By the time I came out of the internet café, it was fully bright outside.
Saying “the morning sunlight filled the streets” would be giving it too much credit.
The sun had been slacking off behind the clouds all morning, and the light clung stickily to the asphalt.
The air smelled of last night’s barbecue and the wet asphalt that the sprinkler truck had just rolled over.
I stood at the entrance of the internet café, squinting for five seconds to adjust.
My eyes were dry as sandpaper, and a dull ache throbbed at the back of my head.
After nine hours hunched over a keyboard, my spine was still protesting.
My phone had 13% battery left, and the notification bar was piled with over three hundred unread messages.
Ha. Guess I’m a big deal now too.
I shoved the phone back into my pocket and started walking toward the rental apartment.
I forced myself not to dwell on that private message from the early hours.
The Flower Crystal had glowed for half a second and then gone dark—so what?
It was probably just letting out some air. Normal rock behavior, like a person turning over in their sleep.
Yeah, exactly.
The Flower Crystal dug into my chest, stinging a little.
I’d put it back on before leaving the internet café, the chain slipping through the collar of my T-shirt, the stone pressed against my chest.
Still cold.
Always… cold.
Three blocks later, my phone vibrated again.
I pulled it out and looked.
Good news: finally not a spam text.
Bad news: bigger problem than a spam text—the Brand Partner had sent a Legal Notice.
Bro, what time is it? Don’t your legal department people sleep?
Oh wait—they’re on regular working hours. I’m the one without a job.
Sigh…
I flipped the phone over, screen-down, and let it go dark.
You know what? If you shove a live grenade back into your pocket and pretend it doesn’t exist, it won’t explode! Amazing, right?
Then the phone vibrated again.
Then again.
And again and again.
Okay, fine. Pretending a grenade doesn’t exist really does get you blown up.
I finally pulled the phone back out.
That Brand Partner representative I’d never met, three thousand kilometers away, informed me in ninety-eight characters: due to my “Public Image Collapse,” the partnership was terminated, the promotional fee already paid must be refunded in full, and per Clause 72 of the contract there was also a penalty fee.
The exact amount could be found in the attachment. Best wishes for a pleasant life.
The partnership fee from the brand had sounded impressive—a full one hundred twenty thousand.
But after the platform cut, agency management fees, and the “public opinion risk deposit,” what I actually got in hand was just enough to cover the Hua Su debt and two months of rent—the rent wasn’t much, just two thousand, but the interest on the Hua Su debt was rolling like a snowball.
And if the contract was ruled as breached, per Clause 72, the penalty was twelve times the full partnership fee.
Twelve times one hundred twenty thousand. I might never pay that off in my lifetime.
I’d hesitated over that contract for a whole night before signing.
Because if I didn’t sign, I couldn’t afford next month’s rent or the late fees on the Hua Su debt—both of which were out of reach.
What a “pleasant life” indeed.
Thanks. Life just kicked me in the gut, but that kick did feel pretty pleasant.
I read that message twice before confirming one thing: that representative definitely wasn’t the admin girl reincarnated.
She was far kinder. She wouldn’t chase you for compensation after getting you fired.
Then came the DingTalk vibration.
The boss had kicked me from the company’s main group.
I could’ve guessed that. But here’s the funny thing—DingTalk specifically showed: “You have been removed from the group ‘xxxx Technology Big Family’ by administrator Wang.”
Big Family.
I stared at those three words and laughed out loud.
The Big Family kicked me out like kicking a dog rummaging through the trash.
Old Wang then sent a string of messages in private chat, six in total, which read like a modern poem when strung together:
“Xiao Lin”
“that article”
“is it true”
“you okay”
“don’t do anything stupid”
“text me back”
I almost lost it again. Old Wang, you should write doggerel when you retire. Your first piece can be titled “To Lin Jian.”
Should I reply? How? Reply with “I’m fine, thanks for asking, and by the way everything in that article is true but that wasn’t my wife, that was me”—no matter how I phrased it, it sounded like lines from an absurdist play.
I sent him a meme. A dog lying by the window watching the rain, captioned “I’m fine.”
Old Wang’s avatar went dark.
Great. One less friend.
Oh wait—there were never many friends to begin with.
This persona didn’t attract real friends, only guilt and sympathy disguised as friendship.
And those two things couldn’t be cashed in for pocket change after your image collapsed.
I kept walking. I stopped at a 711 to buy a bottle of water, and the cashier lady at the register gave me an extra look.
What… are you looking at?
Did you see that article too?
Impossible. A 711 cashier doesn’t read self-media.
But what if she did? What were the odds of recognizing a collapsed-house widower?
I’d seen a video saying the human brain can remember five thousand faces, and my face now carried a hundred twenty thousand followers.
I kept my head down and hurried out of the 711.
The rental apartment was on the fourth floor. Old and crumbling, no elevator—well, if it had an elevator, I wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway.
Every step up the stairs reminded me: you stayed up all night, you got fired, you’re in debt. Oh, and your phone is still vibrating.
Second floor. The Brand Partner sent a second email, politer and colder than the first.
