As Nan Chu’s hands moved, Lin Luxiao instinctively looked down.

She was quick about it. She straightened his collar and immediately withdrew her hand — her fair-skinned hand flashed past his eyes for just an instant, like a beam of light, trailing a faint scent of cherry blossoms. Lin Luxiao shifted his gaze away and pushed his hands into his pockets, looking elsewhere.

Just in time to catch the director and Sanbao coming over to thank them.

Sanbao, barely as tall as a sapling, came scampering over and launched himself at Lin Luxiao, small hands wrapping around his thigh. He was so little that his head barely cleared the man’s leg. He buried his face between Lin Luxiao’s thighs, made little cooing sounds, and said, “Thank you, Uncle Lin!”

Lin Luxiao looked down and ruffled the child’s hair, his gaze uncharacteristically soft.

Sanbao hugged him tight. He was so small that both his hands, reaching around, ended up right at the top of Lin Luxiao’s thigh. He tilted his head back with bright, chirping enthusiasm: “Uncle Lin, are you still hiring at your station? When I grow up I want to come work with you!”

Lin Luxiao gripped the leg of his trousers, crouched down, palmed the back of Sanbao’s head and gave it two rubs, and said with a low laugh, “Then you’d better study hard and pass the military academy exam. And no more sticking your head into places it shouldn’t go like you did today.”

Inexplicably gentle.

Nan Chu found herself wondering — what would his own children be like?

Sanbao said brightly, “Alright! Sorry for all the trouble again today!”

Lin Luxiao rubbed his head again. “With you being this mischievous, I’m definitely racking up the overtime.”

The director smiled and stepped up from behind. “Luxiao, won’t you stay for a meal?”

The institute’s director was an old comrade of Lin Luxiao’s grandfather from years gone by. When Lin Luxiao was young and used to get into arguments with adults — acting up and causing a scene — Lin Qingyuan had threatened to dump him at the welfare institute. The director was one of those who had more or less watched Lin Luxiao grow up.

Lin Luxiao stood. “I have to get back to the station. I’ll come see you again another time.”

The director nodded warmly, then looked at Nan Chu. “And you? Will you stay for a bite?”

Nan Chu replied, “I have an afternoon booking. My car’s waiting downstairs. I’ll go see Bao Shu in a bit and then I need to head out.”

The director nodded with a look of fond relief. “Bao Shu has been talking about you for a long time. Go on and visit him. I’ll take the children in for their meal.” With that, the director led the children away, and the hallway was left with just Nan Chu and Lin Luxiao. They exchanged a glance.

Lin Luxiao bent down to gather his things and asked in an even tone, “What are you doing here?”

Nan Chu shrugged, indifferent. “Charity work. Don’t all public figures love setting themselves up as philanthropists? The company made me.”

“Philanthropist?”

He didn’t really understand why a barely eighteenth-tier actress would bother building that kind of image, but going by Nan Chu’s expression in that moment, he couldn’t detect anything off about it. He gave a vague acknowledgment and went back to collecting his things.

Nan Chu gave a mischievous grin. “Alright, I’ll let you in on a secret — the charity is a front. I secretly had a child and I was afraid it would affect my reputation, so I left him here.”

That successfully got his attention.

Lin Luxiao stopped what he was doing and looked at her with a deep, measured gaze.

Nan Chu smiled. “Don’t let my youth fool you — I’m actually a mother.”

“……”

Lin Luxiao didn’t engage. He gave a sardonic little curl of his lips and bent back down to coil up the rope.

Nan Chu walked around behind him, leaned in slightly, and murmured close to his ear, “When do you have time?”

Lin Luxiao straightened up and looked down at her. “Being a mother already and still this free? Don’t you need to spend time with the kid?”

She laughed. “Got to find the kid a father, haven’t I.”

“……”

How she could say something like that so matter-of-factly was beyond him. And he had no idea what had come over him in that moment — he actually played along.

“Where’s the father?”

Nan Chu sighed. “Young and foolish. He ran off.”

“……”

Lin Luxiao: “You’re telling me something this significant — you’re not afraid I’ll expose you?”

Nan Chu: “I trust you — otherwise why would I have gone home with you at sixteen?”

Lin Luxiao tried not to misread that sentence, but the words that came out of his own mouth were biting: “So after leaving my place you went to some other man’s — and ended up with a kid?”

Nan Chu didn’t answer. She looked at him, smiling that victorious smile, those outer corners of her eyes long and fine, the curve of them soft, angled upward — a little bit dangerous.

Damn it.

Shen Mu had been right. The game-playing was definitely deep.

Lin Luxiao fell silent. He refused to engage further, turned his head, and went back to packing up his things.

Nan Chu watched him quietly for a moment. Apparently she was bored enough to fish a cigarette out of her clothes, put it between her lips, and light it. She took two steps back, leaned back against the railing — and then her shoulder suddenly dropped under a weight. She had barely looked down before, in her peripheral vision, a hand appeared out of nowhere. She had no time to react before she was grabbed by the arm and yanked to the side.

Lin Luxiao gripped her shoulder, tilted his chin at the section of railing below where she’d been leaning — one of the cut-out gaps. “Are you blind? Didn’t you see that was open?”

Nan Chu held her cigarette between her lips, looked at the railing, took a drag, tilted her head back and exhaled a breath. Her voice was a little husky with a lazy ease. “Are you worried about me?”

Lin Luxiao gave a cold laugh.

Behind him was the afternoon’s blazing sun, scorching hot, burning everything to impatience. Nan Chu held her cigarette and forgot to smoke it. The ash at the tip spiraled upward, cinders scattering in all directions — and she was pinned in place by the cold look in his eyes.

