After sending it, Fu Rangyi exited the conversation, then clicked back in. Suddenly, he had a bad feeling, like a protagonist in a movie being followed. He keenly glanced back. The parking garage was empty; there was no one else.

Have I been infected by Zhu Zhixi? Am I becoming a little neurotic too?

He took the express elevator to his office.

Fu Rangyi had no classes for the first two periods. He dealt with his accumulated work and followed up on the thesis progress of several students. Wanting to check for any new tasks, he opened his email and once again saw an email from Yu Heng.

In the past, he wouldn’t even want to open it, only wanting to escape. But today, seeing this name, the image of Zhu Zhixi slamming the table and shouting “This is harassment!” popped into his mind, and he couldn’t help but chuckle.

A colleague next to him turned to look at him in surprise, but Fu Rangyi was unaware.

He clicked open the email and glanced through it. The content was no longer the fiery confessions of before, but a long-winded apology.

These words were worthless to Fu Rangyi. He scrolled down and saw the last line.

[Professor Fu, the S University New Year’s Cultural Festival is coming up soon. My friend gave me a few tickets to the drama club’s performance. I heard you occasionally go to see plays, and I’d like to give you one.]

Of course. Fu Rangyi knew it. The apology was just a pretense; this person hadn’t given up at all.

He deleted the email and also blocked Yu Heng while he was at it.

His phone vibrated again. It was a message from his pinned contact. He had quoted the previous message in his reply.

[Bad Rabbit: Life-extending plan? What an ugly name…]

What should it be called then?

Fu Rangyi didn’t send that message. Instead, he quietly pondered for a moment.

A new message arrived.

[Bad Rabbit: Share Picture]

The photo showed a slender, fair wrist, wearing an ice-blue beaded bracelet.

[Bad Rabbit: Did you re-string it for me? How did you do it so well? Your hands are so skillful.]

[Bad Rabbit: Suddenly remembered you’re the one who broke it. Hmph. Retracting one compliment.]

Fu Rangyi typed a line, then deleted it, and finally just sent one message.

[Pretty Widower: Received. Retraction invalid.]

“Ah, finally made it to the end of the semester.” The professor in the opposite cubicle stretched and said with a smile, “Professor Xiao Fu, after the students are done with the New Year’s Cultural Festival, our teaching and research group should go out for a get-together too.”

Fu Rangyi looked up and said with a smile, “Sure.”

“Bring the one from your home? So everyone can meet?”

“He…” Fu Rangyi lowered his eyes slightly, and the image of a certain lively social butterfly automatically appeared in his mind.

His canines once again tingled faintly.

“He’s been a bit busy with work lately. I’ll ask him when I get back.”

“Sure, everyone is so curious about what kind of person managed to reel in our Professor Xiao Fu.”

Reel in? Thinking of the way he had commanded him yesterday, Fu Rangyi thought, tame is more like it.

He opened the chat window again, reading Zhu Zhixi’s messages one by one, clicking on every picture. Finally, he looked at Zhu Zhixi’s reply one more time.

“Life-extending plan” really didn’t sound very good.

Fu Rangyi opened the notes app on his phone and clicked on the topmost note. For now, it only had three lines written in it.

[1. Try to believe in the existence of the countdown and satisfy Zhu Zhixi’s requests as much as possible, but refrain from initiating excessive physical contact.]
[2. He said “I’m really going to die,” and also mentioned being sick. He said “again” when he had the nosebleed last time. Need to find a way to take him to a doctor. Ask Li Qiao to help find a reliable doctor.]
[3. Supervise him to sleep early, wake up early, and eat on time.]

Rename. He clicked on [Life-extending plan], and deleted it.

After some thought, he lowered his head and edited it.

[Little Rabbit Domestication Plan]. Save.

An alarm went off. Checking the time, Fu Rangyi left his office, went to the lecture hall in North Building 3, walked up to the podium, opened his slides, and began his class for the students.

“In archaeological fieldwork, aside from some production tools and daily life items, we also unearth many animal skeletons and remains. By analyzing these animal remains, we can deduce the species of these animals and the era in which they lived.” Fu Rangyi pushed up his glasses and pressed the button on his laser pointer. The next slide appeared.

“Modern people love to keep cats, and this behavior can be traced back to the late Neolithic period more than five thousand years ago. At the Quanhucun site, archaeologists found some cat bones. Analysis revealed that the diet of these cats was very similar to that of the people at the same site. From this, it was inferred that they were domestic cats, pets that were kept.”

“Is that a cat’s tibia?”

Standing in front of the glass display case in the museum, Zhu Zhixi stared at the thin, long little bone, his heart feeling soft. He said, “This little cat must have been very thin.”

Zhou Ming smiled. “Is that so? I’ve talked with some archaeological experts before, and their research results were the opposite. Ancient cats were generally larger than modern ones because they were kept as tools for catching mice.”

