Kou Tong ardently said goodbye to Old Immortal Ji, whose words were caught in his throat. He flicked his sleeves and left without taking away a shred of cloud. 

Old Man Ji had a pair of enormous sunglasses on his head. He narrowed his sinister triangular eyes, feeling that this Dr. Kou, who came and went like the wind, had come from far away to make no contribution apart from getting in the way of his livelihood. Thinking of his deep grief when he had been parted from the cash, the old immortal set aside his position and lay down a ferocious curse: “Bah, rotten brat. Those who squander my emotions will come to a bad end. Take care that you aren’t held down for the rest of your life!” 

…This story tells us that whether an immortal is real or fake, you can’t casually offend him, or else, like the pirates of the Caribbean, you’ll live a desolate life bearing a curse, no matter how attractive you are—of course, that’s a story for later. 

When Kou Tong returned to the base, he saw Lao Yao’s wife Dou Lianqing. 

She was supposed to be nearly forty, but she was well-preserved and still seemed very young. She was suitably dressed and pretty, sitting a little uncomfortably in the room, speaking now and then to General Zhong. 

Huang Jinchen was sitting there having nothing to do with anything, avidly looking the woman up and down. Kou Tong felt that Dou Lianqing was about to burrow underground from his gaze. So he walked over decisively, took off his coat, and threw it over Huang Jinchen’s head, blocking the constantly emitting X-rays, then picked up the uniform of the base’s researchers and draped it over himself—owing to a hardware problem, he couldn’t walk as if on wings; he could only sashay gracefully over and unhurriedly sit down. Like a beast in human clothes, he said, “Hello, Madam Dou.” 

His voice was magnetic and his expression was erotic. There was about him a contradictory sense of both steadiness and youthfulness. He wore a likable smile like someone trying to get ahead in the world. It was simply spring covering the earth, returning warmth to the mortal world—Huang Jinchen, having liberated his head, thought that Ximen Qing must have carried on with Pan Jinlian in just this way¹. 

So Koumen Qing…er, Dr. Kou quietly exchanged some idle chat with Dou Lianqing, handily directing her attention from General Zhong onto himself. Whether his technique was excellent, or whether it was simply that he looked more genial than General Zhong, the woman who had just been on edge seemed to relax somewhat. Her fingers stopped ravaging her bag. 

Then Kou Tong turned and said to General Zhong, “Leave this to me. You go ahead.” 

General Zhong nodded. He looked at him as though wanting to speak but holding back, then turned and left. Kou Tong looked at Huang Jinchen. Huang Jinchen quickly sat upright and straightened his clothes, pretending that he was diligent and eager to learn, very desirous of staying to observe. Kou Tong took back the coat he had just dropped and draped it over his arm. He said to Huang Jinchen, “Go sit over there.” 

Then he turned and said to Dou Lianqing, “Don’t be nervous. This is my assistant.” 

Huang Jinchen was most expert at holing up in a corner where no one would see him, then letting off sniper fire. He could slow his breath and not move a muscle for dozens of hours at a time, as though he didn’t exist. In ancient times, he would have been an excellent candidate to study the Tortoise Breath Technique. 

Indeed, after hardly any time, Dou Lianqing had completely forgotten that such a living creature existed. 

When she had slowly relaxed, Kou Tong glanced at the bag in her hands, then very naturally used a hinting gesture to put the coat hanging over his arm aside. Dou Lianqing automatically performed the same action as him, putting down the bag she had been holding in her arms. 

Then she took a deep breath. As though she had lowered a barrier, a bit of exhaustion appeared in her expression. She raised her hands and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t mind telling you, Lao Yao and I…we’ve been having some problems lately. I don’t know what to do… He’s always so irritated, and when I ask what’s wrong, he won’t say…” 

“Take it slow.” Kou Tong pushed a box of tissues towards the woman whose eyes were quickly reddening. He gently patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t rush. We’ll take our time talking. Lao Yao often loses his temper, and he’s becoming more and more uncommunicative, right?” 

Dou Lianqing nodded. “Yes. I know that a family needs to communicate. It says so on TV. But…he doesn’t want to say anything to me, and I can’t ask. He gets angry as soon as I ask. That day, I came home and saw that he was…was even hitting the child. He even hit the child on the head with a copper paperweight. Such a heavy thing, and he just… I thought he would die, I was so scared! So I said to him, if you want to kill my son, you should kill me first…” 

Dou Lianqing became more and more agitated as she spoke. Finally she was sobbing almost too hard to talk. 

Kou Tong spoke to her quietly. Huang Jinchen looked on. But as he watched, he began to feel bored, so he got out a gun and lightly began to wipe it. 

This was a woman who couldn’t do anything but cry when she ran into a problem. Since General Zhong had brought her in, Huang Jinchen had found out that this Dou Lianqing was not only a full-time housewife, she was also one of those women with an especially gentle, especially feeble disposition, with stronger dependency than the average person. In ordinary times she probably hardly put a foot out the door; it seemed that she wouldn’t be able to find her way around if she left her house. When someone spoke to her, she could spend ages being terrified. 

Like a rabbit—this was Huang Jinchen’s assessment. 

He had been doing this job alongside Kou Tong for less than two days and he was already starting to feel bored. He had the feeling that he had left the front line and become the director of a women’s federation, listening to timid female comrades tearfully lamenting household problems; after hearing enough of it, his head hurt a little. 

Couldn’t she do something instead of staying with him? Huang Jinchen couldn’t understand it. In his understanding, after a clip of bullets, everything would be smooth. 

