WC ⋆ Chapter 24

The first meeting preserved in memory descended vividly before his eyes. Jiang Yishen stood there in a daze, watching his two-years-younger self open his phone, create a memo, and bend down to count the boxes.

It was clearly the person in front of him who was bending down, yet Jiang Yishen felt the world spinning, as if he had been punched and sent flying, spinning three hundred and sixty degrees through the air before crashing face-first into the dirt.

The scene and colors warped and twisted, just as they did during every midnight reset. Before Jiang Yishen could react, he appeared in a completely new place.

Hearing was the first sense to wake. A thumping sound circled his ears; he thought it was his heartbeat and pressed a hand to his chest. Then a piercing whistle blared out of nowhere, like the primordial sword-strike that split heaven from earth, cutting every person and thing back into place.

Jiang Yishen rubbed his eyes a few times. A clamor of voices surged toward him, and he stood at the back of a crowd. A sudden roar of cheers gave him a start.

It was the sideline of a basketball court. Jiang Yishen pushed through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd and only then realized the thumping sound was a dribbling ball. A player charging forward took two steps in one and went up for a layup; the basketball slammed into the hoop with a clang, and a wave of cheers erupted. The referee stood in the middle of the court blowing his whistle.

The player who had just scored broke into a wild, handsome grin. Jiang Yishen could not bear to watch his two-years-younger self posturing like that. His scalp prickled and he turned to leave.

He had walked a few steps before he remembered: in his recollection, Qi Lin had always come to watch his games.

His childish past self could go unobserved, but he had to see Qi Lin.

To avoid letting the general public discover that an invisible person was squeezing through them and causing a social panic, Jiang Yishen painstakingly circled around several times before finding a gap with no one in it. He squeezed his way to the front row with great effort and spotted Qi Lin standing beside the referee's area.

The instant he saw Qi Lin, Jiang Yishen suddenly felt a wave of dizziness. The scene, as vivid as a playback, abruptly rippled and blurred into a movie screen, and he felt a fragment of memory, floating in the air, drill into his mind.

It was a memory that did not belong to him, one that had never happened: Jiang Yishen saw the basketball heading toward the referee's area. It came too close, and no one had time to react; the ball shot straight at Qi Lin's face.

In the "phantom," Qi Lin raised a hand and slapped the ball back. After the game, Jiang Yishen had specifically sought Qi Lin out to ask how he was doing. The Jiang Yishen on the court had noticed that because the ball came so suddenly, the posture Qi Lin used to deflect it was rather strained, and his hand might have been hurt by the impact.

At the time Qi Lin said it was fine and showed him his reddened hand. The two of them even used the occasion to have a meal together.

After that episode, their relationship advanced by leaps and bounds, and they began meeting up regularly to eat and study.

"Watch the ball!"

Jiang Yishen snapped back to the present. He fixed his gaze, and the exact same sudden incident from that "memory" played out again: two players from opposing teams collided by accident.

He knew that two seconds from now, the basketball hanging in midair would be swatted away and come spinning at high speed toward Qi Lin's direction.

In that moment instinct overpowered reason. Without a second thought, Jiang Yishen rushed onto the court, barging through the tangled players, and at the very last instant before the basketball flew out of bounds, he slapped it back with one hand.

The ball spun a hundred and eighty degrees in the air. Carried by the momentum, he crashed down in front of the referee's table and collided with several players who had rushed in to help.

Fortunately the scene was chaotic and there were too many people; no one could tell who was bumping into whom. Aside from the few players closest to the ball, no one noticed the ball's strange outgoing arc.

Jiang Yishen cursed under his breath as several teammates piled on top of him. He was in a complete panic, terrified of someone sensing something was wrong. He crawled out while shouting: "Lu Fan, if you put this much energy into your actual playing it'd be great, you almost got your old man launched two miles into the air!"

In the commotion, Fan Zi got slapped across the face by someone unknown. He covered his cheek and looked around in all directions without finding the culprit.

Jiang Yishen scrambled off the court, but his foot caught and he stumbled. The familiar dizziness swept over him again.

He watched helplessly as that hazy, never-happened memory froze into a filmstrip, then slowly crumbled to ash before his eyes and vanished without a trace.

Jiang Yishen stood stunned for a moment, then looked back. The small incident had passed; the game continued as normal, and Qi Lin was still standing in the same spot, quietly watching the match.

