It started when a bloody rain was about to fall.

Upon hearing this, Ye Qingrou raised her head.

Time was stretched, frozen, and distorted infinitely in that instant.

The light cuts in at a subtle angle:

A beam of cool fluorescent light seeped through a crack in the ceiling, while a beam of warm September midday sun slanted in through a window at the end of the corridor—

The two colors converged, blended, and refracted on Ye Qingrou's face, forming a strange halo that was both cold and warm.

Ye Qingrou's gaze fell on Lin Ye's face.

His previously polite and distant gaze suddenly flickered with an extremely subtle change—

It was an instinctive reaction to being suddenly struck by a kind of beauty that was pure to the extreme and primitive to the point of being dangerous.

The pupil dilated slightly within a tenth of a second, and the nebula-like patterns on the iris became briefly clear.

It was as if, in that instant, his entire gaze was focused, magnified, and then frozen by some irresistible force.

immediately--

The fluctuations were quickly suppressed and smoothed out by well-trained rationality, transforming into a kind of almost instinctive scrutiny and vigilance.

Like the conditioned reflexes of apex predators when encountering unknown species:

Who is this? Where did it come from? What is its threat level? What countermeasures should be taken?

Lin Ye's appearance is indeed strikingly handsome—no, that's too mild a word.

It was a visually striking experience that bordered on violence.

The brow bone and bridge of the nose form a steep and perfect undulation, like the silhouette of a mountain cut by a glacier, casting a deep shadow in the sidelight.

The shadows slid down the hollows of his eyes and down the bridge of his nose, dividing his face into countless geometric planes of light and shadow—each plane perfect, each plane breathtaking.

His eyes were as deep as the eternal night of the Arctic.

The pupils are a rare dark brown, almost black in dim light.

But within that pure black, there was a very thin ring of gold at the edge of the iris, like the light leaking from the edge of a solar eclipse sphere—

It was a suppressed, yet impossible-to-hide, proof of something brighter.

His eyes held the gloom and sharpness left by eighteen years of struggle at the bottom of society.

It was as sharp as a tempered blade, cold, hard, and dangerous—it would bleed if touched.

Yet, unintentionally, it reveals a certain brokenness and an unconscious vulnerability.

That kind of vulnerability is not weakness.

Rather, it is the irreparable crack on the exquisite porcelain—it blemishes the perfection, but in doing so, it makes the perfection even more breathtaking.

Because people will wonder: how could such a perfect object be cracked? And what kind of force caused the crack?

His skin had a cold, pale color due to long-term malnutrition and overwork.

That paleness is unique to people who have long been deprived of sunlight, who have long stayed up late, and who have long relied on cheap food to survive—it is not innate, but forced.

Her cheekbones, however, had a very faint flush from the earlier abruptness, like rouge scattered on the snow.

The crimson color came and went quickly, fading away before he even realized it, and was swallowed up by paleness once more.

His lips were beautifully shaped but lacked color, and the natural downward curve of his mouth gave him a world-weary and weary air.

That was an eighteen-year-old body housing a soul that had experienced too many vicissitudes—although that soul had not yet experienced the apocalypse, it had already aged prematurely under the heavy pressure of survival.

These contradictory qualities fused together in him to create a fatal and dangerous attraction—

Like a stunning black rose, it grows freely on the rusted steel ruins.

Beautiful yet dangerous, fragile yet tenacious, it proclaims a tenacious vitality that will still bloom even in dire circumstances.

Ye Qingrou's breath almost imperceptibly froze for a full two seconds.

She had seen too many handsome faces carefully wrapped in money and refinement amidst the splendor of high society.

Those faces looked like replicas cast from the same mold:

A perfectly curved smile, meticulously styled hair, and eyes that always radiate an untroubled composure—

That's the look in the eyes of someone who's been overprotected; it's the look of someone who doesn't know hunger, cold, or despair.

But never has a face looked like this—

The ultimate beauty and the sharp pain are so contradictory yet harmoniously fused together.

The visual impact of that instant almost breached all the cognitive defenses she had built up over the past eighteen years, creating tiny cracks in the rational barrier that Ye Qingrou had carefully constructed.

Ye Qingrou could feel her heart skip a beat.

The fine hairs on the back of my neck stood up for a moment—

It was a shock on an animalistic, purely aesthetic level, completely unrelated to class, status, or upbringing.

It is life's most primal reaction to beauty, a judgment made by the body before reason intervenes.

But she was still Ye Qingrou.

Sole heir to the Yip's Medical Group. He was taught from a young age:

True power is never swayed by appearances; true nobility measures value by bloodline and capital, not by the light signals received by the retina.

The class gap and social divide, as deep as the Mariana Trench, are far more significant than any visual impact and are more effective in determining the proper distance between people.

The amazement is just a fleeting physiological reaction.

The reality is that these are rules that need to be followed for life, social codes etched into our genes.

"It's okay."

Ye Qingrou nodded slightly.

His voice had returned to its usual calm and stillness, like a smooth, mirror-like glacial lake in the mountains, without the slightest ripple.

The temperature and humidity of each syllable have been precisely calibrated—not too cold, not too hot, not too far, not too close, just the most appropriate distance between strangers.

When Ye Qingrou lowered her eyes again, her gaze was no longer fixed on Lin Ye's face, but rather on the scattered papers in her hand.

The movements were fluid and natural, and the pressure applied when smoothing the curled corners of the pages with the fingertips was just right.

It flattens the paper without leaving new creases. The efficiency and precision with which it reorders documents by page number are comparable to a machine.

It was as if that moment of staring had never happened.

It's as if what's standing in front of you is just an insignificant background element, a moving backdrop.

Lin Ye accurately caught that fleeting change in his eyes.

That brief moment of amazement, like a summer night's lightning, illuminated his eyes for a fleeting instant before fading away.

The subsequent examination was like a scalpel cutting through the skin, cold and focused.

Ultimate alienation is like the glass wall of an ICU, transparent yet insurmountable.

A slight twitch occurred to Lin Ye's heart—

It wasn't a flutter of the heart, but a deeper bitterness and a profound understanding.

He was all too familiar with the evolutionary sequence of this kind of gaze:

A brief moment of amazement, a quick return to composure, followed by polite distancing.

Just like when people see exquisite artworks in a shop window that are priced at astronomical sums, they may admire them and stop to look, but eventually they will turn around and leave.

Because they knew that it wasn't their world, and even the right to touch it required the accumulation of three generations.

Lin Ye didn't say anything more.

He simply nodded silently and walked past Ye Qingrou.

His sleeve almost brushed against her shoulder. The rough texture of the cotton fabric and the delicate silk of her dress briefly clashed in the air—

The friction coefficient, weaving density, and price difference between the two fibers are embodied in a virtual distance of 0.5 centimeters at this moment.

The distance was so small that it was almost negligible.

Yet it is so vast, so vast that it can never be crossed.

Then Lin Ye continued forward, toward the green iron gate of the logistics department, its paint peeling. He was walking toward his own world, a world filled with sweat, struggle for survival, and cold reality.

The air density in that world seems to be greater than here.

Every step Lin Ye takes requires him to fight against invisible resistance—resistance that comes from poverty, from the bottom of society, and from countless people like him who are folded into the folds of society.