Chapter 2: Forced Into a Blind Date
At five fifty, the bell rang. At the entrance of Lecture Hall 102 on the first floor of North Building One at S University, a large crowd of students streamed out and squeezed into the corridor.
“Why does it feel like more and more people are coming to audit the class? The entire last row is from other schools, right? Has archaeology gotten this popular lately?”
“It’s not archaeology that’s popular. It’s Professor Fu… A photo of him teaching got posted online a while ago, and he went viral again.”
“The course with the highest fail rate in the whole department but the hardest one to get into—who understands how valuable that is?”
“No wonder… But this batch probably won’t last long either. Professor Fu is way too strict. Even auditors get called on to answer questions. He’s not like Old Zhang, who lectures with humor and even teases the students. Professor Fu doesn’t smile once through the entire class.”
“That’s because he holds himself to a high standard too. Go search his papers. Scroll down and you’ll see they’re longer than my lifespan.”
“Oh, right, did you guys see that subway video? That Alpha with pheromone disorder was terrifying. He went completely berserk. Thank goodness there was a brave, warmhearted guy who stepped in, or who knows what would’ve happened.”
“I saw it. Even with the mosaic, you could tell that guy was super good-looking. So fair-skinned, and his outfit was nice too.”
“All you know is looking at handsome guys… But seriously, compared to that, Professor Fu is way too reassuring. He’s clearly an S-rank Alpha, but he’s never leaked pheromones. He basically never takes off his suppression bracelet all year round, and even his rut periods are frighteningly stable. I heard he doesn’t even have a partner. His self-control is terrifying.”
“That’s called having Alpha ethics.”
“Stop talking. The professor’s coming out.”
Several students moved aside in the corridor and greeted him respectfully with smiles. “Goodbye, Professor Fu.”
Fu Rangyi gave a slight nod in response, then left.
On the way back to his office, he turned off silent mode on his phone and saw several missed calls. Some were from his parents, and a few were from unfamiliar numbers. One of them had called as many as sixteen times.
Aside from that, he had also received two harassing text messages.
[You hate that you go into heat like a dog for someone you don’t even like? But isn’t that simply your nature as an Alpha?]
[Just like that man on the subway.]
For the past two days, he had often been harassed by phone calls. After he picked up, the other party would say nothing, only letting out an eerie laugh through a voice changer. A few days later, they would switch to a new number and call again.
He frowned, blocked the number, and when he exited the page, he accidentally tapped into a short-video app. The first video that popped up was the social news story the students had just been discussing.
To protect privacy, all the faces had been mosaicked. This vicious incident made him think of the content of the harassment messages. Fu Rangyi felt a kind of physiological disgust and did not linger, directly swiping away.
But the next second, he paused briefly and swiped the video back. His gaze locked onto the third person who suddenly jumped out to do the right thing.
He took a screenshot, zoomed in, and stared at the beaded bracelet on that person’s wrist.
It was an animal protection bracelet issued by an Antarctic research station. One could receive one after adopting an Antarctic wild animal.
He had one too.
The glacier-blue beads were crystal clear, with a silver badge about the size of a pinky fingernail in the middle, resting against a snow-white wrist.
Further up was the palm.
Open, close, then open again. Sitting in the consultation room, Zhu Zhixi was about to stare a flower right out of his own palm.
So far, aside from himself, not a single person could see this countdown. He had been confirming this constantly with every person he met since entering the hospital, and the result was that everyone treated him like a mental patient.
To avoid repeating the same mistake, after sitting down in the consultation room, he casually raised his left hand, palm facing the doctor, making 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 he actually reached out his hand too.
Smack—the little old man lightly high-fived him.
Zhu Zhixi felt despair.
[59 days, 17 hours, 02 minutes, 23 seconds]
[59 days, 17 hours, 02 minutes, 22 seconds]
…
Zhu Zhixi sighed. However long he had been sitting here, the countdown had been ticking for just as long, never stopping for even a moment.
