It started raining as he went to pick her up from work. The Federation’s weather was unpredictable; inaccurate forecasts were the norm. Jiang Ying didn’t make a habit of checking the weather every day, nor did she like carrying a bag with an umbrella everywhere she went.
And Erga had a year-round warm climate with little rain. Having lived there for so long, Su Heng didn’t have the habit of carrying an umbrella either.
It was only when they reached the ground floor of the office tower that they realized it was raining. He thought Jiang Ying would be upset, but when he looked down at her, the corner of her lips held a smile. She stretched a hand out beyond the eaves, trying to catch the rain in her palm.
A thought suddenly surfaced in Su Heng’s mind.
“You like the rain?”
“Huh?” Jiang Ying paused, caught off guard. “I wouldn’t say I like it.”
The collected rainwater slipped through her fingers, leaving nothing but a cold, damp chill in her palm.
She shivered from the cold, yet her expression remained cheerful. Two tiny dimples appeared on her cheeks.
Jiang Ying pulled her hand back, pressing her palms together. She brought them to her mouth and breathed warm air onto them. “Before—when I could see—I actually didn’t like rainy days. No matter how heavy the rain, it was rare to get a day off. I still had to brave the rain to go to school or work, and by the time I arrived, I’d be completely soaked. After I lost my sight, I can’t really say I like it, either. But rain is the most obvious weather I can perceive now, so I gradually started to enjoy the sound of it.”
She thought for a moment, as if finding her justification a bit flimsy and unable to fully convince herself. “By that logic, I should like thunder too. But that sound is too loud. Without the advance warning of lightning, it sometimes startles me.”
So that was how it was.
Logically, he should have felt sympathy for her circumstances.
But at this moment, another thought, dark and roiling like thunderclouds, seized his mind.
—So, was the sound of rain at the Psychology Clinic there because of her, too?
Jiang Ying clearly didn’t consider this to be a particularly important matter. Yet the instant this guess formed in his mind, his heart felt as if it were being clenched by something, squeezed until a sour, bitter ache seeped out.
Just as that acidity bubbled up to his chest like carbonation, a sudden gust of wind blew the torrential rain into his face, bursting those half-formed bubbles and his hidden thoughts alike.
“It seems to be getting heavier.”
Jiang Ying wiped her face, retreating a step in surprise. She tugged at his sleeve. “A Heng, I have a spare umbrella in the drawer at my workstation.”
“I’ll go get it. Wait here for me.”
Su Heng took her hand and guided her further inside the office tower lobby. The automatic glass doors slid open and then shut again, muffling the increasingly fierce sound of rain hammering the ground.
“Stand further in.”
The rain that had just dampened her palm was now enveloped in his grasp.
Before his body heat could even transfer to her, Su Heng let go.
One instance of hand-holding desensitization, Su Heng mentally recorded. It wasn’t complete; it could only be considered elementary training. If he held on for even one more second, he might not be able to control the urge to tighten his grip on her hand.
Before he turned to head upstairs, he said once more, “I’ll be right back.”
Su Heng took the elevator up to the high floor where her company was located.
She was often the last person to leave work. When she left, she would instruct him to turn off all the lights, close the windows, and shut down the air conditioning.
The office was pitch black. When Su Heng turned on the first row of lights, a thought suddenly struck him: before he came along, how had she managed all these tasks alone?
…Ah, she couldn’t see.
Turning off the lights probably made no difference to her.
Perhaps cloudy, rainy days indeed made it easier for negative emotions to surface. This realization made him feel even worse.
He unconsciously flexed the mechanical arm hanging at his side, wondering if she felt the same helplessness repeating days like this as he did when his body had a rejection reaction to this arm, running a high fever that nearly killed him.
The back row of lights came on as well.
Su Heng stopped in front of her workstation and opened the drawer on the right.
A very small folding umbrella.
He reached out his intact hand to take it. Just as his fingers touched the umbrella, he noticed a stack of several notebooks beside it.
From the side, he could see that with the exception of the very top one, almost all of them were completely filled. They had been flipped through countless times, the paper wrinkled, the side edges no longer the pristine white of the largely unused one. There was almost no scent of catnip on them. These were objects she could no longer use; they hadn’t been opened in a long time.
He took the umbrella and swept his gaze over her desk surface.
Clean and tidy, with hardly any extraneous items. A washed mug sat to one side, next to a box of instant coffee. Several torn-open packets had been tossed into the trash bin beside her chair. Two unopened boxes of coconut milk sat beside the computer monitor, and a small coffee spoon rested inside the mug. Perhaps she preferred mixing something into her coffee rather than drinking it black, like an Americano.
A keyboard, seemingly bought specifically, lay on the desk. It was placed on a linen desk mat, neatly stowed under the computer monitor stand. It showed no signs of recent use.
During the work week, sitting in the break room, he had intermittently overheard plenty of discussions from the office outside.
In the early stages of the project, she had led the establishment of the entire game’s world-building and created several of the main characters.
He imagined her sitting right here, using this keyboard to type line after line on the screen, attempting to move players with a game, to make more people accept the Beastman race. How naive and optimistic.
And now, as her world lost its light, she had become the person who could least understand her former self.
He stood there for two seconds, suppressing that surge of complex emotions.
