“You’ve stood in front of that cabinet for five minutes.” He looked over, expression calm, and said, “Since you don’t, then what’s there to choose?”

“……”

Now that felt familiar.

Yan Luqing rolled her eyes. “I was carefully selecting the side dishes for the noodles I’m about to cook! Can’t I!”

As if amused by her saying “side dishes,” Gu Ci looked at her, his eyes suddenly arching: “Oh…you can cook noodles?”

“……” Yan Luqing felt insulted. While turning on the fire, she tore open a pack of dry noodles with a sharp “szzzip.” “Of course I can.”

Although from childhood to now she had basically been eating in the cafeteria, boiling noodles should at least count as a basic skill.

Who knew, Gu Ci then asked: “Are they tasty?”

“……” This sudden question made Yan Luqing fall silent at once.

She could accept many of her own shortcomings, but she truly could not accept her lack of talent in cooking.

At first when Yan Luqing said she had a hobby of cooking, the dean and the dean’s wife eagerly taught her, until later the dean and his wife begged her to give it up.

It was not that she had not tried, but no matter how much she did, the result was the same—only cooking noodles could barely be considered edible—

And even then, only barely edible.

“…The point of eating noodles is just to fill the stomach anyway, what does it matter whether tasty or not.” Yan Luqing thought of her various failures in the past, and muttered, “It’s just noodles, what kind of flower could even be cooked out of them?”

She had not expected that the moment her words landed, the faint sound of a chair shifting came from behind.

Gu Ci stood up, long legs striding toward the counter where she was. His movements naturally took the ladle and long chopsticks from her hands, eyelashes lowered as he looked at the pot, and he said: “Let me try.”

Yan Luqing was stunned.

“Try what?”

“Try…” Gu Ci lifted his eyelids, as if asking, as if teasing, “whether I can cook a flower out of them for you.”

“……”

Yan Luqing had originally only planned to come down and fill her stomach with her own plain, tasteless noodles.

She had never imagined she would actually get to eat a bowl of noodles cooked into a “flower.”

Gu Ci used the vegetables she had left cut on the chopping board to arrange a flower in the center of the noodles. The design was a bit hardcore, yet it actually looked not bad.

When he handed it to her, he only said: “Try it.”

Yan Luqing had originally resolved to be stingy with her praise.

“……”

But it was simply too delicious.

It was hard to imagine that noodles with only vegetables could be seasoned into such a fresh and enticing taste.

The family head was thoroughly satisfied today. With the hungry family head and chef-wife scene, she decided to take back her decision to dismiss the wife’s identity.

Amid her occasional words of praise, Yan Luqing gradually finished eating.

The portion Gu Ci made was exactly enough for her alone, hardly any waste.

Yan Luqing stood up, carrying the bowl away, and casually asked: “I’ll pour some water. Gu Ci, do you want some?”

“Get me a bottle of cold water, thanks.”

“Oh.”

At first, Yan Luqing did not think anything strange. She placed the bowl on the counter, turned, opened the refrigerator door, and took out a bottle.

It was only when she felt the chill in her hand that she realized something was wrong.

“…No way. With that stomach of yours, you still drink cold water?” Yan Luqing, having taken it out and walked up to him, turned back again, “Don’t go courting death, okay? Don’t learn from other young people being trendy, the colder it gets the more they drink iced drinks. We may be young, but our bodies are already old. With this kind of body, you should be properly drinking some health tea.”

Yan Luqing nagged on: “Even drinking a bit of alcohol can warm you up, and yet you’re drinking cold water…”

She put the water back, muttering all the while. When she turned her head, she found Gu Ci’s gaze fixed on her face, his expression surprisingly serious.

Yan Luqing’s steps halted: “What is it?”

“……”

There had clearly been no resistance when she opened and closed the refrigerator.

Gu Ci once again recalled her every action during that night’s sleepwalking.

At the time he had been observing her expression and movements, so he had not noticed that in truth the scene was exceedingly eerie—so eerie that if her bodyguard’s son had seen it, he would have dropped to his knees on the spot.

Gu Ci had been standing right beside the refrigerator then, but in his impression, Yan Luqing had been coming straight toward him, not toward the refrigerator.

Her eyes might have been vacant, and the direction of her gaze not at the refrigerator either.

Combining this with her behavior when awake—she had no reaction toward the refrigerator at all…this meant that the night before, closing the refrigerator door had only been a casual action.

Closing the refrigerator door so forcefully, prying his hand off the door, but unrelated to the refrigerator itself.

Then for what reason.

Did she dislike refrigeration?

In just a few breaths, countless thoughts flashed through his mind. At last, under Yan Luqing’s puzzled and probing gaze, he withdrew his eyes. “It’s nothing.”

Yan Luqing poured a cup of warm water for both herself and him. After eating and drinking her fill, she once again felt a wave of drowsiness.

But she did not want to leave yet, so she sat back in the chair, watching Gu Ci type at the keyboard.

