Chapter 149: Ch 149: Unwilling Alphas

The sun began to push its first real light across the village, warming roofs and packed paths, drawing the place out of sleep in stages. Farmers gathered tools. Vendors unlatched shutters and arranged their stalls. Somewhere a rooster insisted on being heard. Among the guest houses, the alphas assigned to fieldwork started to surface as well—some more willingly than others.

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Qin Yuran yawned hard enough that her eyes watered. She bent over the basin and cupped cold water to her face. The shock of it did its job: sleep loosened its hold in increments, the last of the night’s blur rinsing away under her palms. She patted her skin dry with a soft towel, checked her phone, and grimaced at the numbers.

"It’s so early," she murmured.

Early or not, the soil would not till itself, and she had no interest in wasting the coolest hours of the day. She gathered herself—hair pushed back, shirt straightened, the mental list of the morning’s work already in session—and walked back toward the room she shared with Song Meiyu.

She stopped in the doorway and leaned against the frame.

Song Meiyu slept on the empty bed frame with only a blanket between her and the boards, body curled tight against the residual chill. Her hair had come loose in the night and lay in soft disarray across the makeshift padding; instead of looking unkempt, it somehow made her prettier in a way that felt ungodly at this hour.

Qin Yuran simply stood there and watched, a quiet smile settling on her face without permission. She did not know how long she remained like that—long enough for the smile to become something she would have denied if asked, long enough that the doorway started to feel like a safe place rather than a passage.

Eventually she peeled her attention away and walked out without waking the omega up.

Song Meiyu had her own tasks later, but the soil had to be ready first. In addition, tilling early meant the omega could sleep longer. Qin Yuran turned from the door and moved through the house with careful steps, avoiding the boards that creek with every step, and let herself out into the morning without letting the latch announce her exit.

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In another house, Zhao Yichen’s alarm went off.

It rang. It rang again. It kept ringing with the mechanical optimism of a device that believed volume alone could solve human problems. Zhao Yichen, however, did not stir. Beside him, Han Jiho frowned his way out of whatever peace he had managed on an equally unforgiving bed frame.

"Zhao Yichen." The name came out laden with sleep. Han Jiho shook the alpha’s shoulder... Nothing. The grin on Zhao Yichen’s face remained stupid and serene, the expression of a man dreaming something that did not include alarms, fieldwork, or consequences.

"Zhao Yichen." Louder. Firmer. More edge. However... Still nothing. Only the continued soft smacking of lips against a dream Han Jiho was not brought into.

A vein threatened to pop somewhere near Han Jiho’s temple. It was still the earliest part of the morning. His back already ached from the empty bed frame. The man beside him was treating consciousness like an optional upgrade. Han Jiho decided, with perfect clarity, that his day had already been damaged.

He sat up, killed the alarm with a stab of his finger, and glared at the sleeping alpha. Then he gathered what strength the hour had given him and shoved Zhao Yichen clean off the bed.

The fall produced a solid, ungraceful thud, followed by a loud groan from the floor.

Han Jiho huffed and crossed his arms. "Your alarm went off." Annoyance saturated every syllable. "Now go till outside." He did not wait for a reply. He lay back down, closed his eyes, and reclaimed the boards as if the matter were settled.

Zhao Yichen pushed himself up from the floor, one hand pressed to his back, expression caught between injury and the slow return of higher thought.

"Well," he said, voice thick with sleep and sarcasm, "good morning to you too."

He knew a lost argument when he was sitting in the aftermath of one. After a few seconds of collecting what calm and clarity he could find on the floorboards, he reached for his phone and started the short, undignified journey toward washing up—leaving Han Jiho to the remainder of a sleep that had already been disturbed, and the morning fields waiting for one more reluctant alpha to join the work.

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Meanwhile, in a house that could only generously be called standing, Gu Chengze opened his eyes.

The first thing that met him was not silk, not climate control, not the careful dim of expensive curtains. A broken stretch of roof let a hard bar of morning light fall straight onto the uneven floorboards. The walls were weathered to the point of insult—cracks running like faults through the plaster, holes that suggested the structure had stopped arguing with the weather years ago. The air smelled of dust and old wood. And beneath his back, supporting what remained of his dignity, was a bed so unyielding it might as well have been made of stone.

He processed the room in stages. Luxury had been the baseline of his life for so long that its absence registered first as error, then as offense. His usual indifferent mask held for only a second before heat flooded up behind it—raw, immediate fury.

