Qiu Yu wasn't someone who liked to resort to violence, but after Chen Cebai revealed his true identity, every word he said made her want to hit him.
"...Fine. I won't let you die."
Chen Cebai said nothing. He just looked at her.
To be honest, the way he was looking at her made her skin crawl.
It wasn't the intensity of his gaze that unsettled her, but the overwhelming emotion in his eyes. Every time their eyes met, she got goosebumps—like she'd been touched by something serpentine, scaly, and slick with slime.
Without thinking, she covered his eyes with her hand and whispered, "Don't look at me like that."
Afraid he'd misunderstand and think she didn't want him looking at her at all, Qiu Yu quickly added, "...That didn't come out right. I just mean, I'm not used to the way you're looking at me now... You never looked at me like this before."
In contrast to his aggressive gaze, Chen Cebai's voice was calm.
"I'm afraid of scaring you."
So that's what it was.
Another misunderstanding.
She'd thought he wasn't interested in her—that the lack of predatory heat in his eyes meant he didn't desire her. But in truth, he was just... afraid of frightening her.
That realization made her heart ache with a bittersweet tenderness.
Even the air felt thicker now, heavy with summer heat, clinging to her skin.
Only now did Qiu Yu begin to feel what it truly meant to be in love.
After confessing their feelings, things between them had been sweet, yes, but there were still friction and tension caused by his secrecy.
But now, their hearts were finally in sync.
Qiu Yu couldn't help but smile, eyes curving with joy.
Even with her hand over his eyes, Chen Cebai could still see her.
She truly loved him.
It wasn't just kindness. It wasn't a lie. It wasn't a strategic compromise.
She loved him.
She pitied him.
And if it had been anyone else offering that pity, he would've been disgusted. But Qiu Yu's compassion stirred something in him—kept him in a state of near delirium, constantly teetering on the edge.
His fingers trembled.
They had been shaking ever since a few moments ago, and hadn't stopped.
He could easily suppress the tremor—but he didn't. Instead, he nudged her with his tied hands, silently asking her to hold the one that was trembling.
Qiu Yu looked surprised. "Why are you shaking so much?"
Chen Cebai leaned closer.
A shadow fell over her.
As he approached, her heartbeat went completely out of rhythm.
She had always liked the way he looked—but now that his inhuman nature was out in the open, the contrast between his aloof, moonlit appearance and his wild, unhinged energy made it impossible to breathe around him.
It struck every nerve of her desire.
Utterly suffocating.
Then Chen Cebai spoke by her ear: "Because of you."
Qiu Yu blinked in confusion, forgetting what she had asked.
Chen Cebai seemed to anticipate this and continued without pause, "I've been trembling... because of you."
That was when Qiu Yu finally understood why he'd asked her earlier if she truly wanted everything with no holding back.
It wasn't that he didn't want to be honest—it was that he feared she couldn't handle his honesty.
Even before they'd been open with each other, he had been dangerously blunt. And now that he had permission to be completely unreserved, every word from his mouth hit her like a shock—unexpected, but perfectly in line with her... proclivities.
He didn't ask her to lower her hand or untie the makeshift binding around his wrists. But she could feel his gaze, intense and unmistakable, guiding her hand downward.
Here too, because of you, he murmured.
Qiu Yu instinctively covered his mouth.
But his mouth was just one tool for expressing emotion. Once it was silenced, his eyes—uncovered again—spoke volumes.
And his gaze was even more blatant than his words. It scorched her. Branded her.
For a second, she felt like she was being violated just by the intensity of his stare.
In a panic, Qiu Yu pulled the tie from his wrists and used it to blindfold him.
It made things even worse.
The dim bedroom, the serpentine slick substance slithering around, the unplaceable dripping sounds—it was like a monster's cold, dangerous den.
The only place to settle in the entire room was the bed at the center.
Chen Cebai sat on it—white shirt, black trousers, collar slightly undone from her pulling, revealing his collarbone and a sliver of his chest.
