Dusk settled in on all sides.

Once night fell, Beidu City was no longer quite so stuffy. The early autumn chill rode in with the evening air, tinting the deep ink-blue sky with a damp, watery sheen.

Splash… splash…

An artificial stream ran beneath the covered bridge of Xiangshan Clubhouse. Its murmuring water rose and fell faintly, the rippling surface reflecting glimmers of light even more dazzling than the stars above.

This was a highly private club, elegant and tranquil, open only to a small number of VIP members.

Yan Ruojun was one of them.

He had invited business partners here many times before to discuss deals and projects, signing cooperation agreements worth staggering sums amid clinking glasses and polite conversation. No one dared underestimate him just because he was an Omega.

But tonight, Yan Ruojun was here simply as an unmarried Omega.

In truth, ever since being diagnosed ten years ago with that rare genetic disease, he had become less and less “Omega-like.”

To him, every Alpha’s pheromones seemed to have turned into a deadly poison.

He could not touch them. Could not be touched by them.

Because his genes fiercely resisted the approach of any outside pheromones, only to turn around and impose merciless punishment on his body—

Every month, for three to five days of heat, each episode more violent and overwhelming than the last, leaving Yan Ruojun exhausted and miserable.

Not a single inhibitor on the market worked for him. Worse, they triggered abnormalities in his hormones, so doctors had strictly forbidden him from using them.

Thus, every month during those days, Yan Ruojun could do nothing but grit his teeth and endure it through sheer willpower.

For ten years straight.

Even outside of heat periods, in everyday life, he had to constantly wear pheromone-blocking patches or a blocker collar. Cleansing spray was an absolute necessity he could never leave without.

Yan Ruojun was thoroughly sick of it all. If the surgery weren’t so risky, he would have gladly had a doctor cut out his glands altogether.

And yet, all these inconveniences and health risks could be resolved at once if only an Alpha with a compatibility rate above 95% were to mark him.

That diagnosis result made Yan Ruojun instinctively recoil.

To be honest, it was difficult not to feel tempted—if only for a temporary mark—at the thought of being freed from the agony of his heat. It sounded simple, efficient, almost perfect.

But whenever even the slightest expectation arose, a strong wave of disgust would surge up from the depths of his heart, so intense that he would almost resent that still-nonexistent “Alpha” himself…

How ridiculous.

It was as though his illness were forcing him to keep his chastity for someone.

That intense sense of oppression, that feeling of being locked in chains, was precisely what Yan Ruojun hated most.

His parents were broad-minded and had never disciplined him on the basis of his sex. He had received elite training since childhood and had developed a naturally forceful personality. Though he was an Omega, he had always hated losing control or being controlled.

So when Lin Zhu’s information was placed before him, Yan Ruojun’s first reaction was not joy but resistance.

It wasn’t because Lin Zhu himself was so unbearable.

It was because Yan Ruojun could not accept the possibility that his reason and emotions might be influenced by a miraculous pheromone compatibility.

He could not accept becoming a female beast ruled by pheromones.

Just then—

The tea room door was suddenly shoved open with a harsh sound that clashed violently with the surroundings, interrupting Yan Ruojun’s thoughts.

He looked up toward the noise and saw a very young, very handsome face.

The newcomer’s features were sharp to the point of aggression. His thin eyelids drooped lazily, the outer corners of his eyes slanting down.

His expression looked cool, yet listless and world-weary.

Especially that bright head of gold hair, blown messy by the wind—it stood in almost complete opposition to the elegance of the traditional tea room, like rock music crashing into an orchestra.

The abrupt noise startled the tea master. Her hand shook, and two white porcelain tea bowls knocked together with a crisp, clear chime. She hurriedly lowered her voice in apology.

Yes.

At this moment, there were more than just two people in the tea room. Seated behind a screen was also a female Beta tea master.

Yan Ruojun had no intention of meeting Lin Zhu alone.

Outside the door, the golden-haired boy’s bangs were a bit long, half-shadowing his brows and eyes. He glanced at the tea table in the center of the room and the suited man seated across it, then walked forward with one hand in his pocket.

As if he hadn’t noticed anything unusual, Yan Ruojun adopted the same polite bearing he used to receive business partners and lifted a hand to invite the other man to sit.

His well-tailored suit wrapped around his arms, emphasizing lines that were long and graceful.

His hands, too, were exquisitely formed, flesh and bone grown in perfect proportion—not too much, not too little. Even his fingertips held a faint, soft pink.

Strangely, however, the first and second knuckles of his index finger bore a set of very conspicuous scars, as if someone had bitten them with their teeth. Layer upon layer of bite marks overlapped there, leaving that patch of skin slightly darker than the rest.

Like crack lines in porcelain.

Impossible not to notice.

