WC ⋆ Chapter 22

There was nowhere nearby the hospital suitable for a chat, so they walked a short distance before finding a coffee shop. Qi Lin hesitated a little before going in: “Is this too formal?”

“Mainly because it’s cold outside.” Yin Yu pulled the door halfway open. “You’re welcome to squat outside if you’d like.”

Qi Lin really didn’t want to talk to him. The guy’s mouth was too sharp, irritating him to no end. He pushed his way into the coffee shop on his own and found a corner seat.

“What do you use to read divination signs? Bazi?” Qi Lin had already shed the tension from a moment ago and was now calm, launching into an interrogation. “What’s your background? Taoist priest?”

Yin Yu raised one finger and wagged it. “I only need to look.”

“You have Yin-Yang Eyes?” Qi Lin studied his amber-colored eyes.

“You could put it that way.” Yin Yu rubbed his forehead. “My Shifu opened my Third Eye.”

Qi Lin’s entire worldview took a heavy blow. He was clearly standing in a perfectly normal, modern world, and the person across from him was even scanning a QR code on his phone to order coffee, yet suddenly all these supernatural elements had been thrown in, and he couldn’t process it. “Are you serious?”

“Just kidding, just kidding.” Seeing that Qi Lin had taken him literally, Yin Yu finally stopped teasing him and said with a straight face, “Tell me the whole story from beginning to end. I’ll say this upfront: I’ll help you take a look this one time. If I keep going after that, it counts as intervening in your karma, and I don’t want to get mixed up in other people’s business.”

Qi Lin shrugged. “Aren’t you already intervening in karma right now?”

“That’s different.” Yin Yu pulled up a strained smile. “My intervention is itself an established part of this karma of yours. Do you understand what I mean?”

Qi Lin was getting impatient. “Stop being so cryptic. Just say it plainly. I don’t have that much time to go in circles with you. My ex-boyfriend is going to finish his exam soon and if he can’t find me he’ll make a scene.”

That last remark was sour enough to make Yin Yu’s teeth ache. He grimaced before saying, “Let me put it this way. Your reincarnation cycle is a very macro-level cycle. It’s a closed loop where the head and tail connect, unlike anything I’ve seen with other people. So my appearance is a predetermined link in the formation of that closed loop. Do you follow?”

“Too abstract.” Qi Lin closed his eyes. “Go get the coffee. Let me breathe for a second.”

At this moment he regretted beyond measure why he had ever made that wish, which had reduced him to this predicament.

At the time, he and Jiang Yishen had been broken up for just over a month. He had just decided to quit his job, his relationship with his family had also soured, and he was in a terrible mood. On a roommate’s recommendation, he had gone traveling in the South for a week.

Yin Yu said he wasn’t a Taoist priest, yet Qi Lin remembered making his wish to an old Taoist priest. At the foot of the temple hill, there were quite a few vendors lining the path, stall after stall of blessing prayer beads, and that old Taoist priest’s stall was at the very end: a battered three-wheeled cart, with a piece of white paper casually written on it that read “Make a Wish.”

It looked like anything but a legitimate operation, yet Qi Lin had never in a million years imagined that such an unorthodox method could actually work. If he had known from the start that things would spiral out of control, he absolutely would not have phrased his wish so vaguely and so extremely.

And now, out of all this murky confusion, there had appeared this Yin Yu, who claimed he could see what was wrong.

To be honest, even after the loop had started happening, Qi Lin had never thought he would have the chance to understand the reason behind the loop from the perspective of its underlying logic.

It was all too strange, something that seemed to completely transcend his current life and understanding. He didn’t dare hope to fully comprehend it; he only wanted to know how to break it.

And this person of uncertain reliability, who looked just as unorthodox as that old Taoist priest, was now asking him in all seriousness: “Do you know where the trickiest part of this wish is?”

Qi Lin’s face was expressionless. “No matter life or death.”

“No.” Yin Yu tossed a copper coin from his palm into the air, caught it, and pressed it face-down on the table. “It’s the second half.”

His hand slowly pulled away. The coin lay reverse side up.

