Chapter 24: Married
Had he thought it through? Of course Zhao Man had thought it through.
Ever since he first learned about the twenty-point bachelor tax, the wheels in his mind had been turning.
Twenty points might not sound like a fortune, but a full sack of potatoes cost only two. For a resident of the West Sixth Ring, twenty points was a massive sum. Besides, he still had to farm later, and even a bottle of soil disinfectant was only ten points.
If it remained twenty points forever, he might have swallowed the bitter pill. But Zhao Man had browsed the base forums: the bachelor tax increased year after year. Eventually, not only did the base collect taxes, but every district slapped surcharges on large purchases and luxury goods—and once bought in sufficient quantities, nutrient solution was classified as a luxury item.
With that in mind, Zhao Man had started sifting through the matchmaking board. The applicants generally fell into two camps. The first lived outside the city walls and demanded that Zhao Man put their names on his property deed to grant them residency inside the base. The second already lived within the base, but came saddled with massive extended families; lacking space of their own, they expected him to surrender his home to house them all.
Zhao Man had no desire to sponsor a charity case, nor did he intend to let opportunists strip him of everything he owned. He had practically resigned himself to paying the points when Tang Heng came crashing into the picture.
Tang Heng’s sudden proposal yesterday had caught Zhao Man completely off guard. After his reflexive rejection, he spent the night combing through the matchmaking board again, growing more unnerved with every post he read.
As the payment deadline drew near, some people had already begun hurling vile abuse. But what truly made Zhao Man’s blood run cold was a message from a Beta who had sent him a tracking map. It laid out every single route Zhao Man had taken during his foraging trips: the sand yam slope, the berry bushes, and even the low-radiation water pools were marked in precise detail. Worse still, someone had been pacing outside his door last night. In a bedroom hovering near thirty degrees Celsius, Zhao Man had broken out in a cold sweat.
“I’ve thought it through. It saves twenty points, after all,” Zhao Man said with a light smile.
“Alright. Then I’ll submit the application?” Tang Heng looked at Zhao Man, his face a careful mask of testing the waters.
“Go ahead.”
Finishing off his potato in a few quick bites, Tang Heng entered their personal details into his terminal and submitted the marriage registration.
Ten minutes later, a system notification pinged on Zhao Man’s terminal, asking him to confirm whether he agreed to enter into a partnership with Tang Heng, ID AN8320714S697, of the West Sixth Ring. The moment he selected “Yes,” less than ten minutes passed before his personal profile updated to Married, with the spouse field officially filled in with Tang Heng’s name.
Zhao Man stared at the screen, lost in a daze. It had been so rushed, so brief, and so utterly mundane that it felt as though he were floating in midair, his feet unable to find solid ground.
Snapping out of it, he found Tang Heng watching him intently.
“What is it?”
“Having second thoughts?”
Zhao Man shook his head. “The change in status just happened so fast. Even though I prepared myself for it, I haven’t quite wrapped my head around it yet.”
“Should we invite your family over? Have a simple wedding?” Ordinary folk in the West Sixth Ring didn’t do wedding ceremonies; submitting an application on the terminal and getting it approved was all it took. But Tang Heng remembered hearing from classmates during a training seminar in the Central District that wealthy people held elaborate ceremonies when they wed.
Family? Zhao Man shook his head. In the original host’s memories, his relatives felt no affection for him whatsoever. And Zhao Man’s own family ties from his past life had been cleanly severed long before he ever arrived in this world.
“I’m fine. Just give me a little time to adjust.” For reasons Tang Heng couldn’t quite fathom, the subtle, wistful curve of Zhao Man’s smile made his heart ache. He reached out and gently pulled him into his arms.
Beyond how abruptly it had happened, the reason Zhao Man felt such a lack of reality was simple: he had just married a man. A man!
Back in his past life, when Zhao Man was in middle school living with his grandparents in a small rural town, an older cousin from a distant branch of the family had returned from the big city to start a business. E-commerce live-streaming had just taken off back then. That cousin sold local farm produce and did remarkably well, lifting the entire town’s economy in the process. Everyone praised him as a resounding success who brought immense honor to his ancestors.
The good times, however, did not last. Someone caught that cousin kissing another man, blowing open a whole new world for the naive young Zhao Man: so guys could actually date guys.
What followed was an immediate, vicious turn in the town’s opinion. People called him “mentally ill,” sneered that he “wasn’t a real man,” and declared that he had “disgraced eight generations of ancestors.” Relatives descended upon him in relentless waves to talk sense into him, some even pleading with him to just father a child—promising that once he had an heir, they wouldn’t care what he did. Before long, that cousin packed up and left the town for good.
Though he was gone, the fallout remained. Zhao Man had been in middle school at the time; on weekends, he would usually meet up with friends to play ball at school or go hiking by the river. But because of that cousin, his grandparents warned him to “mind his boundaries” every time they saw him hanging around other boys. Slowly but surely, his friends stopped asking him out on breaks.
The school cracked down on heterosexual dating, while his home cracked down on homosexual dating. Back then, a rebellious teenage Zhao Man had thought: Just you wait until high school—I’m going to date boys AND girls.
To his dismay, he flunked the high school entrance exams and had to settle for the mediocre local high school in town. Living under the suffocatingly attentive care of his grandparents, he ended up dating neither.
The high school cracked down on teenage romance with an iron fist. His grandparents were terrified that dating a girl would ruin his grades, equally terrified that dating a boy would ruin his grades and their bloodline, and worried sick that having no friends would leave him vulnerable to bullies. In short, they worried themselves ragged. They seized every possible opportunity to lecture him: If you’re going to date, find a girl, but your studies come first.
