[Rooftop — September 16, 9:32 PM]
The wind had calmed down to a more gentle breeze.
Lin Feng lay sprawled across the chaise lounge, cigarette burning down between his fingers. The plastic was cold against his shoulder blade where his shirt had pulled up. He shifted, trying to find a spot that didn't dig into his spine.
Around him, the rooftop had gone dead still. Even the pool looked like black glass—not a ripple anywhere.
Above him was that fucking ever twilight night sky.
He took a drag and watched the blue-violet glow wash across everything. Those light clusters drifted overhead like slow-motion fireworks that never exploded. Back on Earth, night was just black. Stars if you were lucky. Moon if it was out. Simple.
This place doesn't make sense.
The lights reflected in the pool water below, doubling the weirdness. Two alien skies staring back at him.
Just don't think about it. Don't ask questions.
Remember - I'm a transmigrator. I displaced the original Lin Feng.
God knows what will happen if they find out I'm not the Lin Feng that they know.
And of course, things are different here. I am in the world of the novel.
I'm not even sure if this world operates on the same physical laws compared to Earth's.
The better response for me this time is just to nod along.
Act like those floating light clouds were just normal Tuesday night shit.
Though… It's so quiet…
Christ, when was the last time I was alone?
His head fell back against the chair. This morning felt like a different lifetime.
Weiwei kissed and bit him for 5 hours.
Lin Qingwan came into his room with a battering ram.
Then the Lin family breakfast.
Followed by Xiao Yue and Lin Weiwei's first confrontation.
And then Zhang Tingting's surprising 'defection' to his side.
And finally, Long Tian's double date.
Not to mention all the wild things about tech and this world that sound more like an info dump to him than anything.
The Imperial Federation Treaty.
The words sat in his head like lead. Fourteen hundred years. Fourteen hundred fucking years of deliberate technological stagnation. Not a plateau—a freeze. Enforced by treaty to prevent another Great War.
On Earth, fourteen hundred years ago people were building cathedrals with hand tools.
Here they'd had modern cities, computers, cars, and they just... stopped. By law. For longer than the entire span of human technological development on his world.
Electronic failure.
Every space launch. Every attempt to break free. Same result—electronics failed the moment they tried to reach beyond this world. The same phenomenon that made ELECs necessary down here.
The cigarette had gone cold between his fingers. He let it fall beside the chair, ash scattering across the concrete.
Back home, we went to the moon with computers weaker than pocket calculators. Here they've got 240-nanometer chips and they can't even get a satellite to orbit.
The thought made his stomach clench. This wasn't natural. This wasn't physics. Something was actively preventing this civilization from advancing. From reaching up.
Perhaps it was that treaty Xiao Yue mentioned.
Or perhaps... it's something else.
The same thing that makes this sky glow like that.
He closed his eyes and let the alien light paint red through his eyelids. Fourteen hundred years of stagnation.
Millions of brilliant minds told they couldn't reach higher, couldn't break through, couldn't even try.
But every system had rules, and every rule had exceptions. Someone just had to be willing to find them.
I'm too tired for this tonight. Better to take a good rest first and think about these things later.
Behind him, the rooftop door opened.
--------------------
He didn't turn around. The footsteps were light and measured — no clicking heels, no aggressive pace. He knew who it was before she reached the second chaise lounge beside his.
Xiao Yue sat on the edge of it. She didn't say anything. She didn't look at him. She just looked at the sky, her hands resting on her knees, her posture straight but not rigid.
The silence between them held.
Lin Feng found himself studying her in the strange light. Not the way he'd analyzed targets during operations, but something deeper.
The blue-violet glow caught the elegant curve of her neck, the way her dark hair fell in a perfect line past her shoulder. Her profile was striking - delicate features that somehow conveyed absolute strength, lips that curved slightly even in repose.
But it was more than that. Her breathing was steady, measured - the rhythm of someone comfortable with silence, comfortable with herself. The way her shoulders held themselves with quiet confidence even in rest.
Beautiful. But not just beautiful.
