The portholes of the Herta Space Station cast a cold, dim blue glow across the interior.
Dressed in a standard station male-staff uniform, a young man who appeared to be in his mid-twenties stood by the porthole during a break from work, cradling his phone with a dopey grin plastered across his face.
"Susu, my dear Susu, heheh, my darling Susu~!"
His brown mushroom-cut hair nearly buried itself in the phone screen. The chat log was reflected in his pupils, and the corners of his mouth were stretched into the drooling smile of a man absolutely gone. He was holding the phone so close that the tip of his nose was practically brushing the profile picture — a "cute fox-girl with golden-tangerine hair."
His name was Wen Furui, a researcher at the Herta Space Station.
In the past, he had buried himself in research and never once thought about romance — until he started chatting with a beautiful fox immortal online, and his entire worldview began to shift.
Then, the day before yesterday. Just the day before yesterday!
Wen Furui had decided to enshrine that date as his lucky day and second birthday — the moment fate's gears turned again and meshed with his life anew.
He had been chosen, by great fortune, as a premium member of "Beautiful Fox Immortal Chat," and there he had met Miss Susu!
Like Brother Jie meeting Ah Wei, like an iKun meeting his idol, like Tom meeting the white cat — for the first time in Wen Furui's eyes, the black-and-white world burst into vivid colour, and he began to feel the powerful beating of his own heart.
To think that somewhere in this galaxy there existed such a dreamy, wonderful, utterly adorable creature. His entire first half of life had been an absolute waste!
Before, he had been a walking corpse going through the motions of study and research. Only now, at this moment, had he truly begun to live.
Wen Furui tucked his mushroom head down and shuffled into the lounge. Everyone drinking tea and wine looked up and laughed. Someone called out:
"Wen Furui, you've even changed your phone wallpaper to Miss Susu!"
He didn't answer. He turned to the bar and said: "One 'Lovesick' cocktail, and a dish of anise beans."
He scanned the code. Ninety credits.
The other staff members burst into laughter.
"I heard she sent you a voice message? You listened to that one clip thirteen times yesterday?"
"Old Wen, trust me, you've been had. Everything online is virtual. The water's too deep — a guy with your personality doesn't stand a chance."
Wen Furui's eyes went wide as he rushed to defend Susu: "How dare you sling that kind of baseless slander at someone's character!"
"What character? I personally watched you transfer money to Susu yesterday, and you're even planning to send her gifts. You're completely bewitched."
Wen Furui's face flushed crimson. The veins on his forehead pulsed and bulged beneath his brown mushroom cut. He pressed his phone hard against his chest:
"Long-distance dating isn't being bewitched — it's interstellar online dating! Two souls resonating across the void — can you really call that a scam?"
He paused, then launched back with righteous conviction: "Susu only occasionally sends me a sticker or a voice message. That's called matching information density. Do you people even know anything about social dynamics?"
What followed was a stream of increasingly incomprehensible declarations — things like "Susu has never run a scam in her life, I transferred the money of my own completely free will" and "Don't you dare judge my way of expressing affection through your narrow worldly lens!" — which sent the entire room into another wave of uproarious laughter.
The lounge inside and out was filled with a buoyant, merry air.
Unbothered by his colleagues' attitudes, Wen Furui drained half his 'Lovesick' cocktail. The crimson slowly faded from his face, replaced by a faint flush of alcohol and a sudden upsurge of poetic inspiration:
"Susu, my Susu.
How did I fall for you?
Your pink dress.
Like a pink toilet plunger.
Suctioned hard onto my heart."
"What kind of cringe poetry is that?" a staff member commented, face contorted.
Wen Furui paid no attention. The poem perfectly captured the contents of his heart. It was completely normal for those lifeless husks of people — dead inside their own spiritual worlds — to fail to understand him.
"Brother, trust me, let me break down her manipulation tactics for you."
A colleague with distinctly playboy energy sidled over, craning his neck to try to read the chat log on Wen Furui's phone.
"I don't need it!"
Wen Furui twisted away from the prying eyes. In his panic, his phone slipped and fell straight into the cocktail glass. Liquor splashed all over the front of his uniform — he didn't even notice.
He frantically fished the phone out, then immediately curled back to his spot by the porthole, jabbing at the screen until his knuckles went white:
"Susu replied! She replied!"
The eyes beneath his mushroom cut were bright as stars. The phone screen cast a strange reflection across his face, and the liquor that had dribbled from the corner of his mouth was trickling down his chin into his collar — he was completely oblivious to it all, his dopey grin wide enough to show his back molars.
