In that split second of distraction, a crack opened in Chu Xusheng’s illusion.

Zhou Qian sensed the danger at once. Brown snake scales flashed across his body, and his pupils narrowed into slits. With the heat vision of a pit viper sharpening his sight, he caught the figure hidden inside the illusion.

The Zhou family’s atavist blood came from a viper. They were Snake Atavists.

“Who are you?” Zhou Qian asked, alert.

Chu Xusheng looked at him without expression. “An enemy of the Zhou family.”

A thoughtful look crossed Zhou Qian’s face.

That made Chu Xusheng laugh—a cold, shallow laugh that never reached his eyes. “Too many enemies to guess which one?”

Something seemed to occur to Zhou Qian. Shame showed on his face. “I’m sorry… I can offer some limited compensation, if that’s what you want.”

Chu Xusheng hadn’t expected to find even this scrap of humanity on the face of a Zhou. He had thought every last one of them was an animal. Still, if Zhou Qian had any humanity at all, it wasn’t much.

Chu Xusheng let out a cold laugh and drew back his scorpion tail. “I don’t want your compensation. And you couldn’t make up for it even if you tried. What your Zhou family owes me, I’ll collect with my own hands. This won’t end until one side is dead.”

He turned and walked away.

Zhou Qian stood there, watching that red figure recede into the distance and disappear. Then he dropped onto a broken crate by the roadside, defeated.

He would never forget the day he came home and saw that Zhou Yongzi had become someone else.

And he would never forget the woman by her side, her mouth open in a silent scream.

Chu Xusheng would never forget that day either.

He couldn’t get through to his sister, no matter how many times he called. So he started calling the bakery clerk instead.

It took more than a dozen calls before the person finally picked up. They hemmed and hawed, sounding guilty, and said in a tone full of implication, “Your sister’s boyfriend called her over to his house this morning. She probably won’t be coming back to work. The shop’s shutting down.”

Why was the clerk acting like that? Had she been warned? Bought off? What had that atavist family done to his sister?

He immediately dug out every bit of money he had saved over the years. He borrowed what he could from classmates and friends, bought the fastest ticket he could afford, and rushed to Yunjin Prefecture.

By the time he arrived, the bakery was already closed. The clerk was gone. A fierce dread took hold of him.

He went straight to the Zhou estate and started circling it.

The estate sat halfway up a mountain, backed by a cliff. Security was tight. In the night, it looked like some lavish demon palace.

He had grown up in the countryside. Climbing hills and trees was what he did best. He meant to find a way in and find his sister.

Instead, after circling around, he came to the bottom of the cliff.

There he saw a heap of bones.

And he saw his sister lying on the ground.

Her face was gone, reduced to a bloody blur. Her eye sockets were empty. Her mouth gaped wide, but no sound came out. Her body was twisted from the fall.

And he still recognized her at a glance.

There were no words for what he felt then. It was as if his heart had split open.

After their parents divorced, each took one child away. Then both remarried. Brother and sister ended up with the same fate—ignored, looked down on, treated like extra people in someone else’s home.

At least they still had each other.

They could call. Encourage each other. Lean on each other.

Even that little bit of happiness had been taken from them.

“Please… help me…” the boy whispered through tears, his voice raw.

…

It was nearly late morning before Jing Pei got out of bed. It was Saturday, so there were no classes.

She had just finished washing up when she heard a few maids clustered by the wall, peeking at something. She went over and looked too.

“What’s all the excitement?”

She saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with hard muscle under his clothes. He wore a neat little mustache, and both arms were covered in dense tattoos—wild vines crawling over skin, the same untamed feel the man himself gave off.

The maids jumped and hurried to explain. “Young heir, he’s here to apply as your family doctor. He came a few days ago too, but Second Master Long threw him out.”

But wow, he was handsome. Rugged, masculine, tattoo sleeves, that mustache, all that muscle—and he was a doctor? The contrast was intense.

It was Tang Woxue.

The corner of Jing Pei’s mouth lifted. She walked out.

“Second Uncle.”

The two men in the living room both looked over.

