The road to the restaurant wasn’t long.
Yet to Fu Songcheng and Yu Huaiting, right now, this road felt both long and distant.
The two walked side by side, half a meter of distance between them.
The old Yu Huaiting would have found a way to press close to Fu Songcheng—but now he said not a word.
Silence the whole way.
Several times Fu Songcheng parted his lips slightly, his Adam’s apple bobbing, wanting to say something, anything—but when the words reached his tongue, they turned into a dry bitterness, and he swallowed them down.
His thoughts were occupied by killing intent and Yu Huaiting—Fu Songcheng truly couldn’t think of what to say at a time like this.
Pushing open the familiar restaurant door, the wind chime rang out crisply.
The android waiter seemed to sense the low pressure between them and carefully led them to the secluded corner by the window where they usually sat after training.
The two sat facing each other, and the meeting of their gazes became impossible to avoid.
Yu Huaiting’s back was ramrod straight. His breathing had grown a little rapid; his two long legs had nowhere to rest beneath the table, crossing and uncrossing uneasily.
He tried to shift his gaze out the window, to look at the rest area’s virtual sky, but couldn’t control the corner of his eye drifting toward Fu Songcheng.
But Fu Songcheng had been watching him all along, and just happened to catch the sneaky dog peeking.
The instant their eyes met, Yu Huaiting didn’t even dare glance at Fu Songcheng from the corner of his eye anymore.
Yu Huaiting’s hand quietly gripped the edge of the table—the solid wood surface even let out a faint, strained creak.
“Break it and you pay for it.”
Fu Songcheng took in all of Yu Huaiting’s struggle and spoke up, finally breaking the silence between them.
His own heart was hardly less tormented—but Fu Songcheng was the kind of person who, no matter how violently things churned inside, as long as he wanted to hide it, no one could see through his cracks.
But he knew himself: his stomach was cramping slightly from tension.
He couldn’t say what he was tense about—whether he was tense that Yu Huaiting hated him, or tense that Yu Huaiting didn’t love him.
They were like two wild beasts locked in the same iron cage. Clearly neither wanted to hurt the other, yet an invisible whip lashed them, forcing them to bare their fangs at each other.
The android waiter set down the water and hurriedly fled.
“We’ve been set up.”
A declarative sentence.
When facing danger and conspiracy, Yu Huaiting had a beast’s keen instincts. He didn’t investigate causes, didn’t care about consequences—yet always arrived at the correct conclusion.
Hearing this, Fu Songcheng’s heart—which had been hanging in midair, gripped tight by unease—miraculously settled back into place.
He’d said “we.”
“Mm.”
Fu Songcheng answered, his voice gentle.
He suddenly felt that zeroing the love value and implanting killing intent wasn’t such a big deal. If he could decide to stay for Yu Huaiting, then he should believe Yu Huaiting would too.
He had seen Yu Huaiting’s clumsy true heart.
So this time, let him lay himself bare to him.
“Our guaranteed-win situation in the instance suddenly reversed, without any reason. If we had lost, we couldn’t have left the instance at all. Your conclusion is right.”
Meanwhile, Source Star.
Quan Heng’s face was ashen. “Cut their livestream signal immediately!”
On the big screen, the image that had been focused on the restaurant corner instantly went black, displaying a system maintenance notice.
Yet the livestream’s bullet comments had long since exploded.
[Is the official even human?]
[3.15 just passed and you’re still committing crimes against the wind!]
[Cutting the stream just like that? I want to see them fight!]
Quan Heng looked at the screen full of rapidly scrolling complaints and curses and felt his temples throbbing.
He truly couldn’t understand—where was the appeal of these two, Yu Huaiting and Fu Songcheng? When had they accumulated such a massive CP fanbase?
“What are you standing there for!” Quan Heng turned and roared at the assistant beside him, drenched in cold sweat. “Control the comments! Contact the trolls, shift the narrative!”
“Post Yu Huaiting’s combat screenshots! His old solo-clear videos, his highlight moments—dig them all up and push them to the trending list!”
Quan Heng ground his teeth. “Before the identity system bound them, Yu Huaiting had no shortage of combat fans! Rouse those combat fans’ emotions, get them to tear into the CP fans! Say Yu Huaiting is a pure killing machine who doesn’t need a lover holding him back.”
Quan Heng stared coldly at the blacked-out screen and gritted out: “Control the public opinion first.”
Inside the game.
