Dr. Kou raised his head to look at the light. He felt that the future was uncertain, but he was still optimistic, because the next moment, he compared himself to Yao Shuo; remembering that the venerable old fellow didn’t even have a water pistol, he felt balanced. 

Elephant's Bane—Kou Tong tore the label off, thinking that this name sounded pretty aggressive; if only its capabilities were also aggressive. 

Kou Tong walked unhurriedly along the narrow street, like an idle sightseer. Then he came to the end and found another fork in the road—

Kou Tong stopped, his long, slender finger reaching into the water pistol’s trigger. He spun the light water pistol around his finger. 

Choice was a magical thing. Not having a choice was painful, and having a choice was also painful. There are some economists who, in order to make this seem easier for humans to understand, have put forward the notion of so-called “opportunity cost.” 

The cost of taking one road is abandoning the other road. 

Kou Tong thought there was a lot of merit in this. This was indeed the painful aspect of choice—there was no extra credit for choosing right, yet there was a deduction for choosing wrong. No matter what you chose, the future was unknown; there was always a great chance of regret, or…perhaps all roads would lead ultimately to the same end. 

Probably one person couldn’t hold too many social resources. According to the ideas of some men, having an imperial harem should be the ultimate dream, but wasn’t the Jiajing Emperor nearly strangled by his palace maids all the same¹? With an emperor who calls on his harem every night, all sorts of people will suspect him even if he plans to take a break. Thinking about it carefully, there’s really no difference from a male prostitute. 

An unpredictable future was confusing, and a manifold future was also confusing, because no one could split themselves into different parts. The most powerful person still couldn’t walk two completely different paths of life. 

Kou Tong stood in place, looking left and right, feeling that in either direction, the road ahead was full of danger—to his left was a clean little street with emerald green vines extending from both sides and flowers of unknown type growing on them, like the walkway a newlywed couple would walk in a country wedding; it was very beautiful—of course, the flaw in this beauty was that Qin Qin was standing at the end. 

And to his right, as if to demonstrate that “there’s a fine line between heaven and hell,” even the sunlight couldn’t shine in; it was so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Kou Tong glanced that way and felt a dank wind blowing from there. 

Kou Tong drew his foot back and waved in Qin Qin’s direction. He asked, “Can we talk? This isn’t soundproof, is it?” 

Qin Qin’s expression looking at him was still like a hungry ghost staring at a steak, with a morbid and crazy perseverance. Her expressionless face had the oppressiveness of the calm before a storm. 

“We can talk.” She nodded. “I can hear you.” 

Kou Tong tilted his head slightly and asked, “Can you come over here?” 

“I can’t,” Qin Qin said, “those are the rules of the Lovers. Only the person standing at the fork in the road can choose which way to go. You can come here, but I can’t go there.” 

The rules of the Lovers—according to Lao Yao’s theory, the tarot cards had their own rules. Qin Qin was familiar with them. Her obsession made her accept them with unquestioning belief, so in this consciousness projection space, for the time being, she didn’t have the ability to surmount these rules. But when she became more indignant, she would take no more notice of any morals or rules—even the ones she herself had formulated. 

That would also be when she lost control over all the cards. 

Kou Tong scratched his chin with his forefinger. 

Qin Qin reached out a hand to him. “Come, come here, come to me. I was wrong last time. I won’t lose my temper again, and I don’t blame you for destroying two of my cards. I’ll be very, very good to you. Come with me.” 

Kou Tong smiled. Not answering her directly, he asked, “Why don’t you tell me what this card’s rules are?” 

“It’s a choice in the depths of your heart,” Qin Qin said. “Each time you pass a fork in the road, you face two difficult choices in your heart. The further on you go, the closer the choices will come to the deepest place in your heart—but don’t worry, I’ll remove the card right away.” 

Kou Tong raised his eyebrows. So his choice now was composed of—Qin Qin or suffering? 

Obviously, whether in the depths or shallows of his heart, Dr. Kou was 100% sure that he didn’t have such an obnoxious idea. This must be the product of Miss Qin Qin’s unshakable belief imposing her will on the card. 

So he raised his head, leaned on a low wall beside the forking point, took out a cigarette, shielded it with his hand from the chill wind coming from the right side, lit it, and was silent for a moment. 

This brought a sort of indescribable roguishness to the man’s habitually genteel face. His eyes and brows were faintly lowered, as if restraining some private cynicism. 

“Qin Qin.” When he had nearly finished smoking his cigarette, Kou Tong at last spoke. “I’ve always remembered what my profession is. I sympathize with any patient of mine or one of my colleagues. I also know that sometimes, doing unreasonable things isn’t your fault. I’m a doctor. I have a responsibility to accommodate patients.” 

The corners of his mouth moved slightly, displaying a fleeting cold smile. Then he stubbed his cigarette butt out against the wall. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m a lump dough to be kneaded as you like, a goddess who pardons mortals without any lower threshold. I’ve experienced many life-and-death stakes in my life. If I let a little girl like you control me, I’ll be too humiliated to live in the future if it gets out.” 