This was the true state of things two years ago as Jiang Yishen remembered it: he played in the game, Qi Lin watched from the sidelines, and they had no interaction whatsoever.

Back then Jiang Yishen had assumed Qi Lin was there on student council business, so he never spoke to him. After the game ended, contact faded, and the next time they exchanged words was already at the Ferris Wheel the following Qixi.

The violent movements from just now had left his breathing unsteady. Jiang Yishen stood there, a suspicion rising in his heart.

Could it be that the sudden "phantom memory" from just now was actually what was originally supposed to happen?

The ball hits Qi Lin, he goes to find Qi Lin and talk to him, and their interaction begins half a year earlier than it did.

It was because he had come here from two years in the future that he changed the course of events, preventing the ball from hitting Qi Lin and delaying what should have been the beginning of their acquaintance.

Jiang Yishen was shoved from behind. He turned around; it was a passing student who seemed to have bumped into something out of thin air and was looking back in puzzlement.

Jiang Yishen stood there blankly for a moment, then quietly walked toward a corner with no one in it. The swirling thoughts made his head feel close to bursting.

He understood now. He had not returned to the past but to the "cause" within cause and effect: this was a world that would produce variables because of him.

The filmstrip that had crumbled before his eyes left him with a lump in his throat. Jiang Yishen did not dare think about it: if on the day of the opening ceremony he had not knocked over that chair, or if he had picked up the spare batteries and handed them to Xiao Wu, would his first meeting with Qi Lin also have turned into a scrap of dust that would never happen?

Jiang Yishen sat down on a chair beside the basketball court, hunching over and clutching his head.

Although he did not know why any of this was happening, Jiang Yishen had already set a rule for himself: ensure that everything proceeds according to his memory, and let no further mistakes occur.

He could not accept a world without Qi Lin. If an accident truly arose later that severed their connection, Jiang Yishen was considering using his invisibility to ambush Qi Lin and then tie him up and leave him under his own dormitory building.

The world in his peripheral vision warped again. The chaos of a scene transition enveloped him. Jiang Yishen closed his eyes, and after a brief moment of blankness, his surroundings became clear once more. He sensed carefully; the first thing he perceived was the smell of earth.

It was the smell of earth in the height of summer, the kind that rises when raindrops fall on the ground.

Jiang Yishen knew what time this was.

He opened his eyes. His vision slowly focused. He was leaning against the entrance of a convenience store.

Raindrops pattered down. He turned his head. "Jiang Yishen" and Fan Zi had just walked out of the store together, sharing a single umbrella, discussing plans to take a cruise boat to celebrate Qixi.

Jiang Yishen had learned from his earlier mistakes. He got ahead of them and ran to the dock where they would line up to board the boat, walking back and forth without triggering any filmstrip memories.

That let him breathe a little easier, even though he still did not understand what it meant.

Before long he spotted Fan Zi and "Jiang Yishen" appearing at the far end of the road. Jiang Yishen crouched nearby, nearly soaked to the skin, his gaze burning as it locked on the two of them.

In less than a minute, he smelled something wrong.

Fan Zi's shoes were not slippery at all.

Jiang Yishen remembered that Fan Zi had worn a pair of canvas shoes with nearly worn-flat soles. The rain had made the road slick, and he slipped with every other step, until he ended up hanging entirely off Jiang Yishen's body.

They had run into Qi Lin while waiting in line. Fan Zi had lived up to expectations by taking a spectacular faceplant, and all three of them had been bundled off to the hospital together. That night he had even walked Qi Lin back to his dormitory.

Jiang Yishen blinked the rainwater off his eyelashes, completely dumbfounded.

How were they not slippery?

Fan Zi walked with perfect, steady, mountain-solid steps.

This was a disaster. This would not do. He had to slip.

Without a second thought Jiang Yishen shot to his feet and sprinted to the convenience store, grumbling to himself as he ran. He finally understood why Fan Zi had slipped so dramatically back then, unable to keep his footing for a single step.

He grabbed a bar of soap from inside the convenience store, tore the packaging off in a few swift moves, then sprinted back to the spot beside the queue entrance, crouched down, and started scrubbing with the rainwater.

Jiang Yishen had never made such a mess of himself, but he had no time to care about that. Like a curling player, he scrubbed the soap furiously, smearing the path ahead of Fan Zi until it gleamed and reflected light.