But he was still well-trained, sitting there looking extremely patient. Yet he wouldn’t devote his attention to Dou Lianqing anymore. Instead, he began to observe Kou Tong. 

Huang Jinchen’s first impression of Kou Tong had been his particularly confident voice. 

In the midst of war, this man was like a jack of all trades who wouldn’t suffer from stage fright no matter where you put him. No matter who fell, he would be able to hold out. With his eyebrows raised, he looked fixedly at Kou Tong’s back, which was slightly bent because he was leaning forward. Apart from his researcher’s gown like a layer of garlic skin, he was wearing only a shirt, making his spine stick out. Huang Jinchen stared for a long time, lost in thought, then came to the conclusion that “his waist is really thin.” 

A grown man like this—Huang Jinchen crossed his arms over his chest, watching Kou Tong familiarly soothing the woman’s emotions, leading her to speak more about Lao Yao’s circumstances. He thought in astonishment—why would he do a job like this? 

He looked critically at the woman again, thinking that this was so-called civilized society, where even shrimp and little fish had “human rights.” If this was ancient days, where the weak were prey to the strong, would there be any use for such a person to be alive?

Amid a hail of gunfire, they had groped around in the dark abyss to bring peace to the world. So many people had died on the way, so many had been injured; they had done almost everything humanly possible for this country and this society, protecting the lives of the common people, protecting them so they could sit safely at home, like this person, and live a life of dignity. 

Why weren’t these people content with their lots? They wept and wailed all day about trifles, looking all around for help. 

Weak people seemed truly loathsome—women included. This was Huang Jinchen’s second conclusion. 

During this time, Dou Lianqing’s emotions had basically been steadied by Kou Tong. She sat there wringing a tissue soaked in tears, her head down, awkwardly smiling at Kou Tong. Then, with Kou Tong’s help, she slowly began to tell about the trivialities of her home life. 

She didn’t seem to have much self-confidence. Whenever she finished saying something that contained some subjective assertion, she would look at Kou Tong like a stray lamb and say, “That’s only my opinion. What do you think?” 

Huang Jinchen became even more derisive, indifferently thinking, Look, this is the outcome of civilization—it has produced a thing like this, specializing in wasting resources, without a single useful aspect. 

As he saw it, this was just like humans protecting giant pandas—simply out of having nothing better to do. Those things only ate one type food. When the bamboo flowered, they would go hungry. They couldn’t catch prey, they couldn’t run, they even had difficulty giving birth. Shouldn’t they have been eliminated by natural selection long ago? What right did they have to go on living? 

What was the value of insisting on squandering vast quantities of human and material resources on protecting these things? 

He had thought that Kou Tong was one of the rare people he esteemed, but it turned out that he did this job that was about the same as being a panda keeper. So Huang Jinchen came up with a third conclusion: Dr. Kou really was kind of a weirdo. 

Dou Lianqing talked at length about Lao Yao and things at home. Lao Yao had in fact changed a great deal over the last few years, especially since his request to withdraw from active service had been approved. The man who had originally been very cheerful had suddenly become devoid of human feeling. 

Quick to anger, touchy, ready to twist others’ meaning, communicating less and less with his family, not spending time with his son anymore; it was as if he had become more busy after withdrawing to the second line of duty. 

“I don’t know what to do. What should I do?” the woman mumbled. “I feel very pained. We argued recently, and I said I was going to divorce him, but…but…” 

Kou Tong gently said, “You don’t want to leave him?” 

Dou Lianqing looked at him in confusion. “Leave him? How will I live if I leave him? I’ve never…I’ve never thought of what it would be like not to be with him one day. I think… I…I don’t know. You’re a psychologist. Can you tell me what to do?” 

In her agitation, she even grabbed Kou Tong’s sleeve like a drowning small animal, looking at him with tears in her eyes. 

Tsk—Huang Jinchen silently lowered his head, hidden unobtrusively in the shadows, wiping his gun again and again. 

With great patience, Kou Tong spoke to the woman for two or three hours. Then he escorted Dou Lianqing out. She had been half-dead when she had come, but she was very pleased when she left. Feeling that he had been holding back a little too long, he went back inside, got out a cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, and opened the black cover of the notebook he had been using. 

“Fed up, aren’t you?” Kou Tong suddenly said to Huang Jinchen as he flipped pages without so much as looking up. 

Huang Jinchen stared, raised his eyebrows, then slowly stood up and plopped into the chair Dou Lianqing had been sitting in. “Is this what you do every day?” 

The movement of Kou Tong’s hand paused. He raised his head, held his cigarette between two fingers, and looked at him with a smile. “Yeah?” 

For the first time, Huang Jinchen didn’t joke or grin cheekily. He paused, then earnestly said, “I think it’s too bad.” 

“What’s too bad about it?” Kou Tong stuck the cigarette in his mouth, laughed, and turned over the black cover of his notebook. “I think it’s pretty good.” 

In Lao Yao’s consciousness space, he had explained to Huang Jinchen that a consciousness space was a real space, but he hadn’t had a chance to tell him the nature of the “people” inside. According to the average person’s understanding, “people in a real space” ought to amount to “real people.” 

But Huang Jinchen had been able, without any hesitation, even methodically, to kill that person in the coffee shop. 

As Kou Tong thought this, he raised a hand and dialed an internal number. “Hey, instructor… Yeah, she’s gone. Come over here, I’ll talk to you about Yao Shuo.”