WC ⋆ Chapter 45

Qi Lin had a premonition that this would probably be the last retrospective transmission.

The closer the transmission node was to the normal timeline, the more he could feel a sense of losing control that was not his own. The things around him were developing little by little into the shape he remembered, flowing unstoppably and irrevocably into the predetermined river.

Qi Lin had watched many similar TV shows and films before, about reincarnation, time travel, and time loops, where the protagonists actively or passively changed what had happened, carrying a kind of thoroughly satisfying sense of control.

But now that he was truly living it himself, Qi Lin felt only a suffocating oppression, an oppression that came from his understanding of himself. He suddenly realized that compared to the entire fabric of time and space, his own agency was so terribly small.

Perhaps it had something to do with the form his soul had taken. In many moments he could only watch helplessly as things happened, powerless to intervene.

He watched everything proceed in orderly fashion, shaping itself little by little into the world he had seen back in January. Yu Jiaming would still write that report letter. He Jian would still enjoy his good reputation and leave the organization with honor. Jiang Yishen would still learn of his father’s illness in the middle of preparing for his graduate entrance exams. He himself would still choose to quit his job two months later, hiding it from his family to study full-time.

On September 11th, they would still break up.

The last stop of the retrospective transmission: an autumn rain had just fallen the night before. People had pulled sweaters out of their wardrobes and put them on. It was the first week of the new semester. The welcome ceremony that had received a full forty thousand yuan in funding was rehearsing on schedule. September 11th, Wednesday.

Qi Lin and Jiang Yishen were born into this time-space at the entrance to the External Relations Office, inside the Administration Building.

The corridor was empty and there was no sound of voices from inside the room. The clock pointed to six in the afternoon. The rehearsal for the welcome evening gala was about to begin.

“Do you still remember the numbers you just memorized?” Jiang Yishen was the first to come back to his senses.

“I do.” Qi Lin nodded.

Calmly, almost absurdly so. If he remembered correctly, in half an hour they would break up at the school gate, yet the two of them were currently most focused on that string of invoice numbers.

Jiang Yishen squeezed his palm and moved toward the door. “Let’s go in and check again.”

Bang!

Jiang Yishen walked headfirst into the door. He covered his head and turned around in disbelief.

Qi Lin was startled too. He reached out tentatively and touched the door, cold and hard, impossible to push open.

He quickly stepped back a few paces and walked out onto the glass corridor, looking at the reflection in the glass. Still a blank. They were still two souls.

“We can touch things now,” Qi Lin said in surprise, poking the glass.

“Then you’d better be careful not to touch anyone.” Jiang Yishen pulled him downstairs. “During the last rewind, I got smacked by Fan Zi trying to block a ball at the basketball game.”

“What blocking a ball?”

Jiang Yishen kept his head down as he went downstairs, hesitating for a moment over how to answer.

When he had told Qi Lin about his own rewind story earlier, he had skipped over this part. At the time the two of them had just gotten back together, their emotions had come down from an intense peak and neither of them was thinking very clearly, so he had left out this somewhat regrettable deviation.

By now they had been through quite a lot together, and he could probably look at it with a calmer perspective.

“That basketball game, the time you came to watch me play.” Jiang Yishen took a deep breath. “There was a ball flying toward you, and I blocked it away. But at that moment I saw another line of development. If I hadn’t blocked that ball, because of the wrong catching posture, your hand would have been hit and swollen. After the game I came to ask how you were doing and we had dinner together.”

In that unchosen path, they had become close half a year earlier, gotten together quickly, without the blank period in real life where they had been strangers to each other.

What made the feeling even more complicated was that this might actually have been the normal timeline, and it was only because of Jiang Yishen’s intervention that everything had changed.

Qi Lin was shaken by this. He finally truly understood the extreme tension Jiang Yishen had described at the time, and understood why Jiang Yishen had shed involuntary tears when he came home and saw him.

Pull one hair and the whole body moves. One step off, and they might have had no future at all.

Jiang Yishen felt the hand Qi Lin was holding him with tightening continuously, so he stopped walking, turned his head, and kissed his face. “It’s fine. It’s all in the past. Right now the two of us are here together.”

In a corner of the first floor of the Administration Building there were a few networked computers. Jiang Yishen figured there was no time like the present, and while the numbers he had memorized were still clear, he should look up what needed to be looked up first.

He switched on a computer, maneuvered the mouse to enter a webpage. Qi Lin glanced around nervously beside him, as if worried someone might suddenly appear. “Isn’t it a bit too out in the open to check here?”

“It’s fine.” Jiang Yishen was perfectly at ease. He opened the electronic tax system, and the two of them entered the invoice numbers they had just memorized.

The search returned no results. Their guess was confirmed: the invoice was indeed fake.

“I also memorized another one. Try looking it up.” Qi Lin said, squeezing over to enter another string of numbers.

This time results did come up. The time and location matched, though the amount was uncertain as to whether it was accurate. That invoice had been pressed underneath the others at the time and printed a bit blurry, so Qi Lin hadn’t been able to make out the other details clearly.

But it was enough.

On the way out of the Administration Building, Jiang Yishen became unusually silent. About ten-odd minutes passed before he found his voice again.

“What are you planning to do?”

“Haven’t decided yet,” Qi Lin said.

