Qi Zhimu sneezed a few times in a row.
"What's wrong, Mr. Qi? Did you catch a cold—or is someone talking about you behind your back?" Clarisse asked with concern.
"No one would talk about me. It's probably the sudden drop in temperature." Qi Zhimu rubbed his nose.
He'd been talking with Clarisse for a long time. It was already deep into the night.
"…Then why don't you wear more?" she asked softly.
"Two reasons. The first is probably a habit formed in childhood… I don't remember it clearly."
Qi Zhimu searched his memories. His voice took on a faintly reflective tone as he spoke.
"When I was little, my homeland erupted into a world war. All kinds of destructive weapons polluted the land, sky, and sea."
"The air reeked every day—an odor that made you sick. The war spread across the whole planet. Countless people were displaced."
"Too many biochemical weapons were used. They spawned countless lethal viruses. No one who got infected survived."
"I collapsed in a pile of corpses waiting to die… then my teacher appeared. She was a life sciences researcher. She picked me up and gave me a chance to live…"
It was the first time Qi Zhimu had spoken about his past. Clarisse listened, utterly absorbed.
"Maybe I was just hard to kill. My teacher said I carried at least a dozen viral sources. A few of them restrained each other, and that's why I held on until she came."
"After that, I became her test subject. To stay alive, I spent two full years soaking in a culture pod at the beginning."
"If I left, the viruses might erupt again."
"Even after I could leave, I still had to be tested often—constant monitoring of viral activity and mutations."
"Wearing too many clothes was troublesome. Most of the year I'd just throw on something clean. My memory's fuzzy, but it was probably like that."
"And the second reason?" Clarisse asked.
Qi Zhimu fell silent for a moment, then explained as if it were nothing.
"…The viruses are gone, but they left sequelae. Sometimes I lose sensory perception."
"Sensory perception?" Clarisse tilted her head.
"Touch, smell, pressure, temperature, pain… Sometimes I can't taste food properly, or I can't sense changes in the weather. It's not severe."
"I used to be in good shape, so it didn't matter. Now maybe I'm getting older—I've started feeling cold, somehow. Heh…"
"Mr. Qi doesn't sound like someone who's old."
He spoke lightly, but Clarisse didn't fully believe him.
What she'd seen over the past few years didn't lie.
People feel cold and put on more layers. They feel hot and dress lighter.
Mr. Qi's "sometimes" losing sensation might not be occasional at all…
Maybe he couldn't sense the weather for most of winter. Maybe he could only rely on monitoring data to decide whether to add clothing.
And—taste.
Clarisse suddenly remembered: the last time she brought red-blue crystal fruit, Mr. Qi tasted it and said it was sweet.
But the fruit was clearly sweet-and-sour. Even fully ripened, the sourness was obvious.
At first, she'd assumed it was just personal preference.
Now…
A needle pricked at her heart.
Could it be… he'd lost his true sense of taste long ago, without realizing it?
But if his taste was impaired, how could he make such delicious pastries and those exquisite dew-like spirits?
Unless—
His taste hadn't been a problem before, and it only started recently.
"Even your teacher can't cure it?" Clarisse forced down her pain.
"…If it could be cured, it wouldn't be called a sequela." Qi Zhimu smiled with open-minded ease, though guilt flickered inside him.
That was also half a lie.
In truth, these symptoms had only emerged in recent years.
It wasn't viral aftermath—it was the decline of aging.
He was short-lived. His natural lifespan was at most a little over a hundred years.
He was still alive only because Ruan Mei had extended his life back then.
But he didn't intend to say any of that.
Someone who was about to die should bring the unpleasantness into the grave alone—not embed it into someone else's memories.
Qi Zhimu understood one thing very clearly:
To Clarisse, he was only a passerby in her life—a doctor who cured her mother's amnesia.
That was all.
Clarisse didn't know what he was thinking. She only sighed softly.
"How could you suddenly sigh like that?"
"Because I feel for you, Mr. Qi. Fate has been so unfair to you."
"Heh. It was never fair. I understood that as a child. But that's part of life."
Qi Zhimu smiled gently.
"Live into the shape you want. Then 'unfair fate' matters less. You can treat it like it doesn't exist."
"Then, Mr. Qi… did you become the person you wanted to be?" Clarisse pressed.
"I think I did."
"…That doesn't sound very confident."
Qi Zhimu's smile didn't change. "There's no standard answer. It's like pi—you can never calculate it to the end."
"Fate made me wander homeless and suffer… but it also let me meet my teacher and be redeemed."
"When I think of it that way, fate has been fairly balanced to me."
Hearing that, Clarisse felt he wasn't a pessimist at all—more like an optimist.
He was broad-minded.
Or maybe people who had stood at death's edge simply saw things more clearly.
Clarisse thought of her own homeland.
Nations weren't openly at war, but their covert struggles never stopped.
Even within her own country, court politicians fought to the death over interests.
But compared to what Mr. Qi had lived through as a child, her upbringing was practically paradise.
Being excluded, being isolated… it was nothing in comparison.
Maybe that was why she couldn't truly understand how he could be so calm.
"Mr. Qi, you really respect your teacher."
"Of course. Without her, there wouldn't be me today—there wouldn't be you today, or Mrs. Durand."
"A teacher who raised such a gentle doctor like you… she must be a gentle person too."
"Yes. My teacher is the gentlest person in the world."
Qi Zhimu answered from the heart, without a second's hesitation. Speaking of his teacher made his gaze even softer.
"She always said she only treated me as a test subject, studying how to clear my viruses… but for that one sentence, she worked herself to the bone for six whole years."
"In those six years, she went without sleep for days and nights, again and again, just to find one more thread of hope in me—and hold on to it."
"After the viruses were cleared, I had nowhere to go. So she took me in as a student and taught me everything she knew."
"From the most basic knowledge to the most cutting-edge theory—she taught it all to me by hand."
…
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My : pat*eon*com/RuneA
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