The Sleepless Summer of Ripening Rain (2)

The room they were in was lit half warmly, half dimly. The air carried the faintly intoxicating scent of Bulmer Cider. Beside a full-length purple dressing mirror stood a doll-sized bed draped in gold-threaded curtains for resting, its fluffy goose-down quilt piled on top.

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No matter how one looked at it, this seemed like a five-star hotel suite, yet the subway surveillance screens glowing blue all around and the cold workstations made it clear that this was actually... a subway monitoring room.

A special monitoring room that had been built and remodeled in an extremely short time. It even bordered the realm of the dead.

Crunching away at potato chips, Su Enxi nodded solemnly. "Mm, Little White Rabbit actually decisively rejected the 'real deal.' That really is fucking outrageous."

"No, that is pretty outrageous, but there's something even more outrageous. Did you track his running speed?" Shuuder Mai frowned slightly. "And what the hell does Chen Wenwen have to do with the real deal? Our Little White Rabbit has seen the whole flower-filled forest by now, okay? Honestly, I think there's something off about him today."

"I was joking. Of course she isn't the real deal. He ran the hundred-meter sprint in 6.46 seconds, damn... There really is a problem. A huge problem! He even looked like he had enough energy left to check the map on his phone. There's no way he could reach that speed without an awakened bloodline. Mai, what was your hundred-meter record again?" After staring blankly for a moment, Su Enxi cried out, "Did he take nothing but PE classes for credits this semester?!"

"Without taking that stuff, my best was 7.68 seconds in the hundred meters. That was last time. His explosive speed is much, much faster than most A-rank hybrids under the same conditions. The current short-distance sprint record holder in Cassell College's PE classes is Three-Nothing Girl, and even she only managed 7.35. Though she definitely held something back."

Shuuder Mai irritably snatched away the cheese-and-butter-flavored potato chips, stuffed a handful into her mouth, and propped one long leg on the icy blue surface of the monitoring console.

She chewed her chips. "This isn't something taking or not taking PE classes at Cassell College can explain. Even if an ordinary person trained from the Cretaceous period until now, they still couldn't break through the limits of the human body, right? The only explanation is bloodline awakening. The part of him that belongs to dragons woke up without us knowing."

"Lady, lady, Mai. Before I met you, I always had this Yamato Nadeshiko filter when it came to Japanese women. If someone trained from the Cretaceous period until now, could they still be an ordinary person?" Su Enxi rubbed her forehead. "Also, could you stop putting your other leg on me? I can't withstand that kind of temptation, and neither can my chips."

Shuuder Mai casually swung her leg and glanced sidelong at her good partner. "I'm honored to hear that, but my charm isn't powerful enough to affect objects, is it?"

"You bitch, baka... I mean your leg is too heavy and you're too fat. You crushed my cheese chips! There's a limit to being narcissistic, okay?!"

Su Enxi ground her teeth softly, gulped down the crushed chips in one go, and chose to take direct action against someone.

"If I can endure this, what can't I endure? Come on, fight!"

After a bout of horseplay, the two straightened their rumpled clothes. Their gazes met, and then they calmly returned to their respective seats as though nothing had happened.

"...Anyway, now that Little White Rabbit, the protagonist, is in position, we can draw back tonight's curtain, right? The curtain of death." After speaking, Su Enxi secretly kicked Shuuder Mai again.

She sounded calm when she spoke, but her tone was as cold as if she were reading a death list.

Shuuder Mai promptly kicked her back. "That's right, the curtain of death. Little White Rabbit No. 2 is already inside Nibelungen. The handsome, obedient, polite, but slightly cold-blooded Little White Rabbit will pave the road to dragon-slaying for the cowardly, useless, incompetent Little White Rabbit, then die. I told you, this plot is super dramatic."

"In so many youth and adventure stories these days, the cold-faced yet warm all-rounder is the defining trait of the second male lead. If his death can push the plot forward, why wouldn't the screenwriter be happy about it? Isn't the boss just a heartless screenwriter?"

