, unpredictable temper.
Because of this, he frequently suffered inhuman beatings and torture.
They were obviously not the ringleaders of the trafficking syndicate, just small fry within it. Someone in the ring would lock onto a target, and then they would execute the operation precisely in real-time, abducting children through various means.
The people Zuo Xingyun saw most often every day were children who, like him, had been trafficked, some boys, some girls, with boys being the majority. Their ultimate destination was being sold off.
Staying by these two people’s side had lasted a full five years.
Zuo Xingyun couldn’t quite remember clearly anymore. He only had a first-grade elementary school education, knowing just how to write his own name. He used to have a mommy and daddy too, but even though they rarely spent much time at home, he could no longer recall what they looked like.
Beyond that, he knew nothing else.
As his thoughts drifted, a light drizzle suddenly began to fall. Enduring the pain, Zuo Xingyun forced himself up, crawling step by step to the edge of the alley.
The bustling city did not belong to him, and the dilapidated, backward village was not his destination either. He was a caged stray dog; until the very last drop of value was squeezed out of him, they would never let him go.
Only by squatting beside the dumpster, in the most untrodden place, could he carve out a sliver of peace.
Dizzy and lightheaded, having taken only a few steps, the world began to spin before his eyes. His stomach, starved for far too long, was empty, writhing in spasms and roaring in an attempt to find food.
He refused to continue living this way; no matter what, he had to escape this time.
Constantly being watched and beaten over the years had instead fostered his acute investigative awareness. The person assigned to watch them switched every two hours, and only during noon when they went to eat did he have a window to catch his breath.
As luck would have it, today’s weather was volatile; the morning was clear and cloudless, but in the blink of an eye, a light, pattering drizzle began to fall.
He had originally been kneeling on the ground shivering, but feeling the prying gazes behind him wane, he slipped into the alley alongside the crowd.
His injured leg made it hard to walk fast, so he could only move while gritting his teeth against the pain. The calf of his left leg had been beaten by the man; compared to the surface wound directly bleeding on his knee, the pain in his calf radiated from the inside out, hurting excruciatingly with every movement. Perhaps it was broken.
If he were dragged back, his other leg would probably be done for too.
This wasn’t his first time trying to run away. Every time they went to a new place, he would try to cry out for help, but what a young child said held no credibility to outsiders, so he was always caught by them.
The price of being dragged back was agonizing. In their dark, old, damp room hung various instruments of torture; the brand on his back was left behind when he was dragged back from the police station at age ten.
Though he had never received an education, a biological organism’s instinct is to seek advantage and avoid harm. Zuo Xingyun didn’t understand what hatred was; he only knew he feared pain, feared suffering physical torture, and disliked his adoptive parents. If he could escape, even if he couldn’t return to his biological parents, it would be fine as long as he didn’t live under their control. That was the best life young Zuo Xingyun could imagine.
His frail body hid in the gap between a green dumpster and the wall. Zuo Xingyun carefully poked his head out to look toward the mouth of the alley.
He saw several menacing-looking men furrowing their brows as they looked around in all directions. His heart leapt to his throat.
Will I be caught? Will I be dragged back and abused all over again?
The wounds on his back throbbed dully, and blood from his knee kept seeping out, staining the short-sleeved shirt whose original light color was no longer discernible.
Yet after walking a few steps into the alley, they suddenly turned back, stopping just a step away from him.
Hearing the footsteps gradually fade into the distance, Zuo Xingyun finally exhaled a breath.
His face was completely devoid of color, his lips pale as he leaned his back against the cold wall. Relaxing his breath also meant relaxing his body, which slowly slid downward.
No, I haven’t completely escaped yet. At best, they just couldn’t find me temporarily and went off to eat. If I linger here, they’ll still find me out.
Yet City C was so massive, where could he run to? Was there any place where he could hide without being found, any place willing to take in a twelve-year-old, unidentified, skin-and-bones child?
Zuo Xingyun sat blankly against the wall in the alley for a while, feeling an intense wave of hunger.
He pushed himself up against the wall, wanting to flip open the dumpster to see if there was anything inside. The green dumpster was nearly as tall as another person, and Zuo Xingyun, starving and lacking strength, exerted a great deal of effort just to lift the lid.
Standing on tiptoe, he rummaged around inside the dumpster, and it really did yield something: a bag of securely packaged bread.
Overjoyed, he pulled the bread out with trembling hands and eagerly tore open the packaging, a rich, milky fragrance rushing over his face.
This strongly stimulated his weakened stomach. Zuo Xingyun swallowed hard, grabbed the bread, and shoved it toward his mouth.
Yet the next second, a streak of shadow flashed past, and Zuo Xingyun bit into empty air.
He looked in bewilderment at his empty palm. The bread was gone!
Mmph… meow…
He turned his head to look. On the ground, a calico cat, so thin it was just skin and bones, was pressing down on the bread and eating it viciously.
Its eyes flashed with a bright, luminous glow, and as it ate, a threatening purr rumbled in its throat while its paws pinned the bread down.
Zuo Xingyun spotted its drooping nipples; this was a nursing female calico cat.
He paused, lowering his hand in a defeated manner as he slumped back down against the wall to squat. He didn’t intend to snatch it back from her mouth, merely staring blankly at the cat.
How can it snatch things?
He gazed at it with a dejected expression. The cat, thinking he still hadn’t given up, clamped the bread in its teeth and backed away, the water stains in the alley sticking to the bread.
Zuo Xingyun sighed and said softly, I didn’t mean to fight you for it.
He was human; he could dig through plenty of other dumpsters, but cats couldn’t, and this cat had babies.
The cat was a stray, but its babies still had a mother, and its babies weren’t stray cats.
Must be nice…
Xiaohua, so this is where you are.
Suddenly, a bright, youthful voice rang out from the mouth of the alley. Startled like a bird facing the wind, Zuo Xingyun instinctively hid himself.
Peering out through the gap in the dumpster, the sky was dim, and combined with the back-lighting angle, he couldn’t make out the newcomer’s face.
Not very tall; judging by the voice, the age should be about the same as his.
Zuo Xingyun’s vigilance eased slightly as he secretly sized him up.
The person gradually drew closer, the crisp, bright sound of small leather shoes echoing sharply in the alley.
He wore overalls and a white shirt, a red pair of headphones larger than his face hanging around his neck, and a black schoolbag dangling down to his buttocks, looking quite heavy.
Following his line of sight upward, the boy held a blue polka-dot umbrella in his left hand, tilting the angle slightly to reveal a youthful and superior face.
Zuo Xingyun stared in a daze. He had wandered through so many places and seen all kinds of people, both poor and wealthy, but this was the first time he had ever seen such a pretty boy.
Round almond eyes, lively and bright, with thick, long upturned eyelashes. Red lips, white teeth, and a powdered, jade-carved face as fair as white jade, without even a single mole.
Completely unlike his own filthy self, this boy in front of him exuded noble elegance from head to toe. Even while walking in the rain, his little leather shoes were as bright as new, untainted by a single drop of rain.