Chapter 95
The road leading up to the mid-mountain villa was full of winding curves. Shu Ci pinched the bridge of his nose, suppressing a bellyful of questions, and closed his eyes as he waited for Lu Wanqing to navigate this difficult stretch of road. His mind was filled with constantly flashing fragments; the face that had fleetingly appeared in his dreams was becoming clearer, finally sketching out the features of the man beside him.
The car came to a steady stop and the engine died. Lu Wanqing instantly unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned over toward Shu Ci.
Shu Ci hadn’t said a word to him the whole way, and his complexion looked terrible. Lu Wanqing had been on tenterhooks; even when he asked if they should go to the hospital, he received no response. Now, leaning in close, he saw sweat streaming down Shu Ci’s temples.
“What’s wrong? Did you have a nightmare? Or are you feeling unwell somewhere?”
His voice carried an anxiety he couldn’t hide.
Even in the face of life and death in the freezing snow, Lu Wanqing had never shown a shred of uneasiness. He had been prepared to leave this world, remaining calm even when his glands had nearly dried up.
General Lu, whom fate had molded to remain unmoved by honor or disgrace, was now panicked over the unexplained sweat of his partner.
Shu Ci took a deep breath, trying his best to temporarily push those fragments out of his mind. He struggled to open his eyes and looked at Lu Wanqing, seeing the man cupping his face helplessly, his deep blue eyes reflecting Shu Ci’s own image.
“Back at the base, you asked me if I had ever been to the Far-flung Regions.”
“Mn.” Lu Wanqing used his thumb to wipe the sweat from Shu Ci’s temple. Since it was brought up, he no longer hid it. “The day of the mole incident, I chased a voice all the way to that cave.”
Shu Ci looked at him unblinkingly. Lu Wanqing paused, then recounted the sequence of events from that day.
He didn’t have Yu Xingxing’s talent for vivid storytelling; even the perilous, desperate situation was glossed over lightly. Yet, Shu Ci still frowned at his words.
“I asked you that day because the shout in my memory became clear in my dream, and it sounded very much like your voice.”
The military doctor had diagnosed him with mild PTSD. Soon after, he stopped hearing that hallucinatory voice, and the vague sound was drowned out by time.
“I don’t know if it’s a case of ‘what you think about by day, you dream of by night’.” He gave Shu Ci a deep look. “During that time, you were at the base every day. I was thinking about you constantly, so it’s possible your voice just entered my dreams.”
Shu Ci nuzzled his palm. “But the incident in the Third District made you doubt yourself again, right?”
Lu Wanqing nodded. He never needed to say much; Shu Ci could keep up with his train of thought instantly.
When the silver-white mutant creature broke through the air, he had distinctly heard Shu Ci’s voice in the void. He could no longer use PTSD or any other excuse to brush it off.
There had to be some connection between him and Shu Ci that existed between dreams and reality.
“You might not have guessed wrong.” Shu Ci lowered his eyes. “The inspiration for that movie I filmed came from a dream. In the dream, I was tied to an icy rock. I was alone and terrified, so I could only scream for help.”
Everything became clear.
At that time, in his own world, in the split second before waking from the dream, he had cried out to his savior.
And in Lu Wanqing’s world, those few screams of his had guided Lu Wanqing straight into the traitors’ ultimate lair, pulling Lu Wanqing back from the gates of hell.
“If it weren’t for me… you might not have been in so much pain back then.” He looked at Lu Wanqing apologetically.
Lu Wanqing shook his head. “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have found that place, I wouldn’t have held the final line of defense for the Seventh District and the Chengxin Sea, and I certainly wouldn’t have been transferred out of the logistics team and awarded a first-class merit because of it.”
Looking at it now, the butterfly wings of Shu Ci from another world had been flapping since many years ago.
It was his gentle flutter that created the Lu Wanqing of today.
“Thank you for dreaming of me.”
Lu Wanqing lifted Shu Ci’s chin and kissed the peak of his lips.
