CNS | Chapter 4

Chapter 4, Shen Ze

Jiede stood at Eden’s back door, holding a half-burned cigarette between her fingers.

The ash was teetering on the brink of falling, but she did not notice at all. Her eyes were fixed unblinkingly on the direction of the bar counter.

There sat a stranger, a young man.

He was wearing a black long trench coat, and his jet-black tousled hair was wet and plastered to his forehead. His exquisite features were like a sculpture, so beautiful he did not seem human at all.

The only somewhat strange thing was that, in such muggy weather, he was still wearing a black turtleneck sweater under his trench coat.

“Looks good, right.”

Boss’s voice suddenly appeared beside her like a ghost. Jiede jumped, and the ash on her cigarette finally dropped to the floor.

“Didn’t I tell you? Isn’t he a million times better-looking than Wei Lan?”

There was a trace of emotion mixed into Shen Run’s words that Jiede did not usually hear. After thinking it over, she decided that this emotion was called “pride.”

“Although that’s not quite that exaggerated, he really is definitely the best-looking person I’ve ever seen.” Jiede was a little dazed. “You picked him up too?”

Shen Run thought about it and gave a definite answer. “Yeah, that’s right, and he counts as the first one I ever picked up.”

Jiede nodded. “Oh~, I get it, he’s the source of all evil.”

“Pfft——”

Shen Run could not help laughing out loud. Source of all evil, that really was fitting.

He really did like to pick up little strays that were in a sorry state, bring them back to heal their injuries, and then set them free. Most of them would express their gratitude and leave, and some would choose to stay, like Chi Yu.

Jiede was very unhappy about this. She often had one line on her lips, “You’re going to get into trouble sooner or later for randomly picking up unknown things and bringing them back.”

Shen Run always accepted her sarcasm with a smile, then kept on bringing people back.

“So, who is he?” Jiede exhaled a mouthful of smoke and asked the question she was most curious about.

Shen Run leaned against the doorframe, his eyes on the beautiful young man sitting at the bar, a soft light flickering in his gaze.

“Shen Ze, my younger brother. Don’t we look alike?”

Jiede choked on his words and coughed violently several times. She looked at Shen Run, then at that young man, and a rare change of expression appeared on her normally deadpan face.

“No.”

She said. “This isn’t a matter of whether you look alike or not.”

“You two don’t even look like you’re the same race, do you?”

“Boss, you have a typical Eastern face. He has a high nose bridge, deep-set eyes, and although he also has some Eastern features, he’s at least mixed.”

“Unless your family had a genetic mutation, or, are you half-brothers? Maternal half-brothers?”

Jiede, who normally treasured words like gold, rattled off such a long stretch in one breath. Shen Run was amused by her and laughed out loud. “We don’t have blood relation.”

“Fuck……”

Jiede could not help blurting out a curse. “If you don’t have blood relation, why the hell are you asking whether the two of you look alike?”

Shen Run spread his hands. “Can’t I ask?”

Jiede could not help cursing him again.

“What kind of brothers don’t even have blood relation?” She rolled her eyes.

“We lived together for fourteen years. Doesn’t that count as brothers?” Shen Run asked with a smile.

“A blended family?”

“Almost.”

“What do you mean, almost?” Jiede grew more and more confused about the relationship between the two of them.

“Tsk, explaining it really is a bit troublesome…” Shen Run rubbed his brow.

“You should know that some giant corporations assign employees birth quotas, right?”

Jiede nodded. In this era of giant corporations everywhere, there was a kind of person who stayed inside a company from birth to death. Their food, clothing, shelter, and transportation all took place within the company, and they spent their lives carrying out the so-called “labor duty” and “consumption duty.”

At the same time, in order to keep this inhumane corporate culture going, the giant corporations also imposed rigid birth quotas and included this indicator in promotion evaluations.

The children employees gave birth to were educated by the company and trained into qualified workers, over and over again, ensuring enough consumption power and labor power.

“My father was a senior employee at an aerospace company. In order to fulfill the birth quota, he found my mother, who had the same trouble, and they quickly completed all the steps of marriage and childbirth, then went their separate ways.”

Jiede was a little surprised. This was the first time she had heard the Boss mention his background.

Shen Run saw through Jiede’s thoughts and joked with a smile, “What, you thought I sprang from a stone?”

He also lit a cigarette, holding the thin cigarette between two fingers, and continued.

“A few years later, my father fulfilled all the requirements for promotion, but the company required him to have a second child.”

“Maybe he was dissatisfied with me. He no longer wanted to start from scratch to have another child, so at that time he came up with a good idea, marrying a single mother with a child and using her ready-made child to complete the company’s task.”

Jiede’s expression gradually became complicated. “That child was Shen Ze.”

“Yeah. Thinking about it now, when I first saw him, he had long hair, and I thought he was a girl, so I kept calling him younger sister.”

