WC ⋆ Chapter 44

Just from that one sentence, Jiang Yishen was able to locate this scene in his memory.

They had just fought over the matter of borrowing money. The money lent out the day before had been returned with interest, and Jiang Yishen was planning to use this opportunity to make up with Qi Lin.

It was the weekend. He had intended to ask Qi Lin out for dinner, but somehow the conversation drifted to plans for Qixi.

Jiang Yishen had asked Qi Lin what gift he wanted. Qi Lin said anything would be fine, that not giving one was fine too, that just showing up was enough.

Hearing those words now, they sounded perfectly ordinary. But somehow, back then, they had struck the Jiang Yishen who was living through it in a way that felt wrong no matter how he turned it over, like he was being brushed off.

The two of them bickered over the phone, trading lines back and forth, and somehow, inexplicably, it turned into a full argument.

“Jiang Yishen” sat on the staircase with his head bowed, picking at the hem of his pants. The real Jiang Yishen and Qi Lin crouched in front of him, watching as he swallowed his grievances without saying what he actually felt, insisting instead on dragging in other things to deflect.

“Jiang Yishen” first accused the other party of never telling him what he liked, then said he felt like the distance between himself and Qi Lin was growing further and further.

Qi Lin remembered how furious he had been when he heard those words at the time. He had been carrying the ring he had just bought, not yet given, and then in the very next moment had the label “you don’t like me at all” slapped on him. There had been nowhere to even begin arguing back.

So he had said that Jiang Yishen was always overthinking things, that whenever he could see something was wrong and asked about it, the answer was always “I’m fine, nothing’s wrong, I’m not unhappy,” and then days later he would start second-guessing himself and say he had been upset back then. What was that supposed to be?

The “Jiang Yishen” before them launched into an intensely heated exchange of words, following the pattern of their old arguments. The real Jiang Yishen suddenly grabbed Qi Lin and pulled him to his feet, dragging him toward the exit. “Let’s go!”

“Hm?” Qi Lin hadn’t finished listening and stumbled at the tug. “What’s the rush?”

“We’re leaving!” Jiang Yishen was burning with urgency. He swept one long arm around Qi Lin and half-carried, half-shoved him out the door.

In the last second before they left the stairwell, Qi Lin heard a barely perceptible sound of sobbing from behind them.

“Oh, you’re about to cry,” he said.

Jiang Yishen carried him along and said stubbornly, “I’m not.”

Qi Lin felt he should laugh, but he couldn’t manage it. He leaned against Jiang Yishen’s shoulder and watched the stairwell grow gradually distant, stepping further and further away from the pain that had belonged to the two of them in that time and place.

“Did I used to say really hurtful things?”

“It was fine.” Jiang Yishen’s voice sounded a little strained. The replay of that scene just now had filled in the parts that the Qi Lin on the other end of the phone had never seen, and it made him feel like he had been sliced open and laid flat on display like a diagram of a green pepper. A bit humiliating.

Qi Lin rested his chin on his shoulder. “I didn’t really know how to be in a relationship back then.”

“You’re not much better now,” Jiang Yishen said, muffled.

The two of them walked along the path in the direction of the Teaching Building. Students on bicycles passed by from time to time. Qi Lin watched them, and it felt as though he had been carried back to the summer of a year ago.

The stifling heat had steamed the air until it burned. On that road, only the sidewalk at the very edge had any shade from the trees. Sometimes they would sneak their bikes up onto it. The surface of the sidewalk was not as smooth as the road, and whatever was in the bike basket would get jostled, making a clattering racket.

The asphalt road gleamed under the sun. The pebbles flicked up by passing wheels were both hot and heavy. Students hurriedly crammed their bikes under the sparse patches of shade and ran into the Teaching Building with their arms shielding their faces from the sun, letting the air conditioning blow away the thick summer heat.

That was the campus life Qi Lin held in his memory. At the time it had seemed like nothing at all, and once it had passed, there was no going back.

