“I saw that symbol in the place I was when I was little.” Huang Jinchen reached over from behind Kou Tong, his finger lightly tracing the outline of the map. “The coach told me that it was a seed.” 

His extremely gentle breath brushed past Kou Tong’s ear. The two of them were very close, but for some reason, there was nothing suggestive about it. 

“The coach was like a nanny, responsible for raising us little kids, teaching us how to talk and other basic skills little kids need.” As he said this, Huang Jinchen’s expression wasn’t angry, wasn’t downcast, wasn’t even longing, but it was a touch bewildered. “I remember there were many children around then. Each of us had a single room. We were normally very closely watched, and our daily schedules were strictly limited. Everyone frequently changed living quarters. There was practically no opportunity to have much contact with the people around.

“Later, when I was a little older, I didn’t see that coach anymore. I was taken to a strange place and entered closed-door training. The training was done via an elimination system. The people around me changed nonstop.” Huang Jinchen leaned back against Kou Tong’s desk and knocked over an old pen container on it. A big pile of odds and ends came clattering out; apart from pens, it contained everything possible.

Huang Jinchen raised his eyebrows and carelessly flipped through the things. He found that inside were not only the collector’s cards found in all kinds of instant noodles and snacks, there was also a letter that at a glance was clearly a love letter written by a little girl. 

Huang Jinchen couldn’t resist laughing silently. This made his somewhat willful eyes and brows look considerably softer. Kou Tong indifferently said, “Don’t laugh. This was written by my first love.” 

Huang Jinchen looked at him wide-eyed. “Dr. Kou, as a pure and honest medical professional, could you have a less rich romantic history?” 

Kou Tong said, “Even medical professionals have a period of budding youth.” 

Huang Jinchen sighed and wrung his hands. “Well, shit, I really do fucking regret not having met you earlier, or I could have plucked that bud out of its cradle. Now it’s turned into a skirt-chaser.” 

Kou Tong continued, “I still remember her name. She was called X103. She had two dimples when she smiled and a long braid. Every time I saw her, I couldn’t resist pulling it.” 

Huang Jinchen stared. 

Kou Tong said, “I told you, didn’t I, that my mom passed away fifteen years ago. Since I obviously couldn’t live on my own then and had no guardian, and none of my relatives could be contacted quickly, I was taken to the community orphanage. Then I was inexplicably picked out, went through a series of incomprehensible tests, then got taken away by a group of people.” 

Huang Jinchen softly asked, “Then what?” 

Kou Tong hesitated for a moment. “I can’t tell you the exact course of events. I was still young then, and my emotions weren’t especially stable. I must have added in many of the memories myself later. They’re probably not actual events.” 

Huang Jinchen nodded. When Kou Tong spoke in a certain especially objective manner, he had a strange attractive power and sense of dependability that made people involuntarily trust him. 

“I also had a coach, and a group of kids my age who lived in different compartments.” Kou Tong turned his head and looked into Huang Jinchen’s eyes. In that instant, there seemed to be something identical in their eyes, as if in their completely different bodies flowed the same cold and mysterious blood. 

“But I wasn’t like you,” Kou Tong said. “I was older when I went in. Reasonably speaking, I didn’t really need a coach to teach me to eat, get dressed, talk, or write. I only stayed in the little Seed room for just over a month.” 

Huang Jinchen at last couldn’t resist cutting in: “Just one month, and you found yourself a little girlfriend.” 

Kou Tong said, “Brother, how about we discuss serious matters first?” 

Huang Jinchen nodded quickly. “Yes, yes, go on, sir, go on.” 

Kou Tong picked up: “Yes, your first little sister-in-law was someone I met during that month. The kids around me were like you, very strictly watched and often changing neighbors, so they rarely voluntarily spoke to others. Though none of that could hold back my young boy’s heart when it saw beauty.” 

Huang Jinchen instantly felt speechless—since meeting this man named Kou Tong, who was respectable on the surface but in reality extremely slutty, he had regularly found his glib tongue rendered speechless; this really could be called meeting his match. 

The slut Kou Tong, in deadly earnest, said, “The first time, when no one was looking, I short-circuited the room’s electric circuit, but because of the surge protector, the fuse burned out, and it automatically tripped. Nothing at all happened, and I was nearly caught. So the second time I learned my lesson and made a second attempt.” 

Huang Jinchen felt that when he was little, Dr. Kou must have been even more of a scalp-numbing terrorist than Manman. 

“I took the resistor out of an electric kettle, plugged it in, and dropped it onto a stack of books on a wooden table. And soon after, the smoke started.” 

Huang Jinchen looked at him in admiration. 

Kou Tong smiled. “The smoke filled the whole corridor. The fire alarm began to scream. A team of firefighters quickly came in. All the children living in the compartments scattered in the dark. I finally had a chance to chat up X103.” 

Then the smile on his face slowly disappeared, his expression becoming graver. “It’s from her that I heard about the Seed and later deduced quite a few things—when we were little, we would periodically go through a series of many tests. I found that after each round, some children would move out.” 

Huang Jinchen thought carefully. “That’s how it was. Then what?” 

