Chapter 2: The Forced Blind Date

At 5:50, the bell rang. At the entrance of Lecture Hall 102 on the first floor of S University’s North Building, a large group of students poured out, crowding the hallway.

“Why does it feel like there are more and more people auditing? The last row is all students from other schools, right? Is our archaeology department that hot right now?”

“It’s not the archaeology department that’s hot, it’s Professor Fu… A photo of him in class was posted online a while ago, and he went viral again.”

“The class with the highest failure rate in the entire department but the hardest to get into. Who understands the value of that?”

“No wonder… But this wave of them probably won’t last long. Professor Fu is too strict. Even auditors get called on. He’s not like Lao Zhang, who’s humorous and witty in his lectures and even jokes with the students. He doesn’t even smile throughout a whole class.”

“That’s because he has high standards for himself. Go search for his papers. You scroll down, and the list is longer than my lifespan.”

“Oh right, did you guys see that subway video? That Alpha with the pheromone disorder was so scary, he just went berserk. Thank goodness for that kind-hearted young man who stepped in. Who knows what would have happened otherwise.”

“I saw it. Even with the mosaic, you can tell that guy is super handsome. So fair-skinned, and his fashion sense is great too.”

“All you know is how to look at handsome guys… But speaking of which, in comparison, Professor Fu is just so reassuring. He’s clearly an S-class Alpha, but he’s never released his pheromones. He barely ever takes off his suppressor bracelet all year round, and his susceptible periods are incredibly stable. I heard he doesn’t even have a partner. Such terrifying self-control.”

“That’s called having ‘Alpha virtue’.”

“Stop talking, the professor is coming out.”

The few students moved to the side of the hallway, smiling respectfully and greeting him, “Goodbye, Professor Fu.”

Fu Rangyi gave a slight nod in response and then left.

On the way back to his office, he turned his phone off silent mode and saw several missed calls. Some were from his parents, and a few were from unknown numbers, one of which had a missed call count as high as 16.

In addition, he had received two harassing text messages.

[Do you hate going into heat like a dog for someone you don’t even like? But isn’t that your nature as an Alpha?]

[Just like that man on the subway.]

He had been frequently harassed by phone calls these past two days. After answering, the other party wouldn’t say a word, only emitting a strange laugh through a voice changer. A few days later, they would call again from a new number.

He frowned, blocked the number, and when exiting the page, accidentally touched a short video app. The first video that popped up was the social news the students had just been discussing.

To protect privacy, the faces were all pixelated. This vicious incident reminded him of the content of the harassing text messages. Fu Rangyi felt a physiological revulsion, didn’t linger, and directly swiped away.

But the next second, he paused for a moment and swiped back to the video. His gaze locked onto the third person who had suddenly jumped out to be a Good Samaritan.

He took a screenshot, zoomed in, and stared at the beaded bracelet on the person’s wrist. It was an animal protection bracelet from the Antarctic research station. You could get one by adopting an Antarctic wild animal.

He had one too.

The glacier-blue beads were crystal clear, with a silver badge the size of a pinky nail in the middle, resting on a snow-white wrist.

Further up, was the palm.

Opened, closed, then opened again. Sitting in the clinic, Zhu Zhixi was about to stare a hole through his own palm.

So far, besides himself, no one could see this countdown. He had been confirming this point with everyone he met since entering the hospital, and as a result, everyone treated him like a mental patient.

To avoid repeating the same mistake, after sitting down in the clinic, he had very casually raised his left hand, palm facing the doctor, in what he thought was a very natural little gesture.

Can you see it? The countdown in my palm is glowing.

The doctor, wearing reading glasses, frowned and stared for two seconds, then actually extended his hand.

Smack—the little old man gave him a light high-five.

Zhu Zhixi felt despair.

[59 days 17 hours 02 minutes 23 seconds]
[59 days 17 hours 02 minutes 22 seconds]
…

Zhu Zhixi sighed. The countdown had been running for as long as he had been sitting, without a moment’s pause.

“According to the medical insurance system records, your mother passed away from glandular cancer?”

Zhu Zhixi snapped back to reality, froze for a second, and nodded. “Yes.”

The doctor’s expression became somewhat grim.

“Doctor,” Zhu Zhixi glanced at his computer, “is there something wrong with the test report?”

The doctor frowned and paused for a moment. “Glandular cancer is the most dangerous type of cancer. It has almost no symptoms in the early stages and is very difficult to detect. Once clinical symptoms begin to appear, it’s basically the late stage. The patient’s condition deteriorates rapidly in a very short time, and the survival rate is extremely low. As a family member of a patient, you probably know all this.”

“Most importantly, it’s a terminal illness with a very high rate of inheritance.”

[59 days 17 hours 01 minute 34 seconds]

Zhu Zhixi had an ominous premonition. Impossible.

“I…”

“But you’re a Beta.” The doctor was somewhat incredulous. “I’ve been a doctor for so long, and I’ve never encountered a Beta with glandular cancer.”

“Right!” Zhu Zhixi touched his neck, almost standing up. “I don’t even have glands.”

