Perhaps overwhelmed by the intense gaze fixed on her, Yuanyuan woke up crying from her dream.

As soon as she opened her eyes, she saw a dark figure standing by her bed.

“Waaah—” She was just about to scream when a large, firm hand covered her mouth.

“It’s me.”

“Daddy!!” The moment she realized it was her father, alive and well, she leaped from the bed into his arms. “You didn’t die!!”

Yu Jinxiao’s lips twitched. “Why would I die?”

“Yuanyuan just had a dream where you died! In the dream, you… &*%@#￥?”

Oops, her mouth was covered again.

Of course, she couldn’t talk about what happened in the dream. It had to be magic—definitely some kind of magic!

This dream wasn’t just a regular dream; there had to be a reason for it.

“Daddy, you can’t be a bad person or do bad things, okay?” Yuanyuan warned, her tiny face stern, like a little cat giving a serious lecture.

To Yu Jinxiao, his little cub was just that—his little cub. Her words were all over the place, so he didn’t pay them much attention.

“You don’t need to worry about my affairs. Now, go back to sleep.” He gently placed the tiny bundle back into her bed. “Stop thinking about silly things before bedtime, and you won’t have strange dreams.”

“Then… then I’ll think about Daddy… living forever, living for a billion years.”

Well, at least it wasn’t something bad. It was more like a warm, slightly too heavy coat than a prick to the heart.

“Mhm, I’ll do my best to live a billion years.”

As he tucked her in, Yu Jinxiao wondered how this little one, who barely understood numbers, had grasped the concept of a billion.

Kids—always full of strange ideas.

“Daddy, wait!” The little one wiggled out from under the blanket and reached out, signaling for him to come closer.

Thinking it was something trivial again, Yu Jinxiao patiently sat on the small children’s stool beside the bed. “What is it this time?”

“Yuanyuan will smooth your fur!”

Yu Jinxiao: “?”

As a human, he had never heard this term used among people.

Though he had seen it quite a bit in the animal world.

He glanced at the stack of animal identification cards nearby, suspecting that Yuanyuan had picked up this strange behavior from them.

“No, humans don’t need their fur smoothed,” Yu Jinxiao replied, turning her down without hesitation.

Yuanyuan’s face fell, her eyes filling with disappointment as if the world had just collapsed around her. It looked like she might burst into tears at any moment.

Sometimes, kids liked to imitate things they’d just learned.

Yu Jinxiao thought it was perfectly normal, just like how Yu Yingze used to declare he was Superman when he was younger.

Later, when he grew older—from four to eight—he realized that time had no mercy. He couldn’t fly, nor could he lift a building.

Superman wasn’t real.

But at that age, if adults had cruelly crushed his fantasies, it might have left emotional scars.

Remembering that Yuanyuan had spent her first three years in an orphanage, Yu Jinxiao’s icy heart softened slightly.

“How do you plan to smooth my fur?”

Well, playing along with his daughter wasn’t such a bad thing for a father to do.

“Daddy, just sit here and turn your back to me,” Yuanyuan commanded from her perch on the bed. “Sit still, don’t move!”

Yu Jinxiao, tall and lean, felt rather awkward sitting on the tiny children’s stool, as if his body was being folded into itself.

But he had already agreed to this much. There was no way he’d back out now. Besides, seeing his little cub sad was more than he could bear.

Facing a low cabinet, he caught a glimpse of Yuanyuan’s every move in the metallic reflection.

She grabbed a handful of his hair, and with her small mouth forming a perfect O, she slowly leaned toward his head…

Instantly, a sense of danger shot through Yu Jinxiao’s body!

From his scalp to his neck, he felt an icy chill, as if his head was about to be bitten off.