Fu Zhen got home at two in the morning.
He had recently switched to a new job, working as a server at a bar. It was almost always this hour by the time he finished his shift.
The small living room was pitch dark. Not a sound. Fu Zhen knew that the flatmates he shared the apartment with had long since gone to bed, so he lightened his footsteps, made his way to his own door, took out his key, and eased it open with the most careful of turns—then pulled it shut again just as carefully. The whole operation produced barely a whisper of sound. No one stirred.
Back in his room, he shed his work clothes immediately. He didn't even bother with the light—just collapsed face-up onto the narrow single bed like a dog that had run itself into the ground.
His breathing was unusually loud in the dark. Two years of relentless overwork had begun to take a toll on his heart, and a few moments after he lay down, it started hammering—an erratic, heavy pounding. His breath grew heavier to match.
After a while, the rhythm gradually settled. Fu Zhen lay still, took two deep breaths, and then got up and turned on the light.
He was renting a room in a shared flat—five people in a space that wasn't particularly large. His room was the smallest of the lot: under five square metres, with nothing in it but a narrow single bed and a small bedside cabinet. Nothing else.
The residential complex was old, all of its buildings decades past their prime. The external walls had begun to crumble at the edges, and on windy days chunks of cement would break loose and fall. Someone had set up a sign outside painted with a skull and crossbones, warning pedestrians to keep clear of the walls.
Inside, the building was no better. The concrete staircase ran all the way up to the eighth floor, its corners and edges long since chipped away. The yellowed walls were covered in children's crayon drawings—cartoon characters in every colour—and plastered over with small ads for broadband installation and renovation services. Word was that the whole area was slated for demolition in a few years to make way for a university district.
The landlord was a local, but didn't live on the premises. He came by only on the fifth of each month to collect rent. The living room, kitchen, and bathroom were all shared between the tenants.
The rent was cheap—four hundred yuan a month—but even that amount was no small burden for Fu Zhen. He was working two jobs and still only bringing in under four thousand yuan a month. Once he'd paid for food, housing, and medication, less than a thousand was left over.
Back in April, he'd had a minor accident on the construction site, and it had wiped out every penny he'd saved the year before.
His bank account now held less than three thousand yuan. He was hoping to buy a second-hand laptop and a drawing tablet before the New Year—nothing fancy, two or three thousand should cover it.
Fu Zhen counted on his fingers, carefully mapping out how to stretch the coming months. In the end, he let out a long sigh, flopped back onto the bed, and pulled a pillow over his face.
All he could do was tell himself: once he had the laptop and the tablet, things would get better.
He reached out and switched off the light, then yanked the blanket off the foot of the bed and pulled it over himself. In minutes, he was asleep.
He dreamed.
In the dream, he was lying face-down on an ice-cold floor. Pain had twisted his features into something unrecognisable—he didn't need a mirror to know he looked awful. His father stood on the second-floor walkway above him, one hand resting on the gleaming silver railing, looking down at him the way a person might look at a pile of maggots.
Fu Zhen's leg was in agony. He tilted his head back and looked up at his father. He opened his mouth to explain—to say something, anything—but looking at his father's face, it was as though someone had stuffed a wad of cotton down his throat. He couldn't make a single sound.
The woman he despised stepped out from behind his father, placed a glass of water in his father's hand, and said softly: "Dad, please, calm down."
His father turned to her with a smile. "You've been put through so much," he said. "I'm sorry."
Fu Zhen felt the cold hit him all at once—as though he'd been dropped into a frozen lake. He shook uncontrollably, his teeth chattering, a tiny hammer beating against his eardrums.
His father's expression shifted to one of profound disappointment. "Go," he said, coldly and flatly. "Don't ever let me see you again."
Fu Zhen opened his mouth, but only a raw, hoarse sound came out. His father frowned, and then the servants came. They dragged him out through the gate of the Fu family compound and dumped him on the street outside like a bag of rubbish.
Just like that, he was expelled from the Fu family. Thrown out of the home he had lived in for more than twenty years.
Fu Zhen woke from the dream. He glanced at the alarm clock on his bedside table: five in the morning. He had no idea why he'd woken at this hour—his mind was startlingly clear, without a trace of drowsiness.
He lay there clutching the blanket, the cold of the dream still clinging to him like something burrowed into the bone. And then his leg began to ache—not sharply, but with the deep, creeping sensation of countless tiny insects boring through his skin, gnawing into the flesh beneath.
In the room next door, someone had left the television on loud. The walls were thin.
Fu Zhen could make out every word.
