Chapter 2#
The Inhuman Giant Eye#
In the dead of night.
Suddenly—“BANG!” A jarring explosion of sound. Zhen Ye’s lashes trembled slightly, and he slowly opened his eyes.
Outside the window, downstairs, drunkards from the barbecue restaurant were raising hell, smashing several beer bottles and triggering a cacophony of car alarms along the street.
Zhen Ye fumbled for his phone and glanced at it—3:30 in the morning.
This wasn’t the first time he’d been woken up like this. He’d tried to talk to them before, but the barbecue shop owner was brazenly defiant: “Too noisy? Then don’t live in the lower city. Go buy a villa up in Nanshan.”
Zhen Ye didn’t waste words with him. He called the police directly.
The cops had mediated. But a month later, they were back to their old tricks, doing whatever they pleased, smashing bottles louder than before.
A kind-hearted older cop advised him:
“Kid, I can see you’re a tenant, and your lease isn’t up so you can’t move out. Just buy yourself a pair of earplugs. Nothing else to be done—this area’s always been loud. Years of it, and nobody’s ever managed to fix it.”
Noise is a long-term psychological torture.
Every time he was woken up, a sharp, stabbing pain would flare at his left temple.
He scrolled through his phone for a while, trying to distract himself, but before long the pain blurred even his left eye. He gave up and closed his eyes, breathing deeply, his mind drifting through idle thoughts.
He was supposed to sleep in until noon today.
He’d shifted all three of his jobs’ rest days onto the same date, so that every two weeks he could have one full day off.
His gut told him he needed proper rest. But even after sleeping an entire day, he still woke up utterly exhausted, as if his body were a bottomless pit that no amount of sleep could ever fill.
At times like this, he couldn’t help but resent that he was no longer eighteen or nineteen. Five years ago, he could still pull all-nighters writing papers while juggling part-time jobs to make ends meet.
He managed to drift off only as dawn was breaking.
It wasn’t until noon that his phone vibrated, yanking him out of a nightmare.
“Hello…?”
“Still sleeping?” His childhood best friend, Cheng Zhiran, was shocked. “Are you working two weeks straight again? God, every time I call you, I’m half afraid I’ll hear that you’ve dropped dead.”
“Not that easy to kill me.” Zhen Ye’s voice was hoarse and faint. “What’s up?”
“Coming tonight? We’ve got a gathering.”
“I’ll pass.” Zhen Ye said slowly. “I’m going to see my—”
He swallowed the word “mother” and replaced it with, “—my grandmother. She’s been hospitalized with heart problems.”
“Ah, alright then. Hope she recovers soon.”
Cheng Zhiran suddenly remembered something. “Oh, right—don’t forget to come to our school’s job fair next Sunday. It’s the biggest one in the city this year; miss it and you’re out of luck. That android company you like will be there too, and it’s a perfect match for your obscure major—what was it, robot interaction design?”
“—It’s human-machine emotional interaction design.”
“Yeah, yeah, that one nobody’s ever heard of. Polish up your resume, and I might be able to pull some strings for you.” Cheng Zhiran said enthusiastically.
He was a lecturer in the School of Liberal Arts at Maoda University—utterly unconnected to any tech company. Zhen Ye had no idea what strings he could possibly pull.
Hearing Zhen Ye ask, Cheng Zhiran proudly revealed:
“Pfft, I recently got myself a new paramour—the head of the School of Artificial Intelligence. Just wait and praise your bro for being flexible, I’ll blow a pillow wind and get you an offer!”
Zhen Ye said sincerely: “Hard work, brother.”
Cheng Zhiran laughed heartily. “Not too bad, actually. It’s pretty nice—he’s got good measurements.”
Zhen Ye: “Good for you. Beneficial to intestinal health.”
“Exactly, exactly,” Cheng Zhiran agreed profoundly. “When life gets stuffy, you just need someone to unclog the pipes. When you’re free, let’s hang out. My paramour’s got a few friends, and I think they look pretty decent—I’ll introduce them to you for some fun too.”
Zhen Ye smiled and replied, “Sure.”
They chatted idly for a while longer. After a moment, Cheng Zhiran lowered his voice, as if speaking from the heart: “Xiao Ye, hearing that you still have a sex drive, that you still have hope for life—I’m not so worried anymore.”
Zhen Ye’s breath caught.
“Honestly, when you first came back from abroad, and I saw you sitting there all dazed, eyes hollow, unable to get a single word out for ages—I was starting to wonder if you’d given up on living altogether.”
Zhen Ye lowered his eyes and curled his lips. “Not that dramatic. No matter how big the matter, I can just close my eyes and let it pass.”
