Jiang Nuan walked deeper into the corridor.
As she passed the floor-to-ceiling glass window in the middle of the hallway, her gaze swept past it unintentionally, and in the reflection, she caught sight of herself.
Below her collar, she could see a small curve, and further down, traces that hadn't yet faded.
She tugged her collar up higher.
Her complexion was somewhat pale, but her eyes were clear-headed.
There was one thing she wanted to figure out: whether Lu Shiyan had known all along that she had history with Bai Siyuan.
He was the Zero Squad Captain, with access to high-level intelligence privileges from the Investigation Command, and he had her file in his hands.
So had he been standing on high ground all this time, holding every card in his palm, watching coldly as she probed and struggled in front of Bai Siyuan like a clown—without letting a single shred of information slip to her?
She withdrew her gaze and kept walking.
What awaited her behind that door—an interrogation or a deal—she didn't know.
But one thing she was certain of: before she fully figured out who she really was, she couldn't let anyone else figure it out first.
At the end of the corridor, the door waited in silence.
She pressed the button beside it.
The door slid open automatically.
Lu Shiyan sat behind a wide desk, head bowed, flipping through a document.
His fingers pinched the edges of the pages, reading each one with great care.
Occasionally the tip of his pen would drop, jotting a few characters in some spot, the soft scratching sound amplified in the quiet room.
"Come in. Sit."
He didn't look up; his voice came from behind the document.
Jiang Nuan walked in and sat down across from the desk.
The seat carried a layer of coolness. Her palms pressed against the armrests, her fingers curling in unconsciously.
Lu Shiyan was still flipping through the document.
She silently counted his page turns in her head.
Five, six, seven…
Until the tenth.
He finally finished the last line.
The document was closed and pushed aside casually.
Then he raised his arms, elbows propped on the desk, hands interlocked with fingers laced together, resting loosely against his chin.
Those deep brown eyes landed on Jiang Nuan's face.
"How did you rest last night?"
That feeling from the meeting room was back.
Jiang Nuan met his gaze.
"Pretty well."
Her voice was calm, unhurriedly adding the second half.
"Qinian and Qisui took very good care of me."
He had no right to scrutinize her on this matter.
The moment the words landed, the temperature in the office seemed to drop a few degrees.
Lu Shiyan's right thumb slowly rubbed across the knuckle of his index finger.
Once. Then again.
"Very good care."
He repeated those two words.
Then he lowered his head and started flipping through the document in front of him again.
This time, he flipped for a long while.
As if her words had never existed.
The office was left with only the sound of pages turning and the faint, barely audible hum of the ventilation duct.
So long that Jiang Nuan thought today's conversation was over.
Lu Shiyan's hand stopped.
He pulled a file from the drawer on the right side of the desk, its upper-left corner stamped with the Zero Squad's internal number seal.
He pushed it in front of her.
"Take a look."
Jiang Nuan looked down.
On the cover of the file was her name.
【Zero Squad Active Member: Jiang Nuan】
She reached out and opened it.
The first page was basic information—she glanced over it, most of which she already knew: ability type, ability level.
The second page was medical examination data.
The third page…
Her fingers stopped.
In the lower-right corner of the third page, there was a line of annotation highlighted in bold red.
【Note: This individual has a recorded history of early contact with Bai Siyuan of the Bai family. Specific relationship unknown; related memories are missing. Recommend continued observation; do not inform the individual for now.】
A chill crawled up her spine.
He had known from the very beginning.
From the first day she was assigned to the Zero Squad, it was written in black and white in this file.
And her?
When had she found out?
On the White Whale, in that unconscious moment when she shouted "Brother."
Jiang Nuan raised her head and looked at Lu Shiyan.
"You knew all along."
"Yes."
One word. Clean and decisive, with no attempt at defense.
Jiang Nuan's jaw clenched.
Though she had suspected it, the weight in her chest surged up anyway the moment that single word landed.
"Then why didn't you tell me?"
Lu Shiyan didn't answer immediately.
His gaze lingered on her face for two seconds, as if examining every expression she made in that moment.
"Tell you, and then what?"
His voice remained calm.
"Your memories are missing. Under those circumstances, if I told you that you had history with Bai Siyuan—"
He tilted his head slightly.
"Jiang Nuan, you love unraveling puzzles too much. You're smart, sharp. But there's a recklessness in your bones that doesn't weigh the consequences."
"You'd want to dig the lost memories out of him, to fill in every blank. You'd go all in, no matter what."
A beat of pause.
"And Bai Siyuan just happens to be waiting for you to go all in."
Jiang Nuan's rebuttal stuck in her throat.
She wanted to say she wouldn't be that impulsive—that she had limits, had judgment, that she wouldn't throw herself into someone's wide-open trap over a few fuzzy memories.
But the words caught.
Because there was some truth in what Lu Shiyan said.
If she'd known about their history earlier, could she guarantee she wouldn't pursue the truth?
Not necessarily.
In pursuing the truth, she might fall into Bai Siyuan's scheme.
Or maybe not—she would weigh the pros and cons, act cautiously, or not act at all.
But she had been pre-judged, had her reaction predicted, had the decision made for her about "what's safest for you," and then kept in the dark.
In the name of protection.
Cleanly stripping away her right to choose.
【Don't trust anyone.】
The only legacy the original owner had left her.
Now that she thought about it, that was the clearest survival rule of the apocalypse.
