WC ⋆ Chapter 53

The meeting with Yin Yu was set for noon.

In the previous loop it hadn’t come together, so this time Qi Lin got there first and locked in the time early. The place was a restaurant near the school.

Yin Yu had picked the spot, and Qi Lin and Jiang Yishen only realized when they arrived that it was a roast duck restaurant. The moment they walked in, two stone lions crouched on either side of the entrance, a moon gate faced them head-on, and the characters on the plaque above it were written in such sweeping brushwork that they were impossible to read clearly.

Jiang Yishen reached out and touched one. The surface was ice-cold, real stone. The overhead costs here were clearly not low.

“Does this place have a minimum spend?” he asked quietly.

“No idea.” Qi Lin climbed a few stone steps. Inside, the restaurant opened into a world of its own, a new scene at every turn, and rounding a corner brought the sound of gently murmuring water, and only then did they spot Yin Yu already waiting at the table.

Yin Yu was the kind of person who naturally carried an air of elusive mystique, so by rights he should have fit right in with the style of this place, yet somehow, looking over at him still produced a strong sense of incongruity.

Perhaps it was because he could not give up that leather jacket. Qi Lin noticed that this one was different from the last time he had seen it: a pure-black fleece-lined version, the kind that looked genuinely cool to wear in winter.

“You’re here?” Yin Yu heard the footsteps and turned his head, waving them over.

The chairs were straight-backed wooden chairs with ninety-degree angles, the backs and seats fitted with cushions embroidered with dragon claws. The chairs were immovable, impossibly heavy.

Qi Lin struggled for a good while before managing to sit down, then swept a glance at Yin Yu, who was pretending to study the menu. “You certainly have refined tastes.”

“Isn’t this all for you two?” Yin Yu snapped the menu shut with a clap. “Meeting you two calls for a place that matches the atmosphere. If we just went to any old street stall, and then we started talking about all those profound and mysterious topics with a barbecue going on behind us, wouldn’t that feel incredibly strange?”

“…You’re something else. I happen to love barbecue,” Jiang Yishen said.

Yin Yu couldn’t be bothered to respond to him, and turned to Qi Lin instead. “I never got to ask. How did you two randomly get back together?”

“That was ages ago.” Jiang Yishen finished grumbling and then realized that for everyone else, it had only been a few days.

“What do you mean?” Yin Yu frowned. “You got back together and the loop still hasn’t ended?”

A waiter stepped forward to pour tea. All three of them went quiet in unison, as though they all agreed it was deeply embarrassing to discuss this in front of a stranger, like something out of a middle school fantasy novel.

The waiter, bearing three sets of eyes on him, steeled himself and finished pouring the tea, pushed a cup in front of each of them, and turned to leave.

“Don’t try to fool me.” Only then did Yin Yu continue. “According to my earlier guess, if you got back together the loop should have stopped.”

At precisely that moment, another waiter walked up to the table. “Ready to order?”

Yin Yu couldn’t even finish a single sentence. He had to cut himself off halfway, nearly choking on it. He looked at the waiter, then looked at the two people across from him who were acting as if none of this had anything to do with them, and ground his back teeth together as he ordered a few dishes.

By the time things finally quieted down, his agitation had faded from what it had been a moment ago. He took a half-hearted sip of tea and asked, “So which loop is this?”

Qi Lin said, “Today is the second one. In the last loop I tried to make plans with you but couldn’t. Two hours later a friend would call you out and take up your entire evening.”

Yin Yu’s expression traveled from calm to stunned and finally to something close to shattering. He opened his mouth and couldn’t get a single word out.

“Then I asked if the next morning would work, and you said at the earliest the afternoon,” Qi Lin added, his face expressionless.

“Alright, alright, I believe you.” Yin Yu stopped him. “You don’t need to keep going.”

Qi Lin gave an obedient nod.

Yin Yu was a little restless in his seat. He fidgeted for a long while and still couldn’t let it go, pressing on: “Why would I tell you all that in such detail?”

“You only said you had plans in the evening, from four in the afternoon until midnight the next day.” Qi Lin smiled slightly. “That’s not really that much detail.”

Yin Yu felt a chill run through him at that smile, and decided the best strategy right now was to change the subject.

“Let’s not get into that. What did you two want to see me about?”

Jiang Yishen had been waiting for those words since the moment he sat down. He straightened up and tried to phrase the question as clearly as he could: “Do you remember where you were on September 11th of last year?”

Yin Yu hadn’t expected the question to span nearly a full year. He scratched his head and thought for a long time. “I don’t have any memory of that. September… I was probably just at school.”

Jiang Yishen and Qi Lin exchanged a glance. They’d more or less known they wouldn’t get anything out of this.

At that point in time, Yin Yu hadn’t known either of them at all. They were complete strangers to him. The night of the welcome ceremony rehearsal had been packed with people, so there was no way he could recall anything.

Whether Yin Yu had or hadn’t seen two people arriving across time and space on that night, in that moment, became a secret that would never be answered. No one could ever know.

“Alright. Then there’s one more thing. You got into a car accident last August, right?”

It wasn’t a small thing. Yin Yu nodded without needing to think.

“Your retina detached?”

At this point, nothing more needed to be said. Yin Yu immediately understood what they were asking.

“You want to ask about my eyes?” He pointed at his own eye sockets. The overhead light made his irises appear almost translucent, and the sight triggered an instinctive unease in Jiang Yishen.

Qi Lin spoke up on his own: “The first time we met, you said you could see a red thread on me. I asked you then whether you had Yin-Yang Eyes, and you didn’t answer directly.”

