As expected, the meeting lasted almost an entire day.
Whenever it came to gameplay features or story content, the brainstorming and review sessions always ended up with a bunch of people arguing for ages.
After the basic elements were finalized, the other colleagues gradually clocked out and left.
By the time Jiang Ying and Jin Chuyu finished discussing the remaining version details, both were starving.
“I just sent you the packaged artwork files.” Jin Chuyu yawned. “Want to grab a late-night snack together?”
“Sure.”
Jiang Ying rubbed her eyes.
Ever since losing her sight, even without using her eyes to look at anything, she often still felt a dry, gritty sensation.
The lights in the company were all off already. Jin Chuyu couldn’t be bothered to turn them back on and just used her phone’s flashlight.
The two had just reached the company entrance when Jiang Ying remembered Su Heng was still waiting in the small conference room.
“Ah… my doggy is still in there, I forgot. How about we reschedule?”
“You’re something else, so spaced out from meetings you can’t think straight? How do you forget a whole person that big?” Jin Chuyu waved her hand, and the sliding glass door slowly closed between them. “Go on, go on, go play with your ‘big doggy’.”
Jiang Ying listened to the door close in front of her, then turned and walked toward the small conference room.
The venetian blinds were completely shut, and the lights were off both inside and out.
Jiang Ying didn’t need light; her eyes had not even the faintest perception of brightness left. She was used to the darkness and didn’t find anything amiss at first.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The curtains inside were still drawn. Only when the wind lifted them did a sliver of moonlight slant in, quickly vanishing again under the swaying shadows.
The tall, silent Beastman was leaning against the wall by the window. From the moment she had stepped out of the main conference room, he had been intently listening to her footsteps.
Before she had even pushed the door open, he had already lifted his gaze toward where she would appear.
His slightly narrowed, elongated eyes instantly locked onto the target. In that flickering light, for a split second, they glinted a deep scarlet.
Su Heng had never experienced such a contradictory moment.
Catching her pheromones, he felt both a sense of peace and, simultaneously, a surge of restlessness.
This meager light posed virtually no hindrance to a Beastman with excellent night vision.
He stood in the darkness, watching her lift her arms, fumbling her way closer to him.
The emotions he had barely managed to soothe were stirring awake again.
He pressed himself tightly against the wall just to suppress the urge for his tail to lift and wag, and to control the impulse to immediately pounce on her.
“Su Heng?”
Jiang Ying wasn’t sure if her doggy was still here, and she started to get anxious.
She shouldn’t have left him alone here… in such an unfamiliar environment, with so many strangers outside, wouldn’t he be scared and stressed?
After so long with no response, had he run off on his own?
Maybe she should have tied him up here?
Her thoughts spiraled more and more chaotically. Without her blind cane in hand, she overlooked the obstacle in front of her.
Just before she collided with the table and chairs ahead, Su Heng strode over to her side in a single step and steadied her arm.
“Careful.”
In the faint light that chased its way through the gaps, the towering Beastman kept her shielded within his own shadow.
It gave him a secretive, fleeting illusion that she belonged solely to him.
Su Heng looked down at her.
In his lowered gaze were emotions he himself couldn’t understand: delight, relief, a hint of resentment, suppressed attachment, and anxiety instantly soothed.
He had truly been waiting for her for a very long time.
“You’re still here.” Jiang Ying let out a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness. I thought I’d lost you.”
“…” Su Heng’s voice was muffled. “I told you, I wouldn’t wander off and get lost.”
She hadn’t taken that doggy promise seriously.
Not last time, and not this time either.
She just happily lifted her hand, wanting to pat his head or his ears. But because he didn’t proactively lean down this time, her raised hand met empty air.
“Good dog.”
Jiang Ying instead took hold of his hand hanging at his side. “It’s so stuffy in here, let’s go outside.”
There was no one else left outside.
It was pitch black everywhere, but she didn’t know that. She led Su Heng toward the sofa area.
Having him help her avoid obstacles was indeed a huge relief. The walk from the small conference room to the sofa had never felt so short.
Reaching the sofa, Jiang Ying swung his hand. “Su Heng, you sit down first.”
He didn’t overthink it and obediently sat.
But he immediately regretted it.
He hadn’t expected Jiang Ying to feel her way along his position, climb onto the sofa, and then climb onto his lap, inching forward with her eyes closed.