Her anger came quickly, but it was suppressed even faster.
Within a few breaths, that surging emotion was pushed back down.
If he didn't trust her, thought telling her the truth would make her lose control—
Then she didn't need to be fully honest either.
The moment that thought took shape, Jiang Nuan's mind became more lucid than it had ever been.
For the first time, she truly realized: she no longer just wanted to survive.
She didn't want to be a pawn.
But to stop being a pawn, she first needed to figure out what was going on with this body of hers.
These thoughts sorted themselves out at lightning speed.
Jiang Nuan's expression returned to calm.
"You're right—I do have a probability of acting impulsively. But in this matter, I at least should have had the right to choose."
Her gaze met his directly, without flinching.
He looked at her.
In those deep brown eyes, something shifted subtly.
Close to… a confirmation after examination.
As if something he had been testing all along had finally produced an answer beyond his expectations.
The office fell into a long silence.
Long enough that Jiang Nuan could hear her own pulse beating in her eardrums.
Then Lu Shiyan moved. His hand reached toward the other side of the desk, pulling a thin sheet of paper from beneath a stack of documents.
His fingertips paused at the edge of the paper for a moment, as if weighing something.
Then he pushed the sheet to the center of the desk.
"Take a look at this."
Jiang Nuan's gaze dropped.
It was an investigation brief, very short in content—only a few lines:
[The Bai family had, in the same year they brought Bai Siyuan back, dispatched personnel to the former squatter settlement on two separate occasions. The target appeared to be a search for a specific individual. The final outcome of the search was unclear, and no trace of Jiang Nuan's movements or contact records during that period could be found. The lead went cold.]
A chill crept down Jiang Nuan's spine.
After that black car… the Bai family had gone back looking for her?
This deepened her suspicion that the original owner had met Bai Siyuan again after that incident.
"This record came from cross-referencing the old archives in Command Headquarters after I took over your file."
Lu Shiyan's voice came from across the room.
"The Bai family was looking for you. Whether they found you, and what happened after they did—there's currently no traceable information."
He paused.
"This is all the intelligence I have regarding your early connections with Bai Siyuan."
"And now, all of it is in front of you."
Jiang Nuan suddenly realized something.
From the moment she opened that file, Lu Shiyan had been observing her.
The speed with which she suppressed her anger, the frankness with which she acknowledged his logic, the angle of her counterattack in the end.
Every reaction was data.
When the data accumulated to a sufficient volume, he revised his assessment of her.
Then he handed over this report.
Nothing more.
She couldn't quite name what she was feeling at that moment.
Being treated as a variable to be calculated—it wasn't a pleasant sensation.
But she had to admit: if someone less capable of keeping their cool had been sitting here, that piece of paper would never have appeared.
"Alright. I've taken note of it."
A beat.
"...And thank you for telling me this before I went to the Bai family instead of waiting until after."
Jiang Nuan thought that was the end of today's conversation.
"If there's nothing else, I'll head back and get ready for the trip to the Bai estate."
With that, she turned to leave.
She had just reached the door.
"Wait."
Jiang Nuan's footsteps stopped.
She didn't turn around, just stood where she was.
The chair scraped back half a step with a faint sound. Lu Shiyan rose to his feet.
Jiang Nuan's shoulders tensed.
Lu Shiyan stopped behind her.
His tall shadow fell over her from above, enveloping her entire being in his presence.
The air fell into a brief, dead silence.
Jiang Nuan's heart began to race.
She didn't know what he was about to do. Was it because she hadn't given enough of an emotional response to the information he'd handed over? Or something else?
She turned around to face him.
Lu Shiyan looked down at her.
From that angle, his eyes seemed impossibly deep—the pupils held almost no light at all.
Then he raised a hand toward her collar.
Every muscle in Jiang Nuan's body tightened in that instant—the marks that hadn't yet fully faded.
Instinctively, she raised her hand to push him away, to dodge.
But her wrist had barely moved halfway up before he intercepted it.
He stepped forward in the same motion, pressing Jiang Nuan's entire body against the door.
Both her wrists were gathered in one of his palms, forced up above her head and pinned against the door panel. She couldn't move.
Jiang Nuan was forced to tilt her head up, her back pressed flat against the cold door.
"Lu Shiyan, what are you—"
The words caught in her throat.
Because his free hand didn't go for her collar.
Cool fingertips brushed slowly along the side of her neck, sending a shiver of tingling sensation through her.
Then, his fingers came to rest on the collar wrapped tightly against her skin.
He found the micro-lock hidden at the back of her neck.
Lu Shiyan lowered his gaze, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on her face, taking in the shock and wariness in her eyes.
His thumb pressed down gently.
"Click."
A faint mechanical sound.
The collar that had been pressing against her neck for who knows how many days and nights came loose.
The moment the collar left her skin, a chill spread from her neck through her entire body. The air pressed directly against her skin, bringing with it a strange sense of exposure and weightlessness.
On the spot where the collar had long pressed, a faint ring of indentation remained on her skin.
Lu Shiyan removed the collar and casually set it on the table beside him, producing a light sound.
He still held her wrists, looking down at her.
"Going to the Bai family with this thing on—too conspicuous."
A pause.
He leaned in slightly, bringing his mouth close to her ear.
"Jiang Nuan."
"Remember what you said before."
"You have no other choice."
"You can only—and will only—return here."
