Lin Luxiao finished replying and flipped the phone face-down on the table. He picked up his glass and took a swig. Shen Mu glanced over, smiled, and poured himself half a glass as well. He lightly clinked his glass against Lin Luxiao’s and tipped it all back, then remarked, “I keep feeling like you’re somehow different.”

Lin Luxiao leaned back in his chair, fingers lightly tapping the table, and smiled with his head down. “No I’m not.”

Lin Luxiao had a small habit — when he was impatient, he’d rest his hand on a surface and his fingertips would tap unconsciously.

Shen Mu watched his hand for a while. In truth, there really wasn’t anything different — Lin Luxiao was still Lin Luxiao: upright, tough, occasionally lighting a cigarette while sitting off to the side listening to the others tell dirty jokes, even able to throw in a line that landed perfectly.

But when you looked at him again, something in the space between his brows was always a little different. He just couldn’t quite say what.

Just as Shen Mu was resting his chin in his hand and studying him carefully, the phone Lin Luxiao had left face-down on the table lit up. A sliver of weak light escaped through the gap between the screen and the tabletop.

Lin Luxiao reached over and picked it up, glanced at it, then curled his lips in a sardonic smile and put it back face-down on the table. He tipped his glass back and drank.

Shen Mu asked, “The little brat?”

Lin Luxiao still had the glass at his lips. He shot him a sidelong look and smiled faintly. “I never noticed before how much of a gossip you are.”

Shen Mu shrugged, noncommittal. “I’m concerned about your physical and mental wellbeing. Look at you — you’re nearly thirty with no girlfriend. Even a healthy person would get sick from the pent-up frustration.”

Lin Luxiao raised an eyebrow and shot back, “Says the person who doesn’t have a girlfriend either. Whether you’ve been driven to illness or not — do you not know yourself?”

“……”

Shen Mu looked sheepish. “We’re talking about you.”

Lin Luxiao smoked in silence and said nothing.

Shen Mu added, “You told me about this and only me — Big Liu and Sun Mingyang’s combined emotional intelligence still doesn’t add up to yours.”

Lin Luxiao gave him an expression that said, you’ve got to be kidding me: “You have high emotional intelligence? A monk in the making has high emotional intelligence?”

Whether he could claim high emotional intelligence was debatable, but he was at least more reliable than Big Liu and Sun Mingyang.

“What did the text say? Hmm?”

Lin Luxiao set down his glass, crossed his arms, leaned back in his chair, and said without much feeling, “She asked me to dinner.”

Shen Mu nodded thoughtfully. “You agreed?”

“I turned her down.”

“……” Shen Mu said, “Fair enough — keep her wanting more. So what did she say back?”

Lin Luxiao thought of the single character in that last message, and narrowed his eyes slightly.

“She said: oh.”

“……”

Shen Mu was genuinely surprised. He mulled it over for a moment, then said, “This woman is either extremely calculating and very good at playing it cool, or she genuinely doesn’t care that much. But if she didn’t care, she wouldn’t have gone to your place in the middle of the night to wish you a happy birthday — so it must be the former. She’s calculating.”

He thought it through, then stroked his chin and quietly studied Lin Luxiao. After a long pause he added, “You probably can’t out-play her. Leave her on ice for a while and see what happens.”

Lin Luxiao gave a light laugh, fairly dismissive of that idea.

“You’re overthinking it. She and I — it’s really not very likely. Me turning her down isn’t about keeping her waiting — I genuinely don’t have time. I’ve got external training coming up for a month or so, and my leave for this month is already used up.”

Shen Mu made a dismissive sound. “Training, no leave — right. Give me the word and I’ll tell your old man for you. Have him approve one day off before you go into training. The reason? Just write: looking for a wife. He’ll immediately have his secretary package her up and deliver her to your door.”

Lin Luxiao was raising his glass toward his lips. He gave him a rather less-than-serious look and laughed. “Get lost.”

……

At that moment, Nan Chu received Lin Luxiao’s reply saying he wasn’t free. She was in the middle of scrolling through Weibo. Although she’d turned off comments, there were still plenty of private messages — all variations on the same theme:

“Nan Chu, get out of the entertainment industry.”

When Nan Chu was sixteen, she had collaborated with Ran Dongyang on a film. Because it was a low-budget production with all sorts of complications on the production side, the film wasn’t released until two years later. Both of them gave performances that were decent for their age. When the film entered its promotional period, the producers floated a rumor about Ran Dongyang and Nan Chu as a publicity stunt to generate buzz. But only a few days into that marketing push, a gossip magazine broke the news that Ran Dongyang had been in a relationship during filming — with his classmate, Yan Dai.

A few days after that, Yan Dai’s close friend posted a video online of Yan Dai in tears, which triggered a wave of Yan Dai’s fans going after Nan Chu. Some people even tracked down Nan Chu’s address and mailed her bloody photographs and threatening letters. During that period, Nan Chu was afraid to go outside, because the moment she stepped out she felt like someone was following her.

She began going entire nights without sleep. On one of the rare occasions she finally managed to fall asleep, she dreamed that her entire body had grown mouths — but there wasn’t a single person around who believed anything she said.

People pointed at her with venom, cursed at her, called her a wild child.

At the time, Nan Chu was managed by an agency without much clout. The statement they issued was rejected; her Weibo kept getting posts deleted. The media press releases portrayed her as having seduced Ran Dongyang, as having leaked information to gossip magazines to hype up the relationship — and they wrote a whole string of other nonsense about her besides.