Only when she was securely kneeling astride him did she nuzzle into his embrace like cuddling a large dog, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face in his chest.
“I’m so tired.”
She made a muffled sound against the crook of his neck.
It sounded almost like she was acting coy.
Su Heng’s entire body went rigid. He had always been decisive and ruthless on the battlefield, yet time and again, he was thrown into confusion by her unexpected actions.
But that coquettish voice, laced with exhaustion, made it utterly impossible for him to push her away.
“I originally planned, after getting home from work, to have you help me look at those illustrations. You know, every time I listen to them discuss things in meetings, I actually…”
She paused, hugging him even tighter. The bridge of her nose rubbed against his neck again and again, causing his tensed spine to straighten repeatedly.
“Oh, what’s the point of telling you all this, you’re just a doggy. Where was I? Oh, I wanted to go home and have you help me, but I feel like I won’t have any energy once I’m home.” She sniffled. “Let’s finish the work here, then go home.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. Su Heng didn’t make a sound.
And since he was just a doggy, Jiang Ying naturally didn’t need any response from him anyway.
“So comfortable.” Completely oblivious to the reaction of the man beneath her, she hummed happily. “Hugging my doggy.”
Even because she found it so warm, she tried tugging at his hands, signaling for him to hold her, to make her back warm too.
Su Heng hesitantly lifted his arms and slowly wrapped them around her.
An entire day’s longing was alleviated in this instant.
But it still wasn’t enough.
What he wanted to do to her went far beyond this.
“What do you need me to do?”
He stared reservedly straight ahead at the opposite wall, not looking at her neck so close to him.
Right there was the gland that released pheromones. If he bit down, he would be instantly soothed, far more effectively than last night.
Su Heng couldn’t articulate just how much willpower he expended at this moment to manage not touching her at all.
It was… roughly as difficult as enduring the pain of the prosthetic body experiments back then.
“My phone’s in my pocket.”
She softened her voice, speaking in a coquettish, coaxing tone pressed right against him, as if humoring him. “Obedient dog, take it out for me.”
An utterly ordinary phrase, heard in such a position, became wildly suggestive.
Su Heng’s eyelashes fluttered lightly. With restraint, he reached into her pocket.
Something slipped out and fell to the side in the process, but he had no attention to spare for it.
“Found it?” Jiang Ying turned her face slightly, letting him angle the screen for facial recognition to unlock it. “It should be the folder Chuchu sent me that’s already open, right? Help me describe the scenes in those concept art pieces. Start from the first one.”
Su Heng tapped open the folder and began his second regret of the day.
Even as thumbnails, the list full of kabedons, bed tackles, and car tackles made his eyelid twitch. Among those heart-racing, blush-inducing actions, kissing and hugging seemed like nothing at all.
He hesitated, not opening any of them.
Jiang Ying poked his waist impatiently. “Hurry up.”
“…” Su Heng took a deep breath and opened the first image. “The first few seem to be a set, depicting a sequence of actions.”
In that meeting, the art team had provided the draft CG sketches for the highlight story moments of each male lead for this Valentine’s Day card art. From the initial story conflict to the final tender intimacy, naturally, no part lacked spicy content.
Included among them was the rough sketch of Akkad that the artist had revised on the spot during the meeting.
But a little dog shouldn’t understand any of that.
She still had no reservations at this moment. She nodded against the curve of his neck. “Oh, storyboard sketches? They finished storyboards this fast? Seems like the artists had fun drawing it… ahem, continue.”
“The protagonist of the first set is an adult male Beastman, canine-type by the looks of it. The other is a human female, facing away from the picture plane, her face unseen.”
“You’re describing it so boringly; I already know all that.”
She shifted, finding an even more comfortable position to sprawl on him. “Good dog, you really are so comfortable. Describe the interaction between the two people in that set of images, okay?”
Su Heng fell silent again.
Jiang Ying waited for quite a while, and just as her patience was about to run out, her doggy finally spoke again.
“…The Beastman is slumped in a dim corner. He seems injured, with bloodstains on his face and arms. His mental state is poor; he doesn’t appear lucid.”
“The girl in the image wants to approach him but accidentally stumbles and lands on his… lap.”
Exactly like their current posture.
Su Heng closed his eyes briefly.
Then opened them again.