Which bastard sent me—

The thought cut short. Memory, unwelcome and precise, supplied the answer. This was the house assigned to last place after the tilling competition. This was where he would be living for the next week and six days. Not a mistake... A ranking. A public verdict rendered in cracked walls and a roof that could not be bothered to close.

His face hardened. Fury tipped into incredulity, then swung back into anger with nowhere useful to go. How dare they leave me in this hellhole! His fist tightened with the urge to put a hole in something; however, he aborted the motion almost at once. One solid blow and the house looked ready to finish collapsing on its own. Even revenge, here, had to be rationed.

He let out a breath and sat up.

Only then did he register that he was not alone.

Lin Xuanyu lay beside him in a tight fetal curve, posture compact and oddly comfortable given the circumstances, as if he had negotiated a truce with the hard surface that Gu Chengze refused to accept. For a moment Gu Chengze simply looked at him. Something in his chest moved too fast—unexamined and inconvenient. He named it pity before it could become anything else.

They could not even give this poor omega a proper place to rest, he thought.

The thought arrived fully formed and self-serving. He was an alpha. Annoyance was permitted; endurance was expected. While Lin Xuanyu was soft and delicate—someone who should never have been asked to share a ruin. The injustice of that arrangement inflamed him more cleanly than his own discomfort. Someone ought to answer for it. Staff. Other guests. Whoever had decided that last place applied to more than one body.

Speaking of which, where are those bastards?! He fumed inwardly, his eyes darkening.

Anger was gathering toward a useful explosion when a different question finally surfaced.

How did I get here?

The last clear image he owned was the brawl with Su Wanyan—the heat of it, the insult of her resistance, the chaotic edge of the clearing. After that: nothing. A blank where the rest of the day should have been. The gap bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

Then, as if the question had switched his senses back on, he became aware of weight and pressure across his face. His fingers rose and met bandage—neat, firm, applied with care. Not the chaotic, punitive wrapping Qin Yuran and Zhao Yichen had left him in. This was different. It was corrected. And obviously Lin Xuanyu’s work from the night. The mess replaced with something that allowed a person to wake as a person rather than a cautionary exhibit.

Gu Chengze’s awareness sharpened further. In Lin Xuanyu’s loose grip, even in sleep, were medical tape and a bottle of antiseptic. He eased both free with unexpected gentleness. Something in his stomach turned over.

He did this for me? Without asking for anything in return?

The idea sat strangely in a life where attention usually arrived with an invoice. No one had done this kind of quiet, unpaid care for him before—not without wanting access, favor, money, a name spoken in the right room. In fact, even his own mother had always wanted something. That fact had long since stopped surprising him. He looked again at Lin Xuanyu’s clean, careful face, at the evidence of work done while he was unconscious and unable to reward it.

A small smile pulled at his mouth. Softness, unearned and unexamined, settled into his expression as he watched the sleeping omega.

As expected. He is worthy of being my concubine.

The conclusion arrived with the same confidence he brought to acquisitions. Mo Xingxue would learn a great deal from this one in the future—how to attend, how to yield, how to make an alpha’s recovery feel like devotion rather than labor. The thought pleased him. It arranged the world back into a shape he recognized.

Then the other image returned: Su Wanyan holding Mo Xingxue. The two of them closed into a private circle that had not included him. Gu Chengze gritted his teeth. His hands clenched until the knuckles ached.

And that vixen will learn how to keep her distance from other alphas!

His fingers found the bandages again. Murderous heat flared behind his eyes, pride and ego throbbing in time with the bruises underneath the gauze.

That Su Wanyan! That inferior mut! How dare she leave marks on me. Who gave her the right?!

He could allow that there had been a brawl. What he could not allow was the idea that she had forgotten her place in it.

What he was conveniently not remembering—what the blank after the clearing carefully protected him from—was the simpler truth. It had not been a brawl. It had been a one-sided beatdown. And the reason he recalled nothing afterward was not a mystery or conspiracy or the house’s insult to his status.

He had simply lost, and that it was Su Wanyan’s fists that had put him unconscious.

In the ruin of a last place house, with morning light cutting through the broken roof and a delicate omega asleep beside him still holding the tools of his repair, Gu Chengze sat in the story he preferred: wronged, underestimated, already composing the "corrections" the next week and six days would be required to deliver.

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Is it just me, but boy do I feel uncomfortable whenever I have to write villains LMAO. Also, as y’all can see, I’m experimenting with me writing LMAO! I wanted Gu Chengze’s POV to be mysterious as shi, but I don’t think I pulled it off TvT.