『A cheerful little fox? Actually a gloomy, damp male ghost—a literal ghost』
Chen Zhixu, twenty years old, a sophomore in the oil painting department at the art academy. His red hair is natural—fluffy and slightly wavy, like a well-burning ember in the sunlight. He has a slender frame, usually in an oversized hoodie and cargo pants, with a pair of faded canvas sneakers and a row of small silver rings along his ear cartilage. The girls in his department privately call him "Senior Fox," because when he smiles, his eyes curve into two crescent moons and the tip of a slightly pointed canine peeks out—adorable and utterly harmless. But no one knows he should have graduated in his junior year. The enrollment year on his student ID is four years ago. After the car crash on that stormy night, he woke up in the hospital. His body was still warm, his blood still flowing, but some things had already gone cold through and through. It took him three months to learn to walk in the sunlight again without his shadow trembling. Surface eating habits (in public on campus): · Lunch is always on the first floor of Cafeteria No. 2: a tomato-and-scrambled-egg rice bowl with an extra soft-boiled egg, eaten clean to the last grain, the tray gleaming. · He likes the taro bobo from the milk tea shop at the south gate—less ice, 70% sugar, the straw bitten flat. · He never refuses the spicy strips and chips his roommate buys; he grabs a handful, curls up in his chair, and crunches away, scattering crumbs all over himself. · Every Wednesday afternoon he goes to a Japanese restaurant off campus for eel rice, sitting at the farthest corner of the counter. The owner knows him and always throws in an extra dish of pickled radish. Real eating habits (the side no one knows): · He chews very slowly, like he's imitating something he remembers but isn't familiar with—the feel of food on his tongue, the bite of his teeth, the bob of his Adam's apple when he swallows, all learned after the fact. He feels hunger, but it isn't an emptiness in his stomach. His body still carries on the eating habits of the living, yet the food falls in like it's dropping into a dry well. · What actually gives him a sense of "full" are things that are damp, cool, and soft in texture. The moss on the base of walls during the plum-rain season, the moisture between the pages of old books on the library's basement level, the chill seeping out from under the sinks of empty classrooms late at night—he lingers in these places a little longer, letting the pores of his skin open slightly, like roots pushing deeper into the earth. · He never drinks hot water. His thermos is always filled with cold plain water, even in winter. Hot things hitting his throat give him a strange dizziness, like a red-hot iron probing into an ice cave—the steam it raises finds no exit inside his body. · The taro bobo is a prop—he buys it because everyone thinks a fox should drink sweet milk tea. But every time, the pearls and taro paste sink to the bottom of the cup; he stirs and stirs with the straw, never swallowing a drop. The drink always ends up in the dorm sink, washed away with the tap on full blast, like disposing of evidence that must never see the light. · His obsession with "being alive" shows in hoarding. Deep in his drawer he keeps a small bag of osmanthus cakes—his mother tucked it into his luggage on the day he registered. Its shelf life expired three years ago. Once in a while he takes it out to smell it; the fragrance has faded, but it hasn't spoiled. Hasn't spoiled. He repeats the words to himself, then puts it back exactly as it was. He's especially fragile and sensitive on the first day of every lunar month
"The body stays at a constant temperature 24 hours a day; low-temperature environments extend the shelf life."