On the Same Track

Shen Hui and Zhou Jinbai had nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

If you really had to find some kind of connection...

They'd both been on the school's athletic training team in high school. When Zhou Jinbai got fed up with his fangirls confessing to him and asking through tears why he wouldn't accept them, he casually pointed at Shen Hui and said, "I like someone like her."

-

They met again when Zhou Jinbai's superiors assigned him at the last minute to make contact with a drug-trafficking ring and track it, in hopes of catching the big fish behind it.

Neon lights flashed across the nightclub. The person seated in the middle of the booth had straight hair falling over her shoulders and wore a black tank top beneath a broad-shouldered suit. The outfit shouldn't have suited her, but somehow it did.

Several burly men in black suits stood nearby, heads bowed as they whispered to her, clearly deferential.

Word was, she was the second-in-command to the boss pulling the strings.

Zhou Jinbai was "heartbroken" to see his old classmate go astray. To draw out information about the big fish, and to earn himself a precious first-class merit, he decided to shamelessly leverage their old connection.

Halfway through the deal, he followed her outside for a cigarette. As he thought back to their few encounters in high school, he tried to think of a good opening line, but in a moment of verbal clumsiness, he blurted out, "When I said I liked you in high school, I meant it."

She fell silent. Only when his cigarette was almost finished did she answer with a quiet, "Mm."

Zhou Jinbai: ?

-

It was only when Shen Hui was seventeen that she learned her father, who had died in Southeast Asia as a supposed traitor, had actually been an anti-drug police officer.

After graduating from the police academy, she took her father's place and went undercover in Southeast Asia, tracking the largest drug-trafficking ring in the region, which had been entrenched in southern Asia for years like a bone-deep parasite.

During a rendezvous with a "dealer," she ran into a high school classmate she hadn't seen in years.

It seemed the other person was trying to cozy up to an upstream "supplier" and ingratiate himself with her.

After finishing her cigarette, Shen Hui decided that when a merit came knocking, she might as well take it.

One-on-one romance, happy ending.

Core message: Good and evil, crime and punishment.