Qiu Yu was already used to Chen Cebai's volatility. She frowned and slapped away the hand pinching her cheek without hesitation.
Lately, every time she so much as hinted at wanting to leave, he would fix her with a terrifying gaze.
Qiu Yu admitted, she'd been intoxicated by his appearance at first—Chen Cebai, the most powerful known being in human society, cold and rational to the core, yet his eyes always burned hot and direct when they looked at her.
It was hard not to fall for him. She had indulged him, let him take whatever he wanted.
But it hadn't taken long for her to realize: someone had to stay clear-headed between the two of them. Otherwise, they'd end up just like this.
Drowning in the dark. Melting into each other. Forgetting all order in this endless space outside of time.
She remembered clearly—Chen Cebai once told her the reason he first noticed her was because she treated him like a normal person.
Which meant, deep down, he must have yearned to be one.
She couldn't let that be forgotten.
Chen Cebai tightened his hold around her arms as she went silent, a subtle restlessness rising in his chest.
He knew this wasn't right. Qiu Yu might enjoy his possessiveness, but she was still human. She needed a normal life.
She needed sunlight, connection, places she hadn't yet seen.
But people always have selfish desires.
And in his case, those desires had been amplified many times over by genetic mutation.
Holding her like this—constantly—was already a compromise, the result of an internal battle against his darker urges.
Before the compromise, what he wanted had been far worse. More twisted. Disgusting.
If she couldn't even accept the "toned-down" version of him… then what about the real him, the one with no restraint?
Logically, he knew her resistance was natural. No one could truly accept love this sick and devouring.
Even he sometimes felt alienated from the fleeting, monstrous thoughts that crossed his mind.
And yet, there was still hope in him—that even the darkest parts of himself might be accepted by her.
It was a ridiculous, impossible dream.
Chen Cebai closed his eyes, placed his hand gently on the back of her neck, and buried his face in the crook of hers. He breathed her in deeply, suppressing the anxiety and delusion that threatened to consume him.
Just as he opened his mouth to say they could leave this place tomorrow, she suddenly spoke.
"Of course I want to."
The joy hit him too fast. He didn't even know how to react. His scalp tingled.
"I'm just worried you'll get bored," she said, her long lashes fluttering, resting her chin on his shoulder like a little cat. Their necks touched gently, cheek to cheek. "Only seeing me. Only talking to me. Won't you get tired of it?"
Chen Cebai's breath hitched. He barely heard what she said. Her single "I want to" had been enough to send his heart into chaos.
After a few seconds, he managed a hoarse reply: "Never."
"But I am a little bored," she said, playfully sweet. "Not bored of you, bored of this bedroom. How about we go outside for a while, and once we're tired of that, we can come back here. Okay?"
Chen Cebai didn't argue anymore.
Qiu Yu couldn't help but laugh.
Chen Cebai was surprisingly easy to handle. He only seemed controlling and forceful—when in truth, he couldn't resist her soft voice at all. And even if that didn't work, the moment she showed any sign of anger, he'd surrender completely.
He wasn't nearly as terrifying as he claimed to be. Qiu Yu thought happily.
·
The next day, Qiu Yu returned to the real world, back to being a corporate worker.
Maybe it was because she had finally resolved her conflict with Chen Cebai, but she was in unusually high spirits. Her coworkers kept shooting her strange looks—some curious, some sympathetic, some downright pitying—but she didn't care.
It wasn't until the end of the workday that she realized the stares had been a little too frequent.
Qiu Yu frowned.
One of her female coworkers approached and laid a hand on her shoulder, looking at her with concern.
"…I can't believe this happened. Xiao Qiu, you need to stay calm. Don't do anything rash. And don't blame yourself. This wasn't your fault."
Qiu Yu coolly brushed the woman's hand off. "What happened?"
"You don't know?" Her colleague looked shocked. "It's been trending all day. You… if you're not ready, maybe don't look."
Qiu Yu hadn't used her chip since the day she stepped out of the bathroom. Hearing this, she immediately activated it and opened the social media app.
The top trending tag was #ChenCebai.
Second place: #GeneticModification.
Third and fourth:
#DangersOfGeneticEngineering
#HowToProtectTheHumanGenePool
The woman was still murmuring platitudes. Qiu Yu ignored her, folded her arms, and leaned back in her chair. Her expression didn't change as she refreshed the retinal interface.
A new tag had climbed to the top:
#ChenCebaiCrimesAgainstHumanity
And just under that:
#BiotechHorrorBecomesReality
She tapped it. The first thing to appear was a 30-second video.
It was shaky—shot from a chip. The person filming was in a lab, alarms blaring, red lights flashing.
Then a monster appeared on screen. It walked upright, its skin translucent and slick like silicone, claws gleaming. It shrieked at the camera, bone spikes rising along its back, then lunged.
The screen spun, went black—and the sound of chewing followed, slow and horrifying.
Whoever filmed it was clearly dead.
Qiu Yu's breath caught.
She opened the comment section, sorting by popularity:
[Just look at Chen Cebai's background. You'll understand why he did this. He was a victim of genetic modification himself—of course he wants the whole human race to go down with him. Stop defending him. He's a genius, sure. But that doesn't change the fact that he's a lunatic trying to destroy the world.]
[All the blame's on Chen? What about the company that modified him in the first place?]