“Once it begins, let it never end.” Qi Lin murmured softly.

“After I met you, I thought about it for a long time.” Yin Yu retrieved the coin into his hand, and in the blink of an eye it vanished, tucked away by some sleight of hand impossible to follow. “I’ve never encountered anything like this. I’m only half-trained, actually. I can’t read divination signs, can’t read bazi, star charts, tarot, tea-leaf readings, none of it. But I can see.”

Qi Lin looked up at him, meeting those amber pupils, his breathing a little tense.

“A perfectly complete reincarnation cycle, the likes of which I’ve never seen. Head and tail joined, karma begetting karma. All things are born from being, and being is born from non-being. I don’t know what it means, but it won’t be a dead end. This wish of yours, honestly speaking, whether it leads to death or life, good or bad, all of that is a one-way line. Only the second half is mutual becoming and mutual changing: once it begins, let it never end. If it ends, then there would never have been a beginning.”

Qi Lin saw in his eyes a stillness he couldn’t read, the deep sediment settled beneath this person’s surface casualness, carrying a force that compelled belief.

“I don’t understand.” Qi Lin’s throat was a little dry. His eyes stung in waves, an uncontrollable physiological reaction. His subconscious seemed to have grasped something. It felt like he had made things worse.

He thought of something very important. Yin Yu had said the red thread on him was fading, meaning Jiang Yishen either wanted to end the loop or didn’t want to get back together. But Qi Lin knew it wouldn’t be the latter, which left only one possibility: Jiang Yishen wanted to end the loop.

Yet looking at how Jiang Yishen had been these past few days, Qi Lin kept feeling that “ending the loop” had another interpretation: no longer “continuing” the loop.

Countless moments of hesitation and wavering that had previously been overlooked now surfaced. Qi Lin realized, belatedly, that Jiang Yishen had begun to accept and make peace with the single-day loop. This seemed likely to trigger a higher-order butterfly effect, causing the loop’s red thread on them both to fade.

What would happen if it faded, nobody knew.

What Yin Yu’s verdict today meant, nobody still knew.

“I don’t understand it either.” Yin Yu blew on the foam at the top of his coffee. “This is everything I can tell you. My feeling isn’t good. I’d suggest the two of you get on the same page with your information, otherwise something might go wrong.”

Qi Lin’s mind was a complete mess. The phone lying beside him suddenly buzzed, startling him so badly his hair nearly stood on end. The caller ID showed Jiang Yishen.

Yin Yu turned his face away to drink his coffee, having no desire to pry into anyone else’s personal life, but Qi Lin lied to Jiang Yishen right in front of him.

The other end of the call seemed to mention someone with the surname Xu, asked whether Qi Lin was coming home or something along those lines, and finally asked where he was. Qi Lin said he was at home.

Yin Yu held the cup against his lips, mildly surprised. “Why did you lie to him?”

Qi Lin’s complexion had been terrible ever since they entered the coffee shop. That conversation had drained the color from his lips. He stood up, rewound his scarf, and said quietly, “If I go back now, it won’t be a lie. This coffee is on me. Thank you for telling me all this.”

Yin Yu had no idea what he was planning. Qi Lin seemed like someone with a heavy mind, and Yin Yu had no desire to speculate about all those twists and turns. He only said, “I placed the order through WeChat. How are you going to treat me?”

“Add me on WeChat and I’ll transfer you the money.” Qi Lin pulled up his QR code in three swift taps, held it in front of him for two seconds, confirmed the other person had scanned it, and then walked out of the coffee shop at a brisk pace.

—

“What did he say?” Fan Zi propped his head up with one hand, watching Jiang Yishen frozen in the doorway.

Jiang Yishen stood there holding his phone, his arm seemingly frozen in place, and only after a long while did he slowly lower it, every joint moving with a stiff, creaking quality.

“He said he’s at home.”

Fan Zi glanced at the girl in the bed next to his. The two of them exchanged a look, then Fan Zi tried to smooth things over: “He probably went back, right? It was over half an hour ago. Maybe they just chatted for a bit. My friend is just unreliable like that. He probably finished chatting and went off to eat somewhere on his own.”

