What is despair? 

Manman was too little and couldn’t understand. She could only cry and say “My mom doesn’t want me.” 

If you went and asked Yao Shuo, he would certainly put on an unusually mocking smile, then make some caustic remark about others’ intelligence quotient, emotional quotient, everything quotient. When he was alone, he would silently go out on the balcony and smoke a cigarette, looking outside at the passersby and children, alone with his own emotions. 

Despair was—when you couldn’t see any hope. 

Life dissipated day by day. Age was consuming all his pride bit by bit, like one country slowly encroaching on another country’s territory. He felt that life was going faster and faster, while he was becoming more and more shriveled. Sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night to find that he had become a worm who had lost his armor and strength, so soft that he could be squeezed to death. 

The world was full of anxieties, but he no longer had dauntless strength. When a tree grew an additional annual growth ring, it would expand a layer outward, but a human’s annual growth rings grew on every blood vessel, on every strand of hair; with each additional ring, the future became a little narrower and more flavorless. 

But there was nothing to be done about this. A female author has said: Are you young? Don’t worry, in another couple of years you’ll be old.¹

Looked at from this point of view, life itself was a despairing and unavoidable process. You were forced to be born, struggled to grow up, became stronger bit by bit, forced the world to acknowledge that you had a place in it; then you thought that you had won, but when you got that place, you once again slowly lost it. This truly was a colossal joke. 

If you asked He Xiaozhi, he would abstractly tell you that when the “devil” occupying his body left, every moment was paradise, but when he remembered that the devil would return, that it would never be far from him, that peace was only a gap, that was despair. 

The most incomprehensible question in the world is “Why me?” Why am I the person suffering? Why do they all seem so happy? 

Sufferers of clinical depression seemed to live with the perspective of a dog, the whole world in black, white, and grey, unable to escape no matter how they tried, without even a last straw to clutch at. This was a suffering there was no way to describe in words, no way to defeat with reason, no way to use self-control against; it made you want to jump off a building, want to end this sort of life. 

This night, aside from those who were still awake, each person seemed to be influenced by some brainwave link; there seemed to be a dark cloud over the city. 

Huang Jinchen sensed something amiss and woke up. He had many years of training and an extremely steady intellect. As soon as he raised his head, he found that Kou Tong had already gotten up and was standing by the window, frowning. 

“What is it?” Huang Jinchen asked. 

“I don’t know.” Kou Tong opened the curtains, but no moonlight came in. “Whatever’s going on…I keep feeling like something has gone out of control.” 

Just then, Kou Tong’s mom knocked on the door and explained the dream Manman had had. When she was gone, Kou Tong sat back down at the head of the bed. “Lao Yao’s light is on. There’s noise coming from He Xiaozhi’s room. They’ve both been affected… Qin Qin must be up to something.” 

“What about you?” This was the only question Huang Jinchen was concerned with. 

Kou Tong rubbed the center of his brow. “I wasn’t sleeping just now—I don’t know why, but I keep having a bad feeling.” 

Huang Jinchen leaned down, lit a cigarette, and put it in his mouth. “Sit quietly, then get in bed and go to sleep.” 

He stroked Kou Tong’s hair. The texture wasn’t as soft as it seemed. “If you still can’t sleep, you can go another round with me. I guarantee you’ll sleep soundly until daybreak.” 

Kou Tong felt that he had been teased. It was rather novel. So he leaned back against the head of the bed, narrowed his eyes, and looked at him with a smile that wasn’t quite a smile. He had the impression that there were two trails of saliva trickling from Er-Pang’s open mouth. He seemed very humorous. 

Thinking back, apart from the short period of discomfort after he had learned about the Seed, this man always had a bit of rebellious humor. 

Psychology couldn’t surmount physiology. When the problem was grave enough to be an illness, there had to be some accompanying damage to the nervous system. 

At least, Kou Tong thought that ruthless physical training would raise a person’s psychological endurance to a great degree—this simple-minded man Huang was a good example. 

When Huang Jinchen was once again awoken by his biological clock, he found that the room was still dark. He noticed almost at once that something was wrong and quickly rolled out of bed and looked out the window. Then he pushed Kou Tong by the shoulder. “Hey, wake up, come and look at this.” 

Kou Tong had no such thing as a biological clock. As long as it was dark, his physiological functions would determine that he could go on sleeping. When he was pushed awake, he blearily patted Huang Jinchen’s cheek with the back of his hand. “Be good, don’t bother me.” 

Huang Jinchen: “…” 

It’s all over, he thought in silence, my wife is a pig—of course, he didn’t dare to say it. 

So Huang Jinchen calmly reached into the quilt and pinched Kou Tong’s waist. The latter bounced up at once, like an electrocuted dead fish. Squinting, he adjusted for a while, then asked, “What’s wrong?” 

“Take a look at the time.” 

Kou Tong fished up the alarm clock by the bed, turned on the lighting on the screen, then stared for a moment. “Seven o’clock…in the morning?” 

At 7 AM, even on the shortest days at the dead of winter, it still wouldn’t be completely dark outside. Now, it was like midnight outside. There were no stars, no moon, even…no breeze. 

Kou Tong’s eyes cleared at once. “Get dressed, don’t disturb the others. Let’s go out.” 

The two of them changed deftly and left silently by the living room’s narrow corridor, then went out. 

The lights in the hallways of Kou Tong’s building were sound-operated, and very sensitive. Normally, never mind deliberately heavy steps, even the rustling of clothes could turn on the lights upstairs and downstairs. But when the two of them went out, the lights didn’t come on. 

Kou Tong clapped. There was still no light. 

“The power’s out,” he said softly. 

“So your computer…” Huang Jinchen asked. 

“It’s all right, the battery can hold out for two hours, and the data is almost fully analyzed.” Then Kou Tong gave Huang Jinchen a significant look. “If you hadn’t come along to disrupt things, we might have gotten out by now.” 

“Oh, I was wrong!” Huang Jinchen beat his breast in sorrow. “If I had only resisted, I might already have been moving my luggage into your house!” 

It was already too dark to see. Kou Tong tripped and nearly went rolling. He gave a dry cough. “Young lady, slow down. When we get back, even if don’t have the phoenix coronet and embroidered ceremonial cape, at least we’ll need a sedan chair with eight carriers². You really don’t need to be so…starved.” 

Huang Jinchen put on an affected voice: “You devil!” 

Kou Tong was silent for a moment. “No…no, I…I have a weak waist.” 

The two of them left the building one after another. There wasn’t a single light on in the whole city. Even the air was stagnant. There wasn’t a breath of wind. 

All sounds were covered up. Occasionally they passed by a car stopped by the side of the road. Kou Tong bent down to lean against a car window and found that the driver’s head had fallen to one side; he seemed to be sleeping. 

“Sir? Sir?” Kou Tong knocked on the window. The person inside didn’t react. 

All the people in this city were unconscious. All the lights in the city had been removed. In the endless street, apart from their footsteps, there wasn’t any other movement. 

It was as if…it had become a deathly still ghost city. 

Huang Jinchen was no longer grinning mischievously. The two of them exchanged a look, feeling that Qin Qin’s Cosmo had burned up to a certain point and exploded.