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Chapter 6 – The Prophet’s Threat (1)
Winter nights come early—it wasn’t even five o’clock yet, and it was already pitch black.
Shen Si got out of the nanny van and went straight from the underground parking garage to his apartment via the private elevator, without so much as a glance back.
Through the thick iron door, he could already hear LULU’s heavy, thudding footsteps. That pudgy body hurled itself against the door like a tank, making a muffled thud.
For some reason, Shen Si felt an unusual eagerness tonight—to feel LULU’s warm, wet tongue licking his palm.
The moment he opened the door, darkness surged out from the apartment like a beast, nearly swallowing the dim hallway lights whole.
Shen Si momentarily froze.
See? No matter how much fame and favor one possesses, before loneliness, all are the same.
Thankfully—
That round-headed, rotund creature barreled into him recklessly, two short legs happily pawing at his trousers. LULU’s huffing breaths were like light breaking through the darkness. The loneliness that had pounced on Shen Si was instantly crushed by this unrestrained affection.
He reached out to turn on the entryway light, swung his leg backward to close the door with a kick, and nudged his heels alternately to kick off his expensive Bally shoes under the cabinet.
He crouched down and roughly kneaded the layers of chub around LULU’s neck, then picked the dog up and walked to the fridge. He took out a meat sausage, tore open a corner of the wrapper with his teeth, and ripped it apart in a few quick motions. LULU, already unable to wait, chomped it and flopped to the floor, gobbling it up.
As Shen Si listened to the heavy breathing of the eating dog, the tense expression he’d worn all day finally relaxed.
The director—who’d shouted “CUT!” countless times because Shen Si couldn’t manage a tender smile at the female lead—would definitely have given a pass if he saw Shen Si’s expression now.
Back then, to shape Shen Si’s image as a healthy, sunny, and kind-hearted celebrity, Zhou Wen had suggested he adopt a dog.
Shen Si had zero interest in keeping pets and intentionally made things difficult, insisting on a dog that was quiet, not hyperactive, didn’t need walks, didn’t shed, was easy to care for, easy to clean, and hard to kill.
And so—
The pug, LULU, was brought to him.
For the past three years, LULU had contributed significantly to enhancing Shen Si’s image as a loving pet owner. On his official website and social media, photos of him with LULU nearly outnumbered his solo shots.
Which led to countless female fans screaming in the comments—
“Let me become LULU!”
“So jealous of LULU! Master LULU, let’s swap!”
“Ah Si, let me be your pet!”
“I want to be reincarnated. LULU is living the dream!”
He would shake his head at these:
If these girls’ parents knew they’d raised them only for them to wish to become dogs… what would they think?
With LULU’s snuffling breaths beside him, fatigue surged over Shen Si like a flood.
Without even showering, he collapsed onto the bed and passed out.
Even in his dreams, he heard the director’s duck-like voice shouting “CUT!” again and again in his ear.
The second female lead, with her greasy lipstick, pouted and leaned in closer and closer, trying to press her lips to his. He had nowhere to dodge, took a misstep—and fell into the abyss.
Only for that abyss to suddenly turn into the greasy floor of a cafeteria.
He woke up drenched in cold sweat.
The oily sensation from the dream still clung to him, refusing to dissipate. He struggled out of bed and rushed into the shower, dousing himself with freezing water.
But once he lay back down, sleep was nowhere to be found.
He turned off the lights and sat in the darkness. LULU’s occasional snores punctuated the deathly stillness.
“Drip—” A faint flash of light flickered across the pillow—his phone screen briefly lit up and went dark again.
That brief, water-drop-like sound was the alert for a new email.
Shen Si’s heart clenched. He grabbed his phone—
It was the Prophet again.
“Did you see her?”
The email subject was just that one short line. The message body was completely blank—but it was enough.
It was like a snake suddenly slithering up from the floor beneath his toes, winding around his neck, its scarlet tongue flicking cold, fishy breath at his throat.
“I saw her—”
He typed the words, but suddenly, without warning, deleted them. He flopped back onto the pillow, the phone’s glow vanishing with the movement. The room fell into stillness once more.
He buried his face in the pillow until he couldn’t breathe anymore, then finally looked up.
A thin line of icy blue moonlight slipped through the crack in the curtain, quietly landing on the phone by his pillow, outlining its cold silhouette.
“What you asked me to do—I can’t do it!”
Shen Si continued typing, hitting send with something close to fury.
But the email vanished into the void.
In the darkness, only he and that silver phone remained, locked in silent standoff.
As an Aries, he was naturally impatient.
This kind of waiting—like a plane hitting turbulent air—battered his patience repeatedly, lifting it up and slamming it down again and again.
Frustrated, he got up, walked to the bar, and opened a bottle of whiskey. He took a heavy swig straight from the bottle.
The explosion of burning liquor in his throat finally calmed his fraying nerves.
Barefoot, he walked to the window, pulled aside half the curtain, and let the view of the Bund’s dazzling lights reflect off the floor-to-ceiling glass.
The distant neon brilliance and Shen Si’s solitary figure merged on the cold surface of the glass—perfectly.
At this moment, he was so close to that extravagant world—
And yet, so far.
At the exact moment a reply came in, the first snowflake of winter fell.
The old man didn’t check the email immediately.
Instead, he slowly extended his hand out the window, waiting. When he finally felt the soft flutter of snow land in his palm, he slowly drew his hand back.
To control his trembling, the motion was agonizingly slow—like a film dragged to 1/50th speed.
When he finally brought his palm up to his eyes, the snowflake had already melted into a droplet of water.
A few breaths later, even that droplet was gone, lost in the deep lines of his palm.
He leaned against the window. In the glass was the shadow of his slightly hunched back. Everything above the shoulders was swallowed in darkness, like the silhouette of a headless monster.
That monster lay in wait a moment longer, until the dizzying wave of emotion passed, then finally returned to his desk.
His voice—like a rusted cello—rumbled out from deep in his chest, carrying the rasp, weight, and calm only old age could bring.
Each word he spoke, even every pause, poured onto the screen in his reply—line after line.
Yes, his slow rhythm bordered on frailty.
But his eyes betrayed him.
In the darkness, those aged eyes gleamed—sharp enough to pierce the screen and land squarely on the person reading on the other end.
“Drip—drop—”
As another droplet fell, Shen Si had already leapt onto the bed, gripping his phone tight—his motion crisp, swift, and elegant, like a hunting leopard.
His prey scrolled line by line in his hand.
“So you don’t want to live anymore?”
The prey bared its fangs and bit back.
Shen Si sucked in a sharp breath.
The Prophet had said he would die an unnatural death within a year.
But—if he helped the Prophet, the Prophet would reveal what kind of accident would kill him, and how to avoid it.
“It’s not that I don’t want to live. It’s that I can’t handle that woman,” he had no choice but to admit honestly.
“Didn’t you claim there isn’t a woman on Earth you couldn’t handle?”
The reply came with a mocking tone, as if teasing him.
After a long pause, another email arrived:
“If you insist on dying with dignity, let’s talk about something more real. Surely you don’t think I only know the future and not the past? That thing from two years ago—I bet you haven’t forgotten. You’re about to go on tour, right? If all 36 shows turn out to be lip-synced, and someone exposes that—it’ll be the entertainment scandal of the century… Shall I keep going? I don’t mind telling more people—”