They talked casually for a while longer. Before long it was past three in the morning. Zhu Yun was growing drowsy, her voice getting softer by the minute. Li Xun noticed, and said, “Head back soon.”

Zhu Yun was just about to get up when Li Xun added, “Actually, stay and sleep here.”

She turned to look at him. Li Xun said, “You’re in no state to drive.” He stood up and walked to the sofa, gathering the rumpled bedding into something resembling order. “You can make do here for the night. Head back in the morning.”

Zhu Yun followed him over and stood in front of the sofa for a moment. “If I sleep here, where will you sleep?”

Li Xun: “Don’t worry about me.”

Zhu Yun lay down on the sofa, and Li Xun casually draped a thin blanket over her. Zhu Yun caught a familiar scent. This blanket must have been his for a long time — the smell on it was exactly like him. Not exactly pleasant in any conventional sense, but distinctive: something like pine resin with a trace of smoke, the raw, unadorned smell of a man.

Without quite realizing what she was doing, Zhu Yun pulled the blanket up over her nose and half her face. The gesture reminded her of small cats and dogs, the way they used scent to remember and recognize. They really did have a way of finding comfort in the simplest things.

“Are you sleeping?” Zhu Yun asked from the sofa.

Li Xun had started typing again. “You sleep first. I’ll be there in a while.”

So Zhu Yun drifted off, wrapped in that familiar scent.

In the morning, the light coming through the window woke her.

Zhu Yun had a very reliable internal clock — no matter how late she went to sleep, she was always up at half past six. She squinted against the brightness flooding in outside, stared for a moment, and realized it was snowing.

Zhu Yun gazed at the world blanketed in white outside and felt a stillness wash over her like a sanctuary. She turned her head and saw the formidable, impossible, brilliant man, slumped back in his chair, asleep.

Zhu Yun threw off the blanket and tiptoed to the bathroom. She checked her reflection and tidied her hair, did a simple wash of her face, and on her way out, she noticed the ceiling light was still on.

She moved quietly to the door and switched it off, then came back and sat down beside Li Xun.

He was still asleep. He had too much on his mind, and even in dreams he found no peace — his brow was lightly furrowed.

Zhu Yun had once heard that if you stare at a word for too long, it starts to look unfamiliar. By that logic — what would happen if you looked at a person for too long?

Would she eventually feel like she didn’t know him?

That seemed impossible.

Whatever the final outcome of this road they were on, he existed in her with too much clarity for that.

Outside, the snowflakes fell in a quiet, unhurried drift.

On the morning of the fifth day of the New Year, the whole world was still asleep. Zhu Yun had no idea how late Li Xun had stayed up — she didn’t want to wake him. She was about to slip outside for a while when Li Xun shifted, and his eyes slowly opened.

The whiteness outside caught him too, and he lay there squinting.

Zhu Yun saw he was awake. She filled a cup halfway with hot water and brought it to him. Li Xun stared at the steaming cup, and didn’t move.

Zhu Yun asked, “Are you feeling unwell?”

Li Xun slowly shook his head, and closed his eyes again.

The last time she had seen him wake up was on Dong Siyang’s beat-up old van. He had looked the same way then too — complexion dark and heavy, lips tinged faintly blue.

About ten or so minutes passed before he opened his eyes again, looking somewhat better. He took the cup of water, his voice rough. “…You’re up early.”

Zhu Yun: “I always am. Early to bed, early to rise.”

“You didn’t go to bed early.”

“Then — the early bird catches the worm.”

Li Xun smiled, but just coming awake he didn’t have much energy behind it — the smile was a little perfunctory.

Zhu Yun said, “And there genuinely is a worm — I’m going out to get breakfast now. What kind of worm do you want?”

Li Xun furrowed his brow. Seeing that his brain was still sluggish from sleep, Zhu Yun suggested helpfully, “How about the pickled-vegetable-bread worm from last time? It rolls off the tongue quite nicely.”