The thought surfaced unbidden. This wasn't the manufactured prettiness of magazine covers or the desperate beauty of women who knew they had nothing else.
This was something rare - intelligence made visible, purpose given form. Someone who could see the world as it was and envision what it could become. Someone who could build the future with her own hands.
When the breeze stirred her hair, he caught the clean scent of her skin and felt his chest tighten. Physical beauty, intellectual power - she had both in ways that made his fingers want to trace the line of her jaw while his mind mapped out everything they could accomplish together.
The original Lin Feng really has shit in his head for sticking with Su Qingxue while having someone like Xiao Yue in his life.
Xiao Yue's eyes shifted toward him, catching his stare. She smiled—small, understanding, but not self-conscious—and then looked back up at the sky, as if she didn't want to disturb his thoughts.
It wasn't the loaded silence from the hallway, or the competitive silence from the kitchen. It was the kind of quiet that didn't need filling — two people occupying the same space without demanding anything from each other.
He took another drag. The ember flared, then dimmed.
A minute passed. Maybe two. The glowing clusters drifted overhead, their reflections sliding across the pool's surface in slow, luminous trails.
Xiao Yue spoke first.
"What do you think space travel looks like?"
She said it the way she said everything — quiet, precise, aimed straight at the center of whatever she was thinking about. Her eyes stayed on the sky.
Lin Feng's cigarette paused halfway to his lips.
He looked up at the moon — the same bright disc he'd reached for in the grass, the same one nobody in this world had ever touched.
"Satellites," he said, and something in his voice had changed.
Xiao Yue's head turned slightly toward him.
"Small ones, at first. You send them up and they become humanity's eyes in the void."
He traced a slow arc across the sky with his cigarette. The ember left a brief orange trail in the darkness.
"They'll always be there. Always watching. Recording. Every sunrise over every mountain range, every storm brewing over the ocean. The whole planet visible at once."
His hand drifted higher, and his voice dropped to something almost reverent.
"Then communications. The end of isolation."
He gestured toward the city sprawled below them. "A farmer in the mountains could speak to a scientist in the city. Real-time. Instant. Distance becomes... irrelevant."
Xiao Yue's hands had gone still on her knees. She was watching his hand trace invisible orbits against the glow.
"And then a station." His voice dropped quieter now, almost to himself. "Not a satellite — a place. Something people live in. A structure in orbit, looking down at everything on the entire planet and up into the stars."
His cigarette had gone cold between his fingers, but he kept gesturing upward.
"You'd see the curve of the planet from the windows. The atmosphere like a thin blue line. The sun rising every ninety minutes because you're moving that fast."
He lowered his hand, the cigarette having gone cold between his fingers without him noticing.
Xiao Yue was quiet for a long moment. The pool reflected the drifting light clusters, and the city sprawled below them in its millions of tiny fires, and the moon hung overhead like it had been waiting for someone to talk about it.
Then she smiled.
Not the controlled expression she wore around Lin Weiwei. Not the careful blankness she arranged on her face when she was being evaluated. A real one — small, unguarded, the kind that lived at the corners of her mouth and reached her eyes.
"You've really thought about this," she said.
"I think about it a lot."
"Mm." She looked back at the sky. Her fingers pressed lightly against her knees, and the smile stayed. "Satellites that see everything. Space stations where people live above the clouds."
She said it like she was tasting the words. Testing whether they felt real enough to keep.
"Maybe we'll do it." Her voice was almost offhand — the way someone makes a note to themselves rather than a promise. "Maybe one day... we'll see what the world looks like from the outside."
She said we.
The word hit him harder than it should have. Not just agreement - partnership. She was offering to build the impossible alongside him, completely unaware that he'd already seen it built before.
Lin Feng looked at her — the 7-star heroine — no, his girlfriend, sitting on a chaise lounge on the roof of a ghost building, casually pledging to help him reach for the stars because the man she'd been watching for five years asked her to imagine one with him.
There was not a shred of hesitation in her voice. In a world where space travel was impossible, she was already ready to chase an impossible dream.
Xiao Yue was actually agreeing to change the world. Because Lin Feng said so.
