WC ⋆ Chapter 60

Qi Lin drank beer like water, downing half a bottle in one gulp. Jiang Yishen watched with his jaw on the floor, numbly passing him peeled chestnuts as a snack, forming a steady assembly line.

One bottle hit empty, and Qi Lin was on the verge of a breakdown: "What do I do, it's not hitting me."

Jiang Yishen tried to talk him into stopping: "One bottle is enough to get a light buzz."

"Not working, I'm still totally clear-headed, I can't bring myself to make the call." Qi Lin reached for another bottle.

Jiang Yishen scrambled to pull him back and offered an alternative plan: "You could leave me a sip. One sip and I'll be completely drunk, I'll make the call for you."

Qi Lin vetoed the suggestion. Watching the time race toward midnight, he gritted his teeth, stamped his foot, grabbed his phone, and shut himself in the bedroom: "I'm going in."

The bedroom door slammed shut. Jiang Yishen picked up the empty bottle from the coffee table, gave it a shake, and found not a drop left.

The next second the door flew open again. Qi Lin came running out of the bedroom with the phone pressed to his ear, the call apparently already connected. He crossed to the kitchen in a few quick strides, grabbed another cold beer, tucked it under his arm, and dove back into the bedroom.

"Hey, take it easy with the drinking!" Jiang Yishen called after him.

Quiet settled over the apartment again. Jiang Yishen poured out the half-eaten crackers and kept eating, feeling like he was helplessly holding down the fort alone, a husband whose wife was a daily drunk.

He ate and scrolled through his phone. WeChat had gone back to calm. The rumor incident had barely touched his life, probably because it was a holiday and most classmates had gone home, cutting off the main channels of gossip. A lot of the messages had spread online, and without tone of voice or facial expressions to back them up, they somehow felt less believable.

Jiang Yishen browsed the school's Weibo supertopic for a while. Same boring posts as always: people looking for part-time work, selling secondhand stuff, and even the school's official account had comments nobody was bothering with.

11:55 p.m. Qi Lin still hadn't come out.

He waited another two minutes. With midnight almost here, they had to make today's decision.

Kiss, no loop. No kiss, loop.

Jiang Yishen walked to the bedroom door. Worried that a knock might carry through the phone, he tapped twice very softly. The door wasn't locked. He pushed it open a crack and found the light off inside, Qi Lin sitting by the window in the moonlight.

A layer of silver moonlight spilled across him. The bottle beside him caught a glint of light. Jiang Yishen saw him tilt his head slightly and look over, his eyes glistening.

Jiang Yishen stepped in carefully and crouched down in front of him, looking up at him, then held up his phone to show him the time.

23:58.

Qi Lin was still on the call. He saw the screen, shook his head at Jiang Yishen, then caught his hand and scraped his fingernail twice across the back of his wrist.

Jiang Yishen understood the gesture. He lowered his head and pressed a kiss to Qi Lin's lips.

A silent, lingering kiss, touch and part. He pulled back reluctantly, walked out of the bedroom, and eased the door shut behind him.

The spot on the back of his hand where the nail had lightly grazed him tingled in waves. Jiang Yishen scratched at it hard, scratching until the skin went red, and still it felt like scratching through a boot[[1]], the itch never quite reached. His whole mind was full of the look on Qi Lin's face just now.

Completely unguarded, a little fragile, but easy and relieved.

He felt like he was the one who'd actually gotten drunk.

Jiang Yishen squirmed with restlessness, clawing at the air, feeling nothing but emptiness in his arms and a general wrongness everywhere.

Now he couldn't sleep either. He paced around the living room in circles to burn it off, walked enough steps before dawn to hit number one on his friends' leaderboard, and while checking the ranking, he noticed by chance that Xing Yun had sent a message three minutes ago.

This was the first exchange since the two of them had added each other on WeChat. Jiang Yishen's legs went stiff on the spot. He tapped to open it.

Xing Yun: Xiao Jiang, are you resting yet?

Not a second to waste. He replied immediately: Not yet.

He'd been debating whether to add an emoji, but his fingers were faster than his brain and it was already sent.

Xing Yun's reply came back even faster than his, a whole paragraph that looked like it had been typed and waiting for a long time.

Xing Yun: Are you with Xiao Qi? He just called his dad, and listening in I could tell something was off. Nothing happened over there, did it?

Jiang Yishen glanced toward the bedroom. Qi Lin was still sprawled out on the bed, hadn't even had a chance to change his clothes.

He wouldn't dare lie to Xing Yun. He answered honestly: We're together, nothing happened, he's pretty happy.

Jiang Yishen didn't get a reply. He leaned against the doorframe, eyes glued to his phone, with the same nerves he'd feel right after sending a paper to his advisor.

Private-messaging Qi Lin's mom right next to Qi Lin felt no less daring than holding hands with your partner in front of the dean of students.