“It’s not that you don’t have them.” The doctor corrected him. “From a physiological perspective, Betas do have glands, but they have basically degenerated to a state of low function. They can’t be marked, and their size is very small, as if they don’t exist. But they do exist. Some Betas can even secrete a small amount of weak pheromones.”

“I can’t secrete any,” Zhu Zhixi said immediately.

“As long as there are glands, there is a probability of getting cancer.” The doctor didn’t let him off the hook.

It’s over.

So that’s why I’ve been getting nosebleeds and fainting for no reason recently? These are all signs?

He stared at his palm, suddenly dazed. This couldn’t be some kind of death countdown, could it?

“The hospital’s current biopsies for glandular cancer are all for A’s and O’s. Your situation is too special. I have to report it to my superiors. I don’t know if we can directly use their equipment for examination, and it’s not certain we can detect it…”

Zhu Zhixi was in a daze. “Doctor, if it really is glandular cancer, how… how much longer do I have to live?”

“It’s hard to say. The patient I’ve seen with the most severe condition had a survival period of only two months.” The doctor looked at him with a comforting gaze. “But don’t worry for now. It’s too early to say these things…”

His ears were ringing. It was as if he had suddenly fallen into water, and the subsequent words all became blurry.

[59 days 16 hours 51 minutes 20 seconds]

Two months. 60 days.

The doctor sighed. Such a young kid. He felt some sympathy and wanted to offer a few more words of comfort, but when he looked up again, he saw the child staring around with wide eyes.

“…Are you looking for something?”

The young patient was anxiously muttering to himself, “No, are there really no resurrection ads?”

There really aren’t, only the damned countdown.

This wasn’t fair. Zhu Zhixi couldn’t for the life of him understand why this kind of low-probability bad luck would happen to him, and happen to their family again and again. He had done good deeds and accumulated good karma all his life, never did anything bad, and had even been a Good Samaritan on the day he returned to the country. God gave him an illness, fine, but also opened his third eye to give him a countdown. Was it because he procrastinated on everything, and God was afraid he wouldn’t be willing to die, so he set a deadline early, and when the time came, he would obediently lie in his coffin and shout “five, four, three, two, one” before happily wrapping things up?

Why me, and why 60 days?

When he was a child, he heard his mother say that it was not easy to conceive him. She had suffered a lot and almost had a miscarriage. The first time they heard his heartbeat, his father and brother had gathered around the fetal heart monitor, holding their breath, not daring to make a sound.

Thump, thump.

[The first time we heard your heartbeat, your dad cried. Mom remembers it so clearly. It was exactly the eighth week, the 60th day.]

In another 60 days, his heartbeat would stop.

He returned home in a daze. Zhu Zhixi locked himself in his room and didn’t come out for two whole days. During this time, his phone kept vibrating, and many messages flooded in, but he didn’t reply to a single one. He tossed and turned, read a lot of literature on glandular cancer, and his mind flashed through every place he had ever been, and also the cities he wanted to go to but hadn’t yet. Finally, he thought of his mother.

His first and most profound perception of love actually came from his father’s tears.

After his mother left, for a long time, his father was as usual—busy, efficient, flying all over the world for work. His pain was as thin as a wordless suicide note, light and easily overlooked.

Until one night, unable to sleep, he wanted a piece of chocolate and secretly slipped out of his room. Before he even reached the kitchen, he heard the sound of crying. A young Zhu Zhixi hid behind the huge Christmas tree in the living room and saw with his own eyes his father standing in front of the cabinet, clutching a box of expired chocolate and sobbing bitterly. The tears soaked the suicide note, swelling it and opening up every fold, and the pain became real.

At this moment, he finally began to admit that he was indeed a little panicked. He was afraid of becoming the second suicide note stuck to his father, afraid of the day the numbers in his palm would reach zero. But no matter what he thought, what he did, the countdown ticked away, second by second, without any pause.

On the third day at noon, there was a knock on his door. Hiding under the covers, he heard his father’s voice. “Xiao Xi, are you still not coming out?”

He didn’t answer. He hadn’t yet figured out how to face his dad and brother. Through the door panel, he heard his father’s sigh. His phone vibrated twice.

[Lao Zhu: Xiao Xi, are you unhappy because Dad forced you to come back? If that’s the case, Dad apologizes to you.]

[Lao Zhu: Maybe it’s because my health has been deteriorating these past two years, and I’m always thinking about arranging everything for you and your brother, especially you. These past few years you’ve been flying around all the time, running all over the world. I’m always worried you’re not eating or sleeping well, afraid you’ll get sick. Dad really wants to find a reliable person for you, so that if one day I’m gone, there will be someone to take care of you. I can rest assured even with my eyes closed.]

Zhu Zhixi stared at the [Typing…] at the top of the chat box, his eyes red as he waited for a long time, but no more text came. He directly typed: Dad, you can’t close your eyes. I’ll definitely be ahead of you.

After typing, he deleted it, character by character.

He re-typed: Dad, can you stop saying these pessimistic things? It’s bad luck.

Deleted.

What’s so unlucky about it? It’s true that I’m going to die.