Tang Woxue’s eyes lit at once. He flashed a bright white grin, sunny and open, all easy charm. “Hello, Young Heir Long. I’m Tang Woxue, here to apply as your family doctor. This is my atavist medical license.”

The license looked so new it might have been issued that morning.

In fact, it had.

Long Yiming’s face darkened. “This guy studied atavist medicine on his own for one week and thinks he can come work as our family doctor. Is this some kind of joke?”

“Mr. Long, a man as broad-minded and well-informed as you must know that this only proves how exceptional I am.” As he spoke, he handed his résumé to Jing Pei.

She flipped through it, then said, “I don’t need a family doctor. Mr. Tang is this capable—he’d do more good working at a major hospital.”

“That may be true. But if a person only lives once, then living for yourself matters more than living for others.” He scratched his head with a smile, looking almost embarrassed, yet somehow still sincere. “My obsession with the Chinese dragon is beyond cure. Serving you is my lifelong dream, even if it’s only for a while. If I can’t do that, I probably won’t be able to focus on work anyway. I’ll think about it day and night until I ruin both myself and other people. That’s why I had the nerve to come apply. I hope you’ll give me a chance.”

Jing Pei looked at him. “That sounds pretty perverted.”

Tang Woxue’s smile stiffened.

She gave him an odd look, not looking convinced at all, then turned to Long Yiming. “Second Uncle, you decide.”

With that, she turned and left.

“Where are you going?” Long Yiming called after her.

“I’ve got plans with Director Qiu.”

Long Yiming panicked at once. Qiu Fa again? Last time she met Qiu Fa, it stirred up so much trouble. And now again? What was it this time?

Not long after Jing Pei left, Tang Woxue was thrown out of the Long family estate for the second time. His résumé was flashy enough, but in Long Yiming’s eyes, trying to become the Long family young heir’s doctor after one week of self-study was flat-out disrespectful.

They were the Azure Dragon clan.

“Looks like it won’t be that easy,” Tang Woxue said outside the gate, sounding helpless. But his eyes, deep as still water in an ancient well, did not stir.

Then again, that was normal.

If it had been too easy for him to get close, Jing Pei might have gotten suspicious instead, she thought from inside the car.

She had arranged to meet Qiu Fa at a seafood restaurant. By the time she arrived, he was already there.

Maybe because he wasn’t on duty, he wasn’t wearing the Tribunal Division uniform. He had on only a worn black T-shirt. Without the director’s cap, his thick, close-cropped hair showed, and the clean line of his bone structure stood out all the more. His features were sharp, his face striking enough to make people in the restaurant look back again and again.

What a crisp, no-nonsense, dark-featured cool guy.

Then Jing Pei walked in, and the place became even harder to ignore.

Dark-featured beauty, times two.

Her naturally wavy black hair fell to her waist. Her skin was smooth as cream. A pair of catlike eyes sat under thick brows, bright as gemstones. She wore no makeup, yet her lips looked soft and fresh, like flower petals holding dew. There was something gentle and mysterious about her, something that made her seem distant and hard to approach.

Not just because she carried that expensive, out-of-reach kind of beauty.

She also looked sharp. The kind of woman who didn’t seem easy to fool. The kind who could make an average man break into a cold sweat just by looking at him too long.

“Have you been waiting long?” Jing Pei asked as she sat down beside him.

“No.” Qiu Fa folded his arms, his face blank. “This could have been said over the phone. There was no need to meet in person.”

“Why say it like that? Am I not allowed to want to see you?” Jing Pei shot back.

Qiu Fa looked at her with stern disapproval. “Don’t joke with adults like that.”

“I’m not joking. Who wouldn’t like a big cat?” Jing Pei smiled. Who wouldn’t like something that fluffy and that huge?

“Don’t think of me as some zoo tiger.”

“Right. It’s exactly because you’re not the kind of big cat in a zoo—or in the wild—that might hurt or eat people that I like you more.”

Qiu Fa went still and stared at her.

She had already turned to the server to order, sounding as though she had said it on a whim. She really wasn’t afraid of him. Was that because she didn’t know his past—or because she truly believed he was innocent?

