WC ⋆ Chapter 64

Maybe it was drinking both coffee and tea during the day, plus going through a mad sprint, but neither of them felt sleepy. Even lying on the hotel’s king-sized bed, their hearts were still pounding like drums.

The skin freshly rinsed from the shower still carried a coolness. Qi Lin turned the air conditioning up a little higher, and was standing at the central AC vent testing the temperature when someone grabbed him around the waist and tossed him onto the bed.

Jiang Yishen had just walked out of the bathroom, bare-chested, and stood at the head of the bed looking down at him.

Qi Lin watched him for a moment, then said: “Turn off the lights.”

Jiang Yishen said nothing, switched off every light in the room, leaving only the hallway light glowing faintly.

He had no intention of lying down on the bed. After turning off the lights, he simply stood at the bedside.

Qi Lin looked up at him. Between light and shadow, the outline was etched into a sharp-edged silhouette. Jiang Yishen’s short hair had grown out quite a bit, swept back in a disheveled way.

His mouth felt dry. Qi Lin knelt upright, pulled away the bath towel wrapped around Jiang Yishen’s waist, and lowered his head, letting his lips linger at the lower abdomen, moving down little by little.

A warm, large palm fell on the back of his neck, pressing him closer. His throat was filled to the brim. Qi Lin could barely breathe, swallowing with difficulty, which only earned him increasingly forceful pressure.

Physical desire served as a superb lubricant in intimacy. Without needing to communicate, they could feel their way to a position comfortable for both of them. Qi Lin tilted his head back slightly, closed his eyes, and felt a mischievous hand stroking his cheek.

Some indeterminate time later, Jiang Yishen finally pulled back a little, smearing the sticky fluid at the corner of his lips, glistening together with saliva.

Qi Lin turned his head to cough, tears from the coughing pooling in his eyes. Through the blur, he saw a silk tie being held up to his mouth.

“Open up, be good.” Jiang Yishen said in a coaxing tone. Seeing Qi Lin instinctively bite down on the tie, he tied a knot behind his head.

Jiang Yishen leaned down to kiss him, from the tail of his brow to the tip of his nose, and explained quietly: “I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop myself from wanting to kiss you.”

The black necktie pressed against his face, making those eyes look especially clear.

Ever since seeing the silently enduring Jiang Yishen in the rewind, Qi Lin had come to understand why every time in the month since their reconciliation had been this intense. It was like venting on behalf of the stifled and aggrieved second half of the year. The air conditioning was turned up very high, leaving them both drenched in sweat.

Just as they were about to reach the peak, Jiang Yishen suddenly stopped, and said into his ear: “You said that when you’re busy you like being alone. I remembered that. But I don’t like it. Would you talk to me more?”

Qi Lin narrowed his eyes, as if wanting to speak but unable to, and could only let out some vague single syllables.

“Would you?” Jiang Yishen repeated.

His breath fell against Qi Lin’s ear, hot enough to make him shiver. Qi Lin gave a small nod.

Jiang Yishen always liked to torment him at moments like this, and in the end left Qi Lin so exhausted he passed out, not waking until the sun was high in the sky.

He was woken by footsteps in the corridor. When he opened his eyes, there was no one in the room. Jiang Yishen had disappeared somewhere.

Qi Lin lay face-down on the pillow, not wanting to move. Every part of his body ached, as if he’d been stuffed into a burlap sack and beaten.

He considered himself to have a decent constitution, and it was rare for him to still feel this bad the next day. He buried his head and slept a little longer. When he woke again, a fragrant smell was drifting through the room, and Jiang Yishen had somehow found a whole spread of food and laid it out on the table.

Qi Lin curled up under the covers, only one eye peeking out, blinking a couple of times.

“You’re awake?” Jiang Yishen noticed the movement and opened the room’s curtains.

Sunlight poured in. Qi Lin burrowed back under the covers and said, muffled: “What time is it?”

“One in the afternoon.” Jiang Yishen handed him a cup of warm water.

Qi Lin drank it down half-lying, half-sitting, and his throat finally didn’t feel quite so terrible. He asked: “What were you doing this morning?”

“Went home to check on things.” Jiang Yishen smoothed the stray hair hanging in front of his eyes back behind his head. “This afternoon we’ll go out together.”

Qi Lin held the cup and looked at him.

“To buy lottery tickets.”

Buying lottery tickets, a key item that had been listed as a must-do on the very first day the loop arrived.

The nearest Lottery Shop was quite far away. When they got there the shop was already closed, so they followed the navigation to find another one, and bought a few entries based on the numbers Jiang Yishen had memorized.

These were the numbers he had specifically noted down after the draw at eight in the evening during the previous loop. Jiang Yishen didn’t know whether the outcome would change, so he decided to give it a try.

Coming out of the small shop, they happened to be in a place they had visited before.

The familiar alley, the one with a little black cat inside, the place where Jiang Yishen had first discovered something was wrong with the loop.

It was also this black cat that had made one thing clear to him: this loop would not branch into countless timelines. Instead, each loop overwrote the previous one, and they were always within a single timeline.

More than a month had passed. He had no idea whether the little cat would still remember them.

Jiang Yishen and Qi Lin walked into the alley. The positions of the odds and ends piled on both sides were exactly as he remembered, except that the doors all had “Fu”[[1]] characters pasted on them.

A quick scan revealed no sign of a cat. Jiang Yishen approached the three-wheeled cart where he had first found the black cat, and sure enough, a fluffy black ball of fur burst out, leaped onto the wall with lightning speed, and vanished.