[Oh, here we go again—blaming the company. So anyone who goes on a rampage is the company's fault now? Classic deflection.]
[Fun fact: sucking up to the company online won't get you hired.]
…
Qiu Yu lost interest in the bickering. She switched to chronological order:
[It's real. No confirmation yet if it leaked from Chen's lab specifically. But the area is gone. These things are all over the streets. Don't go outside. Stay home or in your office. And they're really hard to kill. Biotech's gonna be scrambling for a while.]
She closed the app and leaned her head back, exhaling deeply.
What surprised her most was how calm she felt.
Maybe it was in her genes. Even now, her thoughts were clear. No panic. No cold sweat.
She began to piece it together.
The company had clearly discovered Chen Cebai's true nature.
Whether they found out on their own or Lu Zehou told them—she couldn't say.
But Lu Zehou was suspicious. He hated the company. He encouraged her to provoke Chen Cebai with divorce, probably hoping to push him over the edge and force him to reveal himself.
But she had gone straight to Chen Cebai with the truth, so Lu Zehou must've reported him to the company directly, forcing a confrontation.
As for the "monsters," they were likely the company's doing—to distract from the real issue of genetic modification.
Qiu Yu knew them. A company willing to bypass ethical oversight and experiment on human DNA wouldn't stop there. They had to be researching other things too.
Those monsters—either failed test subjects or off-world lifeforms—were now being used to paint Chen Cebai as a cold-blooded, terrifying, mad scientist.
Because if the public wasn't steered that way, they'd likely sympathize with him.
The company couldn't risk that.
They didn't want people empathizing with a mutant—a pawn—gone rogue.
Qiu Yu felt exhausted.
She'd thought that, no matter how much she loved Chen Cebai, she could never stay with him forever in a timeless void.
In the end, one of them would tire of the other.
And yet—less than one day back in the real world, and she was already tired.
Then her chip pinged.
A message from Lu Zehou.
A video, and a short message:
Miss Qiu Yu, it's not too late to work with me.
Qiu Yu didn't even glance at the text. She opened the video directly.
She didn't know how Lu Zehou got the footage—it was from the company's surveillance system.
On screen, Chen Cebai had just left the lab. He pulled off his gloves and mask, tossing them into the incinerator.
He wore his usual white coat and black trousers, a pair of narrow glasses perched on his cold, handsome face.
But unlike before, when he was always laser-focused in the lab, this time, every few seconds he glanced at his tablet and tapped the screen.
Replying to someone's messages.
—He was replying to her.
Qiu Yu pressed her lips together tightly, a sour, aching bitterness rising in her chest.
If she'd known all this chaos would unfold, she never would've let him bring her back to the real world.
She had always known Chen Cebai wasn't a good person. And she had known, too, that his feelings for her were disturbingly obsessive.
—When protectiveness swells past a certain threshold, it festers into something dark and damp, like rot. When love becomes so deep it borders on mania, it's just another form of cold-blooded cruelty.
He hadn't, as the trending headlines claimed, committed crimes against humanity—but it was true that he felt little for humanity at all.
Back in the Eternal Space, she had once talked with him about Lu Zehou.
That was before any of this had happened.
She'd hoped to persuade Chen Cebai to help him. But Chen Cebai's assessment of Lu Zehou had been brutally logical—he evaluated him entirely through data and algorithms, calculating that Lu Zehou could never successfully rebel against the company, that whatever plan he had was doomed to fail.
It was only then that she realized—Chen Cebai only showed vulnerability, only became emotionally erratic, when it came to her.
At all other times, he was like an AI program: his thoughts were pure data, algorithm, and deductive logic.
—She knew every flaw he had. Knew how terrifying he could be. Knew he wasn't a kind or noble man.
And yet, she still felt a kind of aching tenderness toward him.
Just like now.
Watching him in the video—knowing the storm of slander and hate sweeping across the outside world—she knew perfectly well he wouldn't care about any of it.
But her heart still ached faintly.
Just then, someone stepped into the frame, walking up to Chen Cebai and speaking to him.
Chen Cebai raised his eyes slightly, calm and unreadable behind the lenses of his glasses. He lifted one hand, palm inward, and made a dismissive, shooing gesture.
But the man didn't back off. His gestures grew more animated, his tone clearly escalating. His face reddened with emotion, veins bulging, his body language full of urgency—pressing Chen Cebai for some sort of decision.
The video had no sound. Qiu Yu couldn't hear what was being said. She could only watch, breath held, as the man loomed ever closer.
In the next second, something changed.
Chen Cebai's hand—previously resting loosely at his side—was suddenly engulfed in a slick black substance, liquid metal morphing into the sharp curve of a scythe. The blade gleamed cold and merciless, sending a chill down her spine.
He tilted his head, then raised his arm in one swift, fluid motion.
The blade fell.
And the man's head rolled cleanly to the floor.
Blood splattered across the screen.
The lab's alarms flared red as the emergency system kicked in, bathing the room in crimson.
At the same moment, the video suddenly regained sound—chaotic footsteps, shrieks of terror, cries echoing through the corridor.
Someone screamed, high-pitched and panicked:
"Don't kill me! Please—don't kill me! Dr. Chen, please—don't!"
Almost as if he knew she'd finished watching, Lu Zehou sent another message:
Miss Qiu Yu, have you ever seen this side of Dr. Chen?