“What I have doesn’t really count as Yin-Yang Eyes.” Yin Yu shrugged. “My recovery after the surgery wasn’t great, but nothing showed up on the tests. They said it might be an immune issue.”

“What do you actually see?” Jiang Yishen asked.

“The ordinary world.” Yin Yu narrowed his eyes, as if looking at the world through some kind of frosted glass laid over his vision. “Right after the surgery last year, I was in the hospital, and sometimes I could see these clumps of black mist. Have you ever burned dried platycodon root? It was like that kind of smoke. I thought it was floaters or something, but later I found out it was the death energy in the hospital.”

Jiang Yishen felt his skin crawl all over. He raised a hand to cut him off. “And now?”

“Once I left the hospital I couldn’t see it anymore. It’s not the death energy of someone about to die, it’s the death energy of someone already completely dead. You don’t run into many corpses outside of hospitals, it’s not like we’re filming Sherlock,” Yin Yu said.

A waiter brought a plate of roast duck to the table. All three of them fell into their collective silence again with perfect timing. The only sound was the light clink of the plate against the glass tabletop. Small dishes were set out, dipping sauces, thin pancakes, cucumber strips and shredded scallions arranged in little duck-shaped dishes, with the duck’s head pointing directly at Jiang Yishen.

Jiang Yishen stared at the duck for a moment, then nudged it around so it faced Yin Yu instead.

The waiter finished and left. Qi Lin pressed further: “What do I look like to you right now?”

“Normal,” Yin Yu said. “So I thought at first the loop had ended. The first time I met you, there was a red thread on you. Now there isn’t.”

“Don’t say it like that, it’s terrifying. What do you mean there isn’t one now,” Jiang Yishen said, his heart lurching.

“Gone is gone. It’s not like I’m lying to you.” Yin Yu picked up a thin pancake and folded a slice of roast duck into it. “I was born sickly, and from when I was small I could see things others couldn’t. Then I grew up and I couldn’t anymore. If it weren’t for that accident, I never would have thought I’d get to revisit my childhood.”

“With talent like that, why didn’t you find a master to study under?” Jiang Yishen asked.

Yin Yu chewed his roast duck and said indistinctly, “My family wouldn’t allow it. They thought the more I got involved in this kind of thing, the worse my health got. Two years before last… well, I guess I have to say three years before last now. I felt uncomfortable being in this place, so I secretly went to see a feng shui master, took him as my shifu and studied under him for over a year. Then my dad found out and we had a falling-out. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had to borrow money from someone just to cover the surgery costs after the accident.”

Two years before last. Something clicked for Jiang Yishen. That was when he and Qi Lin first met, at the school basketball tournament. That was the starting point of the entire time reversal.

“What do you mean by ‘uncomfortable being here’?”

“Just uncomfortable.” Yin Yu looked at them, puzzled. “Don’t you ever come to a place and just feel awful? The magnetic field doesn’t suit you, your Bazi clashes with it.”

Qi Lin and Jiang Yishen both shook their heads.

Jiang Yishen shook his head and then nodded once: “Oh, I do get sleepy here sometimes. I don’t get sleepy in other cities.”

“That’s altitude sickness in reverse. The elevation here is too low,” Qi Lin said.

“Really? I thought it was because I eat too much,” Jiang Yishen said, hearing this for the first time, his attention veering off at the speed of light.

Yin Yu unhurriedly rolled up another piece of roast duck, then spoke at a leisurely pace: “I’ve said it before. I don’t actually have any deeply mysterious secrets. A lot of things, they’re just fate. There’s no explaining them.”

“So you don’t know why we ended up in a loop, and you can’t provide any information to help with that,” Qi Lin said, summarizing for him without mercy.

Yin Yu wasn’t having it: “I’ve provided plenty of information. I told you about my eyes… wait, how did you two know my eyes had a problem?”

Jiang Yishen said in a completely matter-of-fact tone, “I lent you the money for the surgery.”

Yin Yu spat out a mouthful of tea.

“A lot of things, they’re just fate. There’s no explaining them.” Jiang Yishen sent his own words back to him.

Fate had come full circle, and the whole affair locked together without a single gap. The reason Yin Yu had fallen out with his family was that he had picked up the feng shui and mysticism he had set aside for over a decade, and the catalyst that had led him to return to that old pursuit was, in all likelihood, the time reversal caused by Jiang Yishen.

And it was precisely because Yin Yu had broken with his family that he had been forced to borrow money from Jiang Yishen for the surgery, setting off a chain of cause and effect with no beginning and no end.

For the sake of that few thousand yuan, Jiang Yishen and Qi Lin had had a huge fight, and the ring had not only never been given, it had accelerated the process of their breakup.

Even with the chance of time reversal, even with the possibility of looping an unlimited number of times, neither Qi Lin nor Jiang Yishen could think of any way to change this closed loop. Every link had moved into exactly the right position, connected like mortise and tenon, with not even a single hair’s breadth of space to wedge anything in.

“I genuinely don’t know about this kind of loop, but I can offer some information based on my own experience,” Yin Yu said.

Qi Lin threatened him: “If you say something useless again, we can’t be friends anymore.”

“When have I ever said anything useless?” Yin Yu held a scallion strip between his fingers and traced mysterious shapes in the air with it. “Since the loop started because of a wish, it won’t go on without end. Thirty days. Not seven, not fifteen, so it has to be thirty.”

He finished speaking and tapped his own eye socket. “It should be ending soon, because my eyes are almost healed. I just thought of a possibility: it’s not that the red thread disappeared. It’s just that I can no longer see it.”

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