No Money to Divorce

Adrian was just about to head back into the house with Fayn when the noise of their conversation alerted the giant space rabbit that was resting in its nest. The rabbit ran out and followed right behind the shadows of the two, but fortunately, both Adrian and Fayn stopped as soon as they heard a noise. Otherwise, if the rabbit nudged them from behind, they’d definitely fall over.

“Wow, it’s so fat,” Fayn exclaimed. He reached how to touched its thick fur. “This is my first time touching a giant space rabbit. Doesn’t feel half bad.”

“Of course it feels nice. I washed it just this morning. It’s so big I nearly died of exhaustion.”

“Is it really that fat or is it all fur?”

“It really is that fat.” Adrian stood there with a straight face, allowing the rabbit to rub itself all over him. “I used to think it was all fur too in the past. That is…until it got stuck in the entrance of the nest.”

But Adrian did not mention about how Zhong Yan had gotten himself stuck inside of the nest. He could make jokes about the rabbit to make everyone laugh, but anything related to Zhong Yan was a no-go.

Fayn laughed out loud when he heard that story, and his sudden outburst of laughter caused the rabbit to jump back in fright.

“Quiet down.” Adrian glared at him. “It’s big, but it’s still a rabbit. They’re very meek.”

As if it understood him, the big fluffball tried to hide behind Adrian. Fayn couldn’t help feeling curious. “Does it recognize who its owners are?”

“Well, Zhong Yan said that giant space rabbits were much smarter than normal rabbits. With proper training, they could almost match regular canines in IQ—But of course, anything he says about giant space rabbits needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.”

Adrian relied on the bit of rabbit training techniques he learned from Zhong Yan to coax the rabbit back into its nest. When they returned to the house, Wei Lan had just finished packing up his medical kit. Zhong Yan saw them coming back from the backyard and went over to greet them. “You went to the backyard? I thought you two were talking in the study. Your clothes…Did you play with the rabbit again?”

The red top Zhong Yan had finished cleaning up just before dinner was now covered in fur again, and there seemed to be even more than earlier.

“I’m not the one playing with the rabbit, the rabbit’s the one playing with me.” While saying that, Adrian patted down his own clothes, but Zhong Yan stopped him. “Don’t brush it down to the floor, the cleaning robot will get jammed if there’s too much fur. I’ll pick them out for you later.”

And so, Adrian could only stop. With his clothes covered in rabbit fur, he asked Wei Lan about Zhong Yan’s recovery. Fortunately, he was recovering well, thanks to the good postoperative care he received.

Wei Lan left him a detailed diagnosis sheet, and the two of them saw Fayn and Wei Lan out.

“I wonder if they’ll succeed tonight.” The two watched from the front yard as the car drove off. Adrian said, “Fayn has already rejected two marriage proposals.”

After seeing off the guests, Zhong Yan pinched Adrian and grumbled, “You still have the heart to care about someone else?! I didn’t want to say anything with outsiders around, but what on earth did you just do?!”

“What did I do?” Adrian asked, confused.

Zhong Yan opened his virtual screen and moved it to his face, showing him the deeds he had done. Thanks to Adrian’s mention, the Supreme Institution’s official account responded. “From a statistical perspective, it would be abnormal for Student Zhong Yan to not achieve full marks for a test at this level.”

As a result of the participation of the Supreme Institution’s official account, countless students following their page had also seen their reply. When Zhong Yan graduated, he had broken the highest score record in the School of Social Sciences’ rankings, and the students of liberal arts schools are almost always ranked based on the accumulated scores of their test results. Even if they were not from the same grade as Zhong Yan, and had never seen Zhong Yan’s results in the ranking with their own eyes, just his incomparable test scores that had been immortalized in the School of Social Science’s history at the very top of its leaderboard, and by word-of-mouth through the posts in the school forum, it was enough to imagine how grand an occasion it was that year.

The Supreme Institution accepts only the most elite of students. Naturally, the quality of its graduates will not be poor. No matter what their standpoint was, Zhong Yan’s abilities in the exams represented the Supreme Institution’s standards. To question his ability is to question the Supreme Institution itself. Countless graduates and current students of the Supreme Institution were lining up to mock and ridicule that ignorant poster, and there were even many bigwigs who had already achieved much in society coming in to join them as well. For a moment, this comment had almost become the most popular gathering spot for students of the Supreme Institution in the virtual community these recent years.

Zhong Yan could feel his head buzzing with pain. “I just helped to clear your name and you immediately end up attacking an ordinary citizen—But that alone is enough, you even rallied up the people from the school to attack him! I bet you get a lot of heat from your PR department, don’t you?”

“Who said so? I rarely spoke in the virtual community these past few years, so what can they say about me? The last time I was pestered by the PR department was when they thought we had a kid.”

“What kid? Don’t try to change the subject.”

Adrian’s strategy to change the subject failed, so he could only say, “Alright, alright. We’ll go back on topic. When did I attack him? I just invited our alumni to discuss what happened.”

“But the media will not think so,” Zhong Yan said.

“And will the media not spout nonsense with you posting to clear my name?” Adrian rebutted. “You don’t like seeing others accusing me, but I can’t stand others talking bad about you even more. Only you are allowed to refute the people who scold me, but I’m not allowed to do the same. That’s a double standard, Councilor Zhong Yan.”

Zhong Yan got pulled in by his unreasonable but sweet words. For a moment, all the worries in his heart turned into sweet honey. Adrian quickly brought up a new topic while he wasn’t saying anything to brush this current chapter aside.