“I deduced that it must be some kind of screening process,” Kou Tong said. “So X103 and I settled on a strategy. We lived close together. The windows were all locked, but luckily, to make the children grow up healthy, that place didn’t seal the windows. They looked like they were still clear glass. We calculated the angle. When we couldn’t see each other, we would use a little mirror and a pre-arranged code to pass on information.” 

Huang Jinchen crossed his arms over his chest, listening seriously, feeling that the child Kou Tong was a bit of a demon. He had had great potential as a spy since he was little. 

“This led to a long period when we were constantly moving locations. As expected, I was always with X103, but we didn’t leave the Seed base. We were constantly entering another series of tests.” 

Huang Jinchen frowned. “Why didn’t I move?” 

“Maybe your distinguishing traits were very obvious,” Kou Tong said. “According to your description, you must have left the Seed very young to be trained. My guess is, the Seed was a place specially for cultivating people with certain aspects, like a secret base, selecting children without guardians who had different latent abilities, going through many tests to finally fix on the optimal development plan for them, changing them into people with certain special qualities.” 

Huang Jinchen was silent. Then he opened the “love letter” X103 had written to Kou Tong, looked at the incomprehensible childish words for a long time, then asked, “What’s written here?” 

“It’s a code.” Kou Tong took the letter. A trace of yearning appeared on his face. “Encoded with different Morse code using each sentence’s character count.” 

Huang Jinchen was already calm now. With a high degree of acceptance, he nodded. “Oh, child spy tactics.—What did she say?” 

“That we’d been discovered,” Kou Tong said. “This is the last message she sent me. The next day, the two of us were separated. I woke up one morning and was taken out of the Seed base to be trained. General Zhong was my instructor. As for X103, I never saw her again.” 

Huang Jinchen considered. “Given this young lady’s natural endowments, she’s likely a beautiful spy in some foreign country now.” 

After a long time, Kou Tong at last quietly said, “Who knows? Perhaps.” 

The two of them fell silent simultaneously. After a moment, Kou Tong suddenly took off his shirt. On his shoulder blade, Huang Jinchen saw the figure of a seed. He couldn’t resist pressing on his own back—he had once had one there as well. Because his assignment as planted agent in Utopia was special, it had been concealed. 

“It wasn’t until long after that I learned the truth about the Seed,” Kou Tong said. “I had the highest authority at the ST Base then. I could consult a lot of material I hadn’t been able to look at before.” 

“What was it?” Huang Jinchen asked. 

“Genetic implants.” 

Huang Jinchen frowned. Kou Tong carefully explained: “You know that that era was the era when humans learned of the discussion concerning ‘the countless possibilities of human evolution.’ It created some wild products—for example, Utopia, which has now been called a terrorist organization. Genetic implants, meanwhile, were another idea of the time, the idea that a child, according to some qualities they displayed, could be implanted with a segment of genes that historically had made up the body of some very famous individual—would that tap into a person’s latent abilities to a greater extent, make them surpass ordinary people by countless times and in a certain respect make them ‘a superhuman’?” 

Huang Jinchen felt a chill rise in his stomach. This made the precious hands of this former sniper of inhumanly excellent psychological quality start to tremble. 

What Kou Tong said next was like a cold sentence being pronounced, hitting him fiercely. Kou Tong said, “Yes, the Seed was a very important experiment in the genetic implant project, but it doesn’t seem to have been very successful. The precision of the human body was something the people of the time didn’t expect. Many children displayed genetic transplant rejection. When a man-made nonconforming part appears in a living body, the living body will automatically get rid of it. When it couldn’t be gotten rid of, many people developed all kinds of personality disorders, brain damage, and other problems. There were vanishingly few successful cases—even though, before the genetic implants, the base had performed all kinds of very careful analyses and tests on the children who were turned into experiments.

“The experimental materials are highly classified to this day. I only came into contact with a portion of them when a chance came my way and I found the edge of a bit of the truth after years of research and verification.” Kou Tong looked at Huang Jinchen. “But there’s no need to worry. You’re free now. Starting from the day the Projector began normal operations, I was free. The things I had done were seen as living up to the segment of genes in my body. As for you, after Utopia, the fact that they let you come freeload at the ST Base in the special expert group must signify tacit consent to your request to retire…” 

“Free?” Huang Jinchen suddenly interrupted him. His voice was a little sharp, giving off a touch of extreme danger. Then he laughed quietly, like some ominous bird haunting the night. “You’re saying I’m…free?” 

I’ve lived all these years and still haven’t even been able to figure out who I am. How can I be free? 

What distinguishes a person from other humans? His body? His organs? His thoughts? Or his DNA? If even your genes are different, what else is there…that can prove that you existed? 

Kou Tong silently turned his head, looking at the form of that map. 

Suddenly, Huang Jinchen threw himself forward and hugged him tightly, like a drowning child grabbing the last piece of driftwood. Fingers wrung his shirt into wrinkles as though trying to dig into his flesh. He held on so tightly, his whole body trembling, desperately drawing on Kou Tong’s last bit of warmth, not letting the cold in his heart rise to engulf his head. 

The whole world beneath his feet seemed to have gone far away from him. There was only this one person. They had the same mark and experiences, the same memories and the same suffering. It was as if he was the only one he could depend on for survival. 

Who am I? Huang Jinchen asked himself silently. Who am I really?