Her hapless manager eventually gathered enough information to tell Nan Chu plainly: this entire situation had been directed squarely at her. The hate accounts flooding her comments were all paid bots; the magazine press releases all pointed the finger at her. The manager asked Nan Chu if she had offended anyone recently.

At that time, Nan Chu wasn’t even close to being an eighteenth-tier actress. Although she’d done plenty of children’s clothing advertisements growing up, she hadn’t taken a single booking all the way up to age sixteen. She occasionally worked as a model for magazines and, other than through Nan Yueru’s connections, barely knew anyone in the industry at all. Besides, Nan Yueru was already preparing to retire from the spotlight by then, her fame fading, and even walking down the street, hardly anyone recognized her.

In reality, there was no question of who she had or hadn’t offended. In a world of profit and fame, she was simply the one the production crew had thrown out to take the blame.

The conclusion of that affair:

Ran Dongyang issued a statement and announced his breakup with Yan Dai.

Nan Chu once again became the target of everyone’s resentment. Even though she knew perfectly well that she and Ran Dongyang were cleaner than clear water, it was just like in that dream — even if her whole body had been made of mouths, not a single person would have believed a word she said.

After all, the other party had even broken up over it. To say it had nothing to do with you? Nobody was going to believe that.

All of them were minor players. In the murky pond of the entertainment industry, even the pebbles they were barely made a ripple. Passersby and onlookers forgot about it in passing; the ones who remembered were the fans.

And so, for three years, Nan Chu had been dragged through the mud mercilessly.

In truth, her comment section wasn’t huge — a few hundred comments at most. But some of the things written there were genuinely difficult to look at, and many were clearly from the same accounts posting in coordination. Besides that wave of fans, the number of people who even knew who she was was tiny. Shen Guanzong simply felt it was better to spare her the aggravation of reading it, so he turned off her comments entirely.

She rarely went on Weibo at all; most of the time she only scrolled when she had nothing better to do. She’d opened the app just now while waiting for Lin Luxiao’s text message, and the dedication of the hate accounts was honestly somewhat astonishing to her.

Nan Chu had assumed that after receiving Lin Luxiao’s “not free” text, it would be a long time before she saw him again. She hadn’t expected to run into him so soon.

That day, Nan Chu was at the administrative office of the Beixin City Welfare Institute when someone came rushing in from outside and told the director in a panic: “A child’s head is stuck in the railing on the eighth floor.”

Nan Chu followed the director and ran over to look. Up on the high red-brick wall, a round little head was wedged between two gaps in the eighth-floor railing. A cluster of children stood around him, crying.

By the time they got upstairs, the little boy was wailing at them.

Nan Chu remembered this little boy — round-headed and stocky, tiger-faced and plucky, normally very lively. His name was Sanbao. Right now, he was clearly frightened, his chubby little face gone completely white.

Nan Chu crouched down to look. The institute had been renovated a couple of years ago, but funding had run short and this particular building hadn’t been included — the railing was still the original stainless steel. She put her hand on it and gave it a test push. Sanbao wailed even louder, eyes brimming with tears as he looked up at her: “Sister, am I going to be stuck like this forever?”

Nan Chu looked down at him and deliberately said, “Maybe so.”

Sanbao cried even harder.

Nan Chu was just about to give him a lecture about not sticking his head into things he shouldn’t.

But before she could, something grabbed the back of her neck and hauled her sideways. A low, cool voice came from behind her: “Who told you to scare the kid?”

Nan Chu turned her head to look.

Lin Luxiao was in his dark green firefighting gear, a coil of rope slung over his shoulder, a pair of black eyes watching her without any particular expression.

What a coincidence.

Before Nan Chu could say anything, he hauled her sideways again. “Stand over there — don’t get in our way.”

With that, he ignored her entirely. Two more people came up behind him. Lin Luxiao moved forward with his team, crouched down, took a knee, confirmed that Sanbao had only scraped his head slightly, then turned to point at several spots on the railing and said to the team members behind him, “Get the tools. Cut these four bars — someone go outside to spot him from below, just in case.”

Nan Chu leaned quietly against the wall and watched him work with focused intent.

A man who is serious about what he does is genuinely captivating.

The team conferred for a while.

Lin Luxiao stood, repositioned the rope on his shoulder, braced both hands against the railing, and swung himself over to the outside of the wall. Feet planted on the exterior, he slowly descended along the rope, then kicked off the wall and braced himself — both hands cupping around Sanbao’s head to keep it from slipping outward.

Nan Chu noticed that he had thought to gently cover Sanbao’s eyes so the boy couldn’t look down. He even said quietly to him: “Good boy, stop crying.”

Sanbao stopped crying immediately. His little head nestled against the man’s hands.

“……”

“……”

“……”

“……”

Ten minutes later, once Sanbao was rescued, Lin Luxiao climbed back up the rope, flipped both hands over the railing, and landed on his feet. He had barely steadied himself when there was someone standing right in front of him.

He startled, instinctively stepped back, and looked down at her with a guarded expression. “What are you doing?”

The young woman curled her lips in a smile, her eyes curving into crescents, brows and eyes clean and pale — no makeup. She reached out and straightened his collar. “Captain, it’s crooked.”

“……”