Chapter 43: The Pain of Differentiation
At that second, Fu Rangyi’s smile fell into Zhu Zhixi’s eyes like snow, melting into warm tears.
He felt terribly regretful. He regretted complaining so fiercely about Fu Rangyi’s personality that night during the first snow, blaming him for always getting angry, blaming him for always saying unpleasant things. Yet even then, Fu Rangyi had only answered that he had grown up this way.
Only today did Zhu Zhixi understand that the “this way” Fu Rangyi had spoken of was on a completely different scale from the “this way” he had understood back then.
He had once thought he was very good at comforting people, very good at offering others emotional value, very full of energy. But at this moment, helplessness bound him tightly. Going from wealthy enough to rival a nation to having empty pockets turned out to be something that could happen in an instant.
“I…” After choking up for a long time, Zhu Zhixi still did not know what to say. In the end, he chose to hug him, with all his strength, holding him especially tightly.
His arms wrapped around Fu Rangyi’s back, his palms facing upward, pressing firmly against his shoulder blades through his clothes, fingertips clasped tight. Their two hearts knocked against each other, and he could even feel that faint resonance.
After a while, Fu Rangyi also gently circled his waist with his arms.
Zhu Zhixi suddenly said, “I want to turn into an octopus.”
The sentence was inexplicable and abrupt. He knew that.
Fu Rangyi’s soft laugh brushed past his ear, and Zhu Zhixi’s ears quickly warmed.
He thought Fu Rangyi would ask “why.” If he did, Zhu Zhixi would have been a little embarrassed to answer. He simply felt that one pair of arms was far from enough for hugging. The more, the better.
But Fu Rangyi did not ask. He said, “Better not.”
“Why?” Zhu Zhixi asked.
Fu Rangyi did not answer directly. He seemed to think for a moment before saying, “Turn into a Turritopsis dohrnii instead.”
What a strange conversation.
“Why a Turritopsis dohrnii?” he pressed, unwilling to give up.
Fu Rangyi paused for a moment and said, “Because it’s beautiful.”
“You dislike octopuses,” Zhu Zhixi told him. “Octopus tentacles are very strong.”
Fu Rangyi did not say anything.
Fine, a jellyfish it is. Zhu Zhixi hugged him tightly and thought, whatever he liked, then that was what he would be. In any case, jellyfish also had many, many tentacles. They could also be used to hug him, to wrap around him.
He cared so much that, in his heart, he read and reread the answer Fu Rangyi had given. Then, in his mind, a semi-transparent jellyfish really appeared, floating like a mushroom in the waves, its threadlike tentacles drifting with the water. Then Zhu Zhixi thought, could it be that Fu Rangyi actually preferred gentler hugs?
So, bit by bit, he loosened his arms and held him like a jellyfish, his hands softly moving upward, tentatively touching the back of his neck and gently stroking it.
But Fu Rangyi seemed to misunderstand what he meant. He thought Zhu Zhixi was still curious about the gland, so on his own, he began a new round of self-dissection.
“Many children begin gland development and differentiation at twelve. I was the latest one in my class.”
Hearing him begin to speak, Zhu Zhixi suddenly felt sad again. For some reason, he felt Fu Rangyi was like a little dog desperately wanting to be adopted, obediently and proactively standing up to perform a “bye-bye” trick for him.
But he did not interrupt. He knew that saying it out loud would make him feel a little better. Fu Rangyi’s silence, in the end, came from not having many people who could listen to him speak.
“Mm.” Zhu Zhixi leaned against his shoulder. “I differentiated when I was thirteen. At the time, so many people felt sorry for me.”
“Sorry that you differentiated into a Beta?”
“Yeah. A lot of my classmates thought I should have been an A or an O. But I was very happy, because from then on, I wouldn’t have to listen carefully in physiology class anymore.” He deliberately teased Fu Rangyi, and sure enough, he made him laugh.
Back then, Zhu Zhixi did not have much of a concept of gender, but the people around him seemed to hold certain prejudices. They felt that him being a Beta was something deeply regrettable. Of course, that inevitably influenced Zhu Zhixi. After all, he had still been young then, and his thinking was not fully formed.