Cheng Zhiran’s brow relaxed, then suddenly furrowed again. “Speaking of which, your stepmother and that stepbrother of yours haven’t been causing you trouble again, have they?”
Zhen Ye hummed. “Still dealing with it.”
Cheng Zhiran thought of what his best friend had gone through and bristled with indignation. “You’re just too good-tempered. Next time, don’t give them the time of day. Those two are rotten to the core. First they dumped you in some small European country to suffer, didn’t even give you living expenses, left you to fend for yourself. Then when you earned a full scholarship to a US master’s program through your own efforts and your advisor’s recommendation, they rushed to write letters to the school slandering you for academic fraud, ruining your—”
Zhen Ye sighed and cut him off. “Alright, that’s all in the past.”
Cheng Zhiran glared with wide eyes. “‘The past’? You’re not just going to let it go, are you?”
His fingers tightened around the bedsheet, and Zhen Ye silently bit his lip white. “No, I won’t.”
It’s just that this debt is too large, too old. He’ll settle it with the He family—his own, and his mother’s—all together.
·
Zhen Ye hung up the phone and unconsciously shivered, only then realizing he wasn’t wearing a jacket. His back was covered only in a thin shirt, already stiff with cold.
He urged himself to get dressed, but his movements were still slow; he had to pause after every piece of clothing.
As if getting out of bed were some monumental, insurmountable task.
He was used to being alone, but sometimes he couldn’t help but think—would it be better if there were someone by his side?
Someone to tell him what to wear, what to eat, what the weather was like, to go with him to visit his mother buried up in the mountains. Nothing special—just those ordinary, mundane things.
He went out and boarded the bus. Zhen Ye looked out the window at a specialty shop; the mannequin sat there smiling as always.
He pinched his palm and turned his head to face the front of the bus, hiding from the midday rush crowd just how much he yearned—excessively, shamefully—for a doll.
The bus headed south, and the scenery shifted with the passing trees, from falling leaves to lush green—as if time and season were reversing here.
Zhen Ye dozed for a while, then heard the stop announcement: “Nanshan Forest Park—arriving.”
He looked outside. On the left side of the bus stood a sprawling mountain, clouds and mist winding through it like an immortal realm.
Everything beyond this point was Nanshan. It was a nationally renowned vegetation protection area, home to all kinds of endangered species.
Nanshan’s scenery was beautiful; part of it had been developed into a tourist scenic area, but an even larger portion belonged to private territory—the property of the Rong family.
Zhen Ye got off the bus and went up the mountain along a small path.
It was a hiking route.
Back when his mother was alive, she used to bring him hiking here on weekends. But after hikers repeatedly got lost and died, the Rong family declared the mountain closed, and the place gradually became deserted.
Zhen Ye climbed halfway up and reached a small cliff with a wide open view.
He set his backpack down on the ground and sat down himself, leaning against a banyan tree, his brows curving gently at a small pile of stones in front of him.
“Mom, I’ve come to see you again.”
He unzipped his backpack and took out, one by one, the foods Zhen Yi had loved in life.
Zhen Yi had no tombstone.
He Yusheng said her will requested that her ashes be scattered into the sea.
Zhen Ye had never seen the will himself, but he remembered his mother saying once, from her hospital bed, that she wanted to be buried on the quiet Nanshan mountain, to enjoy the scenery day and night.
So Zhen Ye, at fourteen, stole some of her ashes and buried them here.
He murmured softly to his mother: “I’m doing well, don’t worry… Don’t be in a hurry down there. If you meet someone you like, get together with them. If you need money, send me a dream. If you’re tired, reincarnate…”
From fourteen to twenty-four, every month that Zhen Ye was in Maocheng, he came to see Zhen Yi.
Often he came smiling, sometimes crying, occasionally climbing the mountain at midnight with tears streaming, stumbling and rolling, curling up into a ball before her grave.
He said a lot of nonsense, a lot of disheartened words, and threw temper tantrums, asking her to become a ghost and give him a hug.
There were rumors outside that many people had died on Nanshan, that the place was cursed; that the banyan tree on the mountain grew alone into a forest, gloomy and domineering, skilled at devouring people and drinking blood—Zhen Ye didn’t believe a word.
If it truly were cursed, little Zhen Ye would probably have been strangled and devoured by the silently observing tree long ago. How could he still be alive today?
—Unless the evil tree had excellent moral standards, wouldn’t eat children, and was waiting until he grew up to eat him.
Having spent ten years together, Zhen Ye had grown attached to this ancient, timeworn tree grandfather. Every time he heard baseless rumors about it, he felt a sense of protectiveness.
