But he could not hunt her, nor was he worthy of hunting her
///
However, Chen Cebai’s eyes could not possibly see only her.
He was the youngest, most talented, and most promising material scientist of his generation.
In just two years, he had solved an almost impossible-to-solve “chip disease.”
If it weren’t for the excessively high production cost of neural blocking drugs—each 30mg dose selling for as much as $40,000 and currently limited to purchase by senior employees of Biotech Materials—Chen Cebai would very likely already be the most valuable scientist in the world.
Since marrying Chen Cebai, more than one person had told her that he could never fall in love with her.
Those who said this included her pursuers, Chen Cebai’s rivals, and even his fanatic supporters.
Yes, Chen Cebai had very devoted fans.
Perhaps because the ultimate end of science is theology, Chen Cebai’s fanatic supporters were nearly indistinguishable from religious believers. When their research reached an impasse, they would even worship Chen Cebai’s three-dimensional holographic projection.
Qiu Yu had once been fortunate enough to witness this. She was astounded, gaining a whole new understanding of the degree of superstition people could have toward scientists.
She and Chen Cebai were people from two different worlds.
He could not touch her.
She also could not understand him.
Qiu Yu closed her eyes, suppressing a trace of disappointment deep in her heart, telling herself that things were fine the way they were now.
A cooperative marriage, with no suspicion, no quarrels, and none of the usual flaws of a traditional marriage.
The only flaw was that her willpower was too weak—she was always drawn to the sense of mystery surrounding Chen Cebai and moved by the occasional gentleness he unintentionally revealed.
In just a few seconds, Qiu Yu had regained her usual composure. She smiled at him and said, “Alright, I’ll listen to you.”
She pulled a tissue from the storage compartment and gently wiped the sweat from his forehead. His sweat was also cold, as if someone had poured a few drops of ice water on him.
Chen Cebai did not move, allowing her to do as she pleased.
When she finished wiping his sweat, his expression returned to its usual calm and indifferent state. He raised his hand to take the tissue from her, threw it into the tissue bin, started the sports car, and drove toward home.
Qiu Yu closed her eyes to rest in the car.
Thinking of Chen Cebai’s reminder, she was just about to turn off the chip’s background activity when she suddenly noticed a red notification dot.
Out of compulsion, she tapped it open and found a harassment message.
Qiu Yu was about to delete it when her gaze suddenly froze.
The content of the message was—
[Click the link to learn the true face of Chen Cebai: https://sbpk.ccbxXXXXXX]
Qiu Yu slightly furrowed her brows.
It was probably a mass message sent by Chen Cebai’s competitors. The fact that it had even reached her private number was beyond outrageous.
She didn’t tell Chen Cebai about it to avoid troubling him, deleted the message without a second thought, and continued resting with her eyes closed.
Chen Cebai gripped the steering wheel, driving into the traffic without looking sideways.
To achieve the ultimate streamlined aerodynamic shape, the interior space of this sports car was slightly cramped, yet it did not make one feel oppressive or confined. That was because its interior was also designed to the height of luxury—just the seats alone had been made from who knows how many calves that had only just been bred.
Ever since his sense of smell had been enhanced, he could even discern the physical condition of a calf, see how they were raised, how they were selected, how they were hung upside down on a curved hook, slaughtered, and skinned—just to ensure that the texture and pores of the leather remained uniform. The entire process was nothing short of senseless slaughter.
The stench of livestock blood filled the car, pungent and suffocating. It irritated him.
What irritated him even more was that Qiu Yu’s scent of blood was mixed in as well.
Just like in the morning, her blood smelled intense, sweet, maddening.
Chen Cebai gripped the steering wheel tightly, the tendons and bones on the back of his hand bulging prominently. His greenish-blue veins were clearly visible. Anyone who saw those eerily bluish veins would never believe that he was as calm as he appeared on the surface at this moment.
Fortunately, Qiu Yu had her eyes closed, resting.
Otherwise, he truly wouldn’t know how to explain his abnormality.
Ahead was a traffic light. He took the opportunity to slow down and stop, resting his head against the steering wheel and taking a deep breath.
Just at that moment, Qiu Yu turned over in her seat, and her arm flashed in the corner of his vision.
In that instant, the predatory instinct amplified eight hundred times was triggered once again.
Chen Cebai almost grabbed her wrist, pinned it against the seat, and leaned over to sink his teeth into her throat.
Fortunately, a car horn sounded from behind, snapping him back to reality. He forcibly emptied his mind of those eerie thoughts.
Before picking Qiu Yu up and bringing her home, he had already conducted a full-body examination on himself in the lab.
There was no genetic mutation, no biological contamination, and no signs of any rare disease.
His body showed no abnormalities—or rather, the current instruments simply could not detect what was wrong with him.
He could only rely on biological monitoring data to assess the changes in himself.
But according to biological monitoring, he now resembled a dying patient far more than a healthy living person.
His heart rate had already dropped below forty beats per minute, his body temperature was ten degrees Celsius, and his blood oxygen saturation was below seventy percent. His respiratory rate had fallen to just five breaths per minute.
In other words, he should be lying in a hearse right now, not sitting in the driver’s seat, taking his wife home.
Perhaps due to his abnormally low body temperature, he had been granted an unparalleled sense of calm.
Even though his physical condition was infinitely close to that of a dead man, his gaze behind his glasses remained undisturbed.
The only thing he couldn’t let go of was…
Chen Cebai closed his eyes briefly.
Before getting married, he had already informed Qiu Yu’s parents about the drawbacks of the biochemical chip.
Excessive use of the chip would lead to cognitive impairment, similar to a milder form of Alzheimer’s disease.