Shu Ci involuntarily responded to his gentleness, but in his heart, he was thinking: Before I came to this world, I only saw Lu Wanqing in my dreams. The traitor he mentioned never appeared. But after coming here, I dreamed of the entire Seventh District army fighting unknown creatures.
So, was his arrival an accident? A coincidence?
Or was it caused by some unfathomable external force?
Director Shu, habitually prone to brainstorming and wild plot holes, fell into his own little world of thought during a kiss for the first time. He became increasingly perfunctory, his kisses growing distracted. In the end, he just sloppily rubbed against Lu Wanqing twice, simply enduring the tracing of the man’s tongue.
“…Are you trying to piss me off?” Lu Wanqing quickly noticed his distraction. He couldn’t bear to bite down hard, so he could only pinch Shu Ci’s waist as a reminder.
Shu Ci sucked in a breath from the pain.
When he snapped back to reality, he was already being carried bridal style by Lu Wanqing, striding quickly from the car into the villa.
Suspended in the air, yet held by Lu Wanqing, Shu Ci felt unusually secure. Until… he entered the house and was placed onto the bed.
“Wait, wait, wait. Now?”
“I was thinking, maybe if I mark you, you won’t get distracted?”
Shu Ci lay on his back, his gaze falling on Lu Wanqing’s looming brow and eyes. For a moment, he was speechless. Just because he spaced out during a kiss, Lu Wanqing was unhappy enough to want to mark him to get his attention?
“Just… I was merely pondering some philosophical questions.” With that suffocatingly beautiful face inches away, he didn’t even know what nonsense he was spouting anymore.
Lu Wanqing’s pheromones slowly released, invading little by little from his fingertips. “Speak them out, shall I discuss them with you? Hmm?”
The slightly rising inflection at the end made Shu Ci’s breath tremble, and his whole being became a little flustered and enamored.
He remembered the bottle of… mood-enhancing… essential oil Si Man had left behind.
Waste not, want not, right?
Shu Ci straightened his arms, pressing against Lu Wanqing’s lowering shoulders. “If you want to discuss the philosophical issue of human reproduction with me, can you allow me to take a shower first?”
Lu Wanqing: “…”
He wasn’t sure if Shu Ci was politely declining or genuinely wanted a shower. He turned his body slightly sideways, allowing Shu Ci to slip into the bathroom like a loach.
Lu Wanqing looked at the closed bathroom door and sighed.
He walked to the window, looking past the distant mountains and clouds toward the Chengxin Sea at the edge of the Seventh District.
He messaged Yi Xingshui: [Is it really okay if I mark him?]
Yi Xingshui sent back a string of ellipses.
Yi Xingshui: [Senior, I thought you two would be rolling in the sheets the night I sent that email.]
The affection these two had for each other was practically overflowing; how had they held back from marking until now?
Yi Xingshui: [Li Yi asked two professors on the island who research Purple Pomelo Stone to help contact willing participants who are trustworthy. There was a pair with an official match rating of 10%—of course, you know now that’s all nonsense. One of them even has disorder syndrome. They’ve already completed the marking, and no issues appeared during the observation period post-marking.]
Yi Xingshui: [Is this case enough to put your mind at ease?]
Lu Wanqing looked at Yi Xingshui’s words and fell silent.
He suddenly realized that his worry wasn’t that the marking process would go wrong.
It was that… the Shu Ci inside that shell was, after all, not the Shu Ci from this world. He would always stand in a third-person perspective, viewing the operation of this world as a bystander, pondering philosophical questions about the connection between him and the two worlds.
What if one day, he started thinking about how to return to his original world?
The questions Lu Wanqing had been avoiding all surfaced in this moment.
—Shu Ci, playing the role of an Omega, might not want to stay here forever.
—The version of him from that world, who cannot conceive, might not accept being marked by him.
Once such hypotheses began, they left one feeling lost and unmoored. He didn’t know how to broach these topics with him, nor did he know if he could make him stay.
They loved each other. And precisely because of that love, it was harder to determine what was genuine desire and what was sacrifice or compromise made for the other, for the sake of “love.”
