The Existence He Could Only Look Up to but Never Reach
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Upon returning home, Qiu Yu yawned, took off her coat, and went to take a shower.
She didn’t pay attention to what Chen Cebai was doing. Normally, at this time, he was either remotely guiding other researchers in the living room or leaning against the sofa reading a book.
The print media industry had completely declined. Now, there was an ultra-thin, paper-like e-reader, with a reading experience similar to that of a physical book—perhaps even better.
But Chen Cebai never used an e-reader.
He only read physical books.
He seemed to be farsighted. He rarely wore glasses when reading, usually placing the book on his knees and flipping through the pages from a slightly scrutinizing angle, as if looking down from above.
With his cold and aggressive appearance, his well-defined fingers, and slightly protruding wrist bones, Qiu Yu could watch him for as long as he could read.
So sometimes, Qiu Yu really couldn’t hate his indifference.
He was indifferent in just the right way—every movement of his perfectly aligned with her sexual preferences.
After showering, Qiu Yu dried her hair and collapsed onto the bed. She had intended to browse the web for a while, but her chip had already shut down. Too lazy to get her tablet, she simply closed her eyes and gradually emptied her mind.
Just as she was about to fall asleep, a sudden weight pressed against her waist.
Chen Cebai had also lain down, one hand resting around her waist.
Half-asleep, Qiu Yu’s mind took a moment to process a thought—sometimes, she found herself “out of character” in this cooperative marriage because some of Chen Cebai’s actions were too tender.
Just like now.
The way he held her was too natural, too gentle.
If not for his hand being as cold as ice, sending a chill through her, she might have instinctively nestled into him, melting bonelessly in his embrace.
“Sleeping this early?” Qiu Yu murmured, her voice slightly nasal, carrying a hint of coquettishness.
As if she were acting spoiled toward him.
Chen Cebai’s arm suddenly tightened.
Qiu Yu had barely finished speaking when cold lips pressed down on hers.
Every time she kissed Chen Cebai, she experienced a strange sense of dissonance—his tongue was so cold, yet his kisses were hot and overwhelming.
He kissed as if he were eating something, pressing against her lips, slowly sucking. Only when her mouth was nearly overflowing with saliva would he retreat slightly, letting out a heavy swallowing sound.
Qiu Yu was kissed so intensely that her face turned red.
At that moment, his cool, detached voice sounded right beside her ear:
“Today, when you thought I was accessing your chip, what did you think I wanted to do?”
Hearing his voice up close, its low, husky magnetism became even more pronounced, sending a persistent tingling sensation through her ears.
Qiu Yu was completely awake now, her breathing entirely erratic.
Since he was the one issuing the invitation, she wouldn’t hold back.
In terms of intelligence, she was perhaps slightly inferior to him… Fine, very inferior.
But in a certain matter, they were evenly matched.
Qiu Yu tilted her head slightly, revealing the interface behind her ear.
She had sweet and delicate features, with slightly rounded cheeks. With such an appearance, if she had round eyes with downward-slanting corners, she would have looked youthful and childlike, like a child who would never grow up.
Yet, she was born with a pair of long, alluring eyes, their outer corners tilting upward, neutralizing the pure and innocent aura of her face and revealing a clear, sweet, and charming allure.
Every time Chen Cebai met her gaze, it felt as though his heart was hooked.
He didn’t dare to look.
With every glance, he had the urge to grab her hair, hold her head firmly in place, and keep her gaze from ever shifting away.
Chen Cebai knew these thoughts were rough, nearly unreasonable.
So he always avoided her eyes or forcibly suppressed the hunting instinct within his gaze.
As expected, Qiu Yu did not meet Chen Cebai’s eyes.
Even if they had been kissing just a second ago, he could detach himself from it in an instant, his expression turning as calm and rational as if he were verifying experimental data.
—He was very aware of the nature of this relationship, which was why he rarely looked her in the eye at moments like these.
Eye contact created the illusion of love.
Qiu Yu thought to herself—he truly deserved to be called a high-IQ genius, handling even matters of love and desire with greater ease than she could.
Fortunately, she hadn’t fallen too deep either. Qiu Yu grasped Chen Cebai’s hand and placed it on the interface behind her ear.
The interface was directly connected to her brain’s nerves. If someone forcefully linked to her chip and flooded her brain with massive amounts of junk data, her neurons would burn out instantly, killing her on the spot.
This was equivalent to exposing her most vulnerable point right beneath his fingertips.
Chen Cebai’s fingers twitched slightly.
Qiu Yu tilted her head, her clear, upturned eyes glancing at him from the side, her lips opening and closing.
