Chapter 26

A stack of old medical records.

His own medical records, from a long time ago… But why are there Bai Wei’s records here?

The date on the medical form is ten years ago.

Clearly, Bai Wei had come in a hurry. He had mixed Lu Sen’s medical records with his own, packed them in an old bag, but forgot that his own records were inside.

They were in the only hospital in Snow Mountain Town. Bai Wei needed time to pay, and under his repeated instructions, the nurses set Lu Sen up in a special private room for observation.

“High education, good-looking, great figure, and loves you so much, sending you to the hospital in the middle of the night, spending so much money on your check-ups… You’re really lucky to have such a perfect wife,” the janitor said while cleaning the floor.

Lu Sen was sorting through the messy medical records, arranging them in chronological order. Yes, Bai Wei was indeed perfect. He was the one Lu Sen had chosen after much consideration. Looking at the medical records belonging to him, Lu Sen thought back to when he and Bai Wei first met in the North City, temporarily forgetting about the abnormalities of tonight.

Living as “Lu Sen” in North City was tough. Lu Sen rarely mentioned that, when he first arrived in the human world, he landed in a harbor. The country the harbor led to had been engulfed in over thirty years of war. In that world, there was no life, only survival; no civilization, only brutality.

It was there that he opened his first pair of eyes to observe the world, pretending to be a human child, blending in with the traffic. The reason he chose to mimic this child was simple. He saw that even in the ruins, this child was tightly embraced by his parents.

In that moment, the first emotion that burned in his heart was “hunger.”

Lu Sen hadn’t yet realized what he meant to this world, nor what the world meant to him, but he had first learned about poverty and hunger. Because of poverty and hunger, he felt confused and wanted something. He saw human children with the embrace of their parents, so he thought he needed that too.

He was chased away by the parents, with broken dishes leaving cuts on his forehead. They held the child who looked exactly like Lu Sen, their eyes full of anger and fear. In that moment, Lu Sen’s chest was filled with a second burning emotion. It wasn’t until much later that he understood that feeling was called greed and jealousy.

Perhaps, there was also the fear of being treated as a monster and beaten further.

But that pair of seemingly inviolable parents was instantly reduced to ashes by a missile. At the same time, Lu Sen’s first mimicry was also shattered. In that moment, Lu Sen lay on the battlefield in fluid form, watching the blood-red sunset, realizing that the burning feeling inside him had stopped.

What replaced it was the third emotion Lu Sen experienced: desolation.

In this world, there were things even more inviolable than that pair of parents. The same invisible barriers that could keep even a monster like him out could also be shattered by artillery. Lu Sen wandered in the endless wasteland for a long time, repeatedly reconstructing his form. When he finally walked out of the wasteland, he had already become an adult man. During his journey through the wasteland, he learned to use the powerful weapons and forces that destroyed the parents, and he also learned the ways people used to fight hunger and greed.

Looting.

He became a mercenary and joined a mercenary group. They occasionally used a city as their base, where there was no perfection, only flaws. People said there had once been a beautiful library in the city, a delicate café, and in a small house behind the garden, a loving couple had lived… What Lu Sen saw were only broken walls and, on the scorched walls, traces left by other thugs—bullet holes or pools of urine.

“This wall will remember us, and this city will remember us,” Lu Sen heard the thugs cackling. “Look, this is the city’s hundred-year-old Lovers’ Wall! My bullet holes will be forever immortalized here!”

“We’ll leave our mark on this world!”

Lu Sen migrated with the mercenary group. Everything he saw was marked by flaws… even the poetry collections. Later, he saw what was said to be the text left by the poet before his suicide, written on a wall.

“All things are like smoke and sand, only war remains.”

Lu Sen had passed by these flaws and traces countless times. But in the end, he saw the flaws disappear, the traces vanish, and even the name of their mercenary group disappeared from the contracts where it should have appeared. They became abandoned pieces in the chaos, and then Lu Sen went solo, only to be betrayed by old friends—how unfortunate, he had thought that the smiling old man could be his friend.

“You will always be a monster without a home, there is no place for you in this world, and everything you have will leave you,” the old man had screamed to him before dying.

Lu Sen remembered killing the entire old man’s family, then jumping into the sea under a hail of bullets from his bodyguards, swimming thousands of miles. He thought the old man’s curse was strange, that he actually thought “home” was important, and that Lu Sen would be afraid of losing everything he had—people like Lu Sen, mercenaries, could take anything they wanted. If he didn’t take it, it just meant he wasn’t hungry at that time.

But the old man was right. It was time for him to rest for a while, to go live in a peaceful place, and to have a legitimate position of his own.

This was the mindset with which Lu Sen arrived in the Northern City. Upon arrival, he was drawn to the perfect and complete city. The library’s spires were intact, the cafes were clean and tidy, and the concert hall had not been bombed. He almost immediately wanted to establish his place in this city—not just a house, but a social position. He was starving, but for an outsider like him, that wasn’t easy, and “Lu Sen’s” home was nothing more than an empty shell.