Fu Songcheng flipped his wrist and took an item out of his system space.
[The Axe-Chisel of True Heart].
The instant the item appeared, Fu Songcheng unhesitatingly reached out and seized Yu Huaiting’s hand resting on the table.
“You—”
Yu Huaiting flinched sharply, instinctively wanting to pull his hand back.
The moment their hands clasped, both received a system notification.
[System Notification: Negative attribute triggered—Burning.]
Almost immediately, an agony like plunging a hand into a furnace spread through the skin where they touched.
Yu Huaiting instinctively tried to pull away.
Fu Songcheng pressed Yu Huaiting’s hand down dead, not letting him break free, and shoved the handle of the Axe-Chisel of True Heart into his hand.
Then, guiding Yu Huaiting’s hand, he lightly chopped the axe into his own left arm!
Both let out a muffled groan at the same time.
[Damage Synchronization (Bitter Couple)] judgment took effect: one party’s damage would be applied doubly to both at once.
Blood dripped from their fingertips onto the solid wood tabletop.
A person cannot quantify the damage they suffer—double or imperceptible, it all depends on mood and circumstance. Honestly speaking, Yu Huaiting was very good at enduring pain; sometimes he even craved the stimulation of it—but this time, he found it truly painful.
Fu Songcheng didn’t pull the axe out, letting it stay in his arm, bringing endless pain. He raised his eyes, his gaze clear and firm as he looked at Yu Huaiting.
“I don’t hate you.”
Fu Songcheng spoke. “There’s no way I’d hate you because of the Bitter Couple identity mechanism.”
Without checking the system panel, Yu Huaiting knew the Axe-Chisel of True Heart would issue no warning.
Fu Songcheng was guiding Yu Huaiting to carve out Fu Songcheng’s own true heart.
“I don’t regret teaming up with you.” Fu Songcheng continued, his gaze locked tightly on Yu Huaiting. “Including everything after entering A Thought of Old Dreams—every choice I made, every action—I don’t regret any of it.”
Yu Huaiting felt the pain in his arm and the burning from his palm, recalling their wedding, their first kiss.
He laughed—yet his expression twisted bitterly beyond control—and the hand gripping the axe handle pressed down a little harder.
“Mm!”
Fu Songcheng’s veins bulged from the pain, cold sweat streaming down.
Yu Huaiting wasn’t much better.
Yet he seemed addicted, staring at Fu Songcheng’s wound. In this moment, under the system’s manipulation, the two of them shared the same pain.
So painful, so painful.
So good, so good.
Yu Huaiting’s Adam’s apple rolled violently, and he asked the classic question.
“Do you love me?”
Fu Songcheng looked at him with indulgence, eyes curving slightly.
“No.”
The Axe-Chisel of True Heart remained silent.
Fu Songcheng hadn’t lied.
Yu Huaiting took a deep breath, as if about to pull the axe out the next second and swing it at Fu Songcheng’s neck.
But then, Fu Songcheng’s voice sounded again, successfully soothing Yu Huaiting’s emotions.
“But I like you.”
“I look forward to your approach, care about your emotions, ache for your pain, am curious about your past…” Fu Songcheng dissected his own heart. “My thoughts are swayed by you, my gaze drawn by you—I’m certain I like you.”
Fu Songcheng had lost his former love value, but he’d always been a rational person.
Even if his emotions were erased, he could still, through the grooves of memory, re-carve the shape of a true heart.
The Axe-Chisel of True Heart lay quietly embedded in flesh and blood, raising no objection.
Yu Huaiting’s heart pounded wildly. A sour yet mad emotion exploded in his chest—what was lost surged wildly in his heart, then vanished again.
How many revisions, how many clock cycles would it take to erase the emotions that drew two people who should love each other toward one another?
The answer: there was no such program.
On every rising edge, the program was triggered, demanding they grow to loathe each other; but before the falling edge arrived, they’d fall in love with each other all over again.
Love is the most fleeting, and the hardest to erase.
…
…
[Note: A clock cycle refers to the time a computer’s hardware takes to execute one instruction. A clock cycle begins with a rise, the signal set to 1 (rising edge); then it undergoes a fall, the signal set to 0 (falling edge)—this process is called one clock cycle (if edge-triggered on the rising edge). Every program appears to execute instantly, but that’s only because devices have become so advanced that one clock cycle is too short, creating the illusion of real-time. In reality, instruction execution also consumes a negligible amount of time.]
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