The afternoon in the laboratory was filled with a drowsy stillness. A faint, lingering scent of chemical reagents drifted through the air, taking on a strange, indefinable laziness under the warmth of the autumn sun.
Silas Shen sat at his desk, a biochemical research paper in full English spread out before him. His fingertips, always neatly trimmed and clean, rested against the edge of the slightly green-tinted pages, not moving to turn them for a long time. The invitation in his lab coat pocket seemed to retain a scorching warmth, pressing slightly against his ribs with every breath he took.
"Assistant Lin, what kind of person is your wife, really? Give us the inside scoop!"
Across a few rows of equipment racks, several graduate students—currently in the throes of "thesis anxiety"—set down their micropipettes and began to crowd around Lin. The solemn, academic atmosphere of the lab vanished instantly amidst the flurry of gossip.
Silas's fingers faltered slightly on the paper, but he did not look up. He simply straightened his spine, looking like a cool, unmoved jade carving.
Hunter Huo was leaning by the window, holding a cup of coffee in a relaxed, sweeping posture. Sunlight hit his broad shoulders, gilding his loose lab coat with a golden rim. He appeared to be staring absentmindedly at the ginkgo trees outside, but his ears, hidden beneath his messy blonde hair, were perkily attuned to the conversation.
"Hehe, her..." Lin scratched his head, a visible glow of red spreading across his honest, round face. "She's an Omega. A violinist for the city orchestra. She's incredibly lively—the perfect complement to a boring guy like me who spends all day in the lab."
"An Omega?" A student's eyes widened in surprise. "Brother Lin, not bad! A Beta chasing an Omega... that's quite the leap. So, your compatibility must be..."
In this world ruled by secondary genders and pheromones, "compatibility" was a verdict written into one's genes. Weak Omegas, in particular, would instinctively follow the Alpha who could provide the strongest suppression.
Lin's smile widened, stretching from ear to ear. "Compatibility? Oh, it's exceptionally high—a solid zero."
The laboratory fell silent for a heartbeat.
"Zero?" the student stammered. "Then doesn't that mean you can't smell her scent at all? What about her heat cycles?"
"Yeah, I can't smell her, and she can't feel my pheromones—mostly because Betas don't have those things to begin with." Lin puffed out his chest, his tone lacking any disappointment; instead, it carried an indescribable pride. "But we've been together for five years. Aside from debating what to have for lunch, we've never once raised our voices at each other."
Silas's gaze, fixed on the paper, trembled slightly. His eyes lingered on the word "neurotransmitter receptor" for a long time, but he found he could no longer piece the letters into a logical sentence.
"Don't you feel... like something is missing?"
A slightly raspy but uncharacteristically serious voice suddenly cut in.
Hunter Huo had set down his coffee cup at some point and turned around. Standing with his back to the sun, his deep features were cast in half-shadow. Those eyes, usually full of roguish charm, were now staring intently at Lin, as if trying to dig a final truth about the universe out of this ordinary Beta.
"Missing what? The 'fake' sweetness of being blinded by instinct?" Lin shook his head, looking at Hunter with the enlightened gaze of one who had seen it all. "Little Huo, I think it's the exact opposite. I know she chose me not because she physiologically needed me during her heat, and not because my pheromones made her weak in the knees. It's because when she is wide awake—in every rational morning and every deep night—she still thinks I am the best."
Lin paused, his voice full of steady conviction. "That feeling is much more stable than any pull of pheromones. I don't have to worry about a 'more compatible' Alpha coming along and stealing her away, because the person she loves is me, not my glands."
This confession—so pure it bordered on idealism—felt out of place in a lab filled with precise data and physiological studies, yet it was deafening.
Silas's fingers gripped his fountain pen with unconscious force, the nib leaving a shallow indentation on the expensive paper.
A flash of that humid, rainy night in Haicheng suddenly crossed his mind.
Back then, Hunter had just taken a knife for him. The boy was soaked through, and the thick, aggressive scent of oranges had nearly drowned Silas. It was the devastating attraction of top-tier compatibility, making even a professor as rational as himself nearly unable to stand, creating the absurd illusion that he wanted to surrender.
He had always firmly believed that it was a trap of biological instinct—a trick of the genes.
But now, Lin—this "zero compatibility" model of happiness—was like a scalpel, precisely slicing through the logical defenses Silas used to hide and arm himself.
If you stripped away that 99% compatibility, if you couldn't smell that bold orange scent... would I, Silas Shen, still have this chemical reaction called 'heart-flutter' for that blonde boy?
The lab became so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Hunter didn't ask anything else. He leaned back against the window, his long fingers subconsciously stroking the hem of his shirt. He tilted his head slightly, his gaze leaping over the heads of the graduate students to land directly on Silas's stiff back.
The gaze was too hot—like a silently burning fire.
Silas kept his head down, mechanically turning a page of his paper.
The letters on the page were dense, like countless tiny fish swimming and blurring his vision. He couldn't process a single word. His mind was entirely occupied by Lin's words: "She still thinks I am the best when she's wide awake."
Wide awake.
To Silas, that word had once been his armor; now, it had become his weakness.
He remembered with perfect clarity the cold sweat of pain on Hunter's brow while his dressing was being changed; he remembered the shadow of the boy guarding him outside the door crack; and he remembered... every deep night after that orange scent had vanished, the hollow, irrational longing deep in his soul.
The sunlight gradually shifted, moving from Silas's fingertips to his lap.
The red invitation in his pocket seemed to throb more violently along with the unrest in its owner's heart.