Kou Tong was startled awake by the lights suddenly turning on after the power was restored. 

Without power, he had nothing to do, so he had fallen headfirst into bed and fast asleep in a corpselike position. 

Out of instinct, Huang Jinchen took a high degree of care for the safety of anything like a “base camp” where he was hidden. In one night, they had destroyed two of Qin Qin’s cards. Perhaps this young lady with unusual mental wiring would become furious out of humiliation—though as far as Huang Jinchen could tell, this young lady spent her life in a state of humiliated fury—so he very carefully patrolled in the vicinity of Kou Tong’s house. He didn’t find any strange rats, or anything stranger than rats. Everything seemed very normal. Then he silently walked against the flow of the morning rush of people and returned home by the special channel. 

Then he found that Kou Tong was already fast asleep. Even Huang Jinchen sitting on the edge of the bed looking at him for a long time couldn’t make Dr. Kou wake from his deep slumber. 

Huang Jinchen watched him with great interest—for a sniper, being able to sleep like this under someone’s watchful gaze with no awareness simply made a person a god. Didn’t he feel another person’s breath? Didn’t he feel that his territory had been invaded? 

Huang Jinchen tried widening his eyes and changing the rate of his breathing, trying hard to make himself seem to have more presence by putting on an imposing manner—at last, when his eyes were twitching from being open wide, Kou Tong rolled over. Probably he had accidentally pressed down on his arm and felt the pain. He frowned uncomfortably, shuffled around on the bed, shifted his arm…and continued to sleep. 

There’s even blood seeping through… Huang Jinchen grimaced, as though he was the one who was in pain. Then he lightly took out cotton swabs, picked up Kou Tong’s arm in both hands, undid the bandages, and wiped the blood that had seeped through clean bit by bit. He reapplied medicine and wrapped it up. 

During this time, Dr. Kou, who was extremely astute when awake, slept like a pig; thunder wouldn’t have shaken him. Long ago, Huang Jinchen had heard that for a mental worker, sleep was more important than food. At last he had personal knowledge of this. 

He half knelt at the side of the bed, carefully wiping the shocking wounds on Kou Tong’s arm, from time to time raising his head to observe his expression. Seeing that he was still sleeping fairly steadily, he relaxed. Halfway through, Huang Jinchen suddenly stopped. For some reason, into his mind came the image of a wife in ancient days washing her sleeping husband’s feet. Then he was horrified for a moment because of his visualization, but in his heart he strangely felt a peculiar softness. 

He was like a robot who had just learned to have emotions, tasting these feelings extremely attentively with a kind of curiosity. This was different from that intense feeling like the tingle of being electrocuted. It was as if some strange medicine had been poured into him. There was an inexplicable anticipation in his heart. This anticipation made his manner unusually gentle and his patience unusually good. 

And it was all because of one person. 

An unfamiliar word emerged in Huang Jinchen’s mind—love. 

Due to certain strange junctures, he had developed a longing towards a person separate from the desire of the body. This person wasn’t a thing. He couldn’t be taken apart or substituted. It had to be him, whole and entire. And this longing adjusted the levels of certain hormones in the body to cause an abnormal state of happiness. 

“It is a finer thing to love than to be loved.” Long ago, Huang Jinchen had read these words in a book of bathroom reading material. He had ignored them at the time—because logically speaking, the party actively investing love would usually invest more things in the other person; therefore he had thought this was nonsense without merit. 

But in this moment, Huang Jinchen suddenly understood. 

Though this man was a bit of a scoundrel and very careless, particularly unreliable, often doing things that would make a person writhe in anger—though tender words from this man’s mouth were usually preludes to dishonorable intentions, and he was also a chain smoker with irregular living habits, a bit of a slob, who slept like a pig, snatched blankets and kicked when he couldn’t win…

Despite this, Huang Jinchen still felt willing and happy to do things for him…even if his only reward was a stuck up middle finger. It would still satisfy him for half a day. 

There were some things that probably only people who had experienced them knew about. Perhaps they had formerly thought they were dull and foolish, had scoffed at them, but one day, their ideas suddenly changed entirely. He was like a child who had found another hidden door in the world and quietly snuck in to find that this place was unlike what he had imagined. 

Formerly, his world had contained only assignments and the dead. Whether he was being backup or a planted agent, he needed to be on constant high alert, maintain an emotional distance from others. As time went on, all people were the same to him—“to be used for this” and “to be used for that.” 

“Belonging to a group,” and “having the same past as some person, having the same memories, he knows me and I know him” were both strange feelings to him, and they also touched his heart so directly… It really was a wonderful thing. 

When Kou Tong was startled awake by the lights suddenly flipping on, he saw Huang Jinchen sitting to one side, looking out the window at the sky gradually heading towards evening, his expression unusually peaceful. Kou Tong froze, his pupils contracting, adjusting to the light. He felt that he had never seen such a calm expression on Huang Jinchen’s face—he was either pulling a face and making all kinds of jokes, or so indifferent he seemed like a robot who had nothing to do with what was taking place. 