……

At night, Adrian lay in bed looking at his terminal. Suddenly, the sound of the water stopped in the bathroom. Zhong Yan shouted from inside, “Ade!”

Adrian quickly jumped up from bed. He was worried that he may have fell inside or something, and quickly rushed into the bathroom, asking anxiously, “What’s wrong?”

“What happened to the shower gel in the bathroom?” Zhong Yan asked from behind the shower curtain. “Why did you come in? Close the door, it’s cold.”

Adrian breathed a sigh of relief and said over the shower curtain, “I thought something happened to you. I used up all the shower gel this morning to wash the rabbit. I’ll bring you a new bottle.”

“What? You used it all when washing the rabbit?”

“Yeah. The rabbit’s so big, of course I used the whole bottle.”

Zhong Yan was shocked. “You used the shower gel to wash the rabbit? Shouldn’t you have used the shampoo instead?”

Adrian hesitated in confusion for a moment. Then, he said matter-of-factly, “You use shower gel to wash your body, and shampoo to wash your head, no?”

“That’s not how it works,” Zhong Yan was dumbfounded. “Shower gel is used to wash skin, you use shampoo to wash hair.”

Only then did Adrian had the realization as if he was suddenly enlightened. That really seemed to be the case.

Even though the two were separated by the shower curtain, they still seemed to be able to see each other’s confused expressions.

Zhong Yan did not know whether to laugh or cry. “I was just thinking the rabbit smelled really familiar today. The shower gel we have has a very sweet smell.”

It felt a little strange to talk naked, so he quickly sent Adrian away to get him a new bottle of shower gel. Adrian was also worried that Zhong Yan would catch a cold if he kept the door open, so he quickly closed the door and went off to get it.

Soon after, Adrian returned with a new bottle of shower gel. Zhong Yan thanked him and reached a hand out to grab the bottle, but he could not make it budge for a moment.

Adrian was a little dazed as he saw the hand that was half-exposed from behind the shower curtains. Droplets of water could still be seen on Zhong Yan’s hand, and the slender fingers were clasped around the center of the bottle. Looking further up, he could see his fair wet hands disappear behind the shower curtain, making him wonder about the other parts of his unclothed body that must also be encased in the water and mist at this moment. He himself had seen how fascinating that body was, especially when its muscles contracted, or when it trembled…

“Ade?” Zhong Yan asked suspiciously, “What’s wrong?”

Adrian came back to his senses abruptly. He had already gotten a reaction down there, so he let go awkwardly. “It’s nothing. Quickly finish up, don’t catch a cold.”

When Zhong Yan came out of the bathroom, Adrian wasn’t there. Zhong Yan put on his rabbit pajamas and walked out of the bedroom suspiciously, and walked around the house. He could hear the sounds of the water running in the second-floor bathroom. Clearly, Adrian was washing up inside.

Usually, Adrian would wait for Zhong Yan to finish up in the master bedroom’s bathroom before he would take his own shower. He went off to another bathroom to shower without even waiting for him to finish. Why was he in such a hurry today? Zhong Yan returned to the room, confused. He didn’t take too long in there today either, right?

……

By the time Adrian returned to the room after his shower, Zhong Yan had already cuddled up in bed. Adrian got on the bed and asked, “You said you were going to talk to me after dinner earlier today, about the steak. What is it?”

“Oh, that.” Zhong Yan said, “Don’t legal partners have the rights to see each other’s recent large-scale income and expenditures? Just open up my recent records and you’ll find out.”

The reason why Zhong Yan was able to show everyone Adrian’s bill for the giant space rabbit was because of this function. Adrian looked at it for a while and finally realized that Zhong Yan had bought the secret black pepper sauce recipe from that shop at a relatively hefty price for non-commercial use.

Adrian sighed. “That’s a lot of money you’re willing to spend for a recipe. You were even crying to me about how poor you were when I asked you for 400,000.”

“I didn’t want to give it to you. You wouldn’t marry me if I did. Even though I never expected I’d really be able to marry you as well back then…But I hoped I could drag it on for as long as I could. What’s more, you said you liked the taste…” Zhong Yan was a little embarrassed and his voice had turned so quiet it was hardly audible. “Any amount would be worth it.”

Adrian was ecstatic. He leaned over and gave Zhong Yan’s cheek a peck before carrying him into his arms. He played with the rabbit ears on his pajamas while he asked, “What are you looking at?”

“Just looking at the news.” With flushed cheeks, Zhong Yan pulled his rabbit ears back. “Don’t pull my ears. Right, why did you go upstairs to shower earlier?”

“…Didn’t Wei Lan say that you need needed two more days before you recover?” Adrian ended up saying something irrelevant, and after Zhong Yan nodded, he continued, “I’ll tell you again in two days.”

Zhong Yan raised his head to look up at Adrian for a few seconds, but he couldn’t figure out what he meant. But he was always the meek one when he was alone with Adrian, so he did not delve too deeply into it. Instead, he shared with Adrian the fresh news he had just seen. “I just saw in the trending posts that there seems to be a new breed of giant space rabbit that was successfully cultivated today. Many people were celebrating, but I looked through the Giant Space Rabbit Research Institution’s official website and it didn’t have any updates at all. Right, I also saw a post on the topic from one of the senior sisters from our school. She also helped me out back then. Should I message her to remind her that this is fake news?”