With the tie covering his eyes, the sharp lines of his nose, jaw, and lips became even more pronounced.
Cool restraint and manic obsession, cerebral composure and mad delirium, the unnatural slime against the flickering mechanical neon outside—
Human nature is drawn to contrast. It's irresistible.
And he—he was the embodiment of it.
She had wanted to desecrate him. She wanted to peel back the cold exterior and see the fire inside. She wanted to see his perfectly buttoned shirt come undone. She wanted to see his indifferent gaze lock onto her with hunger.
And now she had.
Qiu Yu knew, without a doubt, that it was she who had initiated everything.
Her heart was still racing, pounding against her ribs. Her face and ears burned with heat. And the only coolness she could reach was Chen Cebai himself.
She climbed onto him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and tilted her head up to kiss him.
He responded instantly—tongue slipping into her mouth, swallowing her breath.
His response was too quick, his swallowing too audible, and yet his expression remained unreadable. The contrast made Qiu Yu wonder if he was seducing her on purpose.
So she asked him directly.
And he answered just as directly: "Yes."
Qiu Yu thought maybe it was the endless maneuvering and second-guessing in real life that made his bluntness so intoxicating.
She blinked and teased, "That's it? Don't you have something... spicier?"
She had forgotten how wrecked she'd been the last time she said "that's it?"
No sooner had the words left her lips than his gaze—what little could be felt despite the blindfold—sharpened with vicious intensity.
He grabbed her hand, reversed their positions, and pushed her down.
His eyes were still blindfolded, but somehow, his gaze came from every direction—from the air itself.
"Of course I do," he said, towering over her.
·
Qiu Yu thought she was going to lose her mind.
It was like stepping into another dimension—the difference between 3D and 4D, where infinite detail exploded outward, revealing angles and perspectives that simply didn't exist before.
Like the old metaphor: in a two-dimensional world, a "circle" is just a line segment. Only in 3D can you perceive its full shape.
Now, Qiu Yu was seeing herself from a fourth-dimensional viewpoint.
Every detail previously invisible became painfully clear. Her brain couldn't handle the data. It almost shut down.
It was Chen Cebai who held her hands, guiding her—patiently showing her how to comprehend this new world.
How to comprehend herself.
At first, seeing herself in 4D was like going through a full-body scan—uncomfortable, almost unbearable. But the sheer vastness of it was something no three-dimensional experience could compare to.
Qiu Yu thought of an old film she'd seen, where the male lead accidentally fell into a five-dimensional space. His entire past unfurled before him, layer by layer, again and again...
That's what this felt like—standing between two mirrors facing each other.
She looked down and saw her body—bones, blood vessels, organs, the pumping of her heart... even the individual myocardial cells.
And not just hers. She saw his too.
Exactly like in the books and films—all details stretched out in parallel, surging into her eyes like a tidal wave. Dizzying. Suffocating.
Especially under these circumstances...
Qiu Yu never dared say "that's it?" again.
She shut her eyes in embarrassment—but even that didn't help. Eyelids couldn't block out the fourth dimension. In a 4D space, 3D beings were transparent.
Exposed. Observed. Studied.
Qiu Yu could only beg Chen Cebai to take her back.
He agreed.
But returning to her own world wasn't much better. After experiencing infinite vastness, the 3D world felt suffocating—like stepping out of space and into a stifling elevator.
Hot summer air clung to her skin. Even when a breeze dried her sweat, salt crusted on her like a second skin.
And Chen Cebai hadn't withdrawn.
Which meant the pressure now came from both inside and out.
Qiu Yu opened her eyes and looked at him.
He seemed to know how much she liked the look of him blindfolded with a tie. He hadn't taken it off.
With his eyes covered, every other expression stood out more vividly.
—The faint veins at his temple. The tight line of his lips.
She remembered what she'd once said.
Back then, she hadn't known how deeply he loved her. She hadn't known how much she longed to draw strength from his overwhelming emotion, like a drifting boat yearning for a heavy, stable anchor.
Now she had it.
Now she knew what real safety felt like.