Before the development of the neural blocking drug, there had only been one solution—using inhalable stimulants.
However, stimulants came with countless side effects, the most obvious being a significant increase in sudden death cases.
Chen Cebai had hoped that Qiu Yu’s parents, as her elders, would persuade her to use the chip less.
However, he had forgotten—Qiu Yu’s parents were senior executives of a well-known monopoly company in Northern Europe. Their sense for profiteering was as keen as a wolf’s—the greater the side effects of the chip, the more it proved the value of the neural blocking drug.
They assumed that the reason he said those things was because he wanted Qiu Yu, so they immediately “sent” Qiu Yu to him.
And Qiu Yu knew nothing about any of this.
Three years had passed, and Chen Cebai still didn’t know how to view this relationship.
Both emotionally and rationally, he should not have been with Qiu Yu.
A 100% compatibility score had only been achieved because, in front of that group of intellectually deficient idiots, he had hacked into the system and rewritten the underlying code. It was meant as retaliation.
At school, almost everyone liked Qiu Yu. She was beautiful, sweet, had a good personality, and a great temper—she never took teasing or jokes to heart.
When their genetic compatibility was shown to be 99.99%, it had already been enough to avoid suspicion—no one would dwell on the matter anymore, and no one would associate him with Qiu Yu.
Both he and she would have had much more peace.
But Chen Cebai had not anticipated that Qiu Yu would kiss him.
The crowd was noisy, chaotic.
Under countless gazes filled with malice and ridicule from all directions, she smiled brightly at him, took a step forward, wrapped an arm around the back of his head, and tilted her face upward—
And kissed him.
Her lips and tongue were warm, moist.
When she lightly wrapped her tongue around his ice-cold tongue tip, his naturally slow-beating heart suddenly pounded, for the first time reaching a rate close to that of a normal person.
In just a few seconds, the kiss had made his fingers go numb.
He wanted to grab onto something—her hair, or her throat.
Fix her head in place.
Not allow her to leave.
But in the end, he did nothing. He simply watched as her lips withdrew.
It seemed that a thin, nearly transparent strand of saliva stretched between them before breaking and disappearing.
Ever since then, in countless dreams, he had seen that faint, elusive strand of saliva passing before his eyes.
Saliva is unclean.
His thoughts were also unclean.
In his dreams, before that strand of saliva had completely fallen, he would suddenly shed his mask of indifference, seize the back of her head with an overwhelming aggressiveness, and suck on her tongue until the base of it ached.
He was born in filth, his mind was filthy, and he was filled with an impure, predatory desire for her.
But he could not hunt her, nor was he worthy of hunting her.
She was not his prey.
She was born superior, radiant.
Using a falsified compatibility score and the excuse of a cooperative marriage, he had possessed her for three years—this was already the most despicable and disgraceful thing he had ever done.
Moreover, he didn’t even know how much longer he could live.
With his current physical state, if someone told him that he would suddenly die in the laboratory tomorrow, he wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest.
He was barely holding on to life himself, so logically speaking, when he saw her dining with Pei Xi today, he shouldn’t have gone over to disturb them.
After all, Pei Xi truly liked her.
If he were to die unexpectedly, Pei Xi would be the only one who could bring her comfort and take care of her.
But—he couldn’t hold back.
She was his wife.
If he wanted to, he could grab her jaw at any moment and kiss her. If he allowed himself to be even more despicable, he could even force her to swallow his saliva. Even now, her body still carried traces of his scent.
No man could tolerate seeing his wife standing so intimately close to another man under such circumstances.
Perhaps it was due to his heightened sense of smell, but the moment he detected Pei Xi’s scent on Qiu Yu, an immense and terrifying killing intent surged up within him.
He wanted to kill Pei Xi.
Preferably right in front of Qiu Yu, with his own hands snapping his neck.
That way, she would understand the consequences of getting too close to other men.
This cruel and horrifying thought consumed his entire mind in less than a second.
It took him a full thirty seconds to forcibly suppress those excessively dark thoughts.
To prevent Qiu Yu from noticing anything, he remained silent the entire way home.
He had originally intended to stay silent until they arrived, but the moment he heard her say that she had overused the chip, the killing intent he had just managed to suppress surged back with full force.
If she developed a neurodegenerative disease… If something went wrong with her body…
For three years, Chen Cebai had always played the role of a calm and non-aggressive person in front of her.
But the moment he realized there might be a problem with her body, the mask of his composure cracked slightly, and his aggression surged to its peak.
As he gripped her jaw and read her biological monitoring data, a truck roared past beside them. In that instant, his excessive aggression nearly made him pull out his gun and aim at the truck’s tires.
Fortunately, there was nothing seriously wrong with her body—she was just a little mentally fatigued.
Only then did Chen Cebai finally relax, belatedly realizing that he had broken out in a cold sweat.
Supporting his forehead with one hand, he turned his head to look out of the car window, catching a glimpse of his own reflection—cold and dark.
Something slick and filthy flashed across the back of his hand.
Upon taking a closer look, it was just a few abnormally bulging veins.
He had been experiencing too many hallucinations these past few days. Chen Cebai didn’t dwell on this one.
He closed his eyes, trying his best to organize his thoughts.
He could feel himself losing control. And he could also feel that this loss of control was intensifying.
As if his nerves were being repeatedly stretched—each pull testing the limits of his sanity.
He only knew that for now, he wouldn’t completely lose his mind. But he didn’t know where his limit was.
Even more uncertain was what he might do if he did lose his mind.
Because right now, all that surged within him were dangerous, terrifying, and horrifying thoughts.
Each one was enough to make his wife—who sat beside him, eyes closed in ignorant rest—shudder in fear.