He didn’t want someone like Shu Ci to suffer any grievances or make any compromises.
Seeing that Lu Wanqing hadn’t replied for a long time, Yi Xingshui sent a few question marks: [??? Did you two fight?]
Yi Xingshui: [Why did your wife also run to ask me about you?]
Lu Wanqing frowned: [What did he ask?]
Yi Xingshui sent him a screenshot: [Asking about the time you were in school.]
Yi Xingshui: [Wait, Senior, didn’t your time at school overlap with your resume in the Seventh District? Is it really not a typo?]
Lu Wanqing’s temple throbbed.
He didn’t know if Shu Ci was actually showering in the bathroom, but he roughly realized what Shu Ci wanted to do.
A complete mark meant complete honesty. It meant the two would have no secrets from each other, meant they would share all their vulnerabilities. In this world, if an Alpha was willing, he could even use his pheromones to dominate the Omega’s emotions—though this last point didn’t apply much to Shu Ci, who had undergone pheromone training.
Shu Ci’s possessiveness was no less than his own.
Before a thorough marking, Shu Ci wouldn’t tolerate him guarding those secrets, nor would he want there to be things he didn’t know.
[It’s nothing.] Lu Wanqing replied perfunctorily to Yi Xingshui, not intending to explain.
He walked quickly to the bathroom and knocked on the door.
“You’re going to die of impatience, aren’t you?”
Shu Ci dragged his voice out lazily, walking out slowly wrapped in a bathrobe. Lu Wanqing smelled a mixed fragrance coming from his neck.
Yet there was no fluctuation of his pheromones in the air.
“Ah, I put two drops of the essential oil Auntie Man gave us.” Shu Ci stretched his neck, bringing his beautiful gland right before Lu Wanqing’s eyes. “Smell it?”
A posture tantamount to teasing caused Lu Wanqing’s adrenaline to spike.
His fingertips lightly touched that patch of soft flesh, watching Shu Ci tremble reflexively.
The robe fell slightly open, revealing a glimpse of skin.
Lu Wanqing ground his teeth gently, picked him up, and walked toward the bedroom. He solemnly placed Shu Ci on the edge of the bed, turned around, rummaged through a drawer, found a camera, and handed it to Shu Ci.
Shu Ci took it blankly. “What’s this? You want to record the first time we roll in the sheets in our lives?”
He was into that? Exhibitionism in front of a lens?
“…” Lu Wanqing was rendered speechless.
In this regard, he couldn’t quite keep up with Shu Ci’s train of thought.
“It’s an instant camera. You can take a picture of me.”
“And then?” Shu Ci pressed the shutter. Soon, the film slowly rolled out of the camera.
Lu Wanqing, within that square inch, looked as beautiful as a descending god.
Lu Wanqing closed his eyes. “You point to a spot on my body in the photo, and I’ll guess.”
“Cough, well, I’ve never seen foreplay like this. So you like this kind of thing?” Shu Ci looked suspiciously at Lu Wanqing’s closed eyes, his fingertips landing on a certain spot. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have taken a full-body shot.”
“…” The tips of Lu Wanqing’s ears turned red.
The entire patch of skin over his heart felt Shu Ci’s touch.
“Move slightly to the left. Not that spot,” Lu Wanqing said.
“Mm, okay, okay.” Shu Ci was a bit surprised, unsure if he really guessed it or was just saying that on purpose. He smiled and moved his finger.
“Shu Ci.” Lu Wanqing called his full name. “You’re not allowed to touch the Adam’s apple either.”
Shu Ci suddenly looked up and saw that Lu Wanqing’s eyes were already closed.
His eyes widened, moving lower. “What about here?”
Lu Wanqing: “I’ll show you the real abs later.”
“Holy sh*t!” Shu Ci’s eyes popped. The fingertips holding the film accidentally trembled and scratched across the photo. Immediately, he saw a faint red mark appear on Lu Wanqing’s neck.
What was there not to understand?!
Lu Wanqing opened his eyes, squatted in front of him, held his hand, and spoke word by word.
“This is my first secret.”
Now, it is yours too.
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