Finally, under Jiang Yishen's expectant gaze, Fan Zi suddenly went into a skid. He grabbed "Jiang Yishen" in alarm and delivered the line from Jiang Yishen's memory:

"I just know I'm going to wipe out today. The soles of my shoes are completely worn down. After rain like this, even a bed of nails would be slippery."

Jiang Yishen let out a long breath, wiped the sweat from his temple with the back of his hand, and was immediately soaked again by the rain.

"Jiang Yishen" said: "Are you filming a romance drama? If you fall in the river, you'll have to call 119 to fish you out."

Back on track. Jiang Yishen's anxious heart settled a little. He kept diligently scrubbing soap suds while scanning the area, and only relaxed once he confirmed that Qi Lin had appeared at the back of the queue.

It was like watching a play performed for him alone. Jiang Yishen observed this chance encounter up close for a while, then stood up and quietly moved to Qi Lin's side.

Qi Lin's umbrella and shirt were both black, which made his skin look especially fair. Jiang Yishen looked at him, then aggrievedly drew closer, even though Qi Lin could not see his pitiful face.

The two useless ones up ahead were still fooling around; it would be another two or three minutes before they noticed Qi Lin's presence. But Jiang Yishen noticed that Qi Lin's gaze had been resting on "Jiang Yishen's" back the whole time.

So he had spotted them early on.

Thinking this, Jiang Yishen watched as Qi Lin lowered his head and opened his phone. His fingers did not scroll; he simply unlocked it and stared quietly at the screen.

Jiang Yishen had no intention of prying, but Qi Lin truly made no effort to hide the screen from people or from ghosts. A single glance was enough to see it clearly.

It was a Moments post, one that he himself had posted on this day: a photo taken inside that convenience store just now, of a row of transparent umbrellas in a corner.

Jiang Yishen felt as though he had been struck over the head. He watched Qi Lin furrow his brows and lift his arm to look at his own shirt.

There were two dark wet spots on the shoulder. Only then did Jiang Yishen realize he had been standing too close, and the water on his body had dripped onto Qi Lin.

He quickly stepped back, but his heart was still drumming.

The sudden revelation was entirely unexpected. Jiang Yishen felt a little dizzy. Half a year after the breakup, he had finally found a few scattered clues that seemed to testify that he was an idiot.

It seemed that today's meeting had not been a coincidence.

Before he could sort out his thoughts, the world spun again. The rain reversed direction, the river reared up high, smashed against the dock, and swallowed his eyes and mouth and nose, carrying Jiang Yishen away into the distance.

This transmission was not like the previous ones, where he had sunk into blankness. Jiang Yishen remained lucid and watched the filmstrip flow past, countless past moments flickering through it.

Him and Qi Lin taking Fan Zi to the hospital. Him bringing Qi Lin a huge pile of bagged potato chips.

The two of them eating together, studying together, running together. Many corners of memory that Jiang Yishen had long forgotten surfaced in his mind again.

The filmstrip moved faster and faster until its contents were no longer distinguishable, then snapped shut with a crack. Jiang Yishen appeared on a soft bed.

He lay still for a few seconds, then scrambled upright and looked around at the room's furnishings.

It was the hotel across from the school.

The room was empty, the lights off, the curtains open. The lights of ten thousand homes poured in through the window. He went over and switched on the bedside lamp, then as a first instinct turned on the television.

His phone was unusable; only the hotel television's startup screen could show the current time.

November 20, 2023. 9:30 in the evening.

Nothing special about the date. They had only confirmed their relationship a little over half a month ago. Ruling out birthdays, relationship anniversaries, and all manner of other anniversaries.

Jiang Yishen remembered. In fewer than fifteen minutes, the two of them would come tumbling into this room, their behavior an affront to public decency, practically scandalous.

Then they would lose themselves entirely on the bed, tinder meeting flame, flame meeting oil, oil frying spring rolls.

Jiang Yishen drew on the lessons of the previous two times and summoned a detective's full mental alertness, rapidly conducting a sweep of the entire room and comparing it against his memory.

He ran into the bathroom. Non-slip mat. Present.

He ran to the balcony. Small sofa and cushions. Present.

He crouched beside the bed and pulled open the cabinet. Empty. The necessary supplies. Absent.

