That year I was nineteen. 

My lifesaver—also my first employer, one of the most famous tomb raiders in the Southwest—had died on his sickbed just after turning fifty. 

The cause of death was a brain tumor.

I had stayed in the hospital to keep watch over him, helping to wipe his body, empty his urine basin, and attend to him in every possible way, treating him as my second father. 

When his mind was still clear, despite the headaches, vomiting, and epileptic seizures, he would joke with me and say, “Look—this is what happens when you make money off the dead.”

Xiao Mai, he would say again, I knew why you wanted to become a bodyguard. 

I knew how much suffering you carried inside, but you couldn’t go on living like this forever.

Xiao Mai, he also said, you were best at protecting others. 

I’ll leave Auntie in your care. She’s still young—if she wants to get married, let her marry; if she wants to make a comeback, let her. It’s just that the entertainment industry is too filthy and chaotic. I was afraid she would be bullied.

Xiao Mai—once a person’s hands were stained with blood, they could never be washed clean for the rest of their life.

Did you believe that?

“Go back.”

I pointed to the road we had come from and said to the boy, “Go back to your own home.”

The boy’s tears stopped. 

His uncertain, startled gaze hovered over my face.

“But she…”

“Jin Wei deliberately had you bring us here. He never intended to let you live. If your lies were exposed, you would be killed by the two of us. If you followed us into the trap, you would be killed by ‘those people.’ And if you survived, it would mean we knew he was the one behind you, so we would let you live. The moment you stepped through your door, he would shoot you in the head. When it was our turn to come for revenge, he would say you were the one lying and clean himself of everything.”

I said, “Did you understand?”

He didn’t understand. He was weak and stupid, but he had to live. 

He had to go to school, make friends, fall in love. 

I shoved his shoulder.

“If you understand, then get lost.”

The boy staggered back a step, pressed his lips together without speaking. 

His wet eyes swept over me in panic, briefly passed over Yu Baijin, and finally chose to turn away from us, running off with an uneven, bouncing gait.

The deep, heavy green shade swallowed him like a stage curtain drawn in a single motion. 

His retreating figure was light, like a young deer.

Yu Baijin sighed.

“You were too soft-hearted, baby,” he said. 

“If something really happened to Rong Wanqing, killing that kid wouldn’t have been excessive at all.”

“I wasn’t the same as you.”

My heart rate was a little too fast. 

I didn’t know whether it was physical exhaustion or psychological strain. 

I tried to slow my breathing and did my best not to let Yu Baijin notice the slight abnormality.

“Besides, a little brat here would only get in the way.”

There were people in the warehouse. 

I thought he had already noticed.

“That’s true.”

With eyesight sharp enough to kiss me in a dark cinema and also to shoot through my side abdomen from within an effective range of fifty meters—perfectly avoiding my spine and hip bone—he truly was heaven-chosen.

“Let’s go over. Be careful.”

I couldn’t help closing my eyes for a moment, pinching the bridge of my nose, telling myself not to think anymore.

—The warehouse in the suburbs.

“Don’t be nervous.”

—Men’s vicious laughter and women’s screams.

“Maybe she already escaped.”

—A torn skirt, underwear, and a camera held in someone’s hand.

I pushed open the half-closed door.

That year, I was nineteen, and for the first time in the true sense of the word, I killed someone.

To protect my employer, who had been kidnapped and gang-raped, I—just barely an adult—had caused a total of fifteen casualties on the other side, dead and wounded combined, all by myself. 

The incident caused an uproar and fermented for months, uncovering an illegal film industry chain that implicated half of the entertainment world. 

Many actresses who had suffered in silence stood up afterward to testify, cursing that those gangsters had deserved to die, that their deaths were deeply satisfying, that they should die again, tens of thousands of times over.

When they heard that I had been seriously injured and hospitalized, some of them even came specially to visit me, thanking me and praising me as a “loyal dog” who protected his master, saying that if I ever got tired of my current employer, I would be welcome to defect to them.

I agreed to none of them.

I vomited for many days, couldn’t eat, and grew thin like a ghost. 

Three ribs were broken. I had a concussion and internal bleeding. 

Seeing a woman’s naked body made me feel a sense of guilt. 

My second employer had said, “Even I was scared by you at the time.”

She wasn’t very old, and she was deeply favored—a delicate flower raised in a greenhouse. 

After this disaster, both her body and mind were severely damaged, yet she recovered faster than I did. 

She sat by my hospital bed peeling apples for me, carving them unevenly and ugly.

“You were like a little mad dog,” she said. 

“You bit everyone you saw, and you didn’t let go until they were dead.”

The instant someone lunged at me from behind the warehouse door, the knife slid out of my sleeve and plunged into his abdomen.

It was fine. This time, I wouldn’t vomit again.

I grabbed the man by the cheeks and, using the knife’s momentum, pinned him against the wall.

“Where was she?” I asked.

