WC ⋆ Chapter 46

If only they could sneak some chips and popcorn, the two of them would definitely have sat by the bushes like moviegoers watching the argument from start to finish.

They stood until they were tired, then crouched, and when crouching tired them out they climbed up onto the base of the wall. Half an hour passed, and the two people in the bushes still hadn’t finished arguing.

Jiang Yishen was nearly falling asleep. He said doubtfully, “Did we really argue for this long back then?”

“We did,” Qi Lin said.

Within that half hour of arguing there were long, long stretches of silence. They could already see the signs of a relationship crumbling. To turn and leave would mean never being able to go back, yet they stood stubbornly in place, not wanting everything to end.

Now, settling their hearts and looking at the argument with objective eyes, they noticed many details they hadn’t caught from the first-person perspective.

“Jiang Yishen” this time had not been reduced to teary eyes by anger. He stood in place with a tired, detached look, as though he had stopped fixating on the matter itself, his spirit drained by the effort of holding the relationship together. He was gazing deeply into Qi Lin’s eyes.

And “Qi Lin” was not looking at him. He only stared blankly at the ground, his reaction slowed half a beat by his cold.

“Did you have something you wanted to say to me back then?” Qi Lin sat to one side, propping his head up with both hands.

Jiang Yishen jumped down from the base of the wall, patted the dust off his hands and trousers, and dodged the question: “Let’s stop watching. Let’s go walk around.”

Qi Lin sat perfectly still without moving an inch, and repeated himself: “Did you have something you wanted to say to me.”

“That was so long ago.” Jiang Yishen scratched his head awkwardly, catching a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of the two figures still locked in their standoff, and let out a quiet sigh in his heart.

“You’re carrying a burden again,” Qi Lin said.

“I’m not!” Jiang Yishen reached out to hold him. “Come down, baby.”

In the distance, the gymnasium had already started playing rehearsal music, and several beams of light swept up into the sky, their glow piercing through the pale grey clouds over the night.

Qi Lin pushed off the wall and jumped into his arms, held firmly by him.

“Tell me.”

Qi Lin knew it wouldn’t be anything pleasant to hear, but he wanted to hear him say it. He wanted to hear all the unfinished words that had once been missed.

Jiang Yishen turned back one last time to look at the two silhouettes by the bushes. This was probably the only chance in his life to see his former self.

“I wanted to ask back then whether you felt that being in a relationship with me was exhausting.”

He had wanted to ask but hadn’t, afraid of hearing an affirmative answer. Yet thinking about it now, how could someone who was willing to fall ill just to take the subway to school to see him ever say they didn’t like him.

If he had asked, would the ending have been different?

They walked very slowly, following the path toward the gymnasium glowing with brilliant lights. Actually, on that September 11th, Qi Lin had no memory at all of there being a freshman orientation rehearsal at school. His memory held only Jiang Yishen’s retreating figure at the moment of parting, blurry and full of sorrow.

The opening music started up, and the sound system carried it outside the venue with a peculiar sense of vacuum. Amid the all-encompassing background music, Qi Lin suddenly understood the meaning of the loop.

In the forward timeline there is only ever the passage of time and the shifting of the world. Things missed can only be swallowed up by the past.

But now he had seen a Jiang Yishen he had never seen before: one who cried quietly, who suppressed his pain, who stopped himself from speaking.

The two of them belonging to January were able to have their wishes come true. In countless moments of the past, the two of them who had longed for companionship but could only be alone seemed, through the loop, to have had their wishes come true across the boundaries of time and space.

Qi Lin nudged him with his shoulder: “From now on, if there’s something you want to say, just tell me directly.”

His voice was very soft when he spoke, the tail end of his words so light it was almost inaudible, making Jiang Yishen’s heart itch. He hadn’t paid any attention at all to what Qi Lin was saying, and just responded with “mm, mm.”

The rehearsal venue didn’t allow people to come and go freely. Apart from the performers, only the school student council and some members of each college’s student association were inside busy with things. Jiang Yishen and Qi Lin slipped in through the gap when the door opened, and saw a dance performance running through its blocking on stage.