Jiang Yishen said nothing, just stared at his phone until the screen went dark automatically, then gazed at his own reflection in the black screen.

Fan Zi didn’t even believe what he’d said himself. Qi Lin was someone who handled things very thoroughly. If he were going to leave, he would definitely come back and say goodbye. Fan Zi knew it, and Jiang Yishen knew it too.

“Forget it.” Jiang Yishen put his phone back in his pocket and smiled at the girl in the next bed with a slight apologetic air. “It’s fine.”

“There’s nothing going on here either, you should head home. Whatever it is, just talk it out.” Fan Zi, for once, dropped his joking tone. Perhaps these past few days all their friends had noticed the two of them were in the middle of rekindling an old flame, only it was going very painfully, at the stage of rubbing sticks together to make fire, producing only smoke with no actual flame.

But Jiang Yishen shook his head, leaned against the wall in a daze, and after a long moment asked, “You all knew Qi Lin isn’t going home for the New Year?”

“Huh?” Fan Zi blanked for a moment. “Isn’t he staying here until the exams are over?”

Fan Zi’s tone didn’t seem like he was pretending. Jiang Yishen felt as though a salt shaker was being rubbed against his chest, coarse and stinging. “You all knew he wasn’t going home.”

Only he hadn’t known.

Xu Baili had told him: Qi Lin had come out to his family in September, about a week after they broke up.

Jiang Yishen felt a sharp ache. He thought back to that day in front of the floor-to-ceiling window at the hotel, when Qi Lin had told him he “hadn’t been doing so well.” At the time, he hadn’t thought to ask further, hadn’t thought to ask even for a moment why Qi Lin wasn’t doing well.

A sense of helplessness dragged him back to those days before the breakup. Even though that night he had genuinely, wholeheartedly wanted to reconcile, wanted to be lovers again, he still hadn’t managed to “talk about everything openly.” This was a festering wound buried in his subconscious, and before today, he hadn’t even noticed it.

Things Qi Lin didn’t bring up, he wouldn’t ask about. Things he didn’t bring up, Qi Lin wouldn’t ask about either. They had broken up over this in the past, and the problem was still there now. Yet Jiang Yishen had thought they had already corrected it: during the time they had been together after the loop started, they had gotten along so much more openly than before.

Jiang Yishen had never learned how to be open his whole life, treating the baring of his true feelings as something shameful. Now, forced to correct that, he always felt the road ahead was long.

But more painful than any of that was the fact of Qi Lin coming out to his family.

For the countless time, with a clarity that was almost cruel, it reminded him: the decision to break up had been his unilateral severing of ties.

He had thought Qi Lin no longer cared for him. He had thought he was no longer presentable in front of Qi Lin. He had thought everything had become so tangled it was beyond saving.

His back pressed against the wall, the cold seeping into his skin. He clenched his fist hard, fingernails digging into his palm. He had fallen into a spiral of self-blame. It was true that the breakup had been a result Qi Lin had also considered and agreed to, just as his mom flying back to the mainland to find him had been his mom’s rational decision. Yet Jiang Yishen couldn’t help thinking: it was all because of him.

“You doing okay?” Fan Zi called to him carefully.

Jiang Yishen lifted his eyelids to look at him.

“Go home. Don’t sit here brooding alone.” Fan Zi said.

Go home. Jiang Yishen looked at the clock. Three in the afternoon. Nine more hours until midnight, and he would have to kiss Qi Lin again.

He suddenly felt that twenty-four hours in a day was far too few. The world pushed people forward.

Neither of them was someone with particularly high principles when it came to physical intimacy. After all, back then they had tumbled into the same bed after only half a month of dating. But this was different. Going to kiss him while carrying all these tangled thoughts, without a pure heart, was something he couldn’t do.

Was it possible to carve out a completely blank stretch of time, to let time stop flowing, the clouds stop drifting, the little cat stop meowing, everything to go still, so they could think things through properly?

Was it possible to just stop like this?

—

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