Xing Yun wasn't responding, and Jiang Yishen could only turn his own message over and over in his head, finding something off about it no matter how he looked at it.

Would she think it was inappropriate for the two of them to be together in the middle of the night? But it wasn't exactly a secret, was it, she'd already called them out on it in person last time, and besides, the fact that she was asking meant she'd already accepted it in her heart, right?

Maybe she was just trying to get information out of him? That seemed unlikely too. If she only wanted to fish for information, she wouldn't have needed to add that second sentence.

Jiang Yishen nearly made himself sick overthinking it alone. Xing Yun's message finally arrived, and it was simple: a single "Okay."

Jiang Yishen almost coughed up blood. He collapsed limply onto the bed, crawled over to Qi Lin's side, and poked at his hair with one finger.

A long while later, Xing Yun added a closing line to the brief exchange: Sorry for the trouble taking care of Xiao Qi. He's there on his own, look after each other.

Jiang Yishen hadn't worked this hard at reading comprehension since the college entrance exam. He chewed over those words several times, and suddenly felt a bold impulse to turn the tables. The phrase "look after each other" had woken something up in him. There was no hierarchy between him and Xing Yun, she was just an ordinary elder, and if he had to put a finer point on it, she wasn't even just an ordinary elder but, in some sense, family.

He sat up, worked up the courage, and asked the question he'd been wanting to ask but had nowhere to ask: Auntie, what did Xiao Qi and his dad talk about? I wasn't nearby at the time.

Xing Yun: Xiao Qi didn't tell you?

Xiao Qi is dead to the world, Jiang Yishen said in his head.

Xing Yun: I only caught half of it, they went somewhere else to talk after that. We'll be seeing each other again for the New Year, no rush to talk about it then.

Jiang Yishen had been lazily lying on the bed, and when he read that line he shot straight up, making the whole bed shudder.

Qi Lin was jolted awake by the jolt, opened his eyes in a daze, and found Jiang Yishen sitting bolt upright right beside him, wide awake.

Before he could get a clear look, everything went dark. Jiang Yishen had switched off the small bedside lamp.

"What are you doing." Qi Lin's arms and legs had gone soft from sleep. He turned over and curled into a ball.

"You…" Jiang Yishen tucked his phone behind his back, watching Qi Lin fumble uncomfortably for a pillow, then remembered to pull him upright. "Change your clothes first, then get under the covers and sleep."

Qi Lin let himself be dragged along, not even wanting to blink. "Don't want to change."

"You have to. You said yourself you can't sleep in your outside clothes."

"This sweater isn't an outside-clothes sweater." Qi Lin lifted his arms.

"Doesn't matter, you'll wake up tomorrow and scold me for it." Jiang Yishen worked his arms and pulled the sweater off.

Qi Lin let out a small laugh at that.

The curtains were still open. In the moonlight, Jiang Yishen studied him for a moment and realized that although Qi Lin hadn't fully woken up, his eyes were clear.

"Did you sober up?"

"Mm." Qi Lin, in a thin grey undershirt, climbed off the bed. "I'm going to lie on the bathroom floor."

Jiang Yishen stuck to him like a shadow, following him all the way to the bathroom door. Qi Lin saw he couldn't shake him off and stopped: "What is it?"

"Your…" Jiang Yishen gestured, genuinely unable to think of a more tactful way to put it, and just said it: "Did you tell your dad about us?"

"Mm." Qi Lin rubbed his eyes and closed the door, leaving behind one line that hit like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky: "He said he can come meet you over the New Year. We can visit on the second day of the new year."

That one sentence scorched Jiang Yishen crispy on the outside and raw on the inside[[2]], and he was once again certain that not a single drop of alcohol would ever be allowed into this home.

From that day to the New Year was a full two weeks, and Jiang Yishen's mental state rose and fell with the passing of time.

The cactus sprouted flower buds again. Everything felt like it had been put on fast-forward. Aside from the occasional anxiety about meeting Qi Lin's parents, he settled into an extremely regular life: spending the days with Qi Lin, going back to his own place at night, and in between, taking Jiang Changpeng to the hospital for a follow-up checkup, where the results were all looking good.

Qi Lin would sometimes suddenly ask to loop a day. Jiang Yishen later figured out he was using the loops to grind through practice problems, making up for everything he'd fallen behind on in the first half of the month.

Jiang Yishen, for his part, received occasional check-ins from both Xu Huaying and Xing Yun. Xing Yun often wasn't asking about Qi Lin's situation at all but about how he himself was doing lately, what he'd been up to. Jiang Yishen took this as some kind of evaluation and tried to come across as positive and motivated, but Xing Yun didn't seem to buy it.

In those ordinary, comfortable days, they passed the "30-day" mark.

