Then, like a shrunken 007, Kou Tongtong-tongxue gave a Huang Jinchen a boundlessly flashy smile of the model specially used to pick up girls, then began to mess around busily with the magical safe. 

There was a clink, and a little door about ten centimeters large popped out from a corner. Compared to the whole incomparably huge secret wall worthy of an imperial household, it was as if you had spent ages picking the lock of a castle and finally opened up a dog kennel.

Huang Jinchen raised his head and looked up at the study’s somewhat elderly ceiling, feeling that his emotions had been deeply wasted. 

Kou Tong pulled out a somewhat aged-looking file pouch. The things inside were disorderly, very uneven. Huang Jinchen looked in past his shoulder and found that the first things to fall out were a few yellowed old photographs. Before he could get a clear look at the people in the photographs, they were put away at light speed by Kou Tong. Then there was a university admission notice and some yellowed letters with faintly visible bloodstains…

The strangest thing of all was a Smurfs poster torn into four pieces! 

Kou Tong found that Huang Jinchen’s face was twisting this way and that like a compass needle in an indeterminate magnetic field, so he explained a little awkwardly, “Everyone has had a period of passion, don’t you think so?” 

Huang Jinchen paused, then nodded silently, feeling that Dr. Kou’s passionate point was very unique. Though given that his strongbox could turn into a mushroom farm, this was actually nothing. 

Huang Jinchen looked sidelong at him, thinking, It really is nothing. 

You always had to be a little more tolerant towards good-looking young men. With someone of Kou Tong’s S-Class, never mind a Smurfs poster locked up in a safe, even if he had been wearing Ugg boots like a Smurf’s big feet and carrying a “Fight Gargamel” banner while streaking, you could still find a way to forgive him. 

…It must be said that Master Huang, who walked an unusual road, hadn’t noticed that he possessed the particular quality of every die-hard fan—selective tolerance. 

When he had flipped through to the end, Kou Tong at last found a small stack of documents—rather than saying they were documents, it would be better to say that they were a middle school student’s coordinate geometry scratch work, all written by hand, as messy as could be, with all kinds of equations normal humans didn’t understand spread out all over, labeled with annotations filled with all kinds of “alien” nouns. 

“What’s this?” Huang Jinchen asked. 

“My notes from when I temporarily had the idea of making this program.” Kou Tong sat on the ground, flipping through them page by page. He grabbed a pen out of a little drawer under the desk and began to write and draw, looking very much like the real thing. 

“Are you a tech nerd, too?” Huang Jinchen asked, drawing close. 

“Half a technician, not especially a nerd,” Dr. Kou said. 

“I see.” Huang Jinchen, who had left school in his teens to specialize in the business of murder, made a fairly accurate determination about himself—It turns out I’m half illiterate, he thought. 

Kou Tong read and read and began to frown. The materials weren’t very complete, only the products of a fit of excitement. They hadn’t been put in order at all, and there were gaps in many places. Even if he put it all in order, he still didn’t know what program had gone wrong because of the disruption to the server resulting in diverting them here. As for how to get back, he was even more at a fundamental loss. 

Huang Jinchen read along with him for a while, putting on a serious look. He found that he still didn’t understand and stopped pretending to be a person of culture. He got out his phone and started to play around, amusing himself. 

His phone was special. There was no name on it, only numbers and simple letters. Opening the call log, there was a string of serial numbers, like his previous name—11235. It had a particularly cold and discomforting sense of mystery. 

In his boredom, he somehow turned on the sound, and out of the knockoff phone drifted the sound of “Love Sale.” After a couple dozen years of history, this song could still make a person’s butt clench—truly an unvisited altar. 

Kou Tong was also shaken. He took time out of his busy schedule to glance at him and saw him scrolling through his call log. Dr. Kou saw at a glance that there were people whose code names were in square brackets, so he asked, “What do the brackets mean?” 

“They’re dead,” Huang Jinchen said without looking up. “Before there also used to be parentheses, showing the ones that were going to be dead soon, though now they’ve all been squared off.” 

Kou Tong was silent for a while, then asked, “Which one am I?” 

“10086¹,” Huang Jinchen said. 

Kou Tong: “…” 

Huang Jinchen explained: “Won’t fight back when hit, won’t talk back when cursed; you can do business with it, you can check your balance, and sometimes it acts cute. You can fool around together when nothing’s going on.” 

“…” Kou Tong blinked. “I think your appraisal of me is pretty high.” 

Huang Jinchen raised his head and grinned. “Must be.” 

Kou Tong kept his head buried in the complicated materials and deductions, feeling a little irascible—for example, he wanted to pick up a hammer and smash a certain person’s reflectively white front teeth. 

Since entering this unknown space, he had started having a bit of a hard time controlling his own emotions. There were people whose emotions naturally had few fluctuations, people with gentle dispositions who wouldn’t easily become overjoyed or deeply grieved. There were others who had to rely on conscious control and professional accomplishments to remain calm. 

Unfortunately, Kou Tong was the latter. 

For a psychologist, he sometimes seemed to be too erratic. A person who was too erratic and lively was generally unlikely to have a calm and tepid nature. He had put in a lot of effort and could fairly effectively keep his emotional fluctuations within the scope of professional requirements, but only inside the threshold of endurance. Here, he couldn’t quite hold himself back. 