He remembered that his present self, at that moment, had been in the restaurant on the ground floor of his office building. After hanging up that call, he had had no appetite left for the meal. He had eaten only a small corner of the rice and set it aside. A heavy exhaustion pressed down on his body and lodged in his stomach. He had wanted to go to the school and find Jiang Yishen, but the lunch break was only so long, and there was a meeting in the afternoon.

A painful, draining relationship.

Qi Lin turned his face and gave Jiang Yishen’s ear a very light kiss. He said, “It wasn’t that I didn’t need the gifts you gave. It was that I liked whatever you gave me. All those gifts you couldn’t bring yourself to commit to buying, I saw them. The watch was beautiful. The bracelet was nice too. I liked all of them.”

Jiang Yishen said nothing.

They walked on a little further. Then Qi Lin suddenly realized something and propped himself up to look at him, and what he saw was a pair of red-rimmed eyes.

No way, he was crying again!

“What’s wrong!” Qi Lin jumped down from his arms, cupped his face in both hands, and used his thumbs to wipe away the traces of moisture at the corners of his eyes.

Jiang Yishen sniffled hard. After quite a long pause he said, “Let’s wait for the campus shuttle. I don’t want to walk anymore.”

Two ghosts waited at the stop for the campus shuttle. Before long, a bus came speeding up. The air conditioning inside was strong, and it blew their simmering emotions down into something calmer.

Qi Lin realized that Jiang Yishen was truly someone with very high emotional needs in a relationship, only he rarely asked for them to be met directly. Having witnessed the conflicts of the past with his own eyes, Qi Lin was gradually coming to understand what Xu Huaying had meant by “otherwise it ends in divorce.”

He took the initiative and held Jiang Yishen’s hand, even though during the height of their relationship they had never been this clingily hand-in-hand while out and about.

Their destination was the External Relations Office, located inside the Administration Building. Qi Lin had come here to handle a lot of administrative matters when he graduated and was more familiar with this area, so he led Jiang Yishen and found the door without difficulty.

The door was locked from the inside, but they could hear two male voices in conversation within.

They slipped through the door, looked around warily, and confirmed that no one could detect their presence before carefully moving closer.

Of the two people inside, one was seated on the sofa and one was at the desk in front of the computer. Both were unfamiliar faces, dressed like ordinary university students, nothing particularly distinctive about them.

The one at the desk was browsing on the computer, talking as he looked. “How could he not come. There’s so much stuff sitting right here.”

When he said “so much stuff,” he casually patted the desk drawer.

The one on the sofa had his legs crossed and said with a smirk, “Wasn’t he all tough on the phone? Wonder who ends up slinking away in the end.”

“What’s the point of getting worked up over him.” The one at the computer spoke with breezy indifference.

That air of calm indifference immediately prompted the one on the sofa to start flattering him, laughing in an exaggerated way a couple of times. “He’s scared to death of you, right? Twenty-some years and he still thought he’d made something of himself, and in the end he’s back in our hands again.”

“Why bring up old things.” The one at the computer responded lightly, and even Qi Lin standing several steps away could tell he was in a good mood from being flattered.

“Not bringing it up, not bringing it up!” The one on the sofa stood, lowering his voice a little. “He wants to act like a respectable person now. Bet he never expected to run into old friends here. Back then he got cornered in an alleyway and beaten up, and even if he’s picked himself back up now he’s still the one getting hit. Who does he think he’s fooling.”

“Alright, enough.” The one at the computer genuinely did not want to hear this anymore. He frowned slightly and shot him a glance, and the room fell instantly silent.

Apparently, having bullied someone in the past was not something he considered a glorious achievement worth being proud of. He was not the only one who wanted to repackage himself as a respectable person with no history. Being brought up again and again, the man at the computer was clearly displeased, and the low pressure in the room did not ease back up.

Qi Lin and Jiang Yishen had pieced together a rough picture. This person was in all likelihood He Jian. Listening carefully, they could pick out the threads of the truth. The grudge between He Jian and Yu Jiaming stretched back many years, rooted in a prolonged period of campus bullying.