“And your offering.”
Zhen Ye pulled out a pack of frozen chicken breast and buried it under the lush, thick-branched banyan tree, muttering as he dug:
“I have a lot of debts to repay this month, so I can’t afford much meat. I ate one piece of this chicken breast; the rest is all for you.”
For a tree, the ideal food is fertilizer, and the best fertilizer is meat.
Zhen Ye touched the thick, rough bark and, as was his custom, softly made his request:
“Sorry for the trouble. When I’m not here, please look after my mother a little.”
At that moment, a fine drizzle fell from the sky, and the banyan leaves rustled and swayed, as if answering.
Zhen Ye’s practice of making offerings to the tree was somewhat neurotic.
But whether it was truly that all things had spirits, or simply that there were rocks below, the dense, tangled banyan roots had actually grown around this small grave, leaving it untouched—allowing Zhen Ye, even after years away, to find his mother at a single glance.
Zhen Ye bent down, picked up the bags and trash on the ground, and carried them down the mountain.
He didn’t look back, so naturally, he didn’t notice that in the dense, layered forest behind him, an enormous eye—with a pitch-black cornea and blood-red pupil—was suspended in midair, slowly rotating.
It stared straight at the young man’s receding back, its double lids slightly narrowing, making a human-like, eerie, amused expression.
In the treetops, a crow flapped its wings in fright.
From its perspective, that inhuman giant eye suddenly leaned close, adhering to Zhen Ye’s back. Unbeknownst to him, it followed him all the way, vanishing into a sticky, dim cage woven from tree roots.
·
After nightfall, Zhen Ye arrived at Nanshan District Hospital.
He was already very familiar with this place. Before, Zhen Yi had been hospitalized here; now it was his grandmother’s turn.
Grandmother called him. “Sweetie, what time will you get here? If the rain’s coming down hard, don’t bother coming.”
“I’ll be right there,” Zhen Ye ran through the hospital gate holding an umbrella, panting. “The rain isn’t heavy. Don’t worry.”
He smiled. “I brought you your favorite egg cake. I won’t rest until I’ve seen you.”
The old lady was both exasperated and tender-hearted. “You little rascal, always so stubborn.”
“Just like you—a rabbit’s temper.”
Unlike the gentle little white rabbit of common perception, real rabbits are known as “silent beagles”—stubborn and mischievous.
As a child, Zhen Ye had more than once gnawed on his grandmother’s old sandalwood prayer beads. The old lady would chase after him in anger, scolding him as a stinking little rabbit cub.
Now, hearing his voice, the old lady said, “Why are you still running? I’m in Building 4. Found it yet?”
“Not yet.” Zhen Ye said between breaths, ducking under a roof eave to rest for a moment.
He looked up and saw: 【Rongsen Biomedical Research Center】—an institution the Rong family had set up in the hospital. He’d gone into the wrong building.
The hospital complex was sprawling, with old and new buildings standing in a jumble, connected to the neighboring medical university and staff housing. It was easy to take a wrong turn.
Zhen Ye looked for someone to ask directions, and spotted a figure sitting not far away.
He passed through an old-fashioned pavilion and came to a concrete open-air corridor. Grey pillars were covered in nameless vines; from afar they looked lushly winding, up close they appeared clawing and wild.
“Excuse me, could I ask—” Zhen Ye paused to get a better look.
Beneath an old streetlamp, a halo of light glowed warm as jade, tracing the edge of that profile just perfectly.
Well-balanced features, handsome and refined—a gentle, elegant face. But a high, straight nose bridge and thin lips faintly hinted at a sense of distance that status brings, making one feel at a glance that he was of noble bearing—far from ordinary.
To put it more colloquially:
—He was even more perfectly suited than the 168,000-yuan “Owen” in the shop window to match the gentle, dignified mannequin Zhen Ye had imagined in his shameful little moments of self-gratification.
Moreover, the man was built big—even sitting down, he was clearly well over 180 cm.
His posture was upright, his immaculate, austere cuffs slightly open. His hands had clearly defined veins and tendons—the forceful hands of a mature alpha.
“Lost?”
The man seemed to notice him and turned his head slightly. A composed, restrained gaze landed on him unhurriedly.
His voice was mellow, even more pleasing than the AI voice of the Owen mannequin after countless rounds of tuning and enhancement.
The phone pressed hot against his ear, and his grandmother was still calling: “Sweetie! Found it yet?”
Zhen Ye’s heart pounded wildly, and he answered dazedly, “F-found it.”
Not a fake.
A living, ideal type he wanted to take to bed.