Like she was chanting a maddening spell.
She said, “Link in.”
Qiu Yu swore she would never say those words again in her lifetime.
A chip could regulate neural electrical activity, stimulate dopamine secretion, and simulate feelings of excitement or euphoria—this was another way to play with “chip sharing.”
She thought it was nothing more than double the dopamine, nothing to be afraid of. Who knew… it was completely different.
Cold and heat.
A neural network topology flickering in and out of existence.
Chen Cebai’s sharply defined jawline, his Adam’s apple sliding up and down.
Simulated sensation, real sensation.
She had just struggled free from the tides of digitization, gasping for air at the surface, only to be instantly chilled by the real temperature, shivering slightly.
Her gaze was unfocused, almost unable to distinguish between virtual and reality.
She reached out and grabbed upward.
What she caught was Chen Cebai’s cold, slender cheek.
In the virtual world, however, she was burned by the temperature of his side profile, letting out a soft cry.
By the end of it, Qiu Yu almost wanted to curse—who on earth had developed this kind of gameplay?
This was too fucking perverse!
She had no idea how much time had passed before she finally came back to her senses from the alternating stimulation of simulated and real sensations.
It was as if she had just been dragged out of a raging tide—her hair was damp with sweat, her whole body trembling, and even her breathing was unsteady.
She reached out instinctively, wanting to grasp the hand of the person beside her, but her fingers caught only empty air.
The moment it ended, Chen Cebai had already left.
Without a trace of hesitation.
Even with a hundred layers of filters over her perception of Chen Cebai, Qiu Yu couldn’t help but feel a little annoyed at his behavior.
She pulled out a soft cotton towel, wiping away the heat-induced sweat while steadying her breath, intending to take a shower once she had fully calmed down.
Perhaps because modern people truly couldn’t live without the internet, she had resisted checking the web for two or three hours but ultimately couldn’t hold back from activating her chip.
Just a quick look at messages—surely, that wouldn’t be a problem, right? Qiu Yu thought.
People who have been spoiled tend to have a certain mindset—they believe that harming themselves also harms those who care about them.
As a flower among flowers, nurtured within a greenhouse, the moment Qiu Yu activated her chip, she immediately felt a sense of defiance, a rebellious pleasure in harming Chen Cebai. With delight, she began browsing the web.
At that moment, she received a voice call request from Pei Xi.
Qiu Yu hesitated for a moment before answering.
“Are you home?” Pei Xi’s voice carried a smile.
Qiu Yu chuckled. “Of course I am.”
Pei Xi let out a short laugh. “Now that we’re not face to face, you can confide in me. What’s going on between you and him?”
Qiu Yu wasn’t particularly fond of discussing Chen Cebai with Pei Xi. It felt too disrespectful toward Chen Cebai. If Chen Cebai were to discuss her with a female friend behind her back, she would find it extremely offensive—whether the words spoken were good or bad.
… But today, she did feel an urge to vent.
Blame it on Chen Cebai’s detached departure—it annoyed her too much.
So much so that she was willing to break her own principles and talk about him with Pei Xi.
Qiu Yu thought for a moment, then tiptoed out of bed, closed the slightly ajar bedroom door, and glanced toward the bathroom. After confirming that Chen Cebai wasn’t in the master bedroom, she furtively asked:
“…Can I ask, how do you guys view my relationship with Chen Cebai?”
Pei Xi paused subtly for a few seconds. “Can I be honest?”
“…Go ahead.”
Pei Xi said, “Not optimistic.”
Though she had expected this answer, Qiu Yu still couldn’t help but feel a wave of disappointment.
“Of course, that answer carries a bit of my personal bias. But, Qiu Yu, think carefully—at what age did you start learning to invest? How much would you spend on a piece of clothing? How much would you spend on a single meal? And before he became a biotechnology researcher, how much could he even afford to spend in a month?”
“If it weren’t for his luck—happening to get into our school and then happening to develop the neural-blocking drug—he would have spent his entire life only seeing you through television programs.”
Pei Xi paused for a moment before speaking in a low voice, “Qiu Yu, to put it bluntly, one reason he married you was to pave the way for his career advancement. The other—there’s a high possibility it was to satisfy his filthy desire for desecration.”
“Whether in the past or the future, you are someone he can only look up to but never reach. I don’t believe that with such an obvious status gap, any kind of genuine love could develop.”
Qiu Yu somewhat regretted confiding in Pei Xi.
Like most people in her circle, Pei Xi carried an innate sense of superiority and looked down on people like Chen Cebai, who came from a poor background.