That seemed to make sense too.

Zhu Zhixi muttered to himself, “I’ll go back and ask the expert at home.”

Having come over early in the morning, Zhu Zhixi first apologized to Zhou Ming and treated him to coffee. Perhaps because he had met Fu Rangyi last time, Zhou Ming was much more measured this time, only talking about work and not personal topics, and even maintained a distance the whole time, which made Zhu Zhixi quite comfortable.

He took out the draft of the exhibition design and the first version of the curatorial plan. After discussion, Zhou Ming was very satisfied and proposed to take it to the museum for review and wait for feedback. Taking advantage of the trip, he wandered around again to see if he had missed any collection items. When he reached the second basement level, he found that there were many collections related to small animals here.

“You like animals a lot?” Zhou Ming asked.

“I do. I even have a stray animal shelter!” Speaking of which, he wanted to share it with Zhou Ming and also see what the little cats and dogs were doing. So he directly opened the surveillance software on his phone.

“My junior and I rented a small courtyard to raise them, and we even installed cameras… Huh? Why is it offline?”

Zhu Zhixi frowned. Aside from the one in the courtyard, the cameras in the rooms were all offline.

Turned off? But only Liang Yi’en stays in the room.

He suddenly remembered Liang Yi’en’s hesitant behavior from a while ago.

[Xiao En, I’ve run into something strange lately…]
[Me too.]

Me too?? Me too what? He had asked at the time, but he didn’t answer directly, only saying they would talk next time.

Could this kid be in a relationship?!

Once humans get gossipy, they will stop at nothing. Zhu Zhixi was desperate to know if the iron tree had truly blossomed. So he used his administrator privileges to log into the surveillance system and check the cloud backups. Strangely, the cloud backups were all deleted, leaving only some motion-triggered recordings in the courtyard.

There’s definitely something fishy going on!

He clicked on those motion recordings. They were nothing more than records of Liang Yi’en leaving and returning. At first glance, there was nothing wrong.

“Is this your junior?” Zhou Ming, who was beside him, also glanced over and said with a smile, “He keeps birds? I do too, what a coincidence.”

Birds? Impossible. The first thing Liang Yi’en was afraid of was snakes, and the second was sharp-beaked animals.

But he zoomed in on the surveillance footage. Indeed, on the shoulder strap of his backpack when he was leaving, there was a tiny yellow bird with a tuft of white feathers on its tail wing.

“That shouldn’t be right.”

Zhu Zhixi clicked on the video from the next day, wanting to see if it was the same. There was no bird the next day, but he unexpectedly discovered that Liang Yi’en’s backpack zipper was open a tiny crack, and a small, fluffy cat’s tail was sticking out, swaying back and forth, with a tuft of white fur at the tip.

On the third day, there was still a crack, but what was sticking out was a fluffy little puppy ear. The tip of the ear was also white.

On the fourth day, when he went out for class, he finally zipped up his backpack tightly. But Zhu Zhixi rewound and replayed it repeatedly, using the methods of a criminal investigator, and finally found a clue. He discovered that Liang Yi’en was wearing a jade-white bracelet on his wrist. He initially thought it was a new inhibitor bracelet, but in the last few frames, the “bracelet” moved.

“Holy shit, it’s a small white snake!”

---

Author’s Note:

The plot going forward will become more and more “fairytale-like,” or have a bit of a fantasy color. (Okay, the countdown thing itself is already quite fantasy-like hhh)

—Small Theater: Professor Fu’s Student Group Chat—

 [Do you guys feel like Professor Fu is a completely different person after coming back from his leave?]

 [Tell us more?]

 [Suddenly remembered this must be Professor Xiao Fu’s first rut after getting married! Oh my god, I dare not think about it in detail]

 [It just feels like the professor has become a lot gentler]

 [The professor has always been very gentle, except when grading papers, when a venomous-tongued second personality occasionally emerges. It’s understandable, after all, if it were me, I wouldn’t want to be mentioned in the acknowledgments of such a trashy thesis either ()]

 [No, it’s just a strong… husbandly vibe?]

 [Ah, is it because the professor is wearing a wedding ring! The wedding ring is so beautiful and looks so expensive]

 [Do you guys feel like the professor is deliberately showing off his wedding ring?]

 [Professor Xiao Fu is not that kind of person!]

 [A little bit. The professor was also secretly turning his wedding ring when he had his hands behind his back today]

 [Turning the ring is because he’s not used to it, right?]

 [But he usually doesn’t use a laser pointer in class. Today he used the pen for all the slides, waving it around. The ruby on his ring is shinier than the laser…]

 [Now that you mention it, it seems so… It could also be that his wife asked him to.]

 [What did I say last time? Look how our Professor Xiao Fu has been trained, what has he been trained into.]