[Fox Immortal Susu: Don't mind what your friends say. They all mean well — they're worried about you getting scammed online. Not just your colleagues, I'm worried about you too! You're so earnest and straightforward — what if someone takes advantage of that one day? Boys need to protect themselves, you know.]
[Fox Immortal Susu: Please don't get angry at everyone over this, okay?]
[Warmth for a Lifetime: It's alright! Susu! I understand! I won't get angry, not at all!]
[Warmth for a Lifetime: Oh right, Susu — do you have enough money for Grandpa's treatment? If not, I still have more here!]
Even if he had to take out a loan.
Wen Furui was absolutely going to help Susu scrape together every credit she needed for those medical bills!
[Fox Immortal Susu: Mm~ ↘↗ Mm~]
It was a voice message. Hearing that soft, gentle voice, Wen Furui could picture it perfectly — a golden-tangerine-haired fox-eared girl, bright smile on her face, shaking her head.
[Fox Immortal Susu: Thank you.]
[Fox Immortal Susu: The money from before is already enough to cover Grandpa's treatment costs for this stage.]
[Fox Immortal Susu: For the rest, Susu will work hard and figure something out on her own. Fighting! .jpg]
[Fox Immortal Susu: Brother Wen's help is something Susu will carry in her heart forever. That money — Susu will absolutely pay you back!]
[Warmth for a Lifetime: No, Susu, you don't have to pay it back! Just use it however you need!]
[Fox Immortal Susu: I can't accept that~ Brother Wen works aboard the brilliant Lady Herta's space station — expenses there must be enormous. You have to take care of yourself.]
[Warmth for a Lifetime: No, Susu, listen to me — right now I'm on three separate projects, and every single one of them pays a bonus.]
[Fox Immortal Susu: Still not okay~ But... Susu is looking forward to seeing Brother Wen's name on the Herta Space Station's Outstanding Researcher Honor Roll!]
[Warmth for a Lifetime: Yes yes! Susu, I'll definitely make it happen!]
Wen Furui made his resolution then and there: starting today, every single moment outside of chatting with Susu would be devoted entirely to study, research, and his projects. He would seize this year's Outstanding Researcher honour — no matter what.
[Fox Immortal Susu: Susu asked a friend to buy a few research books for Brother Wen — they're digital editions. I don't know if they'll be useful for your work, but...]
Cold starlight filtered through the porthole. The noise of his colleagues gradually faded from Wen Furui's ears. He stood rooted to the spot like a statue welded to the window frame, eyes brimming with hot tears.
[Warmth for a Lifetime: Susu, I...]
——
"Hah?"
"What the—"
"Oh, WHAT!"
After reading the chat log on Caelus's phone, the skewer of meat in Qingque's mouth fell with a clatter onto the round table, and a crude expletive escaped before she could stop it.
She lunged forward with the reflexes of a startled sparrow, sending the rocking armchair creaking into a dangerously wide arc.
"You — you, you, what even IS all this!? Waaah~!"
Her body was far too small and light for the physics involved. The tilting chair's momentum took her with it and she tipped clean over backwards — but Caelus moved fast, catching her by her slender, hand-spanning waist just in time to save her from planting face-first into the floor.
The grey-brown tips of her hair brushed across Caelus's chin. He caught a distinct fragrance — something like a quilt that had been sunbaked for three hours on a scorching midsummer afternoon, the kind of smell that made you want to wrap your arms around it and lie down lazily in the grass.
Her cloud-patterned fabric crinkled. Caelus's palm landed directly on that tender, luminous skin — smooth as an infant's.
He made an involuntary assessment.
Compared to himself, Qingque's skin was closer to Seele's — and yet the two were entirely different textures, each with their own appeal.
He gave that sun-cured, salted-fish scent another sniff, and then simply held Qingque like a body pillow.
Qingque, for her part, had very little mental bandwidth left to spare for the intimate contact. Every last bit of her attention was fixed on the chat log.
"Bloody hell — is your mission from the sugar mama actually to catfish people by pretending to be a pretty girl?"
Qingque was speechless. But deeply, profoundly impressed.
Truly worthy of a rich woman. What a bizarre and eccentric hobby — the kind that a small-time civil servant like herself, still at the 'food and clothing' tier of Maslow's pyramid, simply could not fathom.
"How much did the sugar mama pay you?"
Caelus didn't answer, just smiled, and opened Asta's transfer record, holding it up in front of his 'body pillow.'
"What the actual HELL!!"
"1, 2, 3, 4... 6... 9 zeros! Five hundred million!?"
Qingque's eyeballs nearly popped out of her skull.
