For the next three days, the glass room sank into a silence so thick it seemed almost frozen in place.
Pei Yan still brought three meals at the usual times every day and still checked Xie Qingqiu’s injuries on schedule, but their conversations had been reduced to something almost strictly businesslike.
“How does the wound feel today?” “It’s time for your medicine.” “Any signs of a fever?”
Beyond that, not another unnecessary word passed between them. Her movements while changing the dressing remained meticulous, but her touch was lighter than before—so light it seemed deliberate, as though she were carefully maintaining a certain distance and refusing to let even the slightest ambiguity grow between them, something that might be misread.
Xie Qingqiu was perfectly happy with that.
At least, that was what she told herself again and again.
Curled up in the corner of the bed, she flipped through the old books she had read countless times, but her eyes kept drifting involuntarily toward the silent figure outside the secret room.
Pei Yan spent even longer than before sitting in the armchair repairing dolls, often remaining there until well past midnight. The carving knife in her hand moved delicately over the broken porcelain edge, her expression focused to the point of total absorption, as if the “collection piece” in the glass room—the one that had once consumed so much of her attention—was now nothing more than an ordinary part of the background of her life.
That deliberate calm only made Xie Qingqiu inexplicably restless.
She told herself that this distance was the right thing. She should never have developed any unnecessary expectations of being watched over and imprisoned like this.
Yet whenever the night grew deep and still, and she looked at Pei Yan’s solitary profile beneath the dim yellow light, that restlessness was always laced with an emotion she refused to examine too closely—something almost like hurt.
During the dressing change the next day, the silence between them had nearly become tangible.
Pei Yan lowered her head and focused on wrapping fresh gauze around Xie Qingqiu’s wound. Every movement of her fingertips was precise, but unlike before, she did not make idle conversation.
Watching her lowered lashes, Xie Qingqiu suddenly felt that this deliberately maintained distance was even more suffocating than their earlier heated argument.
“Are you planning to keep this up forever?” She finally couldn’t hold back and spoke first.
Pei Yan’s fingers paused slightly. She looked up at her, and a fleeting, unreadable emotion crossed her eyes.
“Keep what up?” she asked evenly.
“This.” Xie Qingqiu turned her face away, irritation coloring her voice without her realizing it. “You won’t say a single word more than necessary when you change my dressing.”
“I thought,” Pei Yan said, lowering her eyes and returning her attention to the task in her hands, her tone carrying a hint of deliberate restraint, “that this was exactly the distance you wanted. After all, the day you left, you made yourself very clear: ‘You have no obligation to explain anything to me.’”
Xie Qingqiu choked on her reply. She opened her mouth, but for a moment she couldn’t find anything to argue with. She had said those words, but hearing Pei Yan repeat them in that calm, distant tone somehow stirred an indescribable sense of hurt and resentment in her chest.
“I didn’t ask you to take me that seriously.” She dropped the words stiffly, then fell silent, allowing the awkward stalemate to spread through the secret room once more.
The painful deadlock lasted until the night of the third day.
That evening, an unusual heat suddenly began seeping from Xie Qingqiu’s shoulder wound.
At first, she paid it no mind, assuming it was merely an old injury flaring up after days on the run. It wasn’t until the second half of the night, when the heat spread from her shoulder and was accompanied by waves of throbbing pain, that she realized something was wrong. She lifted the gauze to inspect it and saw a startling ring of redness and swelling around the wound. The fluid seeping from it carried the faint, ominous color of pus.
She gritted her teeth and sat up, cold sweat quickly beading at her temples. When she had escaped that day, the heavy fall against the brick wall had torn open an old wound that had not yet fully healed. After she had spent hours dragging herself through dusty alleys, infection had finally set in.
She stared at the body-temperature reading that had suddenly spiked on the monitoring panel. After hesitating for a moment, she ultimately did not press the call button.
The last remnants of her stubbornness told her that she shouldn’t bow her head and ask Pei Yan for help so easily on the third day of their cold war.
But the high fever came swiftly and violently. Within less than half an hour, she was trembling from head to toe, her consciousness beginning to blur.
She bit down hard on her lip, trying to endure it through sheer willpower, but amid a dizzying spin of the world, she finally couldn’t hold on and collapsed heavily beside the bed.
The monitoring equipment outside the secret room let out a piercing alarm.
Pei Yan was jolted awake by the abrupt warning.
