Xie Jinghe’s parted lips snapped shut with a sharp click.

The sudden, dark turn in this so-called bedtime story caught him entirely off guard, instantly seeding doubts about the true nature of the ending. He darted a cautious glance at the man lying beside him under the black sleeping mask, silently resolving to flip straight to the final page to verify the outcome.

Yet before he could act, the seemingly asleep man let out a sharp, impatient click of his tongue.

It sounded precisely like a prompt.

Driven by a sudden stroke of wit, Xie Jinghe clamped the thin booklet securely under his arm while scrambling off the mattress, offering a hasty, forced chuckle: “I’m hitting the restroom first—it’s a bit of an emergency. Just wait a second.”

With that, he slipped out of bed and darted straight into the bathroom like a streak of smoke.

Using his absolute maximum reading speed, Xie Jinghe tore through the remaining pages of the incredibly thin storybook. With every leaf he turned, his heart sank a fraction lower, finally bottoming out when his eyes locked onto the massive, sprawling double-page spread at the very end.

The young prince, having successfully mastered the magic incantation, had entirely forgotten the sweet fragrance of the blossom trees. He stopped venturing beyond the stone thresholds of the fortress, and he no longer harbored a single shred of longing for his little puppy companion.

At the old King’s grand funeral, the prince stood arrayed entirely in pitch black, his countenance completely void of any emotional resonance.

Upon ascending the throne, the new King systematically banished every soul from the court—including the very Witch who had instructed him in the arcane arts. A chaotic storm of venomous curses manifested as thick, black smoke, coiling relentlessly around his silhouette, yet he remained utterly indifferent to the spectacle. He simply allowed the vicious, thorn-choked briars to spread aggressively across the land, completely burying the winding forest paths before forcing their way through the castle gates and creeping up the stone walls.

The young King sat entirely isolated at the head of the long banquet table, his palm securely clasping a hollow, pitch-black heart. Every single time his lips articulated the syllable of the incantation, the magic grew exponentially more potent.

The magic wrapped securely around his heart.

Ensuring it would never suffer a single scratch ever again.

Xie Jinghe tentatively muttered the syllables of the so-called “magic incantation” outlined in the text. The moment the words cleared his throat, an immensely suffocating wave of oppression surged through his chest. It felt as though his entire being were being violently compressed into a microscopic, narrow chamber with absolutely no avenue of escape, rapidly breeding a volatile undercurrent of inexplicable fury and deep-seated resentment.

So the magic is actually real.

Xie Jinghe let out a heavy, profoundly relieved sigh.

He felt incredibly fortunate that he hadn’t foolishly read the text verbatim to the man outside. Given how rare it was for them to share such a harmonious atmosphere, the last thing he wanted was to trigger a horrific nightmare for Linchuan.

Shi Linchuan was right on the precipice of drifting off to sleep.

However, because the architectural integrity of the lodge was incredibly ancient, the heavy wooden bathroom door produced a sharp, piercing creak whenever it was manipulated. The harsh, grating sound carried a distinctly eerie quality, instantly shattering his fragile state of rest.

Yet he remained entirely motionless, offering no verbal acknowledgment.

Following a sequence of soft, muted footsteps, the individual who had spent an absolute eternity lingering inside the restroom apparently kicked off his slippers. Kneeling against the edge of the mattress, the youth carefully attempted to straddle the man’s frame to access the inner side of the bed. Shi Linchuan executed a subtle, calculated shift of his legs, deliberately tripping him. Feeling the weight of half a torso collapsing directly over his chest, he smoothly executed a preemptive strike, shifting the blame entirely.

“Xie Jinghe, are you actively trying to trample me to death?”

The weight resting above him offered no immediate verbal defense. Instead, the youth quietly scrambled off him, burrowing deep beneath the thick coverlet before extending a hand to lightly massage his abdomen, murmuring softly: “I didn’t mean to. Did I press down hard enough to hurt you anywhere?”

As he spoke, Xie Jinghe’s hand seemed to navigate on autopilot, drifting lower to smoothly assist the man in adjusting his physical alignment.

Shi Linchuan: “…”

This absolute degenerate.

Before he could articulate another verbal trap, the faint, crisp rustle of turning paper resonated through the space. Shi Linchuan swallowed the string of trash talk poised on the tip of his tongue. In the next heartbeat, Xie Jinghe’s warm, melodious voice filled the air, gently weaving a completely rewritten version of the absurd fairytale.