Third floor. Someone in the ex-colleague group chat posted a psychology article: “On the Narcissistic Personality of Perpetrators in Emotional Fraud.” The caption read: “Isn’t this describing someone we know?”
Someone @’d me. I still hadn’t left that group! They’d probably forgotten, but I guessed it was more likely deliberate.
I finally dragged myself to the fourth floor.
I pulled out my keys. A new notice was taped to the metal door: rent collection.
It had been put up yesterday afternoon, when I was still at my desk performing “grieving for my late wife.”
I tore off the notice. Opened the door.
What greeted my eyes was a wall covered in colorful memorial photos.
Okay, “memorial photos” isn’t quite accurate. Memorial photos usually mean black-and-white photos of the dead. The person in these photos wasn’t dead—just retired. So they should be called “Retirement Memorial Photos.”
That said, a whole wall plastered with “Retirement Memorial Photos” doesn’t make sense in any context either.
Here’s how it started: three years ago when I moved into this rental apartment, I wanted to hang a copy of that office photo at home too. But a wall with just one photo on it looked like it was marking a crime scene. So I hung another one. Then another. And then—
By the time I snapped back to reality, I had a photo wall.
Four rows, six photos each, twenty-four total. From age twelve to twenty-one, every single photo captured her at the most perfect moment of youth.
ID photos, portrait shots, half-body shots, candid snapshots on the rooftop with wind-blown hair, and a silly photo of her in the Flower Outfit making a peace sign at the camera.
The Flower Crown’s internal photo archive could be exported, and data was retained for three years after retirement.
I stood at the entrance, shoes still on.
Twenty-four versions of myself stared back at me.
Silver-gray hair, star-shaped gleam in the right eye, the corners of the mouth slightly curved.
That last expression was trained into me by the Flower Crown.
A Flower Envoy must always smile at the camera, to make ordinary people feel “protected.”
These photos, and more that I hadn’t printed and put up, would all be automatically deleted by the system in three days.
I hadn’t backed them up.
Backing them up wouldn’t have meant anything anyway.
I unconsciously stared at the ID photo in the center—the one that Hammer Has Material had screenshotted.
The next second, I realized I was making eye contact with her.
With the twelve-year-old version of myself who’d just been conscripted, who didn’t know anything.
She probably didn’t know that twenty-four-year-old Lin Jian would turn out like this.
She probably didn’t care either.
I took off my shoes. Walked barefoot across the cold floor tiles.
Put my phone on the shoe cabinet, screen-down. Walked to the middle of the living room. Stopped.
The world finally went quiet.
No phone vibrations. No DingTalk notifications. No comment sections that never end.
The rental apartment was both the ruins of my past and the refuge of my present.
Both functions ran simultaneously, free of charge beyond the monthly rent.
Though even that, I was barely able to afford right now.
I began to look around.
The first thing I saw was the kitchen.
The stove hadn’t been lit in three months, a thin layer of dust settled on the burners.
Next to it sat a bag of dried noodles bought last October—and, for the record, it was October now.
The plastic bag was puffed out, the noodles inside probably fossilized into stone.
The fridge’s crisper had three things left: a jar of Lao Gan Ma, half a carton of yogurt two months past its expiry, and a vegetable that had become unrecognizable.
I closed the door. No courage to open the freezer below.
My gaze turned to the balcony.
A pot of withered Moon Orchid.
The stem was skinny and dry, the leaves curled into brown paper twists, and the soil around the pot’s rim cracked like a crumpled old newspaper.
The way it withered wasn’t the same as a plant that went limp and yellow from being forgotten to water.
The Flower Crown gives every Flower Envoy a companion plant matching their Flower Seed.
The Flower Seed and the code name share one life—the stronger the Envoy, the more the seed blooms.
When an Envoy retires via Flower Burning, the seed withers along with them.
This pot had been with me for twelve years.
For the first nine, I watched it bloom with growing intensity.
The autumn when the Moon Orchid’s buds pushed out most wildly from the base of the stem, I’d just pulled a little girl out of the rubble of a Hui Zhu’s destruction.
I sat on the ground beside the stretcher, watching the medical Flower Envoy wheel her away.
The child had been crying through her semi-consciousness. Her mother’s body was never found.
Her father had stopped answering messages the morning the other Hui Beast appeared.
I returned to the dorm in the dead of night.
The Moon Orchid on the windowsill had opened sixteen flowers, every one of them glowing.
I had no spare Flower Crystal to heal my own wounds, and no one else to file my mission report.
I sat on the edge of the bed, writing every line of the report through the searing pain of my torn wounds, watching it burn through every bud, one by one, just to help me stop the bleeding.
At that moment, I thought, this is the only flower I have.
And for me, it had opened every bloom it could possibly give in that entire autumn.
In the three years since retirement, it had shriveled—yet miraculously, it hadn’t fully died.
Right after retiring, I thought it was in the way and wanted to throw it out.
But every time I walked to the balcony, I’d pick up the pot—and put it back down.
Every spring, a sliver of silver-white sprout would push up from the base of the dead stem, like a single ember smoldering beneath the ashes.
Then, before summer arrived, it would wither back on its own.
It didn’t want to die. But even living took everything it had.
Heh. Just like me.