In the end, the government had pulled him out of the White Tiger family massacre by citing an incomplete chain of evidence, the Minors Protection Act, and the loophole in the Atavist Management Regulations that allowed the state to intervene because he was an orphan raised by a government institution.

Which meant there was no proof he hadn’t done it, either.

So the atavist families all believed he had done it. They believed the government kept him because he was alone in the world, hated by all atavist families, and useful as a weapon to keep them in check.

And the truth was—they weren’t wrong.

Children in those families were taught from a young age that Qiu Fa was a murderer, a traitor, someone to stay away from. Jing Pei was the first person he had ever met who spoke to him with that kind of trust.

And she had said it so casually.

As if it were the most natural truth in the world.

As if there had never been any room to doubt him.

“What are you spacing out for?”

Qiu Fa came back to himself and picked up the glass of water on the table. “Go on.”

Jing Pei had asked him out to honor their agreement and tell him what she had bought from the intelligence broker about his past. He had refused at first; protecting Wen Yuxian and Zhang Simiao hadn’t been for the sake of getting anything in return.

But Jing Pei had already bought the information.

It had cost fifty million.

At the thought, the big cat nearly crushed the cup in his hand.

Jing Pei glanced around, then reached over and took his hand.

Qiu Fa’s first instinct was to pull away. He hated that kind of contact with women; it brought back foul memories. Jing Pei gave him a look that felt almost scolding, and he endured it.

With one finger, she wrote a date into his palm.

“Remember it?” she asked.

Qiu Fa repeated it once in his head. “This is the fifty-million piece of information? A date?”

Jing Pei nodded. “This is the day you die.”

His amber eyes widened a fraction.

He looked at her.

“On that day, someone will ask you to go somewhere. If you go, you’ll die there.” Jing Pei met his gaze, serious now. “Remember that date, big cat. I like you a lot. You’re a good person. You can help a lot of people. On that day, stay at the Tribunal Division. Don’t go anywhere.”

In the original story, Qiu Fa had been the kind of side character who barely took up any page time and still left a huge impression—the kind readers remembered, loved, and talked about. He spent his whole life chasing the truth behind the Green Ribbon, only to die when he was just a few steps away from it. Like Chu Xusheng, he was a tragic figure from beginning to end, with a road so bitter it could not have been made worse.

Jing Pei had always liked that character.

But liking him had never stopped her from stabbing him with the plot. She was a writer with no conscience, after all. Some readers even said the more she liked a character, the more determined she was to kill them off.

Unfair.

But things were different now.

This person had gone from a two-dimensional character to a living, breathing human being.

And she needed Qiu Fa’s strength.

“Why would that intelligence broker know the future?” he asked.

“No idea. Maybe they’re some kind of atavist creature that can see what’s coming?”

“Don’t trust that kind of—” He looked at Jing Pei and swallowed the curse he had been about to say. “That kind of gutter rat too much. How does he get this information? What if it turns on you one day? What are you going to do then?”

“But he has pretty good professional ethics. And it cost fifty million. Better to believe it than risk ignoring it.” Jing Pei played her part to the end, then asked with easy curiosity, “The broker said they’ll lure you there by using what matters most to you. So what do you care about most?”

“Mind your own business.” Qiu Fa got to his feet.

“Stay and have lunch first.”

“No.”

Just then, a server came over carrying a huge platter of thick-cut bluefin tuna.

Qiu Fa’s eyes moved before he could stop them, following the fresh, gleaming slices of fish.

Jing Pei smiled. “You’re really not eating? I ordered this in advance. It can’t be returned, and I can’t finish it by myself. What a waste.”

“…Food shouldn’t be wasted.”

Qiu Fa sat back down with a blank face, though the tips of his ears had turned a little red.

After a pleasant lunch with the big cat, Jing Pei went shopping. She still needed to pick out a birthday gift for Wu Ying.

Right now, no one in entertainment could rival Zhou Yongzi’s momentum. That unmatched beauty, that siren voice, those dreamlike eyes—everywhere they appeared, they crushed the competition. Top international brands were fighting to work with her. Her billboards were everywhere.

Jing Pei was staring at one of them when she suddenly felt a strange presence appear behind her.