“The Beastman wants to struggle, perhaps wants to push her away, but chains bind his neck, arms, and legs. He can’t move, he can only let the girl—”
He suddenly stopped.
Up to this point, it was all still within Jiang Ying’s acceptable range.
Suppressing the inner sense of dissonance, she propped herself up on Su Heng’s shoulders and sat up. She asked, “Let her do what?”
With the distance now pulled back, he saw her face in the faint moonlight.
“The girl seems to be holding a bottle of medicine in her hand. She wants to feed it to the Beastman, but the other party has fallen into a berserk state and won’t cooperate at all.”
Where she couldn’t see, Su Heng tilted his head up slightly.
Those smoky-gray eyes fluttered down, his gaze skimming her chin tip, flushed from nestling against his shoulder, before landing on her opening and closing crimson lips, and staying there.
Amidst the Beastman’s breathing, that pair of quiet pupils faintly flashed scarlet again.
“So, the girl cups the Beastman’s face and lowers her head.”
“She sees the Beastman’s rapidly heaving chest, his beast-like reddened eyes, his glinting fangs, the bulging veins on his neck.”
“But she isn’t the least bit afraid.”
“She pours the medicine into her own mouth and determinedly leans down—”
Su Heng swallowed involuntarily.
The empty office in the dead of night fell utterly silent with the pause in his narration.
Correspondingly, the sound of his Adam’s apple bobbing became exceptionally loud.
This sound activated Jiang Ying’s vague resistance. She realized what the subsequent scene would be and began to feel awful all over. No matter how she sat, she felt uncomfortable, twisting and squirming and burrowing around in Su Heng’s embrace.
And so, the Beastman’s lips, which he had nearly failed to restrain from pressing down, met empty air as well.
In the vast office, only the sound of their clothes rustling remained.
Su Heng was jolted awake by this strange noise. Gratefully, he tilted his neck back, pressing himself rigidly against the backrest to distance himself from her.
Damn rut cycle.
After a brief respite, he was bewitched by that restless heat once more.
The next second, her trembling voice came from his arms.
“How can a Beastman and a human k-k…”
Akkad was a doggy, and Su Heng was a doggy too.
A doggy was a doggy. Humans could kiss doggies, hug doggies, treat doggies as body pillows or hand warmers, but, but, how could they k-k…
Jiang Ying couldn’t bring herself to say the word “kiss”. Her face flushed bright red, and she rubbed and squirmed against him. “I’m not listening to this anymore. Switch to the next set.”
Su Heng couldn’t bear it any longer and pressed down on her waist, trying to get her to settle down.
He didn’t need her to say it; he didn’t want to look at such images either.
But switching to the next set made it even worse…
The human girl was sitting on a sofa. The Beastman knelt before her, lifting her legs and resting the bends of her knees on his shoulders.
Scattered beside the sofa were square plastic packets. One of them was held in the Beastman’s mouth, a corner torn open.
He gazed at the human girl with devotion and fervor, lowering his proud head before her.
And then—
“…!” Su Heng forcefully controlled his chaotic breathing and shut off the phone screen.
“Why aren’t you saying anything again?”
Jiang Ying was starting to feel drowsy from his narration. She poked his waist again.
He bit his lip, frozen in place.
His hands hung at his sides. He wanted to hug her back, but ultimately suppressed that dangerous urge. His fingers clenched the sofa, and… the square plastic packet that had fallen out of her pocket.
This was…
Su Heng jolted violently, holding his breath, not daring to move a muscle.
Jiang Ying felt it growing hotter and hotter beneath her, more and more searing.
She shifted uncomfortably again. “What’s wrong?”
“Sorry.”
Su Heng silently held her by the crook of her arm and lifted her to the side. Under her puzzled expression, he leaned back against the sofa, gritting his teeth as he fought against the Beastman’s instincts.
But even with the distance pulled back, his gaze seemed glued to her, impossible to tear away.
Those images from just now also lingered before his eyes, making him feel as if he were becoming the Beastman kneeling on one knee in the picture.
And after that… on the next image.
The Beastman’s line was specifically marked.
—You know, don’t you? Beastmen are very good at licking.
“…”
“Sorry.”
Su Heng said it again, his trailing sound wavering unsteadily with a tremble. In his absent-minded state, he hurriedly found an ill-timed excuse.
“I’m a bit… hungry.”