But when he returned home, Big Zhu and Old Zhu threw him a grand surprise party and shouted, very unevenly, “Warm congratulations to Zhu Zhixi for differentiating into a Beta!” The house was decorated grandly, so grandly it was almost funny. Streamers sprayed all over his head, and the three of them spent a long time clumsily picking them off.
At the time, he asked Old Zhu: Brother is an S-level Alpha, but I’m a Beta. Do you feel a little regretful?
Before Old Zhu could answer, Big Zhu sprang out from who knew where and loudly said: What’s wrong with Betas? Betas are the backbone of the nation. They’re the most fully evolved gender. What kind of gender discrimination are you pulling?
They stood amid a floor full of streamers and flower petals, arguing while smearing cake on each other’s faces. After the ceasefire, Old Zhu came over and told him that Beta was the freest gender, able to choose anyone and any life.
“If I were your classmate, I would only envy you.”
Fu Rangyi’s words pulled him out of his memories.
He smiled, lifting his face from Fu Rangyi’s arms and looking at him with bright, clear eyes. “If you were my classmate, I’d annoy you every day.”
Then he added, “No need to even think about it. When you were in school, there must have been tons of people who liked you. You probably couldn’t even collect all the love letters, right?”
Fu Rangyi said, “Are you introducing yourself?”
A sly light flashed through Zhu Zhixi’s eyes. He pulled out of his arms and laughed. “Got you. Every time you want to avoid something, you answer with a question.”
Fu Rangyi’s expression calmed a little as he sank into his memories.
After a while, he said, “When my relationship with Fu Liaoxing worsened, it happened to be around the time I was taking the entrance exam for middle school. To avoid conflict, I took the initiative to test into A Middle School. It was a six-year boarding school covering both middle and high school.”
“That school is very hard to get into,” Zhu Zhixi praised. “You’re really amazing.”
And you started school earlier than everyone else too. The thought of Fu Rangyi being the youngest in his class made Zhu Zhixi’s heart go soft.
“It was all right. The good thing was that I didn’t have to go home every day. The downside was also obvious. In boarding school, interpersonal relationships are very close-knit. Everyone is together twenty-four hours a day. Someone with my personality didn’t fit in very well.”
In truth, not fitting in was Fu Rangyi’s active choice. He ignored others’ approaches, rejected forming relationships, and chose and accepted solitude. After actively cutting himself off from social ties, no one could use that thread to manipulate him or control his energy and time.
He said very honestly, “There was a very obvious boundary in my heart. Everything outside that boundary was safe. Once someone tried to cross it, I would feel uneasy. I found that people liked hearing pleasant words and praise. Once they heard those things, they couldn’t help but move closer. I didn’t want them to come closer, especially those who had already crossed that boundary, so I would deliberately say harsh things.”
This confession surprised Zhu Zhixi a little.
He was actually being this sincere.
But Zhu Zhixi also caught something from it.
So from the very beginning, I crossed your safe boundary? From the first time we met?
Zhu Zhixi was afraid he was flattering himself, and he felt too embarrassed to ask, so he simply stayed silent.
“I didn’t have many friends, but I did have quite a few pursuers. That made me even more friendless. Adolescent students are very sensitive about gender. Just like you said, there’s an unspoken chain of discrimination, but Betas are definitely not at the bottom. At the very bottom are children who fail to differentiate.”
His long differentiation period was a brutal history of adolescence. High self-esteem, lowly origins, a tree outstanding in the forest, yet with a hidden illness buried in his body; overly sensitive, lacking guidance. The Fu parents would give him endless spending money, but they had never attended his parent-teacher meetings, never come to see him once.
For a long time, the keywords in his search bar were: “gender disabled person,” “what are agender people like,” and “what to do if differentiation fails.”