His vocal tone was incredibly gentle, though his delivery carried a distinctly hesitant, stumbling cadence as he read. Shi Linchuan endured Xie Jinghe’s thoroughly atrocious phrasing until the revised conclusion finally materialized.

“At the absolute end of the tale, the young prince successfully escaped the kingdom of thorns.”

“The truth was, he never harbored any affection for the icy weight of the sovereign crown, nor did he possess any desire to master magic incantations. Consequently, the prince clasped the leash of his little puppy companion and vanished straight into the clearing of the next spring. They spent their days running aimlessly across the endless valleys, enjoying a profoundly ordinary, blissful existence.”

“Just like every single day that followed.”

“…”

The interior of the bedroom collapsed into a dead silence for two solid seconds.

Shi Linchuan abruptly pivoted onto his side, burying half of his face deep into the pristine white fabric of the pillow. His freshly washed, pitch-black hair fell loosely across his brow without any styling, appearing exceptionally soft as the cotton textile generated a faint current of static electricity through the strands.

Xie Jinghe couldn’t resist reaching out to brush a stray lock aside.

The tips of his fingers abruptly collided with a sharp spark of static, sending a jolt of electricity driving straight into the chambers of his heart.

The man tucked his face a fraction deeper into the pillow, offering a thoroughly displeased mumble: “Stop touching me.” He paused for a brief beat before delivering a merciless critique: “I actually harbored a shred of expectation regarding how entertaining a bedtime story could be. To think it turns out to be this absolute garbage?”

He continued smoothly:

“It lacks a single modicum of logical progression, and the narrative framework is entirely formulaic.”

“Profoundly tedious.”

Xie Jinghe guiltily snapped the illustrated booklet shut, though his vocal tone remained entirely righteous as he countered: “This is a fairytale. The single most critical parameters are that the protagonists secure a blissful, happy existence. Why on earth are you demanding rigorous logical cohesion?”

The man let out a cold, dismissive snort.

“Only someone like you would actually buy into it.”

Xie Jinghe deposited the volume near the corner of the wall before extracting the pillow wedged behind his waist. Extending his long arm, he executed a heavy, sweeping swing to slap the overhead light switch, plunging the space into darkness.

“Goodnight, little youngster Shi.”

Leaving his personal pillow on the outer boundary, his frame slowly, deliberately slithered deeper beneath the covers, once again monopolizing the exact same pillow as the man. Presumably finding his presence far too restrictive, Shi Linchuan let out a succession of highly impatient, irritated grunts. Xie Jinghe ignored the complaints entirely, even going so far as to casually drape his leg over the man’s frame.

Shi Linchuan was being driven to the absolute brink of insanity by the sheer annoyance.

Yet the hour was far too late, and the exhaustion weighing down his eyelids was absolute. Very quickly, he surrendered entirely to sleep.

Perhaps catalyzed by a specific keyword embedded within the narrative, he plunged into a dream state for the first time in an exceptionally long period—confronting a memory so distant it had begun to take on a distinctly yellowed, vintage hue.

Within the dreamscape, his younger self donned a heavy jacket before executing a smooth vault out of the second-story window. Running without a single pause toward a hidden alcove nestled deep within the rear gardens, he let out a couple of soft whistling prompts toward the thick brush.

A tiny, round-headed, short-limbed golden pup squeezed its way out from the dense foliage.

Immediately afterward, he stuffed the tiny, soft mass securely into the pocket of his heavy coat, scaling a perimeter fence scaling nearly two meters in height before sprinting single-mindedly toward an unknown, boundless horizon. He shouted and yelled along the way, barreling headfirst into the next season without ever glancing back once—as though rushing to fulfill a long-anticipated tryst.

The sky was rendered a pale, delicate shade of pink.

An individual clad in a wide-brimmed hat and a heavy face mask sat idly upon a long bench, casually kicking at the stray pebbles resting beneath his feet with an air of profound boredom, looking as though he had been waiting there for an eternity.

He tracked the figure from a distance, an instinctual wave of pure happiness flooding his chest, yet it was instantly mirrored by an uncontrollable, agonizing undercurrent of deep-seated sorrow.

The happiness was always so agonizingly fleeting. The sorrow, far too protracted.

“…”

Shi Linchuan experienced an exceptionally deep, restorative sleep. When his consciousness finally resurfaced, he discovered that the hour remained remarkably early; the expanse framed by the window was locked in a dull, ash-gray twilight, and the morning star had yet to plunge beneath the horizon. Xie Jinghe was curled tightly against his chest, his respiration rhythmic and drawn out.

His eyelids remained closed, his lashes remarkably long.