Li Xun braced himself on his knees to sit up. “It’s not even the sixth day of the New Year yet. How would anything be open?”

Zhu Yun suddenly remembered — it wasn’t even the sixth day.

Li Xun, stifling a yawn on his way to the bathroom, said, “There’s a box of instant noodles by the door. Help yourself if you’re hungry.”

Zhu Yun went to look — sure enough, there was a whole case of instant noodles, twenty-four packs to the box, with only eight left.

Zhu Yun turned toward the bathroom and called out, “Do you eat instant noodles all the time?”

Li Xun was washing his face and didn’t hear.

Zhu Yun put the box back and suddenly had a thought. She remembered the large pile of things she had brought from home last night — and wondered whether there might be anything edible in there.

She opened the bags one by one. They were almost entirely health supplements: expensive items like bird’s nest, fish maw, and cordyceps; more affordable ones like red dates, donkey-hide gelatin, and herbal restorative paste; and an assortment of calcium tablets, fish oil, and vitamins A, B, C, D, and E — the full complement.

Zhu Yun stared at the enormous pile of supplements, speechless.

For a long time, Zhu Yun had felt she and her family lived in entirely separate worlds — that she and her mother were incapable of any genuine communication, that they couldn’t reach any common ground on matters that actually counted. And yet, even now, when many of her views still ran opposite to her mother’s, she had at least learned to look for what they shared in common, and to tolerate and find workarounds for what couldn’t be bridged.

The bathroom door opened. Zhu Yun turned to see Li Xun come out, face and hair still wet.

She looked back at him, while he returned to the desk to smoke and clear his head. She picked a few of the more substantial items from the bags and set them in front of him.

Li Xun ate with extraordinary speed — he tore open the packaging and swallowed a date cake in two bites, then sat down at his computer and began typing furiously.

Workaholic.

The word had once been applied to her by Tian Xiuzhu. But looking at this now, Zhu Yun felt she had absolutely no right to that title.

What did it take to be called a true workaholic? Twenty hours a day at work, the remaining four hours spent preparing to work — anything less, and you hadn’t even earned a nomination.

Zhu Yun noticed Li Xun was working on The Playboy, and asked, “Are you not going after Hou Ning anymore?”

Li Xun: “No point. Can’t find him anyway.”

Zhu Yun: “But you can’t just do nothing.”

Li Xun kept typing, not looking up. “Why do I have to do something? It’s not my project.”

That shut her up completely.

Ah, so he’s properly awake now — sharp enough to be difficult again.

Li Xun, not even glancing at her, announced, “Stop glaring at me first thing in the morning.”

Zhu Yun snorted, swiped the two remaining date cakes from in front of him and pulled them back toward herself. Li Xun gave a silent laugh and observed, “Petty.”

Zhu Yun burned with righteous indignation.

“Who’s petty? You’re the petty one. It’s my project and I’ll take responsibility for it. If you won’t handle it, I will — I don’t believe I can’t track him down!”

“Best of luck.”

“At least point me in a direction.”

Li Xun’s fingers went still, and he let out a small, genuine laugh. Zhu Yun’s pride flared into fury. “What are you laughing at? You’re the only one here who knows him. And technically, you’re the one who brought this trouble in the first place.”

Li Xun looked at the slender hand she’d pressed flat against his desk, his smile still lingering, and mused, “You really have changed a lot.”

Zhu Yun: “I haven’t.”

Li Xun looked up. “You used to dare to talk to me like this?”

His eyes were calm and gently teasing. Zhu Yun felt something pull in her chest. She said, “I was speaking from the heart.”

Li Xun, cigarette in his lips, regarded her with a perfectly detached air and said, “Nice to everyone else — saves all the attitude for me.”

Zhu Yun had had enough of that.

He could make his complaints, but they had to have some basis in reality. She slapped the date cakes down in front of Li Xun, spat “As God is my witness,” and walked away.