Not that Qingque had much interest in anything beyond the mahjong table — her standard for money was 'enough is enough,' which was partly why she posted her Celestial Jade games anonymously. But a number like that still hit differently when you were a nobody civil servant staring at it, especially for a job that involved completing one single, bizarre, simple task. She genuinely could not wrap her head around it.
"This is what it means to be a galaxy-tier rich woman. As long as I latch onto her, I can help you pay your over-quota birth fine too. How about it?"
Caelus picked Qingque up and set her down. She landed with a thwap and folded into a compact little duck-squat.
"Wow, big shot, that's incredible, truly incredible."
The toes curled inside her white stockings shifted slightly. Qingque clasped her hands together in a respectful salute toward this genuine Social Person, then tilted her head and asked:
"So — what kind of... quirks does this rich woman have exactly?"
"It's not a quirk. It's looking out for her subordinates."
Caelus pointed at the skewer of meat that was slightly out of his reach.
"Elaborate."
Qingque picked up a skewer and fed it to Caelus, listening with genuine interest.
"It went like this..."
Caelus gave a brief summary of Asta's commission: to investigate the 'Beautiful Fox Immortal Online Chat' operation that had been running on the Xianzhou.
"Oh, I know about this!"
After Caelus had bitten off a piece of meat, Qingque brought the skewer to her own lips. Her pearly teeth closed around a chunk, and she spoke around it: "My mahjong group chat had a few people who got completely hooked on the Fox Immortal Chat recently. Though — I think today they came back to the group asking people to play again."
The tone they came back with wasn't quite right, though. Like they'd been through a bad breakup — angry and deeply chagrined.
Whatever the case — whether you were getting chewed out and depressed, or nursing a broken heart, one round of Celestial Jade was the cure-all for everything!
"Of course, that's because my partner and I already tracked down and flushed out the scammer running the operation behind the scenes."
Caelus crossed his legs.
An online scam? Simple — just deploy the Haxxor Bunny weapons system.
Haxxor Bunny had quickly gathered the criminal intel on Fox Immortal Daiqing, traced her through the network, and — surprise, surprise — it turned out to be a man. Haxxor Bunny had given him a very firm warning, threatening to hand the evidence over to the Realm-Keeping Commission, and Daiqing had immediately dropped to his knees in a full surrender, returned every credit he had scammed, and cut off all contact with his victims.
"Ah, right — but that still doesn't complete the sugar mama's mission, does it?"
Qingque was puzzled.
"Sure it does. How doesn't it?"
Asta's goal was to protect her subordinate researchers' emotional and financial wellbeing, and to redirect their energy back to work.
But simply dismantling the scammer wasn't enough.
So Haxxor Bunny had gone through the Fox Immortal Chat fan community and, in her role as admin, selected Wen Furui as a 'lucky fan' — and pushed Caelus's freshly-created alt account, [Fox Immortal Susu], his way.
And then — that was all it took.
If a scammer's cheap manipulation tactics could already ensnare Wen Furui, then Caelus — as a Masked Fool, a professional actor — left Fox Immortal Daiqing completely in the dust, both in tactics and in constructed persona.
Wen Furui was the kind of earnest, honest man who was slightly timid deep down but desperately longed for a love with no regrets and no flaws.
Caelus effortlessly shaped a persona that matched every single thing the man had ever fantasised about.
Slap on the labels 'traditional,' 'never dated before,' 'shares your interests,' 'gentle and considerate,' 'virtuous and adorable,' 'fragile yet strong,' and so on — and the rest of that dreamy girlfriend image would assemble itself automatically inside the other person's head.
He had Wen Furui hooked, line and sinker — love at first chat, tossing and turning at night, utterly besotted!
Through Susu's persona, Caelus was now steering Wen Furui to throw himself into his research and studies. He could guarantee — Wen Furui's work efficiency was about to increase by three hundred percent.
"Wow, just..."
Qingque was briefly speechless.
"Then why did you still let him transfer money to you? Isn't that just scamming him too?"
"No no no, Little Que'er, you've got it all wrong."
Caelus wagged a finger back and forth.
"He's a staff member at the Herta Space Station — one of Asta's subordinates. I'm latched onto the rich woman's leg, so I'm more or less Asta's kept boy-toy."
"The money he transfers to me is essentially wages paid out by Asta. I use that money to buy products from companies Asta's family has a stake in. That's not a scam — that's called capital flow. Internal circulation."
"I'm helping Asta improve the motivational incentive structure for her researchers' salaries."
"...That almost sounds like it makes sense. Oh, who am I kidding — no it doesn't!"
Qingque's expression was absolutely priceless.
Are you literally the devil!?
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