When they walked into the ward, the patient in the bed was peeling an apple with a small knife.

The apple was a deep, burnished red, gleaming with a rich sheen under the room’s light. As strip after strip of skin curled away, the pale yellow flesh gradually revealed itself — sweet and fresh-looking.

Bai Youwei studied the man in the hospital bed carefully.

Compared to his former swagger, he looked considerably more worn down now — thin, the hospital gown hanging loose around him. Even his signature handlebar mustache had grown indistinct, stubble spreading to his jaw and sideburns in a dense shadow of dark growth.

He clearly hadn’t shaved in days.

“Something you need?” Nick didn’t look up. His small knife worked steadily, peeling the apple in even strokes. “You’re not here to get back at me, are you?”

Ada walked in, went straight to the bedside cabinet, and practically threw the roses down, as if they were scorching his hands.

Nick shifted his eyes slightly, noticed the bouquet, and gave a thin, lopsided smile. “Holding a grudge, are you? Had to return every last flower too, huh…”

Bai Youwei smiled: “You don’t like red roses? Next time I’ll bring white chrysanthemums. How does that sound?”

Shen Mo said: “Yellow chrysanthemums work too.”

Nick: “…”

He finally raised his head, letting them see his face in full. His features hadn’t changed, but there was a grotesque scar running from his forehead all the way down to his hairline near the ear. The ear itself was missing a chunk, as though a beast had mauled it savagely.

Ada drew in a sharp breath. If the injury were on his body, he might not have felt much. But on a face — Ada could almost feel the pain of it himself.

“That was the monkeys, wasn’t it?” Ada recalled his own past trip to Devil’s Island and still shuddered at the memory. “The monkeys on Devil’s Island eat people. The second they see a human approach, they go completely feral — they won’t quit until they’ve torn a piece off.”

Bai Youwei looked more carefully at the rest of him and noticed several visible scratch marks along the exposed skin of Ada’s forearm that had already scabbed over.

Nick picked up the apple without expression, bit off a chunk, and chewed deliberately, his voice muffled: “Say what you came to say. You didn’t just come here to laugh at me, did you?”

Shen Mo said: “We wanted to ask — how many spots are left on your team?”

Nick paused. He looked at Shen Mo and Bai Youwei. After a moment, he swallowed the piece of apple and said with a slow grin: “Why do you want to know? Don’t tell me… you actually want to join my team?”

Bai Youwei didn’t answer that. Instead she asked: “Who’s the captain of your team? Is it you?”

Another brief silence from Nick. Then he slowly nodded. “For now… yes.”

“We’d like to work with you,” Shen Mo said, straight to the point. “We need to join a team with the fewest remaining instances, break the scoring record, and secure this year’s exit quota.”

“Break the scoring record?” Nick looked at Shen Mo, then swept his gaze across Bai Youwei and Ada beside him. Suspicion flickered in his eyes. “You… actually think you can break the record?”

Bai Youwei leaned against Shen Mo’s arm and smiled: “Whether we can or can’t — once we join, we can try and see, can’t we?”

Nick’s brow drew together. Guarded, he asked: “Why come to me with an offer like this?”

Bai Youwei tilted the corner of her lips and said: “First, because your team has the fewest remaining instances. And second…”

She smiled. “Second, because you’re in a rough spot. You’ve lost so many team members — trying to push for a good score after this must be incredibly difficult, right?”

Nick: “…”

Ada pressed: “Man up and give us a straight answer — do you want to work together or not?”

Nick held the apple, no longer in the mood to keep eating. His tongue ran flatly over his teeth, and he asked calmly: “Aren’t you worried I’d kick you out in the end?”

“You won’t need to kick us out,” Bai Youwei said. “If my guess is right, once the score is secured, the few of us will step down on our own.”

Nick raised his eyebrows and looked at the three of them again with new attention. “Now that’s interesting. You help me get the record, then voluntarily leave the team… What exactly is your goal?”

—