WC ⋆ Chapter 58

April 15th, Qi Lin sent me egg roll pastries today (smiley face).

April 16th, had a very brief phone call, wanted to tell him I’ve been having nasal allergies lately, forgot to mention it (no expression).

April 17th, sent a message (unhappy).

April 18th, (unhappy).

April 19th, (no expression).

April 20th, made a phone call, the egg roll pastries are all gone (crying).

Qi Lin quietly flipped through it. This wasn’t a diary in the strict sense — just a few calendar pages torn out individually, each small square filled with a few lines of text, then clumsily bound together with a clip.

Right up until the loop began, Jiang Yishen had kept writing in this calendar diary.

December 29th, exam at 9:30 in room 1.

December 30th, bored.

December 31st.

The 31st was completely blank. In the five loops before they found each other at the start, perhaps different things had been written here, but in the current timeline’s December 31st, the two of them were together.

Jiang Yishen was crouched alone in the corner of the sofa, looking very unwilling to face this, working hard to digest the shame of having Qi Lin see his diary.

From April to September, the amount of unhappiness packed into those little squares was even higher than he had imagined.

This was a diary Jiang Yishen had written secretly on his own, unguarded, showing his completely genuine inner state — so different from the forever-cheerful, forever-enthusiastic image Qi Lin had seen through video calls.

He heard the sound of his own heart breaking, especially the third time he came across the phrase “troubled him again.”

Qi Lin set the notebook aside, shifted over to the corner of the sofa, and hugged Jiang Yishen.

Jiang Yishen was sitting cross-legged and tucked into the corner, making the hug awkward. The sofa tilted under the weight of gravity, and Qi Lin accidentally pitched forward, wedging himself at an ungainly angle into Jiang Yishen’s arms.

Two fully grown men, both with long arms and long legs, really couldn’t manage anything graceful in such a confined space. Qi Lin, worried about crushing him, tried to struggle free.

Jiang Yishen was grabbed and tugged at for a while before he figured out what Qi Lin was trying to do, so he used one hand to hold Qi Lin’s arm and the other to loop around his waist, repositioning him properly and settling him back into his arms.

That made the arrangement more comfortable, but Qi Lin no longer felt much like continuing the hug.

“Why’d you stop hugging?” Jiang Yishen asked.

Qi Lin was afraid that if they kept hugging, the two of them might get carried away and tumble straight off the sofa. The sofa was right next to the balcony, and if they fell and rolled a couple of times they would land squarely on the cactus.

Following the logic of a normal fantasy film, they would probably smash the cactus to pieces, end up with a few spines sticking out of their heads, and then either use that to break the loop or kick off an even stranger new one.

Qi Lin wanted to return to normal life. The loop always made him feel like life had become unreal — the people around him didn’t seem like people, the trees didn’t seem like trees. He had no doubt that if things kept going like this, his mind would slide into a subtle kind of disorder.

“Do you want to explain them one by one?” Jiang Yishen said, pointing at the diary.

Qi Lin could only sit on a small portion of the sofa, with most of his