Shen Run exhaled grayish-white smoke, the corners of his eyes carrying a smile.

“And then? Why say almost?”

Shen Run tossed the burnt-out cigarette butt to the ground and ground it a few times under his toe. “I don’t know where Shen Ze’s mother came from, I only know that her arms were covered in needle marks.”

“The night before they went to register the marriage, that woman drowned in her own vomit because she took too many banned drugs.”

The air suddenly fell into a strange silence, and neither of them spoke.

“Later I figured it out. Maybe because he knew she would die of a drug overdose sooner or later, my father chose that woman. Marriage and the like were just trouble to him.”

Shen Run looked toward the bar. At some point, several sexy girls had sat down next to Shen Ze, and they were enthusiastically asking him questions about that cool-looking guitar.

“She just died too early. Because of her sudden death, my father ultimately missed that promotion opportunity, and a man like him would no longer care about Shen Ze’s life or death.”

“The afternoon Shen Ze’s mother died, my father sent him to the orphanage.”

“The orphanage. That really was where he should have gone, but we all knew it was not a good place.”

Jiede remained silent. The orphanage of today had already changed in nature. Rather than a rescue institution, it was more like a terrifying factory.

The orphanage was full of fatherless and motherless marginal children. No one cared about their rights. Some people saw a business opportunity and forced these children to work day and night, calling it “labor education” in a nice way.

Shen Run continued and finished the story. “Back then, how old was he? Three or four? So tiny, not even as tall as my thigh. I couldn’t just stand by and do nothing with a child that small.”

“Then you adopted him?” Jiede asked.

Shen Run looked at her as if she were an idiot. “I wanted to, of course, but I was only in my teens at the time. In any country, I wouldn’t have met the adoption requirements, would I?”

“Right…” Jiede nodded slowly.

“But by then I was already a mature network hacker, and resident files were just a matter of changing the data for me.”

“In Shen Ze’s file, his mother, Ms. Zhou Zhimin, had always been alive and healthy as his guardian.”

Jiede’s eyebrows rose slightly. “So you were this criminal already in middle school, tampering with resident files…”

Shen Run rolled his eyes at her. “When I was sixteen, I had already taken part in countless network offense-and-defense battles. The anti-intrusion system in the resident information database was like paper to me.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. In Alicia’s technical circles, his name was a golden calling card.

In the words of Lu Yun, who had brought him into the field, “Shen Run, you were born for network roaming.”

“Anyway, after my father left, I lived together with Shen Ze. This kid was very strange. Shen Ze was a name he made up himself. He said he wanted it to sound like family with my name. In fact, that wasn’t his real name at all.”

At that thought, Shen Run suddenly could not remember the name listed in Shen Ze’s resident file.

What was it again?

“You know, I’m starting to think your whole fortune-teller theory makes a little sense.”

Shen Run looked at Jiede. “Today I had a dream about Shen Ze, and a few hours later, he appeared right in front of me.”

“Truly amazing.” He sighed.

Jiede seemed to remember something. “Wait, does he know what you do for work?”

Shen Run shook his head. “No. Did you forget? We both signed confidentiality agreements. Even family members aren’t allowed to reveal work content.”

“Then, then by rights, we should have already been declared dead seven years ago…”

She made a strange face. “In his eyes, wouldn’t you be a ghost risen from the dead?”

“Yeah…” Shen Run gave a bitter smile. “Otherwise, what do you think I’m doing, leaving my adorable and kind younger brother alone and hiding here talking to a corpse like you?”

He sighed and reached out to press his throbbing forehead. “I don’t know how to face him, I don’t know how to explain to him that I died, and then came back to life.”

“After all, I never thought I’d be able to see him again.”

At the bar, the sexy girl in the white skull-print top pointed toward the back door. The beautiful young man, who had been lowering his head to fiddle with the guitar, finally noticed Shen Run leaning against the doorframe.

Shen Ze’s originally expressionless face immediately lit up with a brilliant smile. “Ge!”

He put down the guitar and strode toward Shen Run.

“But even if you explain it any further.” Jiede lightly wound a finger around the blue-black ends of her hair.

“From an objective point of view, the relationship between the two of you is at most roommates.”

Seeing Shen Ze walk over, Shen Run quickly stopped Jiede from continuing, “If you don’t understand, then shut up.”

“What roommates?” Shen Ze came up to the two of them and asked with a smile.

“Ah, nothing.” Shen Run awkwardly scratched his hair and pointed at Jiede beside him. “This is Jiede, my colleague.”

Shen Ze tilted his head and politely greeted her, “Hello, my name is Shen Ze.”

Jiede forced out a smile that looked uglier than crying.

Shen Run was somewhat displeased, worried that her expression might scare Shen Ze and leave a psychological shadow on his adorable younger brother.