The distance between their two lounges felt very small. Close enough that if she leaned toward him, her shoulder would touch his arm. She didn't lean. But she didn't move away either.
The city hummed below them. The strange sky glowed above. And for one quiet moment, the only two people in the world were lying on chaise lounges on the rooftop, looking at the same moon.
The rooftop door opened behind them.
--------------------
Lin Weiwei stepped out into the wind.
Her eyes swept the scene in a single pass — her Big Brother and Xiao Yue, alone on adjacent lounges, close enough to touch, the cigarette smoke still hanging between them like a shared secret.
Her jaw tightened. She didn't break stride.
She walked across the rooftop and sat on the arm of Lin Feng's chaise lounge. Not Xiao Yue's, not a separate one. His. She settled there with her legs crossed and her hands on her knee, as if this was where she'd always intended to sit.
The shift was instant. Xiao Yue's spine straightened. The smile vanished. The softness from thirty seconds ago pulled back behind whatever wall she kept it behind, and her hands pressed flat against her knees with a precision that said competition mode, active.
"Big Brother, you're still smoking?" Lin Weiwei plucked the dead cigarette from between his fingers and flicked it into the darkness beyond the pool.
"It's late." She wasn't looking at Xiao Yue. She didn't need to. Every word was aimed sideways. "We should go inside."
"We were talking," Xiao Yue said from her lounge. Her voice had cooled by several degrees.
"About what?"
"About the sky."
"The sky." Lin Weiwei's head tilted, and she looked up for exactly one second before looking back down. "It's dark. There. Done. Can we go to bed now?"
And just like that, the magic dies.
Lin Feng pushed himself upright on the lounge. His back ached from the cold plastic, and his throat was raw from too many cigarettes, and somewhere behind his eyes a headache was forming that promised to be spectacular by morning.
"Yeah," he said. "Let's go to bed."
The word bed landed between the three of them.
--------------------
Lin Weiwei's hand found his arm. Light but firm. "Come on, Big Brother. It's late." She was already standing, already steering, already walking him toward the rooftop door with the casual possessiveness of someone who'd decided the evening's itinerary without consulting anyone.
Xiao Yue took his other arm.
She didn't speak. She didn't justify it. She just stood, stepped to his left side, and matched Lin Weiwei's grip with her own with equal pressure and equal claim.
They walked him down the narrow staircase to Floor 100 like an escort detail — one on each side, both holding an arm, their footsteps clicking in unison on the stairs while Lin Feng descended between them with the resigned expression of a man being walked to his own sentencing.
The master bedroom door was open. The massive bed sat against the far wall — grey linens, wide enough for four, the dust already wiped clean during the earlier purge. City light poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows and painted long pale rectangles across the floor.
"There are two guest rooms," Lin Feng said, stopping in the doorway. "One on each side of this room. One for each of you. I sleep here. Three doors, three beds, everyone gets their own space."
It sounded reasonable. It sounded logical. It was, by any rational measure, the correct arrangement.
Lin Weiwei didn't even look at the guest rooms.
"She'll wait until I fall asleep and go to your room."
"That's exactly what YOU would do," Xiao Yue fired back.
"I am his fiancée. I have every right to—"
"You're his stepsister. You have a piece of paper."
"A piece of paper that says I sleep closer to him than YOU do."
"Proximity isn't a legal right."
"Neither is stalking, and yet here you are."
Lin Feng's hand came up. "Then I'll sleep downstairs. On the couch."
"No." Both of them. Simultaneously.
"The couch is on 99, and that's a couch, not a bed!" Lin Weiwei said. "I don't want to sleep in a bed while you sleep on the couch. And she will definitely go down there."
"Why should you sleep on the couch in your own house?" Xiao Yue agreed. "That's unacceptable. And also she will definitely take that opportunity to do something to you."
They were, Lin Feng realized, in perfect agreement about exactly one thing: neither trusted the other within fifty meters of him while unconscious, and no arrangement of separate rooms, separate floors, or separate buildings would satisfy that mutual paranoia.
There was only one configuration left.