Jiang Yishen let out a quiet sigh, though it was unclear who he was sighing for.

This unexpected intelligence was a complicated thing to sit with, but Qi Lin did not let himself get lost in the tangle of it.

He reminded Jiang Yishen in a low voice, “Keep things separate. Whoever wronged him, he can go after that person. We have no grievance with him, and yet he filed a malicious report and went to tell our family. Isn’t he the one bullying us now?”

He had no interest in hearing about someone else’s suffering. Granted, a personality as dark and warped as Yu Jiaming’s must have had reasons behind it, but those things had nothing to do with him. In the conflict with Yu Jiaming, they were the ones who had been wronged.

Qi Lin had no desire to make allowances for someone who did not know how to show basic respect. Even taking ten thousand steps back, strictly speaking, Jiang Yishen had indeed been in the wrong first by not coming back to the dormitory overnight, so reporting him was not entirely without grounds. But deliberately stirring up trouble between them when they ran into each other on the staircase, and hinting to Xing Yun about his personal life, that was purely a matter of character.

For not coming back overnight and getting reported, Jiang Yishen had accepted the consequence without even saying a harsh word in response. Half a year had passed and Yu Jiaming was still relentless. Now that he had come knocking, Qi Lin naturally had no intention of letting it go either.

That said, someone who engaged in campus bullying was no good thing either. In terms of how reprehensible they were, they had Yu Jiaming beat by more than a little. It would be best to sweep them all up in one go. Let old scores be settled today.

There was still half an hour before the four o’clock meeting He Jian had arranged. Suddenly there was a knock at the door.

Qi Lin had assumed it was Yu Jiaming arriving early. The one on the sofa walked over and unlocked the door. The person who came in was a stranger they had never seen, looking somewhat younger, like a fresh-faced first-year student.

The two inside showed no surprise at his arrival. He Jian merely lifted his eyelids for a brief glance, and the first-year student took a stack of small slips from his bag.

He Jian took them and looked them over for a moment, said nothing, and set them on the desk without any particular expression. Qi Lin seized the chance to get a clear look. They were invoices.

The one on the sofa leaned in and flipped through them, and his eyebrows shot up immediately. “How come it’s only forty thousand? Didn’t we say sixty thousand?”

“Sixty thousand is too much… Senior Yu said in previous years the welcome event never used more than thirty thousand, sixty thousand is already double that…” The first-year student was quick to distance himself.

“Double what? Out of forty thousand, what you can actually pocket is maybe a quarter. Split among this many people, how much does anyone actually end up with?” The one on the sofa slapped the invoices down on the edge of the desk, glanced at He Jian’s expression, then continued, “That Senior Yu of yours has gotten timid. He’s scared something will go wrong and drag down his precious guaranteed postgraduate spot. He doesn’t care at all about you people following along behind him!”

Qi Lin and Jiang Yishen listened with shock in their hearts. Neither of them was a fool, and the invoices had been thrown right in front of them.

This group of people was inflating expenses to siphon off funds allocated by the school. Who knew how long this business of hiding things from each other had been going on.

This was no small matter. Five-figure falsified invoices were enough to get them hauled in for questioning. To say there was no one inside the External Relations Office providing cover through connections, not even the highest power could make anyone believe that.

At the critical moment, Qi Lin felt the ground shift beneath his feet. The world before his eyes blurred and stretched into streaks of light. It had been so long since the last Retrospective Transmission that he had nearly forgotten the feeling of his consciousness being pulled away.

They were about to leave this time and place!

The arrow was already on the string. Watching the scene about to dissolve into the filmstrip corridor, Qi Lin was pulled by Jiang Yishen and lunged forward two sharp steps. His fingers passed through the invoices that were already disintegrating into points of light. Jiang Yishen said urgently, “No time. The dumb way it is, then. Invoice numbers. You memorize the front half, I’ll memorize the back half. We’ll look them up when we get back.”

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