Not the kind her parents had offered—cold, transactional, devoid of feeling—but something that was fierce, consuming, and entirely hers.
Qiu Yu knew Chen Cebai was insane—she just hadn't realized how insane.
She used to think they were evenly matched in that regard. Now, she saw that had been pure delusion.
…The doll metaphor, though, wasn't.
Qiu Yu strongly suspected that he desperately wanted a ball-jointed doll—one he could dress, comb its hair, feed, bathe, grip tightly by the joints, and never let escape.
Because right now, she was that doll in his hands.
She had no idea how much time had passed. All she remembered was that ever since Chen Cebai had fully revealed his true self, she hadn't taken a single step on her own.
He had been carrying her all this time—one arm beneath her knees, the other bracing her back. Sometimes, he'd have her wrap her arms around his neck and sit in the crook of his arms.
From the bedroom to the living room, to the kitchen—no matter what he was doing, even if it was just pouring a glass of water in the other room—he refused to let her go.
They were like two sheets of paper soaked in water, slowly fusing together until time erased the distinction, leaving behind a single inseparable mass of pulp.
Qiu Yu loved Chen Cebai deeply—but even she was beginning to feel overwhelmed.
Only now did she realize what a trap she'd laid for herself—she had asked Chen Cebai to be completely open with her.
And she had no defenses against this version of him.
So when she tentatively expressed a desire to walk on her own, he stared at her with an unreadable expression, then leaned in and brushed his jaw against her skin.
At some point, he'd picked up this strange, animalistic habit—marking her like territory.
Even though he now existed in another dimension, he still had a physical body within the three-dimensional world and metabolized like any other living organism.
So, his jaw was rough with stubble—short bristles like grass roots. When he rubbed against her, it felt like the backward-facing barbs on a wild animal's tongue, prickling with an oddly intimate pain.
Qiu Yu quickly pushed his head away.
Chen Cebai didn't care in the slightest. He just said calmly, "I want to hold you forever. And I can hold you forever."
That second sentence made the skin on her scalp tighten.
She felt a flicker of fear—and something else, too. A thrill.
Her heart was pounding wildly. She tried not to get swept away in his madness. "...But I still have to work. And so do you."
Only after saying it did she actually remember her job. She quickly pulled up her neural chip interface to check how long she'd been absent.
Chen Cebai didn't stop her.
And when she saw what the chip displayed, she understood why—time wasn't moving. It had completely stopped.
Strangely, she wasn't even surprised.
Many works of science fiction theorized that the fourth dimension was time. But it was only that—a theory. Humans could only approximate higher dimensions through analogy. They couldn't truly comprehend what four-dimensional space looked like.
Even though she had once briefly entered that fourth-dimensional space, her brain hadn't been able to contain the flood of information. All she'd been left with was a sense of overwhelming vastness.
She had no idea how Chen Cebai had done it—how he had stopped time and turned this place into an eternal space.
In real life, everything has an end.
But here, it could be just the two of them. Forever.
Qiu Yu was surprised.
She had seen how Chen Cebai looked when he was completely absorbed in his research—calm, focused, with a kind of predatory intensity.
She had always thought he was the kind of scholar who lived solely for discovery, who had to keep moving forward, keep breaking new ground to satisfy the hunger of his mind.
She never imagined he would willingly stay with her in a place like this—unchanging, endless, almost deathlike in its stillness.
…Wouldn't he get bored?
Just then, he took hold of her chin, tilted her head downward, and locked eyes with her.
He hadn't worn his glasses for some time now, but she still couldn't get used to those cold, narrow eyes of his.
—His features were too sharp, like frost, like blades. And when he looked at her, his eyes held a depth of emotion so fierce and overwhelming it almost hurt.
Every time their eyes met, her chest itched—like ants crawling under her skin.
Qiu Yu instinctively looked away.
But Chen Cebai misunderstood.
Expressionless, he gripped her cheeks, turned her face back toward him, and said in a low, chilling voice:
"You don't want to?"