“On top of that, during the differentiation period, all kinds of hormones in the body are disordered. My personality was also strange. The classmates around me differentiated one by one, and the dorm assignments kept changing. In the end, I was the only one left and was assigned to a single room. At that time, only Li Qiao would take the initiative to greet me. Later, I asked him why. He said that in our first year of middle school, he got injured playing basketball, and I was the one who helped him up and took him to the infirmary.”
“But I had completely forgotten about it.”
After listening, Zhu Zhixi said, “Li Qiao is really nice. I’ll never laugh at him for going to jail again.”
Fu Rangyi almost laughed.
“After moving into the single room, my mental state also became worse and worse. I often had insomnia, and the medication I needed to take kept increasing.” Fu Rangyi lowered his eyes. “When I was fifteen, my original homeroom teacher took maternity leave because she was pregnant, and a substitute homeroom teacher came.”
Zhu Zhixi sensed the key point and asked, “What subject did he teach?”
“Physics.”
His heart sank, carrying the heavy feeling of about to touch a wound.
“To be honest, his teaching style was very different and very interesting. I wouldn’t say I liked physics much at first, but I was very absorbed in his classes.” Fu Rangyi’s tone was extremely calm. “He also had a good personality and got along with all the students. After becoming the homeroom teacher, he made a decision. He required every student to write a diary every day.”
“I hated writing diaries, so for a long time, I submitted the exact same thing every day. The weather, the time, and then one sentence: ‘Did nothing today. Studied.’”
Zhu Zhixi vaguely guessed something. “But he would respond to you.”
Fu Rangyi was a little surprised by Zhu Zhixi’s sensitivity. But thinking about it carefully, Zhu Zhixi was exactly this kind of delicate person, someone who could see the whole from the smallest detail.
“Yes. He always wrote a lot. For example, he had seen me in the cafeteria that day and noticed that I had barely eaten lunch. He asked whether it was a side effect of the medication. Or he noticed that I was often agitated and recommended some books to me. The next day, I would write that same sentence as usual, and he would even bring that book over and place it on my desk.”
Zhu Zhixi frowned as he listened. “How much older was he than you?”
“Seventeen years,” Fu Rangyi said.
“Seventeen years?” Zhu Zhixi widened his eyes. “He was old enough to have given birth to you!”
What kind of description was that?
Fu Rangyi wanted to laugh, but he could not.
“Yes.” He said softly, “So at the time, to some extent, he filled a bit of an emptiness. It was my longing for care from an elder. Many students, in adolescence, develop a natural admiration for teachers. To pass on teachings, impart knowledge, and resolve doubts—I had so, so many doubts. And finally, from a certain day onward, I began to confide in him through my diary.”
A tightly shut window was smashed open, leaving a crack.
Zhu Zhixi finally understood why Fu Rangyi had said that when someone understood you well enough, they would know how to hurt you.
“Looking back now, it really was terrifying. That person struck with frightening precision at the most vulnerable and confused part of my heart. He wrote: You are outstanding, and that has nothing to do with what gender you may become in the future. He also wrote: A child like you shouldn’t be chosen by others. You should be the one to choose the life you want…”
“When I wanted to study archaeology and met strong opposition from my adoptive parents, he stood up for me. He didn’t just support and encourage me verbally. He even called my father and helped persuade them.”
Back then, the young Fu Rangyi felt that he had finally been “understood.” Understood by an elder who was at once teacher and friend, like an elder brother and a father.
Zhu Zhixi listened in extraordinary silence, his expression growing darker and darker. It was the first time he had ever shown such a look in front of others.
He even began to feel as though he did not want to keep listening. He lowered his head, raised a hand, and pressed his palm against both eyes.
“What did he do to you?” Zhu Zhixi’s voice was a little hoarse.
Fu Rangyi leaned back against the seat and said in a low voice, “He induced me. Right after I differentiated into an Alpha, during the most unstable and dangerous stage. At that time, I had a high fever for four days straight. My consciousness was blurry. I had taken sick leave, and he came to the dorm to see me.”
“When I heard it was him, I climbed out of bed and opened the door. He came in, closed the door, took off his bracelet, and released the densest, strongest Omega pheromones I had ever smelled in my life inside that sealed single room.”