“Tonight, if you hadn’t come, I was originally going to follow Fan Zi here to watch the fun,” Jiang Yishen said, looking around as he spoke. “He has a friend performing street dance, so you could sneak in and watch. Ah, it’s one of the people from that group who called him out for drinks before. I don’t really know them.”

The lighting inside the venue was more dazzling than it looked from outside. The stage lights seemed to be running tests, sweeping across the audience seats one moment and focusing on a single point the next, spinning all over the place, making one feel the dizzy illusion of being drunk at a nightclub.

Becoming a spirit body yet still being able to touch things was a very novel experience. Qi Lin had the feeling that he would cast a shadow, and every few steps he would turn his head to check the ground.

The backstage area was larger than he had imagined, but they found Fan Zi without much effort.

He had no idea whether that friend performing street dance was wearing a performance costume or not, but the outfit was so trendy it could give you rheumatism. The trousers had a hole every centimeter, like a pair of loose fishnet stockings. Around the neck hung all manner of necklaces, and all ten fingers were covered in rings.

One glance from a distance was enough to know this person was no ordinary human, because everything glittering and clinking together on those hands was Swarovski.

Fan Zi was sitting right next to this trendy friend of his. The sound system was testing the stage music, so they could only shout to have a conversation.

“Yin Yu,” Qi Lin said suddenly.

Jiang Yishen forcibly pulled his gaze away from the trendy friend and shifted it to the other side of Fan Zi. That person was wearing a very windproof leather jacket, and even at night had a cap turned backwards on his head, probably to cover the hair that hadn’t fully grown back after surgery.

“It really is him.”

The two of them had come over to this side without any clear purpose, only wanting to see what kind of venue three or four thousand yuan could put together, and seeing Fan Zi was just incidental.

But they had barely gotten close, still three or four meters from Fan Zi, when Yin Yu suddenly lifted his head and looked over.

He only gave a casual sweep with the kind of gaze one uses to look at a passerby, then went back to his conversation.

But that single glance was enough to frighten Qi Lin and Jiang Yishen into not daring to go any further.

Yin Yu’s line of sight just now had been focused on them.

At this point in time, they and Yin Yu were still complete strangers to each other. There was the connection of having lent him money, but the two sides had never met face to face.

Yet just now, it had clearly been the instinctive glance of someone who had noticed people approaching. Yin Yu seemed to be able to see them.

“That’s terrifying, something’s off, let’s go.” Jiang Yishen’s entire body broke out in goosebumps, anxious enough that his tail was spinning in circles, and he pushed Qi Lin, ready to leave.

Qi Lin said hurriedly, “Do you think his Yin-Yang Eyes might have been knocked into him by the car accident? I told you before, the first time he saw me he said I had a divination sign on me, and he could even see the red thread.”

“Never mind all that yin and yang stuff. Fan Zi is right next to him. We absolutely cannot be discovered here, or the timeline will change!”

Qi Lin was jolted awake by his words, realizing they had to be extremely careful about their actions in this place. The two of them hurried frantically to hide themselves in Yin Yu’s visual blind spot.

Only after confirming he couldn’t see them did Jiang Yishen let out a breath of relief and look around, discovering they had stumbled by accident into a small booth set up by the student council.

The small booth was not as noisy as outside, with only a scattering of people sitting inside, gathered around a computer discussing something.

Jiang Yishen was curious and bent down to look. On the computer was a floor plan of the venue for the freshman orientation. Outside the venue there was a small temporary street that had been set up, where the external liaison department had brought in sponsors to set up stalls.

The lanyard of the person sitting in front of the computer read: Head of the Rights and Interests Department.

“Getting worse every year,” that person said irritably, grabbing a fistful of hair. “They ask for so much money and the work they do is nothing special. Some of the sponsorships they’ve brought in, nobody even knows how they negotiated them. Coordination is a mess from start to finish.”

“Isn’t that just how they are,” the girl beside him said coldly, tapping at her phone. “That He Jian’s ability was mediocre to begin with. Somehow he got propped up to department head at the third-year changeover, and except for our year, nobody else knows the situation. Everyone thinks he’s so impressive.”

The department head didn’t respond, but his expression showed complete agreement.