The absolute millisecond his eyes snapped open, every single detail of the dream he had navigated during the night dissolved completely from Shi Linchuan’s memory. He was merely left with a profound sensation of weightlessness throughout his frame, as though floating under the influence of a mild, pleasant intoxication. High coincidental was the fact that this precise sensation mirrored the exact aftermath of their very first night together three years prior.

Back then, he had tightly regulated his alcohol intake, subjecting the thoroughly dazed, disoriented Xie Jinghe to a relentless, brutal campaign of physical demands. When the early dawn of the following morning arrived, he had awakened first to find the youth curled against his frame in this exact identical posture, looking for all the world like a pair of deeply devoted, intimate lovers.

They had ended up in the exact same bed on the very first day they crossed paths.

At that time, as he stared down at the lines of Xie Jinghe’s face, a silent torrent of malicious slander and calculated degradation had run rampant through his mind.

Promiscuous.

Pathetic.

Absolutely atrocious performance metrics.

A thoroughly cheap piece of merchandise.

Shi Linchuan hadn’t cared a single whit about the objective reality of the situation; he had simply, coldly stacked every single vile, malicious descriptor his vocabulary could muster directly onto Xie Jinghe’s identity, arriving at a highly logical, self-contained conclusion:

He truly, thoroughly detested this individual.

That foundational assessment had not experienced a single modification to this very day.

Shi Linchuan raised a hand to lightly flick the long eyelashes of the sleeping youth, followed by a soft, delicate exhalation of air directed straight at them, causing the hairs to flutter like the wings of a startled butterfly.

Presumably registering the prickle of irritation, Xie Jinghe instinctively reached up to scratch his face. Shi Linchuan instantaneously clamped a firm grip around the youth’s forearm, his eyes darting briefly toward the tactical gauze wrapped around the wrist before smoothly, gently positioning the hand directly over his own throat to serve as a structural anchor.

Finally, he personally leaned down to press a soft kiss against the youth’s brow, vacuuming away the residual itch.

As expected, Xie Jinghe settled back down into complete tranquility.

Right at that moment, Shi Linchuan’s line of sight drifted past Xie Jinghe’s profile, catching a glimpse of the thin volume resting nearby. Unable to resist the impulse, he reached over to snag the booklet, casually flipping through the leaves utilizing the dim, ambient light filtering through the room.

What met his eyes was a completely antithetical narrative.

It shared absolutely zero common ground with the sanitized, wholesome sequence Xie Jinghe had articulated the previous evening.

It was twisted, dark, and saturated with a massive matrix of psychological metaphors.

Worse still, Shi Linchuan found the entire thematic progression profoundly familiar—to the point where he could seamlessly map every single dark metaphor directly onto the operational trajectory of his own life experiences. His eyes locked onto a specific line of text encapsulated within a jagged frame of black, thorny dialogue bubbles—the “magic incantation.”

Shi Linchuan slammed the booklet shut with a sharp, violent snap, a definitive suspect instantaneously crystallizing within his mind.

In a highly rare display of initiative, he actively established a connection with his internal mental channel, his mental cadence laced with a thousand invisible needles poised to shred a certain invisible, chatty entity into absolute ribbons.

“System. Explain this immediately.”

Deep within the structural confines of the system matrix.

A brilliant white sphere of light executed a highly theatrical, dramatic stretch before calmly settling back down into a recumbent posture.

Shi Linchuan issued the prompt twice more. Receiving nothing but a vacuum of silence, he instantly understood that the system had no intention of sticking its head out.

He trained a frosty, lethal glare onto the thin fairytale book resting in his palm. His memory involuntarily replayed the string of sanitized, boring sentences Xie Jinghe had fabricated out of thin air the night before. A flush of raw fury tinted the rims of his eyes a dangerous shade of crimson as he ground his teeth together, spitting out a single, venomous curse:

“Liar!”

The final syllable had barely cleared his lips when the “liar” nestled securely within his embrace blearily parted his eyelids.

“Linchuan…?”

Hearing his name, Shi Linchuan tossed the object in his hand straight onto the floorboards. Driven by an uncontrollable surge of fury, he pinned Xie Jinghe down by the shoulders, violently dragging him deeper beneath the heavy blanket before ruthlessly securing his posture, locking him into a kiss that pushed him to the absolute precipice of asphyxiation.

Shocked out of his half-asleep state, Xie Jinghe struggled frantically to articulate a single syllable.