“What I’m worried about is lives.”

He paused, eyes fixed on hers, and spoke in measured syllables: “Every single one.”

With that, he finished cinching the rope, threw it over his shoulder, and walked away without sparing her another glance.

Nan Chu stood there, rooted to the spot.

The warmth in that voice was something even the sun behind him could not melt.

There used to be a saying hung in Lin Qingyuan’s study.

— Youth, once gone, will not return; one day cannot hold two dawns.

That saying wasn’t wrong.

He still remembered the early days just after graduating from military academy, when he’d barely been in the special operations unit for long. A catastrophic earthquake struck Pinglin County. Every road into Pinglin was jammed solid. He followed his squad leader at the time, going in with the first wave of airborne forces. When the helicopter landed, everyone was shocked by what lay before them: rubble as far as the eye could see, collapsed brick walls and fallen tiles, gray-white stone rubble — no way of counting how many people lay buried beneath.

They combed the area with detection equipment, searching nonstop for survivors. Nobody could say how elated they felt when the detector first gave a signal — the search dogs worked for over ninety consecutive hours before finally collapsing on the rubble, barely clinging to life. And even in that final moment, as a dog lay closing its eyes, a life signal was detected underneath its body.

He had just pulled one person from the rubble and turned around to race back. His search area had originally been a school; most of those trapped below were students. He swept with the life detector and found signs of life at the base of a high slope — immediately called in his teammates and they began digging a tunnel.

Everyone was drenched in sweat. They had been digging for days and nights on end, sleeping only an hour or two in between. Their whole bodies were filthy — faces, bodies, feet, all coated in mud. But somehow there was an energy they couldn’t exhaust, and they just kept going. When they’d cleared about a third of the way through, he peered through a gap formed by three stone slabs and saw a pair of small boy’s eyes — dark as coal, deeply dark.

He remembered it clearly even now — the instant those eyes saw him, it was as if they had glimpsed a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean. They lit up at once.

He kept reassuring the child: they would get him out.

But when he looked more carefully into the gap, he saw that a steel beam had pierced clean through the small boy’s chest. The earth around him was saturated with blood, the metallic smell heavy in the air.

The gap was too small for an adult to enter. The steel beam pinning the boy was buried deep in the soil behind him — there was no way to drag him free. If they forced the stones aside, the pile above would cave in at any moment; the boy would be buried again, and he was already too far gone to last much longer. As much as no one wanted to give up, there was nothing anyone could do.

And then Lin Luxiao heard the small boy calling out to him in a feeble voice. When he peered through the gap again, the boy’s pitch-black eyes — down in that pitch-black soil — shone with inexplicable brightness. He kept begging to be saved. He said he wanted to live. He said when he grew up he would serve his country, be a pillar of society, and repay the nation. He begged them not to give up on him. He said if he died, there would be no one left to look after his little sister.

He had barely finished speaking when another aftershock came. He and several teammates were thrown down the slope. When he looked back up, there was no longer any mound — it had been leveled to the ground.

Lin Luxiao knelt in the dirt, fists clenched tight, pressed into the earth, eyes burning red and raw. But he could only stand up and walk forward. The only thing sustaining him was the knowledge that he had to reach and rescue more people before the next aftershock came.

That was his mission.

To this day he didn’t dare let himself picture that small boy’s face in detail. When his old squad leader left the unit, he clapped him on the shoulder and told him: “Luxiao — doing this work means suffering, enduring suffering, and being able to witness suffering.”

……

Lin Luxiao had just finished loading his gear, got in the vehicle, shut the door, and told the team member to drive. Someone came running up to the front of the car — the director had sent someone to wave them down.

“Hold on.” Lin Luxiao told his team member, unclipped his seatbelt, jumped out, and jogged toward the director.

The director handed him a square, flat box. “Last time when your father visited, he got to talking with one of the children here and they hit it off. A few days ago the children did crafts, and this child made a little clay figurine for your father. I know your father is usually too busy to remember things like this — but this child’s situation is special. I’m taking it upon myself to send it along. Do me a favor and bring it home to your father.”

Lin Luxiao took it and gave a quiet acknowledgment. “What’s the child’s name?”

The director said, “Nan Bao Shu.”

“……”

Lin Luxiao: “Please don’t tell me it’s the same kid that girl just mentioned.”

The director smiled. “You mean Nan Chu?”

Lin Luxiao made a noncommittal sound.

“Yes, that’s right. Nan Chu adopted him a few years back. That girl has a truly good heart — though sometimes she doesn’t say a true word, she’s genuinely kind. She not only sponsors Bao Shu’s schooling, she comes to visit whenever she has a free moment, and brings a huge pile of things — for Bao Shu and for the other children too. Bao Shu has autism; she found doctors to take him to countless appointments. When your father visited last time, it was rare for Bao Shu to be able to talk with him for a bit. She just has a tough outer shell.”

Tough outer shell — what about her seemed tough at all? She was perfectly soft.

Lin Luxiao nodded, tucked the box away securely, gave a crisp military salute. “Understood. I’ll definitely get it to you. I need to go — take care of yourself.”

The director nodded. “Go on.”

Lin Luxiao had barely gotten back into the vehicle and was waving farewell to the director when the car had only just started moving — and his pocket buzzed.

He pulled out his phone.

【From Little Miss Troublemaker: Thank you for the lesson, Captain. I now cherish my life very much.】

A moment later, another one came through.

【From Little Miss Troublemaker: At least until I’ve won you over — I intend to stay alive.】

Lin Luxiao took off his cap and set it to the side. He leaned back in his seat, let one corner of his mouth curve up, and typed back quickly:

——If you want to stay alive, start by quitting smoking.