Jiang Yishen was on the verge of a breakdown. He sprinted out the door, not caring whether a door opening on its own would frighten any passersby, and ran out of the hotel in one breath.

A 24-hour convenience store was not far away. He dashed inside, looked around, and found the condom shelf in front of the register.

He steeled himself. Taking advantage of the fact that no one was around, he carefully took a box off the shelf and pressed it flat against the shelving, slowly sliding it downward.

Breaking out in a cold sweat all over, Jiang Yishen moved the item in his hands to the floor and flew low, then thought for a moment and fished a banknote from his pocket, placing it on the shelf where the box had been.

He was not joking around. He absolutely did not want the shop clerk to discover something missing during the late-night inventory check, pull up the security footage, and see this box flying out the door on its own.

He escorted the item back to the hotel room, and finally understood why he had opened the cabinet back then and found only the condom with no lubricant.

Because his current self could not find anywhere selling that kind of thing.

Jiang Yishen had run himself into a sweat on this whole errand. He only remembered when he got back to the room door that he had absolutely no way of getting in, and could only hide behind the potted plant beside the door, quietly waiting for himself to appear.

As he waited he calmed down, and only then did the full weight of what he had just done sink in. He found it utterly bizarre.

How could anything this insane exist in the world? What heavenly law had he broken for the heavens to punish him like this? Could Qi Lin's wish at that rundown temple actually have been for him to have bad luck all the way to the New Year?

This had truly exceeded the bounds of mere bad luck. It was more like an execution. Jiang Yishen had a feeling that if Ultraman showed up standing outside the building in a moment, he would not even be surprised.

He had not waited two minutes before he saw two figures squeezing close together and heading his way.

Jiang Yishen peeked out. His past self was walking at a rapid clip, pulling Qi Lin by the arm, looking as though he could barely wait to give him a thorough kiss right there in the corridor. Quite undignified.

He could not help feeling some doubt. He had clearly thought himself cool and charming at the time, so why did he look so childish from a third-person perspective? Could it be that Qi Lin had been seeing him this way all these years?

The key card beeped and snapped him back to reality. Jiang Yishen reacted immediately, got up at once, and slipped in on the heels of the two of them, accidentally getting kicked by himself in the process.

He had no time to dwell on that. He had intended to rush in quickly and get the item into the drawer, but the room was too small and there was no way to stay out of their line of sight.

Jiang Yishen settled for second best and tried to press himself against the wall without touching them, waiting for the right moment.

He watched himself push Qi Lin down onto the bed, kneel on one knee between his legs, cup his chin with one hand, and lean down to kiss his lips.

Jiang Yishen sucked in a sharp breath, turned his head, and stared fixedly at the ceiling. The sounds around him were relentless. He gritted his teeth for a long moment and finally could not hold back his anger: "Lighter! He said it hurts!"

His hands were already strong, and Qi Lin's frame was smaller than his on top of that. One palm could cover most of his face. He watched his own fingers resting on Qi Lin's cheek tighten involuntarily, leaving red impressions.

This habit of his was very hard to break. Later he had left two palm-shaped bruises on Qi Lin's waist that took a long time to fade, and before they did, a new layer had already been added on top. Qi Lin had cursed him out over it, saying it was very inconvenient when showering at the school bathhouse.

But the Qi Lin in front of him tilted his head back slightly to meet him, both hands hanging loosely at his sides, with no sign of resistance whatsoever.

Jiang Yishen was burning with frustration. So Qi Lin used to be this indulgent with him. How come later on he could not even pinch him a little?

The two of them were thoroughly tangled together. After his bout of frustration, Jiang Yishen finally remembered what he was supposed to be doing. He crept toward the bed and reached for the nightstand drawer.

He pulled it open a crack and pushed the item inside, then eased it back little by little. There were only a few centimeters left when Qi Lin let out a soft, languid sound and propped himself up to look over.

Caught!

Jiang Yishen had never been so tense. He immediately froze and stopped pushing the drawer. Fortunately his past self was also a character in his own right: at a moment like this he had lost all awareness of the outside world and was simply nuzzling against Qi Lin with little murmurs, burying his face in the crook of his neck. "Baby."

Qi Lin's attention was immediately redirected. He pushed a few times at the person hanging off him: "Why are you calling me that? I'm still a year older than you."

"Baby."