“Lin—mph!“

“Sfo… suff…”

His legs thrashed wildly against the bedsheets in a series of continuous, desperate kicks, precisely like a drowning victim starved of vital oxygen. Yet, his hands remained completely reluctant to push the man off his frame, clutching at him tightly as though clinging to a life-saving buoy. The absolute consequence of this internal friction was that he was pushed to the absolute brink of an emotional breakdown, tears threatening to spill from his eyes.

The man, having completely shed his carefully engineered masquerade, was always like this.

He harbored a profound, insatiable addiction for reducing him to a thoroughly pathetic, broken state, before meticulously savoring every drop of the wreckage.

A considerable interval passed.

Xie Jinghe collapsed weakly across the man’s shoulder, genuinely believing his existence was drawing to a permanent close.

Death by suffocation, presumably.

The atmosphere beneath the heavy coverlet was running at an extreme deficit of oxygen, yet neither individual made a single move to lift the corner of the blanket to vent the space. Instead, their physical frames remained tightly, seamlessly interlocked. Shi Linchuan executed a sequence of slow, rhythmic strokes down the length of his hair, his fingertips transmitting a current of static electricity as his voice rasped with the deep, gravelly cadence of early morning:

“Change out of your pants yourself in a moment. Dump them straight into the washbasin.”

“Xie Jinghe, you are an absolute embarrassment.”

Hearing the blunt declaration, Xie Jinghe’s toes instinctively curled beneath the sheets once more as he offered a tiny, muffled defense: “This is a completely standard biological response for a man… besides, I wouldn’t typically manifest this reaction at all. This is entirely your doing…”

Shi Linchuan let out a noncommittal, smooth groan in response, countering: “Simply because of a few passing kisses?”

Xie Jinghe: “…”

Did he seriously just classify that absolute assault as a few passing kisses?

That wasn’t a kiss. That was a calculated attempt at homicide.

The fact that he hadn’t experienced a total loss of bladder control on the spot was a monument to his absolute strength of will.

By the time they had completely finalized their morning routines and cleaned up the space, the sun had fully crested the horizon. Fortunately, a comfortable buffer of time remained before the production crew’s live broadcast window commenced.

Shi Linchuan had just descended from the rooftop sector, happening to collide directly with Xie Jinghe, who was currently crouched low to retrieve the illustrated storybook from the floorboards. The youth carefully patted away the stray particles of dust, clearly intending to slide it back into the inner compartment of his backpack.

“Trash it.”

The man’s countenance instantaneously solidified into a layer of absolute frost, issuing a highly dominant, unyielding directive.

Xie Jinghe raised his head to track the man’s profile, offering a thoroughly perplexed counter-question: “This book is incredibly thin—it won’t monopolize any functional clearance inside the bag. Furthermore, what is your precise rationale for throwing it away?”

Shi Linchuan harbored zero desire to engage in a trivial debate. He closed the structural distance between them in two swift strides, violently wrenching the volume directly from the youth’s grip before slamming it forcefully into the depths of the trash bin with a resounding thud.

“There is no rationale. When I instruct you to throw something away, you throw it away.”

As a sudden realization flashed through his mind, the harsh tension mapping Shi Linchuan’s features softened by a fraction, his vocal delivery dropping into a significantly gentler register.

He appended a final line:

“Be good. Listen to me.”

Xie Jinghe stared up at the man in absolute astonishment, his lips parting slightly. Very quickly, however, his facial muscles settled back into a neutral mask. He trained his eyes onto the object resting at the bottom of the trash bin, his vocal delivery dropping into a low, distinctly unhappy murmur as he questioned:

“Why must you suddenly discard my belongings?”

Shi Linchuan was abruptly rendered entirely speechless.

After a protracted, heavy silence.

The man managed a tight response: “It was never yours to begin with.”

It belonged entirely to him.

The stationary cameras mounted within the perimeter of the room faithfully archived every single nuance of this early morning friction.

Time accelerated at an exceptional velocity.

An entire week dissolved into the past in the blink of an eye.

December 29, 2026. Sunday.

8:00 PM.

The premier domestic divorce-centric reality broadcast, 《Why Are You Unhappy?》 , officially debuted its highly anticipated Week 1 edited broadcast. The release was strategically bifurcated into Upper and Lower episodes, clocking in at a combined runtime of approximately four hours. The comprehensive edit not only integrated the absolute cream of the crop from the live stream periods but also unveiled an immense vault of exclusive, behind-the-scenes footage that had remained completely hidden from the live audience.

Furthermore, a full twenty-four hours prior to the premiere.

The official production account had already deployed a calculated teaser segment across social media platforms, sending the audience’s curiosity into an absolute frenzy.