Then he unhurriedly stuck his hands in his coat pockets, turned, and went down the other road. 

Just at the moment that Kou Tong took the other road, the ground behind him automatically grew a high wall, blocking the other direction—Qin Qin must have forgotten to say that the Lovers had another rule: all sales final, no returns. 

The upshot was that after Kou Tong was finished playing cool, he stepped right into a big hole like a swamp. Dr. Kou was silent for two seconds. He bent down to pluck his lower leg out of the mud like a radish. “Motherfucker!” 

He stood in place on one leg like a rooster, feeling around for a long time and pulling out his lighter. After he lit it, he shone it up ahead—in front of him was an enormous swamp with bubbles boiling on top from time to time, as though something was about to climb out of it. To the left was the corpse of some unknown animal. There was an eerie gloom over the whole path, like the scene of a haunted house. In the illumination of his small light, a bat flew up into the sky, showing two blood red eyes. 

Further up ahead was a thick forest with no visible end, overgrown with brambles. The chill wind traveled through the dangerous foliage, simulating a sound like the howling of some wild beast. 

Faced with this scene, Kou Tong was silent for a while, then suddenly turned and desperately scratched at the wall. “I was wrong, I was wrong! Miss, I was being flippant. I didn’t see the difference between a rouged and powdered skeleton and a real skeleton for a time. Let me go back and choose again, I’ll definitely choose you. Let’s talk it over…!” 

There was no movement from the cold wall. Dr. Kou wilted. He paused for a while. With the aid of his little lighter and the bubbles rising from the swamp, he admired his own reflection for a while in a high difficulty move, then sighed with emotion. “Beauties suffer unhappy fates.” 

In answer, two sinister bubbles boiled up from the swamp.

Kou Tong picked up a big femur from beside him and valiantly knocked on a vine falling beside him. There was a rustling sound. Kou Tong deftly drew back his hand. A shit-brown figure flashed by. A snake stuck its head out of the vines, curled up into a heap, and stretched out its neck, meeting the eyes of the weak nerd Dr. Kou in an attitude like it was preparing to attack. 

“What are you looking at…” Kou Tong shuffled half a step to the side. “Never seen a handsome man?” 

The big snake had truly never seen a handsome man. It swayed on the tree twice, then quickly pounced towards Kou Tong with a predatory fierceness. Kou Tong’s gaze deepened. He dodged aside extremely quickly. Then the femur in his hand hit the big snake’s heart with incredible accuracy. The nimbly curled animal fell into the swamp. It struggled with and then was swallowed by a black monster. 

Kou Tong expressionlessly rolled up his pant legs, pushed aside the vines where the snake had been staying, pulled a long branch from the nearly dead tree behind them, and very familiarly opened a way, walking forward like a traveler honor-bound to follow some road to ruin. 

In fact, Kou Tong was a very practiced hand at dealing with dangers in open country. After all, as an itinerant doctor who could never be found when he was wanted, he had rich travel experience that others couldn’t imagine. 

He had crossed snowy mountains and had a close personal encounter with a glacier. He had missed his step and fallen into a lake over four thousand feet above sea level. He had crossed a big stretch of deserted terrain on bicycles with a group of youths. He had traversed virgin forest, gotten lost in the Golden Triangle, carelessly found someone to stay the night with, sensed something off in the middle of the night, and finally realized that he was in the home of a drug trafficker. 

He knew how high was the sky and how vast was the earth, but he hadn’t felt from this the boundlessness of the universe; instead, he had only become more and more weirdly fearless. 

What was to be done? When he was idle, Dr. Kou would think in pretend anxiety, On one hand, things went on like this because he was still single; perhaps one day, he would drop dead and no one would know. He had wondered whether the genes implanted in him by the Seed had destroyed the nerves that governed fear. Later, even using his toe to think, he understood that this was of course impossible. 

Then why? 

Perhaps he was too curious, Kou Tong thought. 

He had experienced many good things and also many bad ones, but he still maintained a high degree of curiosity towards the world, like a squirrel leaving its knothole on the first day after the end of winter, thinking everything it saw was novel, wanting to find out all about it. 

Perhaps this uncommon vitality was what the genetic transplant had truly left him with—he felt that he was like the wind, unable to stand still for a moment. If the wind stopped, it would scatter; if he stopped, he would find that he actually wasn’t one bit as omnipotent as he imagined. 

He would find that…in fact time had stagnated for him in that late autumn when he was ten years old… As soon as he thought of this, Kou Tong simply cut off his line of thinking in order to avoid doing anything that would be a disgrace to the educated, concentrating single-mindedly on walking this desolate and frightening road like something out of the world of the dead. 

Then he began to hum Huang Jinchen’s cellphone ringtone, driving even the bats into going mad and decamping.