If not for the fact that even the poor could understand biology, Qiu Yu figured they would be eager to promote the theory that “upper-class people” and “lower-class people” had already developed reproductive isolation.
Qiu Yu disliked this kind of mindset.
But her reason for disliking it was simple—so simple that it was almost laughable.
—It was merely because, after the compatibility test was completed, she and Chen Cebai had kissed.
It was a rather subtle feeling, unrelated to love or romance. It was similar to reading a book and then visiting a place mentioned within it—an inexplicable sense of closeness, as if it made you more familiar with that place than others were.
Even if the timeline inside the book and the one outside it were separated by tens of thousands of miles.
That was how Qiu Yu felt.
Because of a single kiss, she naively thought she understood Chen Cebai better than anyone else.
Qiu Yu no longer wanted to continue the conversation. She responded with a couple of absentminded “mm-hm”s, casually switched topics, chatted with Pei Xi for a few more minutes, and then abruptly ended the call.
Chen Cebai was showering in the secondary bedroom.
There was no real need to change locations, but the air in the master bedroom was too overwhelming—a complex mix of scents: sweat, tears, saliva, contraceptives, and the cloying, saccharine scent of her blood, woven into a dense and suffocating web that made the veins on his forehead bulge. He had no choice but to relocate.
While showering, he had to keep his eyes closed, repeatedly recalling the experiments he had conducted today—every step, every detail—until his mind was completely clear, lest those long, alluring eyes of hers force their way into his thoughts.
Otherwise, just the hint of a blurred image would be enough to reignite his terrifyingly strong hunting and aggression instincts.
Even though he had little experience, his threshold had been pushed to an alarming level.
Ordinary processes could no longer satisfy him.
Several times just now, he had wanted to grip her jaw, force her to tilt her head back, and expose her throat.
He could have done it easily.
She would never have known that what he truly wanted was to lower his head and bite down.
His fingers had even absentmindedly traced the veins on her neck.
It was both a thirst for her blood and an instinct to hunt.
Just like how birds with sharp beaks feel the urge to peck, and beasts with fangs feel the urge to bite.
For some predatory animals, both love and hatred can trigger the same instinct—to lunge and bite.
All the more so when his feelings for Qiu Yu went far beyond mere fondness.
It was more like a pathological obsession.
He knew that if Qiu Yu were to describe herself, she would never use the word “innocent.”
But she was incredibly naïve.
In her view, as long as she had read many books, traveled to many places, and personally stepped into a slum about to be submerged by toxic river water, she considered herself knowledgeable and well-traveled.
She was so naive that she didn’t understand the difference between “seeing a lot” and “experiencing a lot.”
Words in books were, after all, just words. No matter how much they exposed the bloody reality of the world, they were still not a reality that could be seen or touched.
Visiting famous landmarks in certain places only meant that she had been there; it did not equate to “maturity” or “worldliness.”
So she had no idea that when she planned to visit that slum about to be swallowed by toxic river water, within less than ten minutes, the entire area had already been preemptively cleared by the local government’s security forces.
Mine-sweeping, mechanical police dogs conducting a grid search, confiscation of all homemade weapons; all able-bodied people, regardless of gender or age, were driven away.
There were even snipers hidden in high places to ensure her safety in case of an accident.
Everything she saw was what her parents wanted her to see.
She believed she wasn’t naïve, but in reality, her innocence was terrifying.
Otherwise, she wouldn’t have married him.
Chen Cebai turned the water temperature to its lowest setting, so cold that even in the air-conditioned room, wisps of chill spread outward.
At last, he managed to suppress certain frenzied, nearly deranged thoughts.
He propped one hand against the tiled wall of the bathroom, ran his other hand briefly through his wet hair, let out a heavy breath, and turned off the showerhead.
Just then, he heard Qiu Yu talking to Pei Xi on the phone.
—His hearing had also been enhanced by several hundred times. He could even catch the faint swallowing sound Qiu Yu made when she hesitated.
…
“Whether in the past or the future, you are someone he can only look up to but never reach. I don’t believe that with such an obvious status gap, any kind of genuine love could develop.”
…
Chen Cebai paused for a second, then turned the shower back on.
Cold water poured down over his head.
Several minutes passed before the stormy waves of his agitation and murderous intent finally calmed.
The moment he heard that sentence, he had an overwhelming urge to walk out and tell Qiu Yu the truth.
Yes, she truly was someone he could only look up to but never reach.
It didn’t matter if she never loved him.
But she had better not show it in front of him—especially not after having just shared intimacy with him, only to turn around and tell another man about it.
That would make his killing intent surge.
A flood of extreme thoughts raced through his mind—thoughts of using every possible method to force her into loving him.