The next second, Shen Ze stretched out his long arms and gently hugged the still-unreacted Shen Run, whispering in his ear, “Ge, where did you go?”

The sudden hug made Shen Run, who already disliked physical contact with others, somewhat uncomfortable. He stiffened in place.

Wasn’t this a little too enthusiastic?

he thought.

Shen Ze was extremely tall. Although he looked a little thin, his chest was actually broad enough. Shen Run was fully enclosed in his arms and very clearly felt the changes brought by the passage of time.

This kid, when did he get taller than me?

Shen Ze buried his head against Shen Run’s shoulder, his voice soft and sticky. “You were gone for so long, I thought you didn’t want me anymore…”

His tone carried grievance, and Shen Run felt as if something had bumped into his heart.

The distance brought about by being apart for too long made Shen Run feel a little awkward. He gently pushed Shen Ze away and lifted the bag in his hand.

“I went to buy food for you, shengjian buns. How is it, do you still like them?”

Shen Ze took the bag of shengjian from his hand and revealed a beautiful smile.

“I like them. As long as it was bought by Ge, I like it.”

Jiede, standing nearby, was blinded by this picture of brotherly affection and did not want to stay even one more second. Frowning, she returned to her workstation.

Shen Run pointed at the bar’s back door. “All right, go in. These’ll be cold in a moment.”

Shen Ze nodded with a smile and followed him into Eden.

When they sat on the sofa in the corner, Shen Run suddenly felt a little uneasy. On one hand, it was because the two of them really had not seen each other for too long, and the atmosphere was somehow awkward.

On the other hand, Shen Run felt guilty, afraid that Shen Ze would ask him about the fake death from seven years ago.

But the handsome young man didn’t ask anything, and simply ate the food he had brought back in silence.

“Ge, aren’t you eating?” Shen Ze looked at him.

“No, I’m not hungry.”

Shen Run brought back a bottle of Hennessy from the bar and only took one glass.

After he poured the amber liquid into the transparent glass, he looked up and found Shen Ze staring at him without blinking.

Shen Run felt a little embarrassed under his gaze and frowned as he said, “You brat, eat properly.”

“Oh.” Shen Ze answered softly and obediently turned his head away.

Only then did Shen Run let out a sigh of relief. After the two of them fell silent, he again felt vaguely guilty.

After thinking it over, he asked haltingly, “Xiaoze, you… have you been doing well these years?”

The young man, lowering his head as he ate the shengjian buns, nodded. “Pretty good.”

Then there was silence again.

“Th-then how has Alicia been recently? Any changes?”

He was asking about the war.

Shen Ze understood what he meant and summed up the city’s seven years of upheaval in one sentence.

“The capital? The most peaceful place. There hasn’t really been much change.”

Shen Run felt a little choked up. He had originally expected Shen Ze to talk a little more, but he hadn’t expected it to end so abruptly.

Of course, Shen Run didn’t really want to learn about these things either. The connected network was very advanced, and he specialized in intelligence work, so he knew about the major and minor events happening in Yalan, and even all over the world.

No one said anything anymore, and the atmosphere cooled again.

Shen Run felt a little bitter. The person who had once been inseparable from him, the person he had still been thinking about in his dreams, had returned to him in an unexpected way. In the music store, Shen Run had even thought it was a hallucination caused by not sleeping enough lately.

Only, he had not expected that after the joy, what remained would actually just be the same distance as between strangers.

One hand rested on the back of the sofa, the other held a glass tumbler. Today’s liquor was especially bitter, and Shen Run felt like he was sitting on pins and needles. He waited for Shen Ze to take the initiative to ask about what had happened seven years ago, while also fearing that he would bring it up. After all, he still had not figured out how to explain it to him.

When he was anxious and uneasy, he noticed that Shen Ze had been wearing black gloves on the hand holding the chopsticks all along.

Shen Run forced out a stiff smile and asked, “Xiaoze, it must be pretty inconvenient to use chopsticks while wearing gloves, right?”

Shen Ze’s movement of picking up a shengjian bun paused for a moment. Then he turned his head. A beam of neon light passed through the bar window and happened to fall on his face. His deep blue eyes gleamed like glass beads.

His high nose bridge made his face appear divided into light and shadow, one half shrouded in the glow of neon, the other merging with the surrounding darkness. His wet black long hair clung to his coat, like little snakes.

Shen Run suddenly felt a strange sense of unfamiliarity toward the young man in front of him, and felt that he looked like the soul-stealing demon from myth and legend.

“Yeah, a little inconvenient.”

Shen Ze answered Shen Run’s question obediently, and that dangerous aura vanished in an instant.

Shen Run shook his head almost imperceptibly, secretly thinking he really was hallucinating.

“Then take them off.” He said casually.

Shen Ze did not hesitate. He put down his chopsticks and quickly took off his gloves.

Revealing a pair of silver-white metal hands, with obvious signs of modification.