“According to the medical insurance system records, your mother passed away from gland cancer?”
Zhu Zhixi came back to himself, froze for a second, then nodded. “Yes.”
The doctor’s expression turned somewhat grim.
“Doctor.” Zhu Zhixi glanced at his computer. “Is there something wrong with my test results?”
The doctor furrowed his brows and paused for a moment. “Gland cancer is one of the most dangerous types of cancer. In the early stages, there are almost no symptoms, and it’s very difficult to detect. Once clinical symptoms begin to appear, it’s basically already late-stage. In a very short time, the patient’s condition rapidly deteriorates, 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 an extremely high hereditary rate.”
[59 days, 17 hours, 01 minute, 34 seconds]
Zhu Zhixi had a bad feeling.
Impossible.
“I…”
“But you’re a Beta.” The doctor found it rather unbelievable. “I’ve been practicing medicine for so long, and I’ve never encountered a Beta with gland cancer.”
“Exactly!” Zhu Zhixi touched his neck and nearly stood 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 also have glands. It’s just that they’ve basically degenerated to a low-function state. They can’t mark others, and the gland volume is extremely small, almost as if they don’t exist. But they do still exist. Some Betas can even secrete a tiny amount of weak pheromones.”
“I can’t secrete any,” Zhu Zhixi immediately said.
“As long as there are glands, there’s a chance of developing cancer.” The doctor did not let him off.
It was over.
So that was why he had been inexplicably getting nosebleeds and fainting recently? Were these all warning signs?
He stared at his palm and suddenly froze.
This couldn’t be some kind of death countdown, could it?
“At present, the hospital’s biopsy tests for gland cancer are all designed for Alphas and Omegas. Your situation is too special. I’ll have to report it to my superiors. I still don’t know whether we can directly use their equipment to examine you, and even then, we may not necessarily be able to detect anything…”
Zhu Zhixi was a little dazed. “Doctor, hypothetically, if it really is gland cancer, how long can I… still live?”
“It’s hard to say. The most aggressive case I’ve seen had a survival period of only two months.” The doctor looked at him with a comforting expression. “But don’t worry yet. It’s far too early to say these things…”
His ears rang. It was as if he had suddenly fallen underwater, and everything that followed became blurred.
[59 days, 16 hours, 51 minutes, 20 seconds]
Two months. Sixty days.
The doctor sighed. Such a young child. He felt some sympathy and wanted to offer a few more words of comfort. But when he looked up again, he saw the young man looking around with a pair of wide eyes.
“…Are you looking for something?”
The young patient was anxiously muttering under his breath, “No way, is there really no resurrection ad?”
There really was not. There was only that damned countdown.
This was unfair.
No matter how hard Zhu Zhixi thought, he could not understand why such a low-probability disaster would happen to him, and not just once, but again and again to his family.
He had done good deeds and accumulated virtue all his life. He had never done anything bad. On the day he returned to the country, he even acted bravely for a righteous cause. So fine, if heaven wanted to reward him with an illness, so be it. But why did it have to open his heavenly eye and give him a countdown too? Was it because he procrastinated at everything, and heaven was afraid he would refuse to die, so it set a deadline early, expecting him to obediently lie down in a coffin when the time came, shout “five, four, three, two, one,” and then wrap things up cleanly?
Why me? And why exactly sixty days?
When he was little, he heard his mother say that carrying him had not been easy. She had suffered a lot and had almost miscarried. The first time they heard his fetal heartbeat, his father and older brother had gathered around the fetal monitor, holding their breath, not daring to make even the slightest sound.
Thump, thump.
[When we heard that first heartbeat, your dad cried. Mom remembers it so clearly. It happened to be the eighth week, the sixtieth day.]
In another sixty days, his heartbeat was going to stop.