“Do you stay up day and night, upside down like this every day?” Yan Luqing was puzzled. “So when you eat breakfast in the morning, you’ve actually not slept at all?”

“These past few days, yes.”

“Then why didn’t you say.” Yan Luqing didn’t notice the illogic in her words, just said casually, “We live together, and I didn’t even know.”

Hearing this, Gu Ci’s fingers suddenly paused, and he slowly lifted his eyes to look at her.

“I didn’t say?” He enunciated those three words very slowly in counter-question.

And before she could answer, he suddenly laughed, analyzing methodically: “Every morning this past week, you eat breakfast and go to school, and by the time you come back in the afternoon, I’m already awake. You wouldn’t run into me, nor would you for no reason ask what time I sleep. Am I supposed to deliberately tell you—”

He paused, and his smile deepened. “Miss Yan, I haven’t been sleeping at night lately?”

“……”

There was indeed no way to answer.

Yan Luqing opened her mouth, but had nothing with which to refute.

And she didn’t know why, but her train of thought once again began to run in an absurd direction—right now it was exactly like a scene where the family head neglects his home, and the wife left alone vents her sarcasm.

Once she substituted herself into this setting…

She looked into Gu Ci’s eyes, and her heartbeat again began to skip unevenly. She turned her head, grabbed her cup, and took a sip of water.

The room fell into a strange silence. Yan Luqing held it in for a long time, but still couldn’t think of what words to pick up at this moment. Instead, her drowsiness grew heavier and heavier, and she finally let out a yawn, eyes full of tears.

Then she heard Gu Ci’s voice, uncertain if it was a laugh or a sigh: “Go to sleep.”

“Mm,” Yan Luqing rubbed her eyes. “Then see you at breakfast.”

Then she stood up and left, went upstairs, returned to her room, first took a bath, then lay comfortably on the bed.

Before sleeping, she still felt it was wondrous.

After the call with the old grandpa, she had thought this night would be sleepless. What she clung to was the self-brainwashing thought: “As long as I am not embarrassed, no one can embarrass me.”

She hadn’t expected that going downstairs to see Gu Ci, she was neither bombarded with bamboo shoots, nor reminded of anything from before, nor did the imagined awkwardness appear upon meeting again—

It could simply be called a warm and gentle little stretch of midnight time.

The princess was so kind today, she thought, truly a real princess.

Gu Ci’s routine lately was indeed as he had told Yan Luqing, but today was different.

This morning he did not sleep. He went out, and when he returned, it was nearly noon.

Yan Luqing happened to come home half an hour later, and impatiently dragged him into her room.

After Gu Ci finished the hypnosis, he came out carrying the things he had bought, holding Yan Luqing. In the living room, Little Black, standing there, saw the two of them, and his face instantly flushed red. He looked completely “I am very sorry,” yet his eyes could not stop glancing over at them, staring like a lightbulb, brightness astonishing.

Gu Ci smiled at him. Little Black’s face turned even redder. He scratched his head and turned away, too embarrassed to look.

Gu Ci carried her upstairs, into her room, placed her on one side of the bed, and then slid a sleep-monitoring sensor strap between the mattress and the sheet. With a thickness of 2mm, it was almost impossible to feel any foreign object.

And this strap would perceive the state during sleep. Other than that, it had no other use.

The battery could only last about three to five days, but these few days would be enough.

If not for suddenly running into her sleepwalking, there would have been no need to use such a thing.

After Yan Luqing went upstairs, at three in the morning Gu Ci was pulled into a video conference. From the kitchen came the sound, from time to time, of a group of people quarreling.

His phone was placed beside him, showing the software corresponding to this device, sending back the data recorded by the sensor strap from when she went upstairs to sleep until now.

It showed she had not left the bed—in other words, no sleepwalking symptoms had appeared.

Nor had she woken in the middle—she had not had nightmares either.

Recently a project was under great dispute. Gu Ci was mentally weary, half listening to a group of people quarreling in English on the computer, half watching the data on the phone screen from time to time.

Every hour of sleep, a summary would pop up. There would also be a score evaluating the quality of that hour’s sleep.

The first hour for Yan Luqing, she had not yet fully settled, and only got seventy-five points.

The second hour was higher, eighty.

The third rose steadily to eighty-five, and by the fourth hour she suddenly found her rhythm, shooting up to ninety-eight.

Gu Ci looked as the one-hour summary report for the fourth hour popped up, with two comments hanging in big letters on the screen.

—Slept super soundly!

—You really are the God of Sleep!!

“……”

Alright then, she had regained the throne of Sleep God.

It was already five in the morning, considered early dawn, with birdsong drifting in from outside.

The people in the computer were much quieter than before. Gu Ci propped his forehead with one hand, holding the phone with the other.

He looked at those two comments, casually tapped on the line that said “Sleep God,” and the phone suddenly played an extremely loud pig-snorting sound effect. Probably to express that indeed, the sleep was really good.

“……”

Morning light gradually brightened the room.

Gu Ci looked at the phone screen, and suddenly let out a laugh.