A Shocking Sight

The sound of the combination lock was soft, but in the overly quiet living room, it was still clearly audible. Gu Yue pushed open the door and walked in, carrying with her the faint chill of the outdoors. Out of habit, she first glanced toward the dining room. A few Liuwei Dihuang Pills were missing from the bottle. It seemed someone had been fairly obedient.

She changed out of her heels, stepped barefoot onto the soft carpet, and silently headed into the living room. She had wanted to see what that guy who supposedly "went into seclusion to cultivate" was up to. But the moment she rounded the back of the sofa, she saw a sight that made her pupils quake.

Tang Wulin, her "kidney-deficient young master," was sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet with his back to the door, utterly absorbed. He was tightly hugging the custom body pillow nearly half a person tall, printed with Gu Yue's chibi portrait, his face practically buried in its soft embrace. What made Gu Yue's blood rush even more was the tablet in his other hand. On its screen was an adults-only "instructional video" with shockingly exaggerated movements. The volume was low, but the suggestive gasps and sounds of fabric rubbing together were especially grating.

Worse still, Tang Wulin's body was moving to the rhythm on the screen, awkwardly yet earnestly thrusting into the pillow in his arms again and again. His imitation was so thorough that he was even trying to recreate the exact angle of force from the waist!

Gu Yue: "..."

She felt her temples throb. Her upper teeth unconsciously bit down on her lower lip, making a faint click. This bastard... he was actually watching it! And learning from it! And it was this kind of... completely unskilled, brute-force nonsense!

A surge of absurdity, humiliation, indignation, and an indescribable sense of danger shot straight to her head. No! Absolutely not! If he learned all this garbage inside out, then before Liberation Day even arrived, she would probably be the first to suffer. That kind of full-throttle attack with no sense of restraint, where he only knew how to charge forward... just thinking about it made her scalp tingle.

In a flash, Gu Yue reacted. She silently approached him, and just as Tang Wulin pressed his full weight into the pillow again with a muffled groan, she suddenly reached out and grabbed the back of his neck!

"Ah!"

Tang Wulin was scared out of his wits. He sprang up as if electrocuted, nearly dropping the tablet. When he turned around in terror and saw Gu Yue's face, smiling without truly smiling and radiating icy menace, his face instantly turned redder than a monkey's backside. He stammered, "W-wife?! Y-you're back?!"

"If I hadn't come back, how would I have gotten to see someone in my house working so diligently on his research, getting ready to 'make a grand showing'?" Gu Yue sneered as she snatched the tablet from his hand. Her fingers rapidly swiped across the screen, and her frown deepened. "Ultimate Conquest, Macho Man Development Manual, Endurance Training... Tang Wulin, your taste in material is pretty unique, huh?"

"I... I wasn't... This is..." Tang Wulin frantically tried to hide the pillow behind his back, but the enormous thing could not be concealed at all. It only made him look more ridiculous. His face alternated between red and pale, his eyes darting everywhere. "I was just... just watching, learning some... theoretical knowledge..."

"Learning?" Gu Yue raised a brow and jabbed the tablet screen with her finger. It was paused on an extremely indecent position. "Learning this? With my face? Tang Wulin, are you tired of living?"

She noticed a small window open in the corner of the tablet. It seemed to be a replay of some fitness influencer's livestream, titled Improving Core Strength and Stamina. Gu Yue was so furious she laughed instead, then immediately began clearing out these "sources of mental pollution."

"Delete them! Delete everything!"

She swiftly wiped out the videos, cached files, and browsing history in one go, not even sparing the recycle bin. Tang Wulin watched from the side with his heart in his throat. He tried several times to stop her, but every time he met Gu Yue's icy gaze, all his excuses caught in his throat.

"And this!" Gu Yue pointed at the abandoned pillow on the floor, frowning in disgust. "Who gave you permission to use it as a substitute, hm?"

Tang Wulin was so aggrieved he was almost in tears. "I-I was afraid I wouldn't perform well when the time came... Besides, you were the one who told me to have this pillow customized..."