The scale of the External Relations Office’s network of graft appeared to be quite large, from Minister He Jian who was about to leave the organization at the top, down to new members at the bottom, seven or eight people in total.

This kind of operation was hard to sustain long-term with only students involved. How many faculty and staff had a hand in it was hard to say. If they reported it up the chain, even sending it directly to the principal’s mailbox might get it held up at the review stage.

All the evidence they had witnessed existed only in the past. Once they truly returned to the real timeline, there would be no witnesses, no physical evidence, no advantage whatsoever.

Honestly, the best approach was to act as if they knew nothing. If they wanted to ruin a lunatic like Yu Jiaming and a campus bully like He Jian, there were plenty of methods available. Exposing the External Relations Office was like a mayfly trying to shake a great tree, and could easily drag themselves into trouble in the process.

“Let me handle it.” Jiang Yishen tried to use wording that sounded gentle. “You don’t need to worry about it anymore.”

Qi Lin was not easy to fool. He heard the implication beneath the words and frowned. “What do you mean I don’t need to worry about it? If you have ideas we can talk them over. Don’t just kick me out of it.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Jiang Yishen reached for him. “You, the provincial exam is coming up soon. Don’t get mixed up in this kind of thing. If you pass, the work unit will do a background check with the school. Don’t stir up any unpleasantness.”

Qi Lin knew he meant well, but still felt a flash of irritation. “Couldn’t you just say that directly? Why did you have to start with telling me not to worry about it, as if I’m just causing you trouble?”

When he got irritated, his stride unconsciously grew longer and longer. The two of them walked faster and faster, and without realizing it they had walked close to the school gate.

“I asked first what you were planning to do, and you said you hadn’t decided yet.” Jiang Yishen broke their exchange down sentence by sentence. “Then I said what I thought, and what I thought was to handle it myself. Whether or not it involves the External Relations Office, you shouldn’t get involved in any of it.”

Qi Lin felt that his explanation made some sense, and yet also felt something was off. He hemmed and hawed for a while before finally putting his finger on what was wrong. “What I mean is, it doesn’t matter how we deal with Yu Jiaming or that bully. What matters is that you shouldn’t just hand down a conclusion. You need to tell me how you’re thinking about it. Do you think you’re some domineering CEO? Issuing one order without caring whether anyone lives or dies.”

“I…” Jiang Yishen was about to argue back when he suddenly heard someone nearby speaking in an extremely familiar tone.

“Just let me know and I can take the subway from here to your place in under half an hour!” the person said.

Qi Lin heard the commotion on the other side of the bushes too. Together with Jiang Yishen he fell silent and turned to look.

The “Qi Lin” belonging to the September 11th time-space had a thick scarf wrapped around him, a face mask on, and spoke with a heavy nasal voice. “You’ve been so busy lately. I’m sick and can’t have you stay over, so if you come it’ll be an hour round trip for you.”

“Wouldn’t it also be an hour for you?” the “Jiang Yishen” standing across from him said. “And you’re sick on top of that. It’s so cold today!”

“Qi Lin” was holding a piece of clothing in his arms. “I was passing by on my way from the office. And the cold isn’t even that serious.”

This was the last argument before their breakup.

Over a trivial, inconsequential little matter: Jiang Yishen had left some things at Qi Lin’s place and needed them over the next couple of days.

Neither of them had learned to honestly accept love from another person. By the end of the relationship both of them had drawn very clear lines, like splitting a five-yuan chicken tender down the middle, two-fifty each.

Jiang Yishen and Qi Lin watched from the other side of the bushes, feeling that what had once seemed like an enormous, world-ending conflict was so childish and simple.

“What if we could do it over?” Jiang Yishen asked.

“Hm?” Qi Lin stared absently at the version of himself across the way, eyes red-rimmed.

“If we did it over, would you still make a special trip to bring me my things?”

Qi Lin didn’t think about it. He just slowly nodded. “Yes.”

The two people across from them argued until neither could figure out what the problem was. It seemed like neither had done anything wrong. They fell into a brief silence.

Jiang Yishen thought for a moment and said, “I’d probably still argue with you.”

Qi Lin touched the tip of his own nose and turned to look at him.

“I still think there was no need for you to make a trip over while you were sick. But if it were now, I would feel very happy even while arguing.”

Qi Lin laughed at that. “What kind of nonsense is that?”

“Just very happy,” Jiang Yishen said.

Qi Lin pointed at the two people across the way. “Were you not happy arguing back then?”

Jiang Yishen neither nodded nor shook his head.

He actually couldn’t remember what he had felt at the time anymore. Only exhaustion, only restlessness. He had lost the ability to act coquettish and sweet, no longer drew satisfaction and happiness from “being cared for.” He had only been thinking: this is wrong, Qi Lin shouldn’t be sick.

All this time had passed, and Qi Lin still didn’t want him to waste an hour coming to the rental apartment. He likewise didn’t want Qi Lin to come to school with a cold. Loop it ten thousand times and that wouldn’t change.

But they would not break up over it again. Jiang Yishen would take Qi Lin to the cafeteria for a warm bowl of noodle soup. It was a delicious window stall he had discovered in the cafeteria during their long-distance period, photographed and saved in his phone album, among those he had never sent to Qi Lin to see.

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