Only after the young man dragged out the chair and sat opposite him did Yan Ruojun smoothly withdraw his hand. He bent it toward himself, checked the dial of his watch, and with a faint smile delivered his first opening line of the evening.

“—You’re eight minutes late.”

The man enunciated clearly. His tone was neither rushed nor slow, and his somewhat gentle voice softened the sharpness of the words until they felt almost like a breeze in spring.

The moment he finished speaking,

the golden-haired boy lazily lifted his gaze toward him. His shapely thin lips stayed closed, and after a brief beat he answered with a short sound through his nose:

“Mm.”

Neither of them offered self-introductions.

Although they had never met before, they weren’t exactly strangers.

What Yan Ruojun didn’t know was that Lin Zhu was far less calm and composed than he looked. In fact, he barely dared say another word, terrified that the moment he opened his mouth, the miserable truth—that he had sprinted here like mad—would be exposed.

Lin Zhu was so nervous he was practically dying.

Actually, he had not been late at all. He had arrived near Xiangshan Clubhouse a full hour before the agreed time, then quietly found an empty corner to rehearse tonight’s scene in his head together with the System.

He was just an ordinary high school boy. There had been so many subjects on the college entrance exam, but none of them tested acting. If he didn’t rehearse in advance, he really had no confidence.

According to the script, tonight was the first meeting between the protagonist and the scumbag ex-husband, but neither of them had a very good first impression of the other.

Yan Ruojun had the mindset of someone accustomed to being above others. He clearly looked down on this young, frivolous Alpha. The only reason he had taken the initiative to ask him to meet was to deal with his family’s urging.

As for the scumbag ex-husband, his motives were even simpler.

His taste was extremely narrow. He liked only delicate, soft, clingy, cutesy Omegas. He had absolutely no interest in a powerful older Omega like Yan Ruojun.

In the original story, he had not come to this meeting because of the other man’s identity as the heir to the Yan family. Rather, because as Lin Xiujie’s fiancé, Yan Ruojun had actually contacted him, the illegitimate son raised outside the family, and had even invited him to meet privately.

Thinking of the pheromone compatibility matter that Beidu First Hospital had called to notify him about…

After a moment of surprise, the Alpha had grown smug with self-satisfaction.

—So what if you, Lin Xiujie, are so proud? In the end, you still can’t keep hold of your own Omega fiancé!

What kind of wonderful expression would appear on his lofty elder brother’s face?

The thought flashed only briefly, but the dark-hearted youth was instantly exhilarated.

So in the original text, the scumbag ex-husband had come tonight purely to enjoy the spectacle. He had even deliberately put on airs, entering the private room only after intentionally arriving late.

Only now, the one who was late had become Lin Zhu.

And the reason for the delay was something else entirely.

The System helpfully reported:

“Host, after running 800 meters, your heart rate and body temperature both rose significantly. It’d be best if you sweat a bit more! Sweat contains trace amounts of pheromones—maybe that’ll successfully induce the male lead’s heat!”

Lin Zhu replied soundlessly in his head, speechless:

“…Would you shut up? You couldn’t even make a body shell without messing it up. What use are you?”

The System grew guilty and immediately fell silent.

Earlier, when the System had first bound itself to Lin Zhu, it had explained:

It belonged to the logistics and maintenance department of the Space-Time Book Bureau, normally responsible for monitoring world stability values.

Not long ago, a major disaster had struck the Bureau.

In one book-world, the ex-husband NPC had awakened self-awareness, patted his butt, and run away.

Before leaving, he had even hacked the Bureau’s database, destroying the source data of all “ex-husband” characters across multiple worlds. With those roles missing, the worlds themselves had begun collapsing…

The System had been temporarily reassigned. It bound itself to the dying Lin Zhu and projected his soul into this world to fill in the missing key plot points.

Because the original data for the scumbag ex-husband had been completely destroyed, the body Lin Zhu was currently using had been recreated by the System one-to-one from his own physical data.

After the necessary modifications, Lin Zhu had become a genuine Alpha.

More than that, the System had automatically rationalized everyone’s perception of him within this book-world. In everyone else’s eyes, he truly was that libertine son of the Lin family—one hundred percent authentic.

But after the human-and-system duo arrived near Xiangshan Clubhouse in advance, they belatedly discovered another problem.

The newly reassigned System wasn’t very skilled at this line of work. It had made a bug while fusing Lin Zhu’s soul with his body data, resulting in the boy possessing an Alpha’s body but being unable to release pheromones on his own.

The bug itself wasn’t complicated. It was simply a synchronization mismatch between soul and body, and would repair itself after some time.

But the problem was—what about tonight’s acting mission?