The lamplight fell on his profile, softening the edges. It was even as if there was a thin layer of light cast on his eyes. 

Then Huang Jinchen’s eyes turned, and he raised his eyebrows. But he didn’t turn his head, maintaining the posture was though his head was raised to watch the sky. In a very cultured tone, he said, “Are you suddenly thinking that I’m very handsome?” 

Kou Tong thought for two seconds, sat up in bed, reached out a hand to touch his face, and candidly said, “Very handsome.” 

After a while, he added, “But not quite as handsome as me.” 

Then Kou Tong carelessly glanced at his own arm and found that the bandages had obviously been changed. He looked at the conspicuously smiling Huang Jinchen. Rather moved, he said, “Thank you.” 

Huang Jinchen used three fingers to perform a movement like tipping his cap. “My pleasure to serve you.” 

Kou Tong laughed. “I’m going to wash my face and get ready to begin work.” 

“Careful not to get it wet,” Huang Jinchen instructed. Then he paused and added, “Also…” 

Kou Tong was sitting on the edge of the bed putting on his shoes. Hearing this, he raised his head. Huang Jinchen leaned down and quickly kissed him on the forehead. Looking closely into his eyes, he quietly said, “I love you.” 

Modern people were accustomed to more ambivalent suggestions, used more mocking means to express their feelings, as though this way they wouldn’t seem so earnest and also wouldn’t be so easily hurt. This had made the status of these three words become embarrassing, and they had slowly faded from people’s lives. Yet at the same time, they appeared in all kinds of movies and TV shows, ads and novels, making them strange but familiar, awkward but frequently repeated. 

Kou Tong froze on the spot. He hadn’t expected these three words to suddenly come out of Huang Jinchen’s mouth in absolute earnest. 

He wasn’t joking, wasn’t deliberately making trouble in front of his mom, wasn’t play-acting. There had been no indications; it had come out of nowhere. 

Huang Jinchen waited for a long time and found that Kou Tong didn’t react. His system seemed to have crashed. So he decided not to wait anymore. He lifted Kou Tong’s chin and kissed him—anyway, he had said yesterday that he could, after the proper business was done. 

His kiss was unusually skillful. Probably because of the unprecedented tenderness he felt, he had more patience than any other time before, and was more lingering than any other time before. 

Kou Tong always yielded to his senses; he instinctively responded. 

Then, just as Dr. Kou had foretold—the originally sweet, sacred kisses…went out of control. 

There was nothing to blame but the zipper on Dr. Kou’s pants truly being too loose. As they kissed and kissed, his uninjured paw habitually reached into the other person’s shirt. Huang Jinchen was of course extremely willing to be touched by him and directly straddled him, arms winding around his waist, pressing down. 

Then…

“Ow, fuck, my ribs, my ribs!” Dr. Kou’s sudden cry broke all the atmosphere. He bumped Huang Jinchen aside with his elbow in order to liberate his little ribcage, caught between the bed and a certain person’s hard chest and unable to bear the burden. 

Huang Jinchen gloomily climbed off of him. With his clothes in disarray, he said, “Darling, you really are like the princess and the pea.” 

Kou Tong looked at his broad chest and the solid muscles under his half-open shirt. He bitterly said, “Partner, you truly have too ample a bosom and too fat a butt. I’m feeling the unbearable lightness of being.” 

—When a man accustomed to taking the initiative found that his partner’s waistline exceeded the measure of his own arm, and his weight exceeded the limits of what he could pick up, that the degree of intensity meant he could no longer entirely keep control of the tempo, he would probably just about understand Dr. Kou’s gloom in this moment. 

Huang Jinchen plastered himself to him and said, aggrieved, “Then I won’t press on you. We can try it riding—I’ll be very careful.” 

Kou Tong considered for a moment and found that he and his partner had some different views. Then he glanced again at Huang Jinchen’s figure and thought that his partner’s views…in fact had some merit. 

So Kou Tong was conflicted for a while, fixed his clothing, sat up, and gave a dry cough. “We can discuss this problem later. I’ll go wash my face now.” 

He dashed into the bathroom next door. 

When he had finished cleaning his face and was ready to fill an endless night with a large dose of data analysis, he heard a slightly strange noise coming from the room. 

Kou Tong returned to the room and watched dumbfounded as Huang Jinchen sat flagrantly on the bed, self-sufficiently performing an inharmonious action. Worst of all was that his gaze was fixed on a photograph of Kou Tong, crying out as if on purpose, “Ah…darling… You’re amazing, darling… Tongtong, you’re really too much!” 

What the hell was his face made of? Kou Tong thought in admiration. 

Then Huang Jinchen found that the real person had come in, so he abandoned the photograph and began to stare decisively at the real person, brazenly showing him—you are the subject of my sexual fantasies. 

Kou Tong couldn’t go in, but he also couldn’t not go in. He automatically closed the door and stood there staring at Huang Jinchen in dismay. After a while, he at last covered his face as though giving up. He sighed. “Er-Pang, what can I do, your baseness is so original…”