In this world, endings were sometimes already predetermined; more often, though, they remained unclear.

Su Enxi continued watching the situations at the various subway entrances and sighed. "It's not very nice to badmouth the boss behind his back, but that's just the kind of person he is. An overwhelmingly powerful, violent, temperamental shut-in with severe narcissistic tendencies. He's as attentive as a servant toward people he likes and cares about, and as ruthless as a stepmother toward those he doesn't. His attitude toward Chu Zihang is strange. Sometimes he's a servant, sometimes he's a stepmother, like there's someone living in his head fighting with him."

"Chu Zihang, Little White Rabbit No. 2, went to that place where the living don't belong. He bears the mark of His Nibelungen, and he wasn't going to live much longer anyway... Maybe after being useful today, he'll be able to make it out alive. No one can help him in a place like that."

Perhaps the boss was only attentive toward Lu Mingfei. At most, he cared about the others because of that association. The truth was simply that cruel, and that person had never bothered to hide it much.

"Ladies, you should probably save your opinions for behind my back next time." A lazy male voice sounded behind them.

There was a third person in the monitoring room?

Shuuder Mai and Su Enxi abruptly turned their heads. At some point, the monitoring room had gained the back of a man in a fitted white shirt and a snow-silver ice bucket. Inside the bucket rested two bottles of champagne: 1995 Perrier-Jouët Belle Époque.

A small tag hung from each bottle neck. "Belle Époque 1998, presented to the ladies: 50% Chardonnay, 45% Pinot Noir, and 5% Pinot Meunier. You will fall in love with it, and with the flames of tonight's grand spectacle."

They knew this champagne well. The figure beside it, idly playing with a theatrical mask, was even more familiar.

"Drink the wine early. It won't do if it gets too cold later. Tasting flames amid ice is no different from pulling chestnuts from the fire."

The newcomer leaning against the ice bucket seemed to be in excellent spirits, wearing a thirty-degree-Celsius smile. "Actually, I care a great deal about Chu Zihang right now, okay? Because this world is a giant happy script, and the final ending is the boring, unoriginal 'one person lives happily ever after'!"

"Shouldn't it normally be 'two people live happily ever after'? 'One person lives happily ever after' definitely means there's tragedy mixed into the comedy," Su Enxi quietly objected. When the boss's gaze swept over her, she immediately blinked obediently and shut up.

"My mistake. I didn't count dragons as people." The boss seemed to be reflecting, though he also seemed to be talking to himself.

"Boss, that sounds like you insulted yourself too." Su Enxi was still the one objecting. She shrank her neck, proving through practical action what it meant to never learn and still dare next time.

Shuuder Mai's observant gaze never ceased.

Naturally, she was familiar with her own boss and knew that the person before her was the boss himself. Precisely because she knew and was certain, she felt a trace of something that should never have existed before... doubt.

Compared with the boss of the past, today's boss seemed to be in an unusually cheerful mood, yet he was also clearly missing something.

The theatrical mask in his hand did not resemble any Venetian mask, hannya mask, or court noble mask. It was extraordinarily thick and carried features from theatrical masks of many countries. Honestly, it was a mishmash of cheap market junk.

Whether it was a priceless antique or cheap market junk was nothing strange. The boss was simply the sort of person who believed that no amount of money could buy what he wanted. When he liked an object, he usually liked the meaning he saw in it. He could arrogantly take whatever he wished from all the values in the world.

Shuuder Mai rested her chin on her hand and swung her legs. "Boss, you didn't come here specifically to eavesdrop on our private chatter today, did you? Do you have any temporary assignments for us poor workers?"

"Mm... Thanks for the reminder. You two are too charming today. I almost forgot my real reason for coming here."

The boss shrugged, put on pale opera gloves and a sharp black formal suit, then spread his hands forward.

"The champagne has been delivered. Let me borrow two bottles of Bulmer Cider for a lavish banquet where there'll be a funeral play to watch."

"And your chips too, pretty girl. I want the delicious crab roe flavor."