Zhu Zhixi’s hands were trembling. Earlier, when he had heard him talk about the orphanage, about being adopted, Zhu Zhixi had felt heartache. But now, apart from pain, he also felt intense confusion and hatred.
Fu Rangyi, however, gave a cold laugh. “He even guided me into taking off my bracelet and collar, saying he wanted to smell what my pheromones were like. He said he liked me. Isn’t that funny?”
“Stop talking.” He hugged Fu Rangyi.
It was not funny at all. It was horrifying. A physiological revulsion and fear crawled up Zhu Zhixi’s throat like a snake. He was about to vomit.
That gentle, friendly, exquisitely crafted human skin, full of kindness and care, had been dissolved by pheromones, and countless maggots of rotten desire had crawled out from inside.
But Fu Rangyi did not stop. “At the time, it truly felt like a bolt from the blue. I was so stupid. I had actually opened myself up to someone like that. I couldn’t tell whether I was afraid or angry. When he opened his arms toward me, I grabbed the desk lamp on the table and smashed it over his head. Then the chair. I beat him until he knelt on the floor. I kicked him with all my strength, hit him, punched his face, his mouth.”
For a moment, that bloodied, unrecognizable face turned into Fu Rangyi’s own. The person he was beating was not someone else, but himself, the self who had so easily trusted another person.
“He actually said he had fallen in love with me. So disgusting.”
Indeed, it was disgusting. As Zhu Zhixi listened, every word, every breath, turned into needles, piercing into his skin, flesh, and heart, and also stitching shut his desire to speak of love.
So this was the beginning of Fu Rangyi’s malignant susceptible-period syndrome. A case of sexual harassment wrapped in the guise of teacher-student affection. A nightmare-like act of inducement.
“This was attempted sexual assault of a minor.” He said it almost through gritted teeth. “Did you call the police? Was he arrested afterward?”
Fu Rangyi leaned against the back of the seat and turned his face aside, so numb that he did not blink. “No. During that period, my adoptive father’s company was caught up in some scandals. He didn’t want his competitors to seize another public-opinion weakness. Also, there were no cameras in the single dorm room. I was the one who opened the door and let him in, and I was also the one who beat him half to death. And I was an Alpha. He said it would be difficult to handle. If word got out, people would only say, how could an A be violated by an O?”
Zhu Zhixi laughed in anger. After that laugh, his eyes reddened again.
“Of course, my adoptive father did retaliate against that person in his own way. He had the school fire him, and he pulled some strings so that he could never work at any school again. I heard that for a while, that man opened a tutoring center too, but that was also forced to shut down. The last time I heard anything about him was when I was in university. My adoptive father told me he had gone back to his hometown, bought a house, wasn’t living especially well, but had settled down. He would never appear in my life again.”
“He really never appeared again,” Fu Rangyi said in a deep voice.
After hearing this, Zhu Zhixi looked at him, yet it seemed he was not only looking at him. Those black eyes were still wet, but they stared straight ahead, stripped of their usual bright smile, appearing dark and gloomy.
“On what grounds does he get to settle down?”
Fu Rangyi froze for a second.
All this time, he had believed that he had long since healed. Those scars were thicker and sturdier than skin, leaving behind only some aftereffects that always faintly, vaguely ached. But at this moment, seeing Zhu Zhixi’s expression, he realized that the pus hidden underneath had never been properly cleared out. It had only been covered by a scab.
Zhu Zhixi’s anger cut open that layer of scab. He was actually hurting for him.
Fu Rangyi stared fixedly at that unfamiliar expression, reached out, pinched Zhu Zhixi’s chin, and said, “It’s all in the past, justice angel.”
Angels would never want to kill someone.
“It’s not in the past.” You never truly walked out of it.
His gaze moved downward and landed on Fu Rangyi’s left arm. Through the fabric of his clothes, he could almost clearly trace the shape of those scars.
“That’s fine too.” Fu Rangyi said it with complete indifference. Then, all at once, he leaned closer, so close their noses touched. Their breaths mingled in the warm air. After a while, he said softly, “Why are you gritting your teeth like that? I almost thought I heard wrong.”