He had to go; she had already waited long enough.
Just as he closed the drawer, a colorful piece of doodle paper was pulled out by the umbrella and fluttered to the floor.
Drawn on it was a young Sub-Beastman boy, canine, seemingly a Corgi. A large tail, fluffy like a squirrel’s, stood perked up behind him. He was laughing with exceptional happiness.
Who was this?
Su Heng froze for a moment, then placed the paper back.
When he returned downstairs, he spotted her from a distance, leaning against the wall. Her head was nodding as she dozed off.
Hearing the footsteps approach, she naturally linked her arm through his, leaning against his side. “Got it? Let’s go home—I’m so sleepy. I kind of want to nap first, then get up and eat dinner.”
“Then sleep for a little while. I’ll order food and wake you when it arrives,” Su Heng said.
“Good Dog.” Jiang Ying wanted to stand on tiptoe and pat his head but was interrupted by a yawn.
“…Let’s go.” Su Heng wanted to ask about the meaning of that doodle, but in the end, he let it go.
Su Heng opened the umbrella and walked on the side where the rain was blowing in, sheltering her at his side.
She seemed to have no concept of this umbrella’s size, unaware that it simply couldn’t accommodate two people, much less someone like him—a Beastman much larger than a human. And naturally, she couldn’t see how the umbrella canopy was tilted entirely toward her, shielding her alone from the wind and rain, or the sight of him completely drenched, exposed to the downpour.
Being soaked through by the rain cooled his body temperature. It also made him much calmer than he usually was around her. Walking so closely pressed together with her, the pounding of his heartbeat was obscured by the splashing rain and the rumble of thunder.
If he ignored that faint sense of dizziness, he could deceive himself that this was another successful round of desensitization.
Yet it wasn’t until they were almost home that Su Heng realized the dizziness hadn’t just come from his sensitivity to her.
A sense of weightlessness. A ringing in his ears. A splitting headache.
Under the Suspension Bridge Effect, it was easy for people to mistake that feeling for love.
The same was true for Beastmen.
Perhaps he had mistaken his brain’s warning about his body’s functional abnormalities for heart palpitations caused by her.
And just as he stood at the doorstep, closing the umbrella, he realized he couldn’t hear the sound the umbrella ribs made as they folded, nor could he hear the anxious cries of her calling out to him.
…
When Su Heng collapsed toward her without a single word of warning, Jiang Ying was terrified.
He crashed into her, knocking open the just-unlocked door. The two of them tumbled together into the room.
There was no way Jiang Ying’s strength could support Su Heng’s weight. She was pinned to the floor beneath the large Beastman and realized his entire body was burning hot.
Something similar had happened before, but Jiang Ying could clearly sense the difference. That time when he’d said he wasn’t feeling unwell, it turned out he truly hadn’t been lying, because his current condition was vastly, drastically worse.
She exerted an enormous amount of effort just to roll him over, allowing him to lie flat with his head resting on her lap.
Like a dog drenched in the rain.
He instinctively pressed closer to her, curling up against her knees. A pained whimper escaped his throat as he rubbed his wet, damp body against her.
Jiang Ying reached out, touching the thin sweat on his forehead, then moving lower to feel his tightly furrowed, trembling brows.
He seemed to be in extreme pain.
Just as she wanted to hold him, she discovered he was completely soaked through.
Jiang Ying was stunned. He hadn’t held the umbrella over himself just now? Had he shielded her head the entire time?
Belatedly, she recalled that the spare umbrella in the office drawer was only a tiny folding one. Regret immediately flooded her.
“It’s all my fault.”
She wiped the rain from his cheek. As her fingertip brushed past the corner of his lips, his lips seemed to move slightly, as if he wanted to say something, but no sound came out.
Sensing his rapidly deteriorating condition, Jiang Ying grew anxious.
She forced herself to calm down, holding his face to soothe him as she spoke. “Obedient Dog, hold on just a little longer. I’ll find someone to come see you right away.”
In emergencies, people truly could summon strength they didn’t normally possess.
Jiang Ying had no idea how she managed to drag Su Heng and heave him onto the sofa in the living room.
She made a phone call, then turned to prepare a damp towel to cool him down.
Hearing the sound of her leaving, Su Heng forced his eyes open with great effort.
He wanted to call her back, to beg her not to go. But he couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t lift a hand.
Only when he saw her stop in her tracks did he feel at ease.
He had a vague inkling of the origin of this high fever.
This mechanical arm had perhaps reached the point where it should be scrapped. When he’d first received it, he had suffered a fever that nearly claimed his life. He never imagined that losing it would be the same.
Yet at this moment, his inner thoughts were not focused on this prosthetic body that had tormented him for so many years.
The high fever made clear thought impossible, as if fog had settled over his mind, preventing Su Heng from grasping the fleeting thoughts that drifted by. Thoughts about her, about his low and heavy mood throughout the entire day because of her, what kind of person she truly was in her daily life, and what she had experienced in the past before he appeared. These curiosities born during the rainstorm were now steamed into vapor by the high temperature, blurring his vision.
He stared dazedly at the figure busying herself with her back to him, thinking illogically.
Soon.
He would become an incomplete person again.
In that case, he would be able to stay by her side even longer, wouldn’t he?