When Zhao Man couldn’t take it anymore, he threw a minor tantrum and vowed silently: Just wait until I get into college. I am definitely finding a man to date.
Yet fate had other plans. His grandfather suffered a sudden, fatal cerebral hemorrhage during Zhao Man’s senior year. Not long after, his grandmother fell down the stairs and passed away before doctors could save her.
Once the funerals were over, his divorced and remarried parents—who lived in the city—hastily met up to negotiate who would shoulder the burden of caring for Zhao Man during his final high school year. The final compromise: stick him in the boarding dorms.
Zhao Man went on to pass his exams and enter a university in another province, where he made close friends he could talk to about anything. Yet he never dated a man, nor did he date a woman; he remained single the entire time. He had assumed he would stay single until he grew old and died. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine he would end up married to a man in this life.
Zhao Man rolled over in bed. Tang Heng was sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. Thinking of his grandparents, he asked softly, “Does the base sell joss paper?”
“What’s joss paper?”
“Uh… paper money burned as an offering to honor deceased relatives,” Zhao Man explained.
“You’d only find that inside the Fourth Ring. The Sixth Ring doesn’t have anything like that.” Tang Heng turned his head to look up toward Zhao Man on the bed, but the frame was too high for him to see over the edge.
“Then what do people do when they miss them?”
“Go pay respects at the memorial monument. That’s usually enough.”
And what if there isn’t even a place to look?
In the middle of the night, Zhao Man was jolted awake by the sharp, relentless crackle of distant gunfire. Lifting his head, he noticed the sleeping bag on the floor was empty. He checked his terminal: ten at night. A weather alert flashed across the display: The base is currently undergoing its second severe cold wave. All residents are urged to maintain thermal precautions.
The gunfire was too loud for Zhao Man to fall back asleep. Nestled beneath his blankets, he browsed his terminal, softly chuckling at forum posts, when Tang Heng stepped through the doorway.
“Did the noise wake you?”
“Yeah. Are there no mutated beasts coming our way?” Zhao Man asked. The gunfire he had heard seemed to come entirely from either side of the property.
“There were. I just cleared a wave.” Tang Heng looked down at Zhao Man’s face, illuminated by the glow of the screen. The kid’s mood was visibly brighter than it had been that afternoon, free of that lost, vacant look.
The mattress dipped as Tang Heng sat on the edge of the bed. Zhao Man looked at him and asked, “Can’t the base rifles use silencers?”
“They can, but gunfire noise is also a useful way to scare off mutated beasts.”
Just as Zhao Man was about to reply, his terminal chimed with another incoming message:
You think getting married solves everything? Keep dreaming.
Catching the sudden shift in his expression, Tang Heng asked, “What happened?”
Zhao Man handed the terminal over. The moment Tang Heng read the screen, his face darkened instantly.
Seeing Zhao Man sit up beside him, Tang Heng picked up the kid’s outer clothes from the foot of the bed. “They’re coming. Do you want to get up?”
Zhao Man nodded, took his clothes, and pulled them on. Watching Tang Heng shoulder his rifle, Zhao Man instinctively reached for the machete resting in the kitchen.
Tang Heng led Zhao Man to crouch by the rear window. Pulling back his mental strength, he activated the house’s automated defense grid, switching it over to Integrated Fire-Control Mode. He then handed his own terminal to Zhao Man. “A-Man, this toggle controls the lure beacon. Keep your eyes on me—turn it on when I signal you. Once I disengage the rifle’s silencer, switch the lure off immediately.”
“Got it,” Zhao Man whispered, his heart leaping into his throat.
With Integrated Fire-Control Mode engaged, two discreet firing ports clicked open along the window frame. Tang Heng’s rifle and high-powered scope slotted seamlessly into the upper and lower mounts. Within ten minutes, the house’s perimeter defense grid tripped. The sound of rapid footsteps echoed outside, followed closely by the agonizing shrieks of wounded mutated beasts collapsing into the snow.
Five distinct ripples of psychic energy fluctuated in the air. As if confirming the situation, a rustling scramble ensued, and hurried footsteps began closing in.
Pfft-pfft-pfft-pfft-pfft.
Tang Heng opened fire in five rapid, suppressed bursts.
Thud, thud, thud. Three bodies slammed into the dirt, accompanied by two muffled grunts of pain.
Three down. The remaining two were merely wounded, having ducked into a blind spot. Tang Heng subtly adjusted his aim toward the right flank of the property.
Zhao Man’s home was flanked on the left by the base perimeter wall, while the rear and right sides were bordered by sulfur rocks. The five intruders had carried an attractant beacon to draw mutated beasts, keeping personal signal dampeners on their bodies as they crept along the perimeter wall. Tang Heng silently counted down the seconds in his head, then gave the signal to activate the lure.
As the seconds ticked by, gunfire erupted from the neighboring homes once again. Ignoring the mutated beasts pouring in from the bamboo grove, Tang Heng counted down silently: Now.
Pfft-pfft.
Thud, thud.
The moment all five targets hit the ground, Tang Heng disengaged the rifle’s silencer and opened up on the swarming mutated beasts in a furious, unsuppressed sweep. Beside him, Zhao Man switched off the lure beacon instantly.
After cutting down the wave of mutated beasts, Tang Heng released his mental strength to sweep the perimeter. Without lowering his weapon, his right hand reached down and quietly covered Zhao Man’s.
The kid’s fingers were ice-cold. Tang Heng rubbed them firmly between his own to chase away the chill. “It’s still early. Go back to sleep. Everything’s clear for tonight. I’ll explain it all to you tomorrow, alright?”
The tension finally leaving his body, Zhao Man was washed over by a wave of bone-deep exhaustion. He returned to the bedroom, drifting off to sleep as the distant gunfire slowly faded into the night.