"Jiang Yishen" paid no attention to this, tucking Qi Lin into his arms and nuzzling messily through his hair. "I like you."

Qi Lin had been kissed into helplessness and simply stopped dodging. "I know."

"I like you." The person holding him murmured softly and pulled him a little tighter. "I went home yesterday and brought back some braised beef my dad made. Tomorrow I'll slice it up and give you some."

Jiang Yishen, crouching beside the bed and painstakingly pushing the drawer shut, nearly spat blood when he heard this. He truly could not remember a single thing he had said that night; he had been too nervous and too excited, speaking without thinking. Who would have known he was talking about braised beef.

Qi Lin also let out a small laugh and said quietly: "You said earlier you'd make pudding for me too."

"I'll make both." A rustling sound came from the bed, breathing growing heavier. Jiang Yishen sensed the urgency of the situation and pushed the drawer shut in one determined shove. The next instant, his past self's large hand reached out from the bed and yanked the drawer open; the corner of the drawer slammed squarely into Jiang Yishen's forehead as he failed to dodge in time.

Jiang Yishen clutched his head with nowhere to voice his suffering. He moved aside and watched his past self feel around inside, then mutter in puzzlement: "Is this all there is?"

Of course it is! You're lucky there's anything at all!

A hand settled on his wrist. It was Qi Lin's husky voice: "We don't need it."

"Hey, hey, hey!" Jiang Yishen immediately bounced up from the floor and shouted at the air. "Okay, okay, that's enough, move on to the next one, hurry up and let me go!"

He tried to ignore the sounds from the bed, but the volume coming from that direction was no lower than his own.

Jiang Yishen retreated to the bathroom in an attempt to block out his awareness. He deeply regretted not having put in more effort to steal something else while he had the chance, because of which, whenever they argued afterward, Qi Lin would say he had nothing but brute strength and poor technique.

The bathroom door closed. Jiang Yishen stood in front of the mirror and stared at the empty expanse of the reflective surface, a little dazed.

The chaos from a moment ago was shut out by the door. In the quiet, a sourness rose from the bottom of his heart, an irrepressible ache, like a hole had been torn open in his chest.

He missed Qi Lin. Not only did he miss the time of their passionate early days, he also missed the current Qi Lin, the one who was slightly distant, the one who, upon noticing his hands had turned red from the cold, quietly hung a pair of gloves by the door for him.

Was it that once he had filled in every gap and repaired the story back to its original shape, he would be able to return to Qi Lin's side?

Was this Qi Lin's wish? For them not to have met, not to have fallen in love, was that Qi Lin's wish?

Jiang Yishen thought about it for a moment, then dismissed the idea on his own. If this were before the New Year's countdown, perhaps he might have turned that possibility over in his mind. But now he knew that Qi Lin was waiting for him to come back.

He still had not replied to Qi Lin's calls and messages. If he made Qi Lin anxious enough, Qi Lin would definitely go through all his friends one by one. If he happened to ask Fan Zi, Fan Zi would know that he had been on the phone while right there in Fan Zi's hospital room, and then misunderstanding would pile upon misunderstanding.

Jiang Yishen grew more and more restless, pacing back and forth in the small space. On the third circuit, he finally felt that unsettling yet strangely reassuring sense of detachment arrive.

This transmission was a long one. Jiang Yishen watched the filmstrip of memories circle around him, and after what felt like a full minute, a few birdsongs called him awake.

What met his eyes was blinding sunlight. He squinted, and found himself standing on stone steps at the foot of a mountain. He turned around to put his back to the sun, and the sight that greeted him was remarkable: behind him stretched a long street packed with small tourist-area vendors.

Tourists bustled about, a constant stream going up and down the mountain. Jiang Yishen grabbed a passing stranger and asked the time. It was October 20, 2024, one month after their breakup.

He looked around in a somewhat dazed way, found the scenic area information board, and discovered this was a temple in a southern city he had never visited.

But it was easy to guess. Moreover, Qi Lin had said it himself when he went to attend the wedding: this was the place where he had made his wish, the starting point of all the loops.

Jiang Yishen's heart leapt to his throat. The wind was strong out here in the hills beyond the city. The October wind cut through his thin sweater. He pushed through the noise of vendors calling out their wares and moved through the crowd, quickly scanning the stalls along the small commercial street.

He noticed something a little strange: there was no fortune-telling spot here at all, and no wishing stall either.

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