“Hey!” Jiang Yishen hadn’t expected the little cat to bolt the moment it saw him. He jumped up to look around, but the black cat was already long gone.

“What’s going on?” He was a little anxious. “The first time I found it, it ran away just like this.”

Qi Lin leaned over to look at the small space inside the three-wheeled cart. There was a heap of tattered rags in there. The cat was probably someone’s pet that just liked to sunbathe here.

“It doesn’t recognize you anymore.”

“Why would that happen?” Jiang Yishen sniffed his own clothes. “My scent shouldn’t have changed.”

Qi Lin looked in the direction the cat had disappeared and guessed: “Maybe because the loop is about to end.”

The loop was about to end. The discrepancies that didn’t fit the loop’s rules would be corrected, and everything would return to its proper course, proceeding step by step.

And yet the cactus had indeed bloomed.

“What about the rest of it?” Jiang Yishen carefully reviewed these thirty days, ran through the new people he had met, and discovered there was one very critical gap. “What about Yin Yu?”

“What about Yin Yu?”

“Yin Yu knows the loop’s secrets.” Jiang Yishen’s imagination ran wild. “What if once the loop ends, he doesn’t recognize us anymore, or he just disappears outright, and this person never actually existed…”

Qi Lin pulled the hand Jiang Yishen had tucked into his pocket back out and put it into his own pocket instead, looking as though he intended to cut ties with him.

“Am I wrong?” Jiang Yishen felt this gesture showed disrespect for his imagination.

Qi Lin said: “How could a living, breathing person just vanish? He has family and friends. Are they all supposed to disappear together?”

“What friends does he have? He came to this city, got into a car accident, and the money was all borrowed from me.”

At those words, a layer of goosebumps rose over Qi Lin’s body. An inexplicable chill crept into his heart. He immediately pressed close to Jiang Yishen’s side and forcefully shoved his hand back into Jiang Yishen’s pocket.

“Damn, the more I talk about it the more scared I get.” Jiang Yishen was even less composed than him, gripping Qi Lin’s hand tightly. “Have you heard about that parallel world thing that happened in our city before? It was pretty popular, something Pan-something-or-other, didn’t it just out of nowhere…”

“Okay, okay.” Qi Lin hurriedly told him to stop. “Then next loop we’ll go see Yin Yu in person.”

“Go see him for what?” Jiang Yishen looked like he’d seen a ghost. “Just scare me to death, why don’t you.”

Fortunately it was the afternoon, and the bright sun blazing down on the street left no place for any ghosts or demons to hide. Qi Lin managed to reassure him: “It’s not going to be that bizarre. This is a normal modern-day world, after all. You could look over there at that police station… feeling better now?”

Jiang Yishen really was staring at the police station. A surge of stern, upright energy welled up within him, and he was oddly soothed. “Alright, you have a point.”

“Doesn’t he read divination signs? Ask him for some talismans or prayer beads or something, keep some as evid… as mementos.”

Jiang Yishen immediately said: “Were you just about to say ‘evidence’?”

Qi Lin gave him a pinch inside the pocket: “I just think you’re overthinking it. Yin Yu is part of the closed loop of the whole cycle. If he disappeared, the closed loop couldn’t close.”

This reasoning was more convincing. Jiang Yishen reluctantly set his mind at ease.

“Next loop, we could go get married.”

Qi Lin stepped on a raised section of the pavement and stumbled forward. Jiang Yishen caught him in a hurry, startled: “What happened to you?”

“Get married? Where are you going to get married?” Qi Lin looked at him in disbelief, then suddenly remembered something. “…Are you proposing to me?”

A cold winter wind swept through, scraping a broken plastic bag along the ground with a rasping noise, drifting past them unhurriedly.

Jiang Yishen hadn’t thought of it in those terms either. He frowned and looked at Qi Lin for a moment, seemingly not having understood what Qi Lin meant, but still cooperatively took the ring off his hand and pressed it into Qi Lin’s palm.

“What…”

Jiang Yishen extended his left hand and held it out in front of him.

Qi Lin, not knowing what he was getting at, followed his instinct and slipped the ring back onto Jiang Yishen’s finger.

“Good. Now we can get married.” Jiang Yishen looked at his hand with satisfaction.

Qi Lin stared at him blankly.

“We can just find Yin Yu. He can even see the red thread, so he probably offers a witness-to-the-marriage service too.” Jiang Yishen said, and continued walking forward.

Qi Lin finally understood what he was talking about, and quickened his pace against the wind to move up beside him: “The way your mind works, it’s like you’re missing a screw.”

They walked to the bank of the Hai River. The surface of the river had already frozen over. A scattering of anglers, bundled up in full gear, sat along the riverbank, fishing through small holes chipped in the ice. The sunlight fell across it, and the long river formed a brilliant ribbon of colorful silk.

Jiang Yishen mapped out the plan for the next loop. No matter how he thought it over, he couldn’t come up with any other regrets that still needed to be made up for.

With only a single-day loop, there was genuinely nothing of great consequence you could accomplish within legal and reasonable bounds.

This was their third run of the loop on New Year’s Eve. If nothing unexpected happened, the loop’s journey would end in the next run.

At that thought, Qi Lin deleted that sentence from his mind and changed “if nothing unexpected happened” to “as expected.”

He hadn’t forgotten: every time he thought “if nothing unexpected happened,” the world would give him a surprise. Sometimes it was a surprise brought by forces beyond anyone’s control, and sometimes it was a scare brought by Jiang Yishen.