Hearing He Jian’s name, Qi Lin and Jiang Yishen exchanged a glance, their hearts suspended high.

“Hey, do you guys know that piece of gossip about the external liaison department?” The girl changed the subject. “They say a junior who was newly recruited was pretending to be a rich second-generation, spending big money outside school to keep people on the hook, and got exposed and put on the super-topic board a couple of days ago.”

The group followed this thread and started chatting, and didn’t bring up He Jian again. Jiang Yishen’s gut told him the department head in front of him wasn’t very fond of the external liaison department, so he asked Qi Lin, “Do these two departments have some kind of dispute?”

“I don’t know.” Qi Lin also furrowed his brow slightly. “I’m not familiar with your year, and besides, I’m in the college association while they’re in the school council. The school council has people from every college, so gossip doesn’t spread easily. When we get back I’ll ask Xu Baili to find out.”

Jiang Yishen’s uniquely sensitive nerves were jumping wildly. His gut told him that fate had laid a scheme of using one knife to kill another right in front of him. The situation just wasn’t clear yet, and the plan still needed to be refined. None of that was urgent anyway. There were still six months until graduation, and they had plenty of time.

Although the useful information they had gathered wasn’t much, it had opened up their thinking. The two of them moved through the various departments backstage, but unfortunately didn’t gain any other findings, and didn’t even hear much gossip.

He Jian himself was nowhere to be seen either. It was the incoming new department head who was holding down the fort for the external liaison department.

The rehearsal went on until nearly ten at night. The two of them found it boring halfway through and headed home, back to Qi Lin’s small rental apartment as usual.

They were no longer simple spirit bodies now and could be physically touched. In Qi Lin’s little place it was genuinely risky. If “Qi Lin” happened to touch them, they might end up scaring him half to death.

Jiang Yishen’s bad idea was to go to a hotel and randomly find an empty room, but they needed to go to Qi Lin’s place first to observe the cactus.

Unlike the liveliness of the campus, Qi Lin’s place was cold and quiet. “Qi Lin,” who had just finished arguing with his boyfriend, sat alone on the sofa, the low pressure freezing the entire room into a shiver.

Without the ability to walk through walls, the only way to get inside was to wait for the gap when “Qi Lin” opened the door to take out the rubbish. According to what Qi Lin had said, he was in the habit of taking out the rubbish after eating, but unfortunately tonight he hadn’t eaten at all.

Jiang Yishen was just about to scold him for not feeding himself properly when he heard a faint sound coming from inside the room. The iron door had such good soundproofing that they had to strain hard through the gap in the door to catch even a word or two.

“Qi Lin” was on the phone.

“Whose call is it?” Jiang Yishen was puzzled.

This time it was Qi Lin’s turn to hem and haw without answering.

Most of the things Jiang Yishen didn’t say were burdens he was carrying silently. The things Qi Lin didn’t say were absolutely secrets he was deliberately hiding.

“Whose call is it!” Seeing his expression of difficulty, Jiang Yishen was even more certain something was wrong, and inexplicably felt a surge of anxious anger.

“It’s…” Qi Lin swallowed. “A… colleague.”

He didn’t know how to explain this. The call was from that senior colleague who loved to harass newcomers, asking about something work-related.

At the time, Qi Lin had been distracted by the argument and hadn’t realized the other person’s true intentions when he picked up the phone. His replies were very perfunctory, and the other person sensed they were making a nuisance of themselves and ended the call quickly.

The two of them hadn’t had much contact to begin with. This time it really was a work matter, nothing urgent. This person just had the habit of calling whenever they felt like it. Normally Qi Lin wouldn’t pick up, and would wait an hour before asking over WeChat what was going on. This time he had been distracted and absentmindedly hit accept.

It was a perfectly innocent matter, but now the meaning was different. In the previous rewind, Qi Lin had seen with his own eyes that Jiang Yishen had actually known about this annoying senior colleague’s existence for a long time.

And because he himself had never shared this with him, Jiang Yishen had felt very hurt.

Silently, pitifully hurt.

Qi Lin looked into Jiang Yishen’s eyes, and his mind had room for only four words: this is over now.

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