The key plot point tonight was:

“Actively induce Yan Ruojun into heat at Xiangshan Clubhouse and perform the first temporary mark.”

What did it mean to die before you could even achieve anything?

This was exactly it.

The System felt like crying.

In the end, the two of them managed to come up with a solution that was barely a solution at all.

There was such a passage in the original novel—

During one heat period, after the protagonist had been subjected to cold violence by the scumbag, he was alone at home and couldn’t help digging out clothes his husband had worn from the dirty laundry basket and hugging them to breathe in the foul scent of sweat, hoping to draw out the tiniest trace of pheromones from it…

So Lin Zhu had no choice but to summon the spirit of his senior-year mandatory running drills and, cursing under his breath the whole way, run 800 meters back along the path.

The usher at the clubhouse entrance had looked at him like he was a complete lunatic.

And now, inside the quiet tea room.

In order to display the complex emotions the System had described—three parts disdain, four parts covert glee, and so on—Lin Zhu fought desperately to suppress his urge to gasp for breath.

After trying for quite a while…

he produced a stone-faced expression.

The System nearly said something, stopped itself, and in the end didn’t dare make a sound.

Guilty.jpg.

Fortunately, Lin Zhu’s naturally world-weary face was doing all the heavy lifting. The effect was striking. One look at him and anyone would think he was no good.

The atmosphere in the room was cold.

But the female Beta tea master present was well-traveled and completely unaffected. She moved gracefully as flowing water while preparing the tea, and the room filled with a delicate fragrance.

Lin Zhu secretly glanced at the mature man sitting across from him. The moment he thought about how he was supposed to somehow induce the man into heat, then take advantage of him and bite him on the neck—

he felt inexplicably awkward and uncomfortable.

…And a little like calling the police to have himself taken away.

Lin Zhu was parched from all the running just now. Not caring how hot the tea was, he downed three cups in one breath before recovering a little. But the hot water going down only made the sweat pour even harder.

“System, are you sure this shell was made according to my original body? Are you sure it’s not defective merchandise?”

As he drank tea, he asked silently:

“When was my stamina ever this bad? I only ran 800 meters and I’m already almost out of breath. My throat feels like it’s on fire…”

Weren’t Alphas in novels all supposed to have the physical condition of mountain gorillas? How had he become even weaker after halfway turning into one?

Before the System could explain, Lin Zhu couldn’t help touching the sweat-soaked nape of his neck.

There was now a slightly raised gland on the left side of his nape, hidden beneath the skin, soft and springy to the touch.

At that thought, Lin Zhu curiously flicked a glance toward Yan Ruojun’s neck.

The man wore a black blocker collar about two fingers wide. It looked like leather, fitted tightly against his long neck, outlining a faintly sensual curve.

Suddenly, the man lifted his teacup and looked over, asking coolly:

“What are you looking at?”

Only then did Lin Zhu realize he had been staring far too long.

He instinctively sat up straighter, but couldn’t think of any explanation, so in embarrassment he just raised his teacup to cover his mouth.

It wasn’t like he could say, “I was looking at your gland,” right?

In an ABO world, that probably amounted to sexual harassment.

It had to be said—the male lead really was absurdly good-looking. Those peach-blossom eyes were sharp yet still soft, his skin pale, his hair dark. The original novel said he had one-quarter French ancestry, which made his features especially delicate…

The longer Lin Zhu looked, the hotter his face became. His throat turned dry and parched. The tea in his cup not only failed to quench his thirst, it seemed to pour fuel on the fire.

He had been thrown into this world only a few hours ago and had immediately had the original novel’s indescribable content screen shoved into his face by the System, filling his brain with things like “heat period,” “marking,” “reproductive cavity,” and “knotting”…

Later, he had squatted in the alley with the System and gone over tonight’s script twice. While they were discussing it, it hadn’t seemed like much to him; it all stayed on the level of mere fiction.

But now, the protagonist from the novel was sitting right in front of him.

Those written scenes automatically transformed into vivid living images, floating uncontrollably through Lin Zhu’s mind and giving him the immoral feeling that he was mentally undressing the other man.

So Lin Zhu lowered his head and poured down another cup of tea.

When he looked up again, he only felt a sudden warmth under his nose. The next second, a flicker of surprise crossed the indifferent face opposite him, and with a slight frown the man reminded him:

“…You’ve got a nosebleed.”

At the same time—

Watching the two of them, who looked more like strangers awkwardly sharing a tea table than anything else, the System—already frantic like an ant on a hot pan—was finally overcome with joy and burst into tears, loudly cheering:

“Well done, Host! The pheromone content in blood is much higher than in sweat. Anyway—anyway, we need to think of a way to get your pheromones onto the protagonist!”

Lin Zhu: “…”

Do you hear the nonsense coming out of your own mouth?