After returning home in a daze, Zhu Zhixi locked himself in his room and did not come out for two whole days. During that time, his phone kept vibrating. Many messages poured in, but he did not reply to a single one.
He tossed and turned, read many papers related to gland cancer, and in his mind, every place he had ever visited flashed past. He also thought of all the cities he had wanted to visit but had not gone to yet. In the end, he thought of his mother.
His earliest and deepest understanding of love actually came from his father’s tears.
After his mother left, for a long time, his father carried on as usual—busy, efficient, flying all over the world for work. His pain was thin, like a wordless suicide note, light and weightless, easy to overlook.
Until one night, when Zhu Zhixi was lying in bed unable to sleep and suddenly wanted a piece of chocolate, he secretly slipped out of his room. Before he had even reached the kitchen, he heard the sound of crying.
The young Zhu Zhixi hid behind the enormous Christmas tree in the living room and saw with his own eyes his father standing before the cabinet, clutching a box of expired chocolates and sobbing bitterly. Tears soaked that suicide note, swelling it, stretching open every crease. Pain became something alive and breathing.
Only at that moment did he finally begin to admit that he was indeed somewhat afraid. He was afraid of becoming the second suicide note pasted onto his father’s body, afraid of the day the number in his palm reached zero.
But no matter what he thought or what he did, the countdown kept moving second by second, without the slightest pause.
At noon on the third day, there was a knock on his door. Hiding under the blanket, he heard his father’s voice.
“Xiao Xi, are you still not coming out?”
He did not answer. He had not yet figured out how to face his father and brother.
Through the door, his father’s sigh came in.
His phone vibrated twice after that.
[Old Zhu: Xiao Xi, are you unhappy because Dad forced you to come back? If that’s really the case, Dad apologizes to you.]
[Old Zhu: Maybe it’s because my health has gotten much worse these past two years. I keep wanting to arrange everything properly for you and your brother, especially you. These past few years, you’ve been flying around all day, running all over the world. I always worry that you don’t eat well or sleep well, and I’m afraid you’ll get sick. Dad really just wants to find you someone reliable. If one day I’m gone, there will still be someone who can take good care of you. Then even when I close my eyes, I’ll be at ease.]
Zhu Zhixi stared at the [Typing…] at the top of the chat box. With red eyes, he waited for a long time but never received the next message.
He directly typed: Dad, you won’t get to close your eyes. I’ll definitely go before you.
After typing it, he deleted the words one by one.
He rewrote: Dad, can you stop saying such unlucky things? It’s not auspicious.
Deleted.
What was unlucky about it? He really was going to die.
Like every ordinary person, faced with the possibility of approaching death, he would feel fear, unwillingness, and confusion. But compared to all those emotions, he found it even more boring.
Life was full of uncertainty, but death was far too definite. It was a period engraved into everyone’s genes at birth, a largely similar ending that no one could avoid. It was so certain that it became dull.
What Zhu Zhixi feared most was dullness. The scare of it arriving early, together with the format of a countdown, instead wrapped boring death in a layer of colorful cellophane and tied it with a ribbon. Although once opened, it was still a corpse inside.
But wasn’t life itself one huge shroud-wrapping competition?
Now that things had come to this, he might as well accept reality. Within the limited competition time, he should pick the prettiest piece of cloth, cut it properly, and wrap it carefully.
He glanced at the countdown and typed for the last time, then hit send.
[Xiao Xi: I understand, Dad. I promise you.]
After accepting the fate of physiological death, Zhu Zhixi also accepted the first step of spiritual death—a blind date.
[Xiao Xi: Isn’t it just meeting once? I’ll go.]
First line on the bucket list: become his biological father’s fairy godmother and fulfill one small wish of a middle-aged widowed Alpha.
But fulfilling it was one thing. He had never been the obedient type.
“Dress formally and plainly. He’s an academic, a very proper person. It’s your first meeting, so don’t dress too unconventionally.”
