Chapter Two: The Dollmaker’s Obsession with Collecting
When Xie Qingqiu woke up, the first thing she felt was cold.
Not the kind of cold that froze to the marrow, but a carefully regulated chill, maintained at exactly the right temperature. She felt as though someone had placed her inside a climate-controlled chamber with extraordinary care.
She opened her eyes abruptly. A short, muffled groan escaped her throat, and a dull ache pulsed through the wound on her shoulder, reminding her that everything from the previous night had been real.
She was lying on a narrow bed. The sheets were snow-white fine cotton, so clean they were almost painful to look at.
She instinctively tried to sit up, but a faint weight tugged at her wrist.
She looked down and saw that a thin silver band had somehow been fastened around her left wrist. Its workmanship was exquisite, and its edges were inlaid with fine, concealed patterns. At first glance, it looked like a piece of jewelry—but she knew exactly what it was: a pheromone suppressor ring, slowly releasing some kind of sedative to suppress the agitation remaining in her body.
She whipped her head around, her pupils contracting sharply.
This was a room—or more precisely, a glass room. Three of its four walls were made of thick, reinforced glass. Through them, she could clearly see a spacious area outside. The walls were painted dark gray, and several rows of storage cabinets stood along them, their doors tightly shut. There was no way to tell what was hidden inside.
A gigantic oil painting hung on the only solid wall. It depicted a withered garden, its petals fallen yet eerily frozen in full bloom, as if some force had forcibly stopped them in time.
Outside the glass room, in a leather armchair not far away, Pei Yan sat upright with a thread-bound book in her hands. The lamplight fell across her lowered lashes, and her expression was so calm that she looked as though she were spending an ordinary evening in her own study.
Xie Qingqiu’s heart sank.
She immediately rolled out of bed and staggered toward the glass wall. She shoved it with all her strength—but it did not move an inch.
She felt along where the door should have been. There was an extremely fine seam, but no handle or button anywhere. Her breathing quickened, and her fingernails nearly dug into the seam in the glass.
“There’s no need to waste your strength.” Pei Yan turned a page without looking up. “It’s bulletproof glass, three centimeters thick. Forget pushing it open—even shaking a crack into it would be difficult.”
“You—” Xie Qingqiu ground her teeth. The wound in her shoulder began to seep blood again from the violent movement, but she did not notice. “Why did you lock me in here?”
“To let you recover.” Pei Yan finally raised her eyes and calmly swept them over her. “And, while I’m at it, to wait for you to calm down enough to hear me out.”
“I have nothing to hear.” Xie Qingqiu clenched her jaw. “Let me out.”
“Ms. Xie.” Pei Yan closed the book and rose, walking toward the glass wall. Through that cold barrier, she met Xie Qingqiu’s eyes. “Before you lost consciousness last night, your pheromone concentration had already climbed above ninety percent of the critical threshold. If I hadn’t temporarily sealed your scent glands with a suppressor ring, you probably wouldn’t have made it through the morning. That wasn’t an ordinary heat response. It was some kind of physiological collapse on the verge of losing control.”
Xie Qingqiu’s expression shifted faintly.
She did remember that burning sensation, the pain that felt as though her bones were about to explode from the inside. But she had never imagined that she had already been so close to death.
“So what?” she sneered, forcing herself to remain calm. “You saved me, and now you want credit? Or are you planning to trade me in for that three-hundred-thousand bounty?”
Pei Yan lowered her gaze to her. A trace of emotion flickered through her eyes—something almost like pity, but not entirely pity.
“If I wanted that bounty,” she said evenly, “I should have called the Joint Defense Bureau last night instead of carrying you downstairs, cleaning and dressing your wound, and watching over you all night.”
Xie Qingqiu froze. Almost involuntarily, she looked down at her shoulder. The wound had indeed been bandaged with meticulous care. The gauze was wrapped flawlessly, its edges secured with medical tape. Clearly, it had been done by a pair of extremely patient hands.
Something in a corner of her heart trembled inexplicably. Then she immediately grew wary again and ruthlessly suppressed that strange stirring.
“People who show kindness for no reason either want something or have something to hide,” she said coldly. “What exactly are you after?”
Pei Yan did not answer at once. She turned and walked toward the row of storage cabinets against the wall. Opening one, she revealed more than a dozen dolls arranged in perfect order. Their poses varied, and their craftsmanship was so fine it was unsettling. Some had their eyes closed and heads bowed, as if asleep. Others stared out with smiling eyes, their expressions so lifelike they seemed ready to speak at any moment.
“Do you know why I like collecting dolls?” Pei Yan’s voice echoed through the empty basement, low and almost reverent. “Because they’re perfect. They never age, never decay, never betray you, and never leave. You carefully polish every inch of their skin, every single eyelash, and they’ll preserve forever the moment you gave them—the most beautiful moment.”
Xie Qingqiu frowned as a chill crawled up her spine.
“And Omegas,” Pei Yan continued, turning around, her eyes settling on Xie Qingqiu once more. Her gaze was so intent that Xie Qingqiu felt deeply uncomfortable, as though her clothes had been stripped away and she had been displayed naked on an exhibition stand. “are the closest thing in this world to a ‘perfect work of art.’ Fragile and delicate, yet hiding astonishing resilience and beauty within that fragility. And you—”
She paused. A difficult-to-describe interest entered her voice.
“Your scent gland structure is the most unusual one I’ve ever seen in my life. Reverse evolution, a toxin response, the ability to unleash pheromone bursts powerful enough to kill—you have no idea how rare you are, Ms. Xie.”
Xie Qingqiu’s blood nearly froze.
“So you’re going to turn me into a specimen?” Her voice trembled, though she forced out a cold laugh. “Put me in your cabinet like those dolls?”
“No.” Pei Yan shook her head, her tone carrying an almost gentle seriousness. “A specimen is a dead thing. But you—I want you alive, breathing, fighting back, and holding a knife to my throat. That’s what’s truly worth collecting.”
Xie Qingqiu stared at her. For a moment, she couldn’t tell whether the woman before her was insane or something even more frightening: a fanatic so lucidly obsessed it had reached her very bones.
“You’re crazy,” she said quietly.
“Perhaps.” Pei Yan smiled faintly, then turned and returned to the armchair. She sat down and picked up the thread-bound book again, her tone returning to its original calm, as though what she had just said had been nothing more than casual conversation. “But before that, Ms. Xie, you’d better think carefully. The people pursuing you out there want to turn you into a ‘dead thing’ far more than I do. The wanted notice issued by the Joint Defense Bureau is very clear: ‘Lethal force may be used if necessary.’”
Xie Qingqiu’s expression darkened completely.
Of course she knew. Over the past three days, she had seen with her own eyes how those pursuers pointed their guns at her without the slightest hesitation. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand how dangerous her situation was. She simply refused to admit that she was now standing at the edge of an even stranger, more perilous abyss.
“Then what do you want me to do?” she finally asked. The sharpness in her voice had faded somewhat, replaced by an exhausted calm that bordered on resignation.
Pei Yan raised her eyes and looked at her as though examining a collection piece that had finally agreed to hold its pose.
“It’s simple,” she said. “Stay here, recover from your injuries, and wait for your pheromones to stabilize. In exchange, I won’t reveal your whereabouts to anyone. Whatever you want here, I’ll do my best to provide.”
“And then?” Xie Qingqiu pressed warily. “Once I’ve recovered, you’ll let me go?”
Pei Yan did not answer immediately. She lowered her head and turned another page. The light cast a small shadow across her face, making it impossible to see what truly lay in her eyes.
“That question,” she said slowly, “we’ll discuss it after your injuries have healed.”
Xie Qingqiu stared at the distance separated by the glass and suddenly realized that her situation was somehow even less within her control than it had been the night before, when she had been covered in blood and surrounded by more than a dozen people hunting her down.
At least on the streets, she had been able to decide where to flee next with nothing but a knife and her own legs.
But inside this carefully designed glass room, she couldn’t even choose the direction in which to escape. She couldn’t tell whether the person before her saw her as prey in need of protection or a work of art about to be sealed away forever.
She lowered her head and looked at the cool silver suppressor ring around her wrist. Suddenly, an absurd thought occurred to her: the ring was almost like some kind of gentle chain. It restrained not only her pheromones, but her entire fate—leaving her nowhere to go.
She slowly sat back down on the edge of the bed. Dull pain surged through her shoulder again and again, forcing her to slow her breathing.
The air inside the glass room circulated well. There wasn’t the slightest trace of mildew or dampness. Instead, the faintest hint of Pei Yan’s sandalwood scent drifted through the air. She couldn’t tell whether it had seeped in through the vents or was merely her imagination.
That scent had clung to the edge of her fading consciousness the night before. Smelling it again now inexplicably loosened her taut nerves by half a degree. She hated that reaction, but she had no control over it.
“Your wound,” Pei Yan said suddenly, her eyes still on the page, her tone as casual as if she were mentioning something in passing. “If you don’t change the dressing within three days, it’ll likely become infected. You can choose whether to let me come in and treat it or do it yourself. But with your strength as it is, you probably can’t even remove the gauze cleanly.”
Xie Qingqiu clenched her teeth and said nothing. She lowered her gaze to her shoulder. A small patch of dark red had already seeped through the edge of the gauze, and the burning throb deep inside the wound was gradually sharpening, reminding her that her body had long since been pushed to its limit.
She had suffered worse injuries before, gritting her teeth and forcing herself through them on sheer vicious determination. But back then, she had at least had trusted companions nearby to take turns looking after her. Now she was alone, unable even to get basic disinfectant.
“…Come in.” In the end, she gave in. Her voice was quiet and hard, as though even surrender had to come with thorns. “But don’t try anything.”
Pei Yan set down her book and rose. She walked to an inconspicuous indentation beside the glass wall and entered a string of nearly invisible numbers. With a faint hiss of air pressure, a door that had previously fit seamlessly into the wall slid open without a sound.
Only then did Xie Qingqiu realize how unnervingly inconspicuous the door was. Clearly, this glass room had never been designed to make it easy for the person locked inside to find a way out.
Pei Yan carried a pale-colored medical kit inside. She remained utterly unhurried, as though she were entering not a cage holding a beast liable to strike back at any moment, but the most ordinary room in her own home.
She sat down beside the bed, less than half an arm’s length from Xie Qingqiu—close enough for Xie Qingqiu to smell the sandalwood on her growing clearer.
“Undo your collar.” Pei Yan opened the medical kit, her tone as flat as though she were stating something that had nothing to do with her.
Xie Qingqiu stared at her for several seconds. In the end, she raised a hand and stiffly undid the tattered collar of her windbreaker, exposing the blood-soaked lining and the vicious wound beneath it.
When Pei Yan’s fingers touched her, they were very gentle, almost imperceptible. Yet that near-instrument-like steadiness only made Xie Qingqiu more uneasy.
She knew all too well that hands capable of implanting a doll’s eyelashes one by one with flawless precision could just as easily dismantle every joint in a person’s body in the blink of an eye.
“What are you afraid of?” Pei Yan asked casually as she cleaned the dried blood around the wound. There was no mockery in her voice, only pure observation. “Your heart rate is elevated.”
“Who wouldn’t be afraid?” Xie Qingqiu turned her face away, refusing to watch what Pei Yan was doing. “A lunatic who claims to collect people as ‘works of art’ is moving something as sharp as a blade around on my shoulder.”
“It’s a disinfecting swab,” Pei Yan corrected her, a trace of amusement entering her voice. “If you were truly afraid, your pheromones would have flared again already. But all you’re doing now is putting on a tough front.”
Xie Qingqiu choked on her reply and glared at her angrily, but didn’t argue further—because Pei Yan was right.
At some point, the aggressive pheromones that should have instinctively kept their guard up around an unfamiliar Alpha had grown unnaturally quiet in Pei Yan’s presence, as though they had been tamed by that thread of sandalwood. Even Xie Qingqiu herself found the sensation strange and humiliating.
Pei Yan applied fresh medicine and rewrapped the bandage. The entire process took barely ten minutes. Her technique was clean and efficient, without a single unnecessary movement or any of the hesitation or ambiguity one might expect when touching another person’s body. Instead, she seemed to be carrying out a precise restoration project.
That almost inhumanly calm concentration left the anger Xie Qingqiu had expected to feel at being violated with nowhere to go.
“There.” Pei Yan closed the medical kit. As she stood, she paused and added, “For the next three days, I’ll come change your dressing every day. If you don’t want me touching you, you can learn to do it yourself. But I advise you not to force it. With your strength right now, even removing the gauze could pull the wound open again.”
Xie Qingqiu did not answer. She only lowered her eyes to the neatly wrapped shoulder, momentarily unable to tell whether what churned inside her was humiliation, wariness, or the unfamiliar sensation of being treated with care—something she herself was unwilling to acknowledge.
Pei Yan carried the medical kit out of the glass room. The silent door slowly closed behind her, restoring the wall to one flawless, uninterrupted sheet of transparent glass.
She returned to the armchair and picked up the book, which was open halfway through. But her eyes did not return to the page. Instead, they remained quietly fixed for a long time on Xie Qingqiu’s bowed head and curled-up figure at the edge of the bed, as though she were gazing at a breathtakingly beautiful, imperfect thing she had finally reclaimed—but had not yet fully tamed.