Zhu Yun spent the entire morning silently fuming at Li Xun in her head. Eventually she thought about how he was still working through the New Year holiday, and figured his reason for giving up on Hou Ning was probably that he didn’t want the progress of The Playboy to suffer.

Once her temper had cooled, Zhu Yun started trying to address the damage herself — looking for vulnerabilities, attempting to trace Hou Ning — but nothing she tried led anywhere.

And then, to make matters worse, something deeply infuriating happened: Hou Ning provoked her.

On the morning of the sixth day of the New Year, Zhu Yun opened her computer to find a single word left on her screen —

IDIOT!

Below it was a Chinese translation:

Moron!

Zhu Yun’s long-absent stress headache paid an immediate return visit. She pointed at the screen and asked Li Xun, “Why did he bother translating it? Did he think I don’t know English?”

Li Xun crossed his arms and laughed.

“Who knows.”

Zhu Yun was incandescent with rage. Just when she was at her most frantic and out of ideas, Dong Siyang arrived.

He came back on the seventh day. Feiyáng staff began trickling back over the course of the day. Dong Siyang himself returned on the eighth — and he came back looking bigger than ever, stepping through the door radiating ferocity, covered in the dust of the road.

Zhu Yun was about to go over and brief him on the situation, but Dong Siyang walked straight past her without a glance, exchanged a look with Li Xun, and the two of them went into the conference room together. About half an hour later, Dong Siyang came back out — said nothing to anyone — and left with a sharpened, predatory focus.

Zhu Yun was thoroughly bewildered. She went to find the office’s most reliable source of gossip for clarification.

“Zhang Fang.”

“Mm?”

“I need to ask you something.”

“Forget it.”

“…”

Zhang Fang smiled, with a hint of menace. “You think I don’t know you were helping yourself to my cocoa powder while I was away?”

Zhu Yun: “I’ll buy you more.”

Zhang Fang: “Do I look like the kind of person who can be so easily bought?”

Zhu Yun looked at him for three full seconds. “I’m going to tell Dong Siyang that you falsified your operations report.”

Zhang Fang instantly shot up out of his chair and clamped a hand over her mouth, indignant. “When did I falsify anything? I just adjusted a few numbers!”

Zhu Yun removed his hand from her face.

“What were Dong Siyang and Li Xun discussing?”

Zhang Fang said impatiently, “Can’t you figure it out? What’s the most pressing issue right now?”

Zhu Yun frowned.

Zhang Fang: “What I told you about over the New Year, obviously.”

Zhu Yun: “The hacker?”

Zhang Fang said, “Right. Team Leader Li brought it to Director Dong to handle.”

Zhu Yun turned around. Li Xun was, as always, tucked into his chair writing code.

He’d said he wasn’t going to take care of it, hadn’t he?

Lying again…

Zhu Yun silently cursed the black-shirted figure three times in her head, then turned back to Zhang Fang. “How is Dong Siyang going to catch him? He doesn’t know anything about computers.”

Zhang Fang sat back down, crossed his legs, and looked at her with a long-suffering expression. “Sister Zhu, can you try to think a little less linearly?”

Zhu Yun: “What do you mean?”

Zhang Fang said casually, “Director Dong has more connections than you can imagine. Give him a name and a face, and there isn’t anyone in this city he can’t find.” Seeing that Zhu Yun still looked puzzled, he added helpfully, “Certain industries were already well-established long before Alan Turing was even born.”

“…”

After getting over her speechlessness, Zhu Yun was struck by a new question.

Setting aside whatever Dong Siyang’s past had been — since he clearly had the ability to track Hou Ning down, why hadn’t Li Xun simply gone to him from the start?

Zhang Fang’s next sentence gave her the answer.

He said, with a quiet gravity, “He can find him, sure. The question is — what happens to him after he’s found? When our Director Dong gets angry, the results can be… unpredictable.”