Like every ordinary person, facing the possibility of death, he also felt fear, unwillingness, and confusion. But more than these emotions, he just felt it was boring. Life was full of uncertainty, while death was so certain. It was a period engraved in everyone’s genes at birth, a more or less similar ending that no one could escape, so certain it was uninteresting.

What Zhu Zhixi feared most was being bored. The premature sense of shock and the form of a countdown, on the contrary, wrapped the boring death in a layer of colored cellophane and tied it with a ribbon. Although when you opened it, it was still a corpse.

But isn’t life just a giant shroud-wrapping contest?

Since it had come to this, he might as well accept the facts and, within the limited time of the contest, choose the most beautiful fabric, cut it well, and wrap it carefully.

He glanced at the countdown and, for the last time, typed and hit send.

[Xiao Xi: I know, Dad. I promise you.]

After accepting the fate of his physiological death, Zhu Zhixi also accepted the first step of his spiritual death—the blind date.

[Xiao Xi: Isn’t it just a meeting? I’ll go.]

First item on the bucket list: Be my own dad’s fairy godmother and fulfill a middle-aged widowed Alpha’s small wish.

But fulfilling it was one thing; he was never the type to be obedient.

“Dress formally and plainly. The other person is in academia, a very serious person. Don’t dress too unconventionally for the first meeting.”

Remembering his father’s instructions, Zhu Zhixi directly picked a dusty pink hoodie from his closet, threw on a baby blue down jacket, washed-out blue jeans, and even wrapped a huge rainbow scarf around his neck, determined to dress himself up as a human color palette.

As if that wasn’t enough, he deliberately had his hair done, put on blue over-ear headphones, and went out with a head of dark brown woolly curls, like a colorful butterfly.

Plain? Please. He wasn’t going to dress like a dead person.

On the gray winter streets, passersby were all slightly hunched over from the biting cold wind, tightly wrapped in their coats. Only Zhu Zhixi was different. He was like a one-second color frame flashing in a black-and-white movie—agile, strange, and colorful.

This frame jumped into the coffee shop and landed in Fu Rangyi’s eyes.

[I’ve arrived.]

His phone vibrated for a second. It was a message from his blind date’s number, but he hadn’t looked at the information, didn’t know the name, so he hadn’t saved it as a contact. A strange intuition emerged. He narrowed his eyes slightly.

This person dressed like a color palette in front of him was, in all likelihood, his blind date. His gaze automatically followed this “butterfly.” He watched this person raise his hand, push his headphones down to his neck, crane his neck to look around, his little curls bouncing, watched him lower his head, glance at his phone, seemingly confirming the table number, then look up again, and walk forward with a bright smile.

Until he quickly approached Fu Rangyi’s table.

But the next second, this person passed him by and sat directly on the sofa booth diagonally opposite.

Fu Rangyi raised an eyebrow almost imperceptibly. The person sitting opposite that table was an Alpha working on a laptop. Seeing him sit down, his eyes clearly lit up. This person’s expression was even more interesting, a mixture of surprise and pleasant surprise, and even a trace of awkwardness.

“Hi,” the colorful butterfly waved his left hand with considerable enthusiasm, as if trying to fully display the bunch of rings on his hand. His palm lingered in the air for a good few seconds. But the other person’s eyes were glued to his face.

“Hello there,” he extended his hand, his voice clear and bright. “Blind date.”

The surprise on the other person’s face was even more obvious. “Blind… blind date?”

“That’s right,” the colorful butterfly mimicked him, then laughed. His body leaned forward slightly, his neck long and fair, with a soft curve.

Fu Rangyi lowered his eyes. The image of a Ming Yongle period tianbai-glazed yuhuchun vase appeared in his mind, especially the neck of the vase.

“Are you nervous?” he spoke again, his tone a bit playful, but with a lazy drawl between the words. “Don’t be afraid, I’m a very nice person.”

Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass window, the purplish-pink evening glow burned like flames, sinking, and was reflected in his eyes. His dark irises seemed to glow with the fire of a gemstone.

An excessively beautiful face was like the sparkling street lights at Christmas, very deceptive. To see the true face, one had to wait for the lights to go out, but most people would have long been dazzled, unable to wait, and it would be very difficult to stay sober.

Therefore, even knowing it was a misunderstanding, that person still extended his hand, hesitantly, as if trying to grasp this hand that had been offered up.

And at that moment, a waitress happened to approach with a tray, coming to Fu Rangyi’s table. “Sir, your sparkling lemonade.”

She placed one of the glasses in front of Fu Rangyi, heard him say a low “thank you,” smiled, and picked up the other glass, about to place it on the opposite side, but was stopped.

“Just give it to the gentleman in the blue coat at that table.” He glanced at the two who were about to shake hands at the diagonal table and said in a deep voice, “Since he’s already sitting there.”

---

Author’s Note:

Fu Rangyi: Quite pretty (crossed out). Nice eyes (crossed out). Has no eyes.

Zhu Zhixi: Single, older Alpha, and in academia… It’s you! (Sits down with a plop). Hi, Professor! (Deliberately being affected, hoping the serious person won’t like him).

Waiter: Huh? Who should I give this lemonade to?