A bank in the Xiling district had been robbed the previous night—the perpetrator armed with two toy pistols, walking away with three hundred thousand yuan. An adult goods shop had opened near Century Primary School and was being forced to renovate after complaints from parents. And then… the news of that woman's engagement to the eldest son of the Qin family.
The patriarch of the Fu family, as a gesture of blessing to his beloved treasure, had transferred five percent of the company's shares into her name as part of her dowry.
And his brother had built her a fairytale castle—complete with a swan lake and an amusement park.
The envy of everyone.
Fu Zhen felt a roughness in his throat—probably coming down with something. He pushed back the blanket and sat up, immediately shivering from the cold. He stepped into his slippers and limped out to the living room, filled a glass with water, and lowered himself onto the old sofa.
He sipped at the glass. The water was ice-cold going down, sliding all the way to his stomach, where it produced a small cramp.
Fu Zhen's expression didn't change. He seemed not to feel it. The air carried a faint smell of instant noodles. In the darkness, he could make out every small sound—and outside, the occasional blare of a car horn from the street.
He set down the glass and leaned back against the sofa. Without knowing why, he began to think of his childhood: himself in a blue pair of dungarees over a white shirt,
sitting on the sprawling lawn outside the villa, clasping the small red rubber ball his father had just bought him, while golden light filtered through thick leaves and laid a dappled mosaic across the grass.
A dog barked. His brother came home from school, walked over, and crouched down. He lifted Fu Zhen onto his back and carried him inside.
Fu Zhen slowly surfaced from the memory. In the early days after being thrown out of the Fu family, he had often told himself that perhaps this was all just a dream—that when he finally woke, everything would go back to the way it used to be.
Now, he understood. Even if this was a dream, it was one he would never wake from, not until the day he died.
He didn't even dare show his face in busy, prosperous parts of the city anymore. His brother, for the sake of that woman, had made him a threat: appear in front of them again, and the other leg would be broken too.
Fu Zhen almost wanted to laugh. But he couldn't quite manage it. He tilted his head back and stared up at the ceiling. In the dark he couldn't see anything—only countless tiny points of red and green light drifting before his eyes, slowly dissolving into each other.
You see, he thought. Nothing in this world is impossible.
A long time passed. Fu Zhen got up from the sofa and went back to his room. He had to be at the construction site in the morning, hauling bricks. While it was still dark, he could get a little more sleep.
At half past seven, the alarm beside his pillow rang. Fu Zhen climbed out of bed, dressed in his work clothes with the ease of long practice, and was at the construction site before eight.
Winter had come. Every year at this season, Fu Zhen's leg ached badly. He had taken far too many painkillers over the years, and his body had built up a resistance; the cheap ones hardly worked on him anymore, and the stronger kind were well beyond what he could afford on his current income.
As the weather grew colder, outdoor work would soon become impossible for him, and with it, more than half his income would disappear. Because of the leg, Fu Zhen could only manage six hours at the construction site per day—less than half the pay of the other workers.
These past two years had left thick calluses on his hands. Who could have imagined that the pampered little young master of the Fu family would one day come to this? It sounded like the punchline to some awful joke.
Still—whatever else, staying alive came first. After a long morning on the site, Fu Zhen bought himself a takeaway box, ate a couple of mouthfuls, then hurried off to the bar.
By this point it was evening. The sun was low and heavy, and dusk had settled over Pinghai City. Half the sky was smothered in a grey-blue haze; the other half was soaked through with the red of the setting sun. Rose-gold light blazed back from the glass facades of the high-rises in sheets of fierce, spreading fire. Fu Zhen stood in the bus, hanging off one of the straps overhead, too exhausted to keep his eyes open, swaying half-asleep.
The green No. 309 bus rattled and groaned its way through the city like a languid silkworm. Without warning, a schoolboy in a heavy backpack sprinted across the road ahead. The driver slammed the brakes.
The bus lurched. Fu Zhen stumbled forward, and his mind went completely blank.
But the impact he'd been bracing for never came. He had pitched into something warm—a chest. A hand caught his back, steadying him before he could truly fall. Fu Zhen blinked. His eyes stung, unexpectedly. For one moment, he missed his brother.
He drew a breath, gripped the nearby seat rail, and carefully straightened up. He looked at the man beside him. He was a head taller than Fu Zhen, wearing a dark olive trench coat. With the light behind him, it was hard to make out his face—just a jaw dusted with a ring of dark stubble, the look of someone who'd stopped bothering.
Fu Zhen said, quietly: "Thank you."
The man made a low sound of acknowledgement. Nothing more. His expression was somewhat detached.
1191260-2794Author's note: The first twenty chapters aren't sweet. The sweetness comes after chapter twenty. I'm so sorry—I can't remove the sweet romance tag while the novel is on the rankings list.