This 30-day count included the loop days in the calculation. They deliberately left one day without kissing, and when midnight came the loop still appeared. Qi Lin reasoned that if the "30-day" theory was correct, it should be counting 30 days actually lived through in real time.

As it happened, the loop had started on December 31st, and 30 days later, January 29th, was exactly New Year's Eve.

The cactus's growth also fit neatly with this theory: it was on the verge of blooming. Jiang Yishen had specifically looked up pictures of it flowering online and judged it would open in a day or two.

New Year's Eve was right around the corner. The whole city within sight was brimming with festivity. The morning markets selling New Year goods were packed every day. Jiang Yishen went once, got swallowed up in a sea of elderly people, couldn't outgrab them, couldn't squeeze his way out, and had no option but to keep a firm grip on his phone, wallet, and ID.

Winter meant wind almost every day, but even the wind during this stretch carried a sense of celebration. The small stalls along the street selling spring couplets and hanging decorations had stones weighing down the four corners, but plenty of window-cut paper still blew up into the air. The hanging decorations scattered in the wind, red paper scraps drifting through the sky like a shower of happiness.

Jiang Yishen bought quite a lot. Since his parents' divorce and his leaving for university, the house had never had any of this put up. But Jiang Changpeng had become especially superstitious in the second half of the year. He'd heard that if the neighbors across the hall put up a "Fu" character[[3]] but you didn't, it would affect your luck, and he immediately dispatched Jiang Yishen to go shopping.

From one end of the street to the other, stalls were packed in tight, and people flowed shoulder to shoulder through the narrow passages between them. Speakers in the distance played songs that belonged only to the Spring Festival, and you had to shout to be heard in conversation.

Qi Lin was bundled up in a scarf and hat with only his eyes showing, being led along by Jiang Yishen.

Jiang Yishen was tall enough that walking straight ahead carved out a path on its own. Qi Lin happened to glance back and discovered a whole string of strangers behind them drafting in their wake.

Everyone was enjoying the coming New Year. Only two people caught up in a rumor storm felt entirely out of place in all the noise.

On January 27th, two trending posts appeared on the school's Weibo supertopic. Whether they'd been boosted or not was unclear, but they racked up huge exposure the moment they went up.

The poster was He Jian. Nine photos' worth of accusations. He started by saying he'd received a joint report from multiple other student council departments, claiming the external liaison department was rotten on the inside. Then he pivoted sharply to a furious attack on Yu Jiaming's character, calling him scheming and treacherous. Finally, for no apparent reason, he started playing the victim, saying he'd been sidelined by the department for years, had a miserable time, and under pressure had done many things that wronged the school and society. What a shame, he said.

His post had clearly been guided by someone with a plan. It didn't just bring up Yu Jiaming's involvement in splitting the spoils; it also hinted between the lines at his poor character, including spreading sexual rumors about people, maliciously reporting classmates, and spying on others' privacy.

The second post was Yu Jiaming's cornered, desperate counterattack. The language was fierce. Not only did he expose He Jian completely, leaving him without a shred of cover, he also touched on a lot of sensitive content involving the school's internal affairs.

Three minutes after the post went up, both the account and the post vanished without a trace.

The situation fermented overnight. Sometime in the early hours, He Jian's post disappeared too, but at least his account survived, holding its ground with an aggrieved profile picture and a blank homepage.

The Weibo post that could no longer be viewed was forwarded by classmates both known and unknown from everyone's WeChat Moments. Some were there for the drama, some were righteously indignant, some were making snide remarks.

Fan Zi's crowd was the most enthusiastic in sharing it, and many classmates from the same major joined in to watch.

Jiang Yishen naturally saw it all. Others might only see the surface, but he knew Yu Jiaming's road ahead was probably not going to be easy.

The infighting had been vicious, and the fact that Yu Jiaming had thrown all those people who'd helped the external liaison department cook the books under the bus without a second thought made it plain enough that all those so-called "connections" had sided with He Jian.

Yu Jiaming had gone to great lengths to secure a guaranteed postgraduate spot and would have to stay at this school for another three years. How he would face his classmates, his advisor, and the school administration over those three years was his own problem now.

Putting all of it online for everyone to see looked like a last-ditch move to save himself by sacrificing others[[4]]. It seemed He Jian wasn't having an easy time of it either, and both of them would likely be held accountable. Nothing had settled yet, but the two people who had orchestrated it all from behind the scenes had no attention to spare. They had more important things to deal with.

Barring any surprises, the loop would end on New Year's Eve. Both of them were reluctant to let it go. Only now, when it was almost over, did it feel like there were so many things they hadn't gotten around to doing. But Qi Lin's parents had tickets for the twenty-ninth, the day before New Year's Eve, which meant they probably wouldn't see each other for two whole days in a row. That was going to feel like a very long time.