Thinking of his father’s instructions, Zhu Zhixi directly picked a dusty-pink hoodie from his wardrobe, paired it with a baby-blue down jacket, washed-blue jeans, and an oversized rainbow scarf, committing himself to dressing like a human color palette.
And even that was not enough. He deliberately got his hair done, put on blue over-ear headphones, and went out with a head of dark-brown woolly curls, like a little colorful butterfly.
Plain? Forget it. He refused to dress like a dead person.
On the gray winter street, passersby were all slightly hunched from the biting cold wind, tightly wrapped in their coats. Only Zhu Zhixi was different.
He was like a single frame of color suddenly flashing through a black-and-white film—lively, strange, and brilliantly colorful.
That frame leapt into the café and landed in Fu Rangyi’s eyes.
[I’m here.]
His phone vibrated for one second. It was a message from his blind date’s number, but because he had not read the profile, he did not know the name and had not saved the contact.
A strange intuition surfaced. He narrowed his eyes slightly.
The person in front of him, dressed like a color palette, was most likely his blind date.
His gaze automatically followed this “butterfly.” He watched as the person lifted a hand, pushed his headphones down to rest around his neck, stretched out his neck, and looked around. His little curls bobbed along with the movement. Then he lowered his head, glanced at his phone, seemingly confirming the table number, before lifting his head again and walking forward with a bright smile.
He walked briskly toward Fu Rangyi’s table.
But in the next second, this person passed him by and sat directly in the booth diagonally opposite.
Fu Rangyi raised an eyebrow almost imperceptibly.
Sitting across from that table was an Alpha working on a laptop. When he saw this newcomer sit down, his eyes visibly lit up.
The newcomer’s expression was even more interesting. Surprise mixed with delight, along with a trace of awkwardness.
“Hi.” The colorful butterfly waved his left hand rather enthusiastically, as if he wanted to fully show off the pile of rings on his hand. His palm deliberately lingered in the air for several seconds.
But the eyes of the man across from him were glued only to his face.
“Hello.” He stretched out his hand, his voice clear and bright. “Blind date.”
The other person’s surprise became even more obvious. “B-blind date?”
“Y-yeah.” The colorful butterfly imitated him, then laughed. His body leaned slightly forward, his neck long, fair, and clean, its curve soft.
Fu Rangyi lowered his eyes. In his mind appeared a sweet-white-glazed yuhuchun vase from the Yongle period of the Ming dynasty—especially the neck of the vase.
“Are you nervous?” he spoke again, his tone a little playful, though the syllables between his words dragged slightly, lazy and languid. “Don’t be scared. I’m a very good person.”
Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass window, the pink-purple sunset burned like flame before sinking. Reflected in his eyes, his dark irises seemed to glow with the fire of gemstones.
That overly beautiful face was like the glittering festive streetlights of Christmas—extremely deceptive. To see its true nature, one had to wait until the lights went out. But most people were already dazzled and bewitched long before then. They could not wait, nor could they stay clearheaded.
Therefore, despite knowing this was a misunderstanding, that man still reached out his hand, hesitant and uncertain, as if trying to take the hand offered to him.
At that moment, the server happened to come over with a tray and stopped by Fu Rangyi’s table. “Sir, your lemon sparkling water.”
She placed one glass in front of Fu Rangyi and heard him say “thank you” in a low voice. Then she smiled and picked up the other glass, about to place it across from him, but was stopped.
“Give it directly to the person in the blue coat at that table.”
He glanced at the two people diagonally opposite who were about to hold hands and said in a low voice, “Since he’s already sitting there.”
Author’s Note:
Fu Rangyi: Quite pretty—crossed out. Nice eyes—crossed out. No eyes at all.
Zhu Zhixi: Single older Alpha and an academic… You’ll do! Sits down. Hi, Professor! Deliberately acting affected in hopes that a proper person will dislike him.
Server: Huh? So who exactly am I supposed to give this lemon water to?