"I told you to customize it so you could hug it while sleeping and feel a little safer, not so you could use it as a practical training dummy!" Gu Yue took a deep breath and forcibly suppressed the urge to pin this idiot to the ground and grind him into the carpet. She shoved the tablet back into his hands and snapped, "Listen, Tang Wulin! This random garbage is completely useless! It's all misleading! Whether you're a horse or a mule, you'll only know once you're put to the test. Messing around with all this flashy nonsense now will only make you lose your mind!"

She paused, looking at Tang Wulin's dazed, miserable expression, as though all his worldly possessions had just been confiscated. Her tone softened ever so slightly, though it still carried an unquestionable warning. "Remember to eat! Stop thinking about useless things all day. If I catch you watching this stuff again, I'll burn that book of yours too and rename you Tang 'Can't' Wulin!"

After saying that, she ignored the dejected man behind her and turned toward the dining room. The air still held traces of the suggestive atmosphere from those videos, but even stronger was the awkwardness of being exposed and the lingering smell of gunpowder.

Tang Wulin stood there blankly, watching Gu Yue's departing figure before lowering his head to look at the now-empty tablet in his hands. His heart went cold. It was over. Even his last "study materials" were gone. He cautiously glanced at the pillow on the floor, silently propped it back up, and felt all his passion thoroughly doused.

Gu Yue walked into the dining room, pulled out a chair, and sat down. She took a deep breath, trying to calm the still-disordered breathing in her chest. Picking up her chopsticks, she tapped the rim of Tang Wulin's empty bowl. "What are you standing around for? Come eat."

Her voice revealed neither happiness nor anger, but Tang Wulin keenly caught a trace of... exhaustion? Or perhaps a kind of helplessness after desperately suppressing something? He did not dare delay and hurried over to sit down.

There were two dishes and a soup on the table, all delicious in appearance, aroma, and taste. Gu Yue opened the box of soy-braised duck she had brought back, and its rich fragrance immediately spread through the room, covering the last traces of awkwardness in the air.

"Soy-braised duck..." Tang Wulin's eyes lit up. It was his favorite.

Gu Yue ignored him and calmly placed a piece of duck leg into his bowl. "Eat. Only when you're full will you have the strength to... recover."

She gave the last two words a meaningful emphasis. Tang Wulin felt a chill run down his spine and nearly choked on his rice. He secretly looked up at Gu Yue, only to find her lowering her head and quietly eating the vegetables in her bowl. Her profile looked especially gentle under the light, as if her thunderous fury from earlier had never happened.

Only Tang Wulin knew what surging undercurrents hid beneath that calm surface. He silently shoveled rice into his mouth, his heart in turmoil. Was his wife angry? It seemed so. Had she warned him? Absolutely. But why... did he feel that when Gu Yue deleted those videos earlier, there had been something besides anger in her expression?

Could she have been jealous? The thought had barely surfaced before Tang Wulin crushed it himself. Impossible, impossible. He had to be overthinking it. His wife was surely just worried he would learn bad habits and not know how to restrain himself when the time came, wearing her out.

With that thought, Tang Wulin straightened his back and mumbled his declaration of loyalty through a mouthful of food. "Don't worry, wife! I'll eat well, sleep well, and strive to recover soon... uh... properly!"

Gu Yue lifted her eyes and glanced at him without speaking. She merely used the serving chopsticks to place another helping of vegetables in his bowl.

"Eat more vegetables and supplement your vitamins. And," she paused, her voice quiet but clearly reaching Tang Wulin's ears, "stay away from those crooked methods. I'll naturally teach you what's useful."

Tang Wulin: "!!!"

He abruptly looked up and met Gu Yue's smiling yet unreadable eyes. Their meaning was impossibly complex, but they made his heart skip a beat before pounding wildly.

Useful... she would naturally teach him?

He watched Gu Yue eat with elegant composure, then thought of his ridiculous performance with the pillow and videos earlier. His face reddened again, but this time, from heat.

That dinner left Tang Wulin both terrified and filled with faint, boundless anticipation. He felt that the door leading to Liberation Day had once again been pushed open a crack by Gu Yue's own hand, and she had even tossed out an enticing piece of bait.

As Tang Wulin buried his head in his food, Gu Yue lightly sipped her soup, a smile flashing in her eyes that no one noticed. It was good to scare him a little, so this idiot wouldn't really let all that random garbage throw him off track. Still... the way he hugged that pillow with my portrait on it and tried so hard to imitate the screen...