The glimmer of dawn, like diluted gray ink, seeped silently into the room.
Kasahana Chiai woke from a brief and chaotic dream.
Her dream was a tangle of warm embraces and cold earth, causing a muffled choke to escape her throat the moment she opened her eyes.
“Ugh…”
She blinked her glassy, clear eyes that remained bright even in the dim light.
Lost for a few seconds, she stared at the unfamiliar silhouette of the ceiling, momentarily unsure of where she was.
But then, the scent permeating the space filled her nostrils, instantly pulling her back to reality.
She knew this scent.
It was Su Yuqing’s smell.
It was a blend of the faint fragrance of the cheap shampoo she always used, the lingering soapy scent of laundry detergent, and… a deeper, tender sense of “home” that made her soul shiver and feel strangely at peace.
The gates of memory were blown wide open by that familiar scent.
It was a long, long time ago…
It had been an early morning at the end of autumn, just like this one, when the cold air had begun to drop and the chill seeped through the cracks of the old-fashioned windows.
A young Su Yuqing, with her hair in a mess, had been rustling about under the covers, searching with her large, bright eyes.
Then, she carefully pulled a warm, fluffy “piece of toast”—an orange-and-white kitten named Xiaozhi—into the warmth of her blankets.
The kitten still carried the chill of the outdoors, but the moment it touched the girl’s body heat, it let out a tiny, contented purr.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! Yuqing! Get that thing off the bed right now!”
Her mother’s sharp, disgusted voice drifted in from outside the door.
“Those wild things from outside are covered in bacteria! It’s filthy!”
The young Su Yuqing immediately shielded the little life in her arms with her entire body.
She looked up and retorted in a clear, firm voice.
“She’s not a ‘wild thing from outside,’ Mom! At least, not since the day I picked her up last month. Xiaozhi has a home now! She’s my family!”
“You silly girl, you make it sound so simple!” her mother complained helplessly.
“Anyway, when the blankets and sheets are ruined by her claws or she makes a mess, I’m the ‘old servant’ who has to wash them! Sigh… if I’d known, I wouldn’t have been so impulsive as to marry your father. You two, plus this cat, are driving me crazy day after day…”
Her mother’s nagging gradually faded.
Young Su Yuqing lowered her head, burying her cheek in the kitten’s soft, warm fur.
In a voice only the two of them could hear, she softly hummed a melody over and over.
It wasn’t so much a song as it was a child’s most pious prayer.
“Xiaozhi, Xiaozhi, grow up fast…”
“Xiaozhi, Xiaozhi, grow up healthy…”
“Xiaozhi, Xiaozhi, we’ll never… never be apart…”
That naive song, filled with endless warmth and dependence, seemed to gush from the deep spring of her memories.
It was so clear, yet so distant.
“Honestly…!”
The idol girl jerked herself out of the whirlpool of memories, her body trembling slightly from the force of the transition.
She cursed under her breath, her voice laced with a frustrated kind of annoyance at her own weakness.
It wasn’t until her hand touched a patch of cold moisture on her skin that she realized her eyes had grown wet without her noticing.
As if she had been burned, she quickly and forcefully wiped away the disgraceful traces with the back of her hand.
Her fingertips turned white from the pressure.
‘Kasahana Chiai, what are you doing?!’ she roared at herself.
‘Her scent is everywhere here. That’s good! Very good! This pervasive, thick scent should act like a piercing alarm, reminding and spurring you on every second.’
‘Do not forget how this human, who now provides you with a place to stay, betrayed you back then and buried you alive in a cold hell!’
‘You are here for revenge, Kasahana Chiai!’
‘You went through so much effort, even undergoing a human transformation to return here, just to make her taste a thousand times the pain you felt back then!’
‘Do not… do not let your resolve be shaken by this cheap, past-tense warmth!’
She took a deep breath, as if trying to completely dispel the unsettling warmth in the air, replacing it with a cold hatred that filled her chest.