No one knew which string had snapped, but Zhu Zhixi directly cupped his face and kissed him.
They had kissed many times before. But this was the first time Zhu Zhixi felt his heart twist like it was being cut by a knife. Only now did he understand that every act of intimacy might remind Fu Rangyi of his cruel past, and yet Fu Rangyi had almost never refused.
“When you treat something as a weapon, only then does it become a weapon.” He once again recalled those words. God, how had he been naive enough to say that back then? It was too cruel.
Even so, Fu Rangyi still had not gotten angry, had not forcefully argued with him, even though this was the most painful root of his suffering.
Even though his sincerity had been trampled on again and again, today, he still chose to lay everything bare before him. Zhu Zhixi had thought he was the brave one. Only in this moment did he realize that the truly brave person was Fu Rangyi.
A shell had struggled to open itself before him, revealing soft clam flesh and a pearl-like heart. And he was holding a sharp knife, the handle burning so hot he could barely keep hold of it.
The kiss grew deeper and deeper, hard to part from, like their fate, which had become accidentally entwined. His tongue brushed past Fu Rangyi’s sharp teeth, and Zhu Zhixi tasted the sweetness of blood and honey, as well as the bitterness of tears. He had so many things he wanted to say. He wanted to tell Fu Rangyi that what that person had felt was not love, but seduction and possession. Yet he also wanted to say, I love you. It is real love.
But he had also thought about possession. Where was the difference? Would Fu Rangyi accept his love? Would he fear his possessiveness? Would Zhu Zhixi hurt him?
His breathing grew faster and heavier. Fu Rangyi seemed to notice. He broke the kiss, patted his shoulder, lowered his head, and asked softly, “What’s wrong? Are you uncomfortable?”
Zhu Zhixi’s face was pale, his brows drawn together, his lower lip trembling slightly.
His chest suddenly cramped with pain. It hurt so much that cold sweat broke out all over him, but he did not dare tell Fu Rangyi.
After taking a while to recover, he grabbed Fu Rangyi’s wrist and said weakly, “My… stomach feels a little uncomfortable. I want some hot water.”
He knew Fu Rangyi would get out of the car without hesitation and go find water. And Fu Rangyi did exactly that.
“Wait for me in the car. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back soon.”
“Okay…”
In the rearview mirror, Fu Rangyi walked away quickly, then even began to run. He grew farther and farther away until he disappeared around the corner. Zhu Zhixi stared after him. He did not know if it was an illusion, but the pain in his heart seemed to ease a little.
He opened the car door, pulled his coat tighter around himself in the cold wind, and walked step by step back to the orphanage, returning to that corridor.
The through-draft cut across his face like knives. Without hesitation, Zhu Zhixi reached out to take down that unwanted photo frame, but for some reason, no matter what he did, he could not remove it.
He suddenly began to cry, tears pattering onto the concrete floor. In his entire life, he had never cried this heartbreakingly before.
In the end, he wiped away his tears with the back of his hand, picked up half a red brick from the ground, and smashed it hard against the photo frame, like the desperate fists the young Fu Rangyi had once swung. Again and again. The sound of shattering echoed through the empty ruins.
Glass scattered all over the floor. The photograph drifted down lightly. Zhu Zhixi picked it up and wiped clean the little snowman’s face on it. Then he turned it over.
Like many group photos, the names were written on the back. This one had been written in ballpoint pen. Enduring the pain, Zhu Zhixi counted again and again until he found his.
“Nian Nian.”
He murmured it several times, wiped his tears dry, hid the photograph against his chest, and returned to the car.
Author’s Note:
Fu Rangyi’s birthday is August 25. In that year, the lunar date was the twentieth day of the seventh month. Don’t match it to the years in our world; just treat it as a parallel world. The character for twenty is pronounced “nian,” so before he was formally adopted, he was called Nian Nian.
Octopuses have very short lifespans, only a few years. But the Turritopsis dohrnii is special. It can reverse its growth through transdifferentiation, making it “immortal.”