He didn’t speak. 

All his strength was focused on the hands blocking me from stabbing deeper. 

Heavy blood loss made his grip unstable. 

Hot, fishy breath sprayed out of his mouth.

I asked again.

“Where was she?”

In the blink of an eye, Yu Baijin had disappeared from my field of vision, leaving only a silhouette cast on the wall by the warehouse lights, flashing past like a ghost—followed immediately by gunshots and the sound of bodies hitting the ground. 

That was physical ability and agility beyond ordinary people. 

I had only crossed hands with him once in my life—only that once.

If not for luck, Rong Wanqing and I would have died last Halloween night, turned into two piles of stark white bones.

I pulled the knife from the dying man’s abdomen and flung another attacker who tried to ambush me from behind to the ground. 

He had a gun, which I kicked away with one strike. 

It flew toward the corner of the warehouse stacked with bundles of lumber and disappeared into some crack.

He was about my size, wearing a black pullover, black pants, and black shoes. 

I knelt on his back, twisted his arms behind him, pressed the gun barrel to the back of his head, and asked for the third time:

“Where was she?”

“She ran.”

The man said, half his face pressed to the ground. 

“Jin Wei said she was in his warehouse…”

I grabbed the hair at the back of his head and smashed his face into the concrete.

“So you people lost her?”

The man laughed.

“Who knows?”

My finger on the trigger went slightly numb.

“Who ordered you?”

His head was forced up. 

One eye was swollen shut. 

He panted heavily. 

Two bloody teeth fell out of his mouth, mixed with stomach acid and hoarse laughter.

“Go ask the dead, pretty boy.”

—We had still missed her.

After a gunshot, everything fell silent, dead silent.

The one who fired wasn’t me. 

The man who had just been acting fearless widened his eyes, his trembling gaze locking onto something in the distance as all color drained from his face.

Following his line of sight, I saw Yu Baijin at the other end of the warehouse, corpses scattered everywhere, and milky white brain matter dripping at his feet.

Drop by drop. 

Most of the dead man’s skull in his hand had exploded open, red and white fluids flowing down. 

The nerve endings were still responsive, the limbs still twitching—like fish meat to be slaughtered, toys torn apart, crushed donuts. 

Living people and dead people were the same in his eyes, equal in value, no different at all.

“Killing” to him was as casual as eating or drinking.

He saw me and waved at me with a beaming smile.

“Bad news—Wanqing wasn’t here.”

That hand was completely soaked in blood, as if painted red or dipped into a pool of it.

“Good news,” he said. 

“They were the same group that attacked me that night.”

“Oh.”

I straightened up.

“What a coincidence.”

I changed my mind.

“Then you had to live.”

As if he had foreseen what was about to happen, the man became panicked. 

He was too noisy, so I fired a shot into his left arm. 

It was my first time using this standard-issue gun. 

It felt good—moderate weight, low recoil. 

My stomach still cramped slightly.

Later I understood: I felt disgusted with myself.

Grabbing the screaming man by the collar, I dragged him to the still-warm corpse, seized the back of his neck, and forced his face into the puddle of his companion’s brain matter.

“When you leave here, go back and tell your master: I was someone who always repaid grudges. Send as many people as you wanted—I would kill that many. Don’t push people too far.”

Yu Baijin raised his eyebrows.

“Did you understand?”

The man retched violently. 

Something like white tofu dregs stuck to the tip of his nose. 

He trembled like a sieve, a dark wet patch spreading across his crotch, giving off a nauseating stench of urine.

“Run.”

I raised my gun, pointed it at the warehouse door, and forced him to stand up with weak, trembling limbs, staggering outside.

“If you dared to stop, I would break your other arm. I wouldn’t let you die anyway.

“Good luck.”

Facing the warehouse door, I silently counted to ten, threw the gun on the ground, and sat down as well, like a puddle of mud, unable to accept this outcome—not the worst, but still infuriating.

We had brushed past Rong Wanqing.

The disappointment, exhaustion, the frustration of the enemy hiding in the dark while we were in the open, the emptiness of drawing water with a bamboo basket, and the embarrassment after a moment of hot-headed venting—all of it felt as though it had stripped me naked, revealing a body full of ugly, festering sores.

Yet in front of Yu Baijin, I urgently wanted to defend myself. 

Standing in his gaze, I was desperate to tell him that I wasn’t this kind of person.

A mad dog. A vicious, neurotic… person who had once been in love with him.

Why I feared his misunderstanding, and how I should prove myself to him, I couldn’t figure out even briefly. 

I could only turn my face away, suppressing the unease in my heart, and ask him instead:

“What were you thinking?”

He squatted among the scattered corpses, one hand resting across his knee, the other sweeping his blood-stained black hair back from his forehead. 

He lowered his head, resting it on his arm, a pair of smiling eyes showing from the crook of his elbow.

“I was thinking about having s*x with you.”