“Tch.”
She let out a disdainful sneer, mocking her own momentary weakness.
Chiai threw back the covers and walked barefoot to the window.
With a loud *clatter*, she pulled the curtains open roughly.
The lifeless, half-dark gray sky lunged into her field of vision, the cold light reflecting off her equally expressionless face.
It looked like there was still some time before the sun fully rose…
‘In that case, I’ll go find some cat canned food to eat first!’
Distracting oneself with primal instincts was always effective.
Thinking this, she turned toward the door, deciding to temporarily cast those chaotic thoughts to the back of her mind.
However, the moment she pushed open the bedroom door, the figure curled up and sleeping soundly on the living room sofa caught her gaze like a magnet, causing her newly built mental defenses to teeter.
Su Yuqing was lying on her side on a sofa that was clearly too short for her height.
She was covered only by a thin blanket and looked uncomfortable, even a bit pitiful.
But her tightly closed eyes and steady breathing indicated a state of exhausted, almost comatose sleep.
Chiai softened her footsteps and walked silently to the edge of the coffee table, stopping like a ghost.
She tilted her head slightly, peering down at the defenseless sleeping face with a judgmental gaze.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk…”
She let out a complex huff of air, as if evaluating an object.
‘Even without a bed, after being kicked out to a place like this, you’re still sleeping quite soundly, aren’t you? You really are thick-skinned, meow.’
Her gaze involuntarily moved down from Su Yuqing’s calm brows and eyes, eventually settling on her slender neck.
On that fair skin, a faint reddish-purple bruise from the collar was visible in the weak dawn light.
it looked like a silent accusation or a proprietary brand.
It was a mark left by another “game” they had played yesterday afternoon in that office.
Almost uncontrollably, the scenes of humiliation and confrontation from yesterday afternoon replayed in her mind like a video on loop, complete with vivid sound and touch, filling her empty and chaotic brain in detail.
“I don’t care if you keep this stupid collar on my neck for the rest of my life! Lock it forever! I will absolutely never submit to you! You can give up on that right now!”
Su Yuqing had been pinned down in the office chair.
Her face was flushed with anger and a lack of oxygen, yet she continued to scream with stubborn desperation.
“Oh? Is that so?”
Back then, she had let out a playful and dangerous chuckle, her fingers carelessly tugging at the thin chain attached to the collar, creating the cold sound of clinking metal.
“But I don’t think I really need to waste an entire lifetime on you, meow.”
“W-What do you want to do?!”
A flicker of panic had flashed in Su Yuqing’s eyes.
“All I need to do…”
she had leaned down and whispered into Su Yuqing’s ear like a demon, “is hold onto my little chain like this… and lead my disobedient little pet out to the public office area outside your office… and take her for a few… laps…”
“You’re insane!!”
Su Yuqing had screamed in terror.
“Look at the time! You know how many people are out there! There are so many eyes watching! You… don’t even think about it! You wouldn’t take that risk! It wouldn’t benefit you either!”
“Hehe.”
The version of herself in the memory had immediately shown a confident smile.
“That’s not necessarily true. After all, I’m just a… willful ‘idol.’ If I do something outrageous, everyone will just think it’s ‘Zhi Ai’s unique personality,’ right? As for you…”
The memory froze there.
Chiai looked at the sleeping Su Yuqing on the sofa, as if she could hear that trembling voice—filled with a final shred of hope and fear—echoing through the office.
“Ah… You… you were definitely joking just now… right…?”
The despair and pleading in that voice formed a bizarre contrast with her current, peaceful sleeping face.
Chiai stood there silently, watching her for a long, long time.
The light of dawn shifted slowly behind her, stretching her slender shadow across the cold floor.
Her face remained expressionless, but deep within those glassy eyes, a turbulent undercurrent swirled, one far more complex and difficult to read than the gray sky outside.
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