Fortunately, he met Bai Wei. From the moment he saw him, Lu Sen knew that Bai Wei was the person he had been looking for.

In truth, Lu Sen couldn’t quite explain whether it was Bai Wei himself who attracted him more, or Bai Wei’s family. Bai Wei had everything that Lu Sen didn’t—experiences of studying in bright, clean classrooms, adherence to ancient etiquette wherever he went, a love for libraries, concert halls, and art exhibitions, insight into anatomy and zoology, as well as a perfect appearance and elegant personality. This made Lu Sen consider that humans, too, could be collectibles.

Furthermore, Bai Wei’s family background in Qinghe also attracted him. If he could marry into the Bai family, he would become the next head of the Bai family. When that time came, he could stabilize his position in this society, which he still found hard to adapt to.

But collecting Bai Wei was no easy task. Lu Sen knew that a blind date didn’t necessarily mean Bai Wei would marry him. He had to maintain a persistent connection with him. But this would require a lot of effort. Bai Wei had read books that Lu Sen hadn’t, admired artists whose names Lu Sen couldn’t even remember, and could talk at length with theater directors backstage, while Lu Sen could only vaguely recall having blown something up similar. Every time before a meeting, Lu Sen had to do a lot of homework, draining his brain.

Luckily, he quickly discovered a simple common interest between them—getting hurt.

As a newcomer to human civilization, Lu Sen decided to act like a civilized person. He nearly perfectly mimicked the human characteristics of people like the “Lu Sen” siblings. This led to frequent injuries.

For example, drinking half of an expired coconut, walking past a reversing car and getting run over, or cutting his finger while slicing a cucumber.

But after each injury, Bai Wei would visit him. He would sit at Lu Sen’s bedside, bringing him a bouquet of white flowers. Lu Sen felt that his and Bai Wei’s relationship deepened with these visits, large and small. They no longer talked about literature and art, but about Lu Sen’s near-death experiences. Bai Wei would exclaim that Lu Sen really did look like someone who could die so easily.

Lu Sen felt that since humans referred to shared topics as common hobbies, then his injuries and near-death experiences with Bai Wei were indeed their shared hobby.

What pleased him was that most of these accidents were true accidents, with only a few being intentional. There was no other reason—Lu Sen was simply too unfamiliar with human society. This shared hobby, which occurred naturally without any intentional effort, made Lu Sen feel much more at ease.

And Bai Wei’s way of visiting and taking care of him was incredibly gentle. At that time, Lu Sen looked at his side profile and thought, this was the quality that a perfect wife should have. Bai Wei was indeed a perfect collectible.

Lu Sen flipped through his medical records. Falling down stairs, food poisoning, being hit by a car, being caught by an elevator door, being struck by falling objects, fires… Each page made him smile happily, reminding him of the little moments with Bai Wei.

Who would have thought that the things he experienced just to marry Bai Wei would bring him such joy now? At first, he only thought that Bai Wei’s etiquette of carrying fruit baskets, the taste of giving flowers, and the elegance in visiting him were all pleasant. But now, thinking back, Bai Wei’s delicate fingers caressing his oxygen tube, his focused smile as he looked at Lu Sen’s EKG, and his lips gently biting the corners of his wounds… Every detail related to Bai Wei’s emotions was vivid in his memory.

It turned out that love could make the Bai Wei in his memories even more perfect. Lu Sen suddenly realized that before that dinner, the Bai Wei in his memories must not have been this vivid.

It was like after falling in love with him, he could apply the current love to the past moments, casting a soft filter over everything related to the transactions of the past—if Lu Sen had known what love was at this point, he would have thought that way.

Now, Lu Sen only knew that he liked it.

He admitted that he liked this world, largely because of its completeness and perfection. The complete library, the well-stocked supermarket, and the beautiful and intelligent Bai Wei. He had acquired things that the villains and old men from back then could never have dreamed of…

Especially Bai Wei, though there had been many unexpected twists, and they hadn’t become the influential figures in Qinghe or even had to become outsiders in Snow Mountain Town… Bai Wei was perfect—beautiful, emotionally stable, and life in Snow Mountain Town wasn’t bad. Perhaps in some time, they could return to Bai’s family to inherit some social connections, get things back on track, and secure a local household registration in Snow Mountain Town, restoring their social status and becoming the new elite of the town with the perfect family…

Lu Sen used the medical records because he remembered Bai Wei saying that the records should be organized by timestamp. He was thinking that Bai Wei would also be involved in the process of communicating with Bai’s family and building their new home. But at that moment, he suddenly saw the watermark on Bai Wei’s medical record.

“Alright, no problem… These are all the test orders. I’ve written the list of tests and the locations of the examination rooms on this paper. Follow the order and complete each one.” Bai Wei handed the list to Lu Sen with her left hand, but kept her right hand hidden behind her back. She said to Lu Sen, “Didn’t you hear me talking?”