The projection space made it very easy for people to lose control. He had been deprived of his principal privileges, amounting to getting caught up in the space. He was also human; he breathed, he felt the whole gamut of human emotions. It was hard for him to be as aloof as the elders already buried in the earth and hanging on the wall. 

So he held his tongue, but his brow furrowed tighter and tighter. This made it look as though Kou Tong’s always smiling face belonged to a different person. These were evidently the same features, but because of a bit of uncontrollable worry and irritation, they looked very grave. 

Suddenly, a finger tapped his forehead at extreme speed. Kou Tong gave a start and automatically leaned back. He found that Huang Jinchen was looking at him. 

“White button-down.” Huang Jinchen pointed at his clothes. “Long pants. If you add in frowning, it makes you look especially ascetic.” 

Kou Tong looked at him blankly.

“Bad mood, huh?” Huang Jinchen was understanding. With unlimited earnestness, he advised, “Well, all men sometimes get fired up. If you shoot off, you’ll feel better.” 

Kou Tong’s eyes met his for three seconds. Then he suddenly stood up, rolled up the documents, picked them up, and dropped them back in the safe. He shut the bookcase with a creak, picked up the jacket hanging over the back of his chair, and strode out. 

Huang Jinchen asked, “Where are you going?” 

Kou Tong said without looking up, “I think that what you said has merit.” 

When he opened the door, he ran into his mom, holding fruit and milk and planning to knock on the door. Kou Tong’s mom said sweetly, “Tongtong, you should drink some milk.” 

Huang Jinchen said, “Pfft—” 

Kou Tong was silent for a moment. “Though the common saying goes that you can still have a growth spurt at twenty-three, I’ve passed the developmental period.” 

Kou Tong’s mom said, “It’s to help you sleep!” 

Kou Tong said, “It’s not like I have to go to school for makeup classes tomorrow.” 

Kou Tong’s mom didn’t speak. She stood there with her limpid eyes, holding the tray, blocking the way, using her expression to denounce her unfilial son. 

Kou Tong looked into her eyes for three seconds, then at last picked up the cup and drank it dry in one gulp. He draped his jacket over himself. “I have something to do. I’m going out. I won’t be back tonight.” 

“Tut.” Kou Tong’s mom shook her head. “Children have their own lives to live when they grow up.” 

Then she adjusted the aim of her barrage to Huang Jinchen, who was furtively watching the fun. She genially said, “Will you have milk, Xiao Huang? Should I add a spoonful of chocolate powder? What about honey?” 

Amid evening pleasure-seeking, people’s moral outlooks seem to decline a great deal. After leaving home, Kou Tong familiarly went to a rather out of the way bar. This place included the overlap of his consciousness. Kou Tong knew that the system would lead him to certain places according to his thoughts. 

Right now, he was in a corner with his back to the light, sitting across from a beautiful-looking, blind drunk youth, putting on a cultured tone. 

“I’m in pain. Do you know that feeling? Do you know that feeling? The whole world…the whole fucking world is having fun, and it’s like I only have myself.” At this point, the youth stopped for a while. The alcohol must have made his brain short circuit a little. He temporarily forgot how to speak. Then he asked, “Do you get it?” 

Kou Tong silently covered the back of the youth’s hand with his hand. He was wearing his UV-protection glasses. The lamplight fell on the lenses, a thin layer of flashing light glancing off, making his half-covered eyes look extremely gentle. When he looked at someone else like this, he seemed unusually affectionate, as though the person he was looking at was someone he had loved for many lifetimes. 

But the unusually “affectionate” Dr. Kou was impatiently thinking, The hell I understand, I just want to hurry up and get you in bed. 

The youth put his hands over his eyes, tilted his head up at a forty-five degree angle to look at the wall light, and said, “Don’t look at me like that. If I get addicted, I won’t be able to give it up.” 

Kou Tong averted his gaze and laughed quietly. He removed the glass in front of the youth and softly said, “Don’t drink too much. It’ll hurt your stomach.” 

These words seem to turn on a tap. The youth instantly collapsed. 

Kou Tong stood up and put a hand on his shoulder. He leaned over and said into his ear, “You’re in a bad mood. You should hurry home.—I’m sorry, miss, could you get him a cup of hot milk?” 

His patience was truly limited today. He had decided to switch to someone else. 

Just then, the youth suddenly put his arms around his waist. “Don’t go!” 

Kou Tong thought, Huh?

The youth boldly raised his head and looked at him. As though making a heroic sacrifice, he indistinctly said, “Don’t go. I need your warmth today. You…” 

Kou Tong didn’t say a word in protest. He reached out to help him up and went out, thinking, Why didn’t you say so sooner? I rather need you to cool down.

Just then, his phone began to vibrate wildly in his pocket. Kou Tong took a look and saw that it was Huang Jinchen. He refused the call. After a while, a text message arrived. Huang Jinchen, in an insolent tone: “Calling 10086 personal service!” 

Kou Tong simply deleted it, turned off the phone, removed the battery, and swaggered out to rent a room with his prey. 

Huang Jinchen occupied Kou Tong’s bedroom on his own. He stared at the phone for a while, waiting. He called back and heard the technical voice said: “The number you have dialed is not available…” 

“Crap,” Huang Jinchen said. Then he slapped himself in the face. “That’s what you get for opening your big mouth!” 

Then he got dressed, got up, opened the window of Kou Tong’s bedroom, looked outside, and nimbly jumped out, not caring how many floors up he was.