One bed. Three people.
This is my life now.
--------------------
"I need water," he said.
He turned and stepped toward the staircase before either of them could object. Two steps, three, four — and then he was past the bedroom door and into the hallway, his footsteps quick and quiet on the hardwood.
The staircase between Floor 99 and Floor 100 was dimly lit. The elevator hummed faintly somewhere in the walls. And sitting on the third step from the bottom, phone in hand, legs tucked to one side, was Zhang Tingting.
She looked up at him.
She'd been there for a while — he could tell from the way she'd settled into the step, her back against the wall, her slippers placed neatly beside her on the stair. Waiting for a natural moment. Not wanting to interrupt whatever was happening above her.
"Lin Feng." She straightened. "Um... where should I sleep?"
Simple question. Simple voice. No subtext, no territorial claims, no competing justifications. Just a girl who needed to know which room was hers.
"Pick whichever guest room you like on 99." He leaned against the railing. "They're all set up. Towels should be in the bathrooms."
"Okay." She nodded, already standing, already collecting her slippers. Then she paused, her eyes lifting past his shoulder toward the master bedroom, where two muffled voices were still arguing about something involving door locks and sightlines.
Her lips pressed together. Not quite a smile. Not quite sympathy. Something in between that said I see what's happening and I am very glad it's not happening to me.
But there was something else there too — a flicker in her expression as her gaze came back to him. Something she didn't quite recognize herself.
"Thanks for dinner, Tingting. The dumplings were really good."
"Mm." She nodded once more, slipped her slippers on, and headed down the stairs to Floor 99. Her footsteps faded quickly.
Lin Feng watched her go.
One second of peace.
"Big Brother!"
"Lin Feng!"
Both voices hit him from behind like a synchronized alarm. He closed his eyes, took one breath, and turned around.
--------------------
"I wanted the window side," Lin Weiwei said.
"You have the window side."
"The OTHER window. The one with the better view."
"They're the same window. This is a corner unit."
"The left one has a wider angle."
"You don't even know what angle means."
"I know what OBTUSE means, and I'm looking right at one."
Xiao Yue's eyes narrowed. "Fine. Corner to corner viewing arc is 140 degrees for both windows."
"Wrong. You need to account for the building's orientation. Southwest facing at 225 degrees true north."
"So the left window covers 135 to 275 degrees compass bearing, and the right covers 175 to 315 degrees," Xiao Yue said without missing a beat. "Still identical 140-degree arcs."
"But the sine of the viewing angles relative to horizon—"
"sin(140°) equals 0.6428 for both windows," Xiao Yue cut her off. "Identical."
Lin Weiwei sat up straighter. "Actually, I said window side. Singular. As in, the side of the bed adjacent to the windows."
"What?"
"This is a corner unit. Both windows are on the same side of the room. Therefore, window side refers to the entire area near both windows." She gestured broadly at both sides of the bed. "Which means this whole space."
Xiao Yue stared at her. "You're trying to claim the entire bed."
"I'm claiming window side. Like I said."
"That's not how geometry works."
"It's exactly how geometry works. The bed forms a rectangle. The windows define one side of the room. Window side equals the side adjacent to that wall."
"You can't just redefine spatial relationships to suit your territorial ambitions."
"I'm not redefining anything. I'm applying basic geometric principles."
Lin Feng stood at the foot of his own bed, watching two brilliant women use advanced mathematics to wage their territorial warfare.
The gap in the middle waited for him. Grey linens, clean sheets, and a space exactly wide enough for one person who had made every wrong decision today.
He looked at the door. Both women tracked his gaze. Four eyes dared him to try.
He looked at the window. Considered the rooftop. Considered the chaise lounge. Considered sleeping near the pool.
No. They'd follow me into the pool.
Exhausted, Lin Feng got into the bed.
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The mattress was softer than he expected — or maybe he was just so exhausted that anything horizontal felt like heaven. He lay on his back, dead center, and stared at the ceiling while two bodies shifted on either side of him.
Lin Weiwei reached over and flicked the wall switch beside the bed. The room went dark. The city glow through the windows painted everything in pale blue and amber — the ceiling, the sheets, the two women on either side of him who were now lying down but very clearly not sleeping.
Nobody spoke. The penthouse ticked and settled around them, making the small sounds that empty buildings make when they're learning to hold people. The distant hum of the elevator shaft. A faint whistle of wind against the glass.
Then Xiao Yue's arm came across his chest.
Her fingers slipped beneath the hem of his shirt, her palm settling warm against his skin. The contact sent a jolt through him that he tried to ignore. Her breathing was controlled, deliberate, but he felt her pulse through her wrist where it rested against his collarbone.
Three seconds. Lin Weiwei's hand slid beneath his shirt from the other side, her palm flat over his heart. Her touch was possessive, claiming the space Xiao Yue had found first. Her thumb traced a small circle against his chest.
Xiao Yue's leg hooked over his knee, her thigh pressing against his through the fabric of her dress. The hem had ridden up slightly, and he felt the warmth of her skin against his leg.
Lin Weiwei matched the move, her calf sliding along his, her foot finding his ankle and hooking around it. She shifted closer, and he caught the scent of her shampoo, felt her breath against his neck.
Then Xiao Yue took his right hand in hers, guiding it to the curve of her waist where her dress had gathered. Her fingers intertwined with his, pressing his palm against the soft fabric, against the warmth beneath.
Lin Weiwei immediately captured his left hand, drawing it across to rest against her hip. Her skin was warm through the thin material of her clothes, and she guided his thumb to trace along the curve there.
Someone's lips brushed against his shoulder through his shirt. He couldn't tell whose. Another set of fingers found the pulse point at his wrist, counting his heartbeat.
"Stalker bitch." Lin Weiwei whispered against his ear, so close her breath made him shiver.
"Incest whore." Xiao Yue fired back, equally as quiet, equally as close to him from the other side.
Lin Feng stared at the ceiling, very aware of every point of contact. Two women pressed against him, their hands mapping territories across his chest and arms, their legs tangled with his, their breathing warm against his neck and shoulder.
I am being claimed by two women who hate each other more than they hate being tired.
This is what my life has become.
The intervals between moves stretched longer. Someone's fingers traced the line of his collarbone. Another hand found his pulse, thumb pressing gently against the rapid beat. His guided hands were held in place, fingers spread across curves and warmth.
The whispered insults faded. Breathing deepened. The territorial warfare shifted into something softer but no less possessive. Legs remained intertwined with his. Hands stayed where they'd been placed, holding him close even as consciousness began to slip away.
The ceasefire came without announcement.
Both women had melted against him, their earlier rigid positioning giving way to natural curves that fit against his sides. Xiao Yue's head had found his shoulder, her dark hair spilling across his chest. Lin Weiwei's arm had settled possessively across his waist, her fingers still touching skin beneath his shirt.
His own hands remained where they'd been guided, resting against warm fabric and the soft curves beneath. Even in sleep, neither woman released her claim on him.
Their breathing synchronized with his. The city lights painted moving patterns across skin and fabric. The strange sky cast its ethereal glow through the windows.
Lin Feng was the last one awake, hyperaware of every sensation — the weight of two bodies against him, the warmth of skin through clothing, the steady rhythm of heartbeats that weren't his own.
His eyes grew heavy. His body had been running on nothing but cigarettes and adrenaline for hours, and now the combined warmth of two sleeping women was pulling him down into dreams he couldn't resist.
He closed his eyes.
So…
I have two girlfriends. A technology freeze that's lasted fourteen centuries. An alien sky that won't go dark. A world that's nothing like the novel I thought I knew.
Tomorrow I'll figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do with all of this.
For tonight though, I'm just going to sleep.
The penthouse went quiet. Three people lay in one bed, and for the first time since he'd transmigrated into this world, Lin Feng felt like he might actually belong somewhere.
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[Zhang Tingting] ★☆☆☆☆☆☆ (1-Star Heroine)
├─ Previous: 7
└─ Current: 5 (-2)
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[End of Chapter 36]