Gu Xizhou was quickly sent to the nearest military district hospital. By the time Gu Jing received the notification and arrived, the doctor had already finished her examination.
The young alpha had been injected with a sedative and now lay in the bed, unconscious. The hot flush of differentiation blazed like a wildfire throughout her body.
Catalyzed by pheromones, old cells died and new cells grew.
Gu Jing entered the hospital room and saw her daughter lying in bed—flushed cheeks, rapid breaths, seemingly on the brink of death. Her heart seized with worry. “Doctor, what exactly is wrong with my child?”
“Why is her fever this severe?”
Had Su Nanfeng poisoned her at the military training base? Even an illness shouldn’t reach this state.
The doctor quickly soothed her anxiety. “It’s a Secondary Differentiation.”
“She’s relatively young, and her physical condition wasn’t great during her Initial Differentiation. It wasn’t completed fully. Recently, she must have encountered some stimulus, triggering another differentiation.”
Gu Jing’s eyes widened. “Then… then isn’t that extremely dangerous!”
Alpha differentiation is a complex change that alters the body’s physiological structure, and it’s quite perilous. In the past, there were even cases where alphas couldn’t endure the Differentiation Period and died prematurely.
A Secondary Differentiation is a re-differentiation for an alpha, its hot flush and pain more than double that of the first.
Gu Jing turned her head to look at Gu Xizhou’s small figure curled up on the bed, and her breath caught in her throat.
Her daughter, so frail. How could she possibly endure this?
The doctor offered reassurance. “The instructor from the base treated her before sending her here, so there won’t be any major issues.”
“Once she gets through these two days of high fever, she’ll be fine.”
Gu Jing agreed quickly but, after a moment’s thought, still requested leave from her superior to stay at the hospital and watch over Little Xizhou.
Hot… so hot…
Little Gu Xizhou felt as if she were a piece of meat on a grill, every inch of her body sizzling with sweat.
The high temperature distorted all surrounding sights. She was like a flaming meteorite, running naked through a pitch-black wilderness, desperate to find a bay that could shelter her.
She ran and ran, breath ragged, heart pounding. In the sweltering, desolate world, a faint ticking sound, like a clock, drifted towards her.
Tick-tock… tick-tock…
The mechanical clock’s sound was startlingly clear in this dark, silent wilderness, like the final death knell in a person’s life.
In the darkness ahead, a woman’s gentle whisper came, matching the clock’s rhythm: “Xizhou… Xizhou…”
“Come over here, come here…”
Little Gu Xizhou turned her head to look. In the darkness, a glimmer of light, like a firefly, appeared.
The light was extremely faint, barely enough to illuminate the path ahead, but it was her only guide in the darkness. “Come on over. It’s alright.”
Little Gu Xizhou didn’t hesitate. She chased after the firefly-like figure, sprinting again.
She didn’t know how long she ran before a familiar scent of cherries drifted in from the dark night ahead.
Gu Xizhou sniffed. The moment the cherry fragrance became distinct, she felt as if she had plunged headfirst through an air wall and run out of that pitch-black world.
“Open your eyes and look…”
Light seemed to fall on her eyelids. Little Gu Xizhou struggled to open her eyes. Through the blurry vision, she seemed to see floating water.
She felt her entire body soaking in water. The water was filled with cherries, bobbing in the current. The rich scent was everywhere.
So fragrant… so fragrant… It’s that familiar smell, yet somehow unfamiliar.
Little Gu Xizhou instinctively reached out a hand and scooped up two handfuls of cherries. She held them to her nose and took a deep sniff. The sweet, fresh fruit aroma rushed straight to her brain, stimulating an unmentionable part of her body, making it ache even more.
More… I need more…
Little Gu Xizhou frantically gathered the cherries around her, moving against the water’s current, crawling forward with her armfuls.
The water splashed. A large number of cherries were washed onto the floor by the flow. Her foot slipped, and she plunged face-first into the water.
As the cold water flooded her mouth and nose, the jarring clock sound in her ears stopped with a final “tick.” Silence descended. Little Gu Xizhou felt her vision go black, and she sank back into the darkness once more.
“Xizhou… Gu Xizhou…”
All sounds were fading away, including that firefly-like light, which was also drifting further and further from her.
Her body and soul kept retreating. The dense darkness pushed her back to the original world, once again locking her in that hopeless, scorching pain.
Tossing and sinking, finding no release.
After an unknown stretch of time, she woke again from the darkness. Again, summoned by that voice, she broke through the black wall amidst the ticking clock, followed the light to its destination, and opened her eyes once more.
The moment her eyes opened, amidst the high fever, she saw everything clearly.
In the spacious bathroom, she sat naked in a bathtub full of water. Countless cherries, like flower petals, clustered around her, trapping her fervently.
Little Gu Xizhou’s eyes widened in an instant. A thought rose in her mind: she had been here before.
In that week-long nightmare, she had been here. This was the place where the “future” Gu Xizhou had spent her Heat/Rut Cycle.
It was the spot where Su Zhiyi, in that dream, had accompanied her through her first Heat/Rut Cycle.
This was her tender haven, but also the source of all the pain that followed.
Tears streamed uncontrollably down her face, instantly blurring all she saw before her.
Little Gu Xizhou’s consciousness remained clear for only a moment. Soon, the ticking sound in her mind stopped again. Her body went limp, and she sank back into the darkness.
As her consciousness was pulling away, she seemed to hear a few knocks on the bathroom door from outside: “Boss… Boss, are you alright in there?”
Boss?
Little Gu Xizhou wanted to spare some mental energy to listen to what that voice was saying, but the high fever quickly evaporated all her reason, casting her back into the pitch-black prison.
In 0820—the world of the thirty-six-year-old Gu Xizhou—Lin Ling stood outside the bathroom door of Gu Xizhou’s room, holding a syringe made from Su Zhiyi’s pheromones, knocking nervously.
“Boss… Boss… are you still conscious?”
“Boss… Boss?”
After several unanswered calls, Lin Ling pressed her ear to the door. Hearing only the rushing water inside, she decisively broke in.
“Beep…”
The electronic lock disengaged, and the bathroom door automatically swung inward.
The moment the door opened, the alpha’s heavy scent of Rosemary, mingled with a cherry fruit aroma, hit Lin Ling squarely in the face.
Scattered cherries, slick with water, rolled to her feet. Lin Ling looked up at the alpha collapsed in the bathtub—skin pale, bone-thin, emaciated. She yelled in shock, “BOSS!”
Clutching the Omega pheromone injector, Lin Ling scrambled over the floor full of cherries, charging in without hesitation.
She plunged the syringe into the alpha’s slender arm. Touching the scorching hot skin, a chill ran down her spine. “A fever, and such a high one! And still in the water! Is she trying to do herself in?!”
“Her wife isn’t even dead yet, how can she wreck herself like this!”
Seeing her boss’s pallid face, which looked utterly drained, blood rushed to Lin Ling’s head. She tossed the empty syringe aside, scooped her decisively out of the bathtub, and threw her onto the bed, wrapping her in a blanket.
The flustered researcher pressed Gu Xizhou down on the bed with the blanket, wiping her all over roughly, jerking her around without giving her any peace.
The appropriate pheromone supplement temporarily brought Gu Xizhou back from her stupor. She poked her disheveled head out from the blanket and opened her eyes to see Lin Ling’s overly tense face.
Before Gu Xizhou’s groggy mind could clear, a surge of anger filled it. She didn’t speak, just stared fixedly, eyes wide open, at Lin Ling above her.
Lin Ling, who was busily wiping her down, belatedly sensed something was wrong. She stopped her hands, looked up, and met a pair of cold eyes. A chill shot straight down her back.
Lin Ling, recalling this person’s temper, promptly scrambled off the bed, raising her hands in surrender. “Boss, I didn’t do anything! I just carried you out of the bathtub!”
“You were burning up, nearly dying from the fever.”
The high fever and Heat/Rut Cycle gnawed at Gu Xizhou’s sanity. Even after enduring it for six years, it never felt any easier.
She took a deep breath and, before her next wave of heat arrived, rasped, “Fever reducer. And clean up this room.”
Right now, she had no energy to pursue Lin Ling’s actions. This was the last day of her Heat/Rut Cycle; she just had to get through it quickly.
Lin Ling moved fast. Without any extra explanations, she promptly had someone come in to clean the room, fed Gu Xizhou the fever reducer, settled her into a warm bed, and tactfully withdrew.
Before long, Gu Xizhou’s hot flush returned.
Even though she’d been injected with Su Zhiyi’s pheromone agent, for an alpha who’d been “widowed” for years and was in her Heat/Rut Cycle, it was merely drinking poison to quench thirst.
Sadness and gloom engulfed her once more, accompanied by desires she couldn’t release.
In bed, Gu Xizhou clutched Su Zhiyi’s old clothes, cocooning herself entirely within them. She buried her head, sniffing her long-vanished scent. Tears poured down like water from a breached dam, unceasing.
“Wuwuwu… Zhiyi… my Little Mermaid…”
Love me. Please, love me.
Don’t disappear before dawn. Don’t turn into sea foam and vanish into the sunlight.
She wept until her eyes were blurry, consumed by gut-wrenching sorrow. Trapped in physical agony and spiritual despair, she found no release.
Past events flickered by one scene after another. Like a boat struggling upstream, she dreamed through the painful ordeal, back to that first touch many years ago, the sweet scent she had tasted.