She sprang from the chair almost instantly and hurried to the control panel. The moment she saw the body-temperature reading leaping wildly across the screen, her face darkened. The deliberate distance she had maintained for days was torn apart completely in that instant.
The door opened at once. Pei Yan hurried to Xie Qingqiu’s side and bent down to help her up from the floor. The moment her fingertips touched skin shockingly hot to the touch, her brows drew sharply together.
“The wound is infected.” Her voice was filled with frustration suppressed to its limit. As she swiftly examined the injury beneath the gauze, she murmured in self-reproach, “I should have realized it. The injuries from your fall that day couldn’t have been that simple.”
Xie Qingqiu’s entire body was burning. Half-conscious, she still heard the rare, nearly self-blaming emotion in Pei Yan’s voice. She tried to say something, but only a low, hoarse moan escaped her throat.
Pei Yan said nothing more. She quickly fetched the medical kit, efficiently cleaned the wound and injected antibiotics, then wrung out a towel soaked in cold water and carefully laid it across Xie Qingqiu’s burning forehead. Throughout the process, her expression was focused to the point of severity. The deliberately businesslike manner she had maintained earlier had vanished without a trace.
“I was too stubborn these past few days.” In her daze, Xie Qingqiu heard her murmur to herself, rare regret in her voice. “If I’d noticed something was wrong sooner, it wouldn’t have reached this point.”
Xie Qingqiu wanted to argue, to tell her that this wasn’t anyone’s fault—that she had brought this on herself by insisting on doing things her own way. But the fever had scattered even her thoughts. By the time the words reached her lips, they had dissolved into a vague, barely audible murmur.
She didn’t know how long passed before the scorching fever finally receded somewhat.
When Xie Qingqiu slowly woke, the light outside the window was already beginning to brighten. She found herself settled in bed. Pei Yan sat slumped fully clothed in the chair beside her, exhaustion from a sleepless night etched across her features, yet she was still holding Xie Qingqiu’s wrist, as though monitoring her pulse and temperature at all times.
“You’re awake?” Pei Yan noticed her stirring and immediately straightened. Fatigue mingled with relief in her voice. “How do you feel?”
Xie Qingqiu opened her mouth, her voice so hoarse it was almost unrecognizable. “...You stayed up all night?”
“A high fever caused by an infected wound can be dangerous if it isn’t controlled in time.” Pei Yan answered evasively. She reached out to feel Xie Qingqiu’s forehead, her expression easing slightly. “The fever is mostly down, but for the next few days, you need absolute bed rest. No more ‘doing whatever you want.’”
Xie Qingqiu turned her face away, a trace of stubbornness emerging through her weakness. “Weren’t you... unable to look me in the eye for three whole days?”
Pei Yan’s movements paused. A complicated, unreadable emotion flashed through her eyes before finally becoming an almost inaudible sigh.
“I thought,” she said softly, with a rare frankness in her voice, “that keeping my distance would lessen the burden of being entangled in my obsession for you. It would also let me feel a little less... frustrated at watching you want to leave while being powerless to stop you.”
“But what happened?” She gave a self-mocking smile, her gaze settling on Xie Qingqiu’s pale face. “All my ‘restraint’ over these three days nearly let you burn up before you ever had the chance to pick another fight with me.”
Xie Qingqiu stared at her, suddenly unable to tell whether the emotion surging in her heart was resentment toward Pei Yan’s deliberate distance or an unexpected stirring of emotion at the regret Pei Yan was no longer trying to hide—something that caught even her off guard.
“I’m not that easy to kill.” She turned her face away, forcing down the weakness in her voice. “You don’t have to abandon your principles for me, either.”
“Principles?” Pei Yan repeated the word softly, a nearly self-mocking note in her voice. “Ms. Xie, from the night you came crashing into my shop covered in blood, I probably haven’t had many ‘principles’ left to speak of.”
She adjusted the blankets around Xie Qingqiu once more. When she rose, the weight of a sleepless night showed in her steps, yet she still stopped at the door and looked back at her.
“Get some proper rest,” she said. “Once you’ve recovered, we’ll continue this cold war and argue some more. But until then, remember that you owe me a life.”
Xie Qingqiu watched her turn and walk away. Only after the door to the secret room closed again did she belatedly realize how much fear for Pei Yan’s own life, the kind that came after narrowly surviving a disaster, was hidden in the words, “You owe me a life”—how much of it Pei Yan herself had never said aloud.
Xie Qingqiu lowered her head and looked at the fresh bandages wrapped around her arm. She suddenly felt that the cold war she had thought she could muscle through by sheer willpower had ultimately been torn open by an accident, creating a fissure that neither of them could pretend not to see anymore.
But the fissure did not make the ice between them melt completely, as she had imagined it would.
For the next two days, Pei Yan continued to remain outside the secret room without leaving for even a moment, monitoring Xie Qingqiu’s temperature and preparing her medication. The restraint and distance from before had lessened in her expression, replaced by a tightly wound anxiety she made no effort to hide.
Yet Xie Qingqiu could also clearly sense that beneath this renewed closeness, there was still an unspoken fissure.
Pei Yan no longer mentioned her escape that day, nor did she ask again about Xie Qingqiu’s thoughts on “leaving,” as if they had both silently agreed to set the fissure aside for the time being rather than truly mend it.
“These past few days,” Xie Qingqiu finally asked during a dressing change, unable to hold back any longer, a hint of probing in her voice, “have you regretted keeping me here?”
Pei Yan’s movements paused. She looked up at her, a complicated emotion flickering in her eyes—perhaps self-mockery, perhaps helplessness.
“If I truly regretted it,” she said slowly, “I could have waited another half hour before entering last night. Ms. Xie, you give me far too much credit for being ‘softhearted.’”
Xie Qingqiu froze, then let out a cold laugh. “So you saved me because you didn’t want to take a loss?”
“Interpret it however you like.” Pei Yan lowered her eyes and returned her attention to the gauze in her hands, her voice revealing nothing. “I’ve never expected everything I do to earn your trust.”
She said it as lightly as if it meant nothing, yet Xie Qingqiu’s heart inexplicably faltered.
She suddenly realized that her barbed question had merely been an attempt to coax from Pei Yan some proof of the concern she both expected and resisted. But Pei Yan refused to give her that opportunity so easily, still gathering every emotion beneath that calm, indifferent facade.
Silence descended between them once more. This time, however, it was no longer as charged as before. Instead, it held a subtle stalemate that both of them understood perfectly, yet neither was willing to be the first to break.
The sky outside gradually darkened. The dim floor lamp in the glass room stubbornly remained lit, illuminating two silent figures who had not truly stepped outside each other’s line of sight.
After finishing the dressing change, Pei Yan did not immediately get up and leave as she usually did. Instead, she took a document from inside her coat, her expression regaining some of the cool composure she wore when discussing serious matters.
“The re-verification date has been set,” she said. “Five days from now, people from the Joint Defense Bureau will bring their equipment and come back to verify the registration data. That friend of mine in the research and development department gave me a way to temporarily distort the readings, but carrying it out will involve considerable risk.”
Xie Qingqiu’s heart sank. The subtle emotions born of the fever and Pei Yan’s confession were instantly replaced by a more urgent sense of danger.
“What kind of risk?” she asked.
“The distortion works by using another set of artificially introduced pheromone data to temporarily cover your original scent-gland characteristics.” A rare gravity entered Pei Yan’s voice. “But that means that during the procedure, your pheromones must overlap with another person’s pheromones to the point of almost ‘resonating’ at the instant the equipment collects the data. Ms. Xie, the only person who can overlap with your toxin pheromones to that extent right now is me.”
Xie Qingqiu went still. Her mind instantly flashed back to that night in Chapter Three, when Pei Yan had held her close as her toxin had spiraled out of control.
The sensation of sandalwood mingling with the agitated icy presence inside her was suddenly so vivid it almost seared her.
“So that means,” she said, painfully finding her voice, “that five days from now, we’ll have to reenact what happened that night?”
Pei Yan lifted her eyes to meet hers. The deep light in them was especially difficult to read beneath the dim yellow glow.
“Not just reenact it,” she said softly. “The risk will be greater this time. If the data collection fails, or the equipment identifies an anomaly, both of us will be exposed directly under the Joint Defense Bureau’s watch, with nowhere to hide.”
Xie Qingqiu stared at her, unable for a moment to distinguish whether the turmoil in her heart came from fear of the danger awaiting them or from a secret expectation she refused even to admit to herself.
The night outside sank into complete darkness. The re-verification five days from now hung over them like a blade suspended above their heads, pushing this already perilous relationship toward a point of no return.
She clenched her fists until her knuckles paled, yet she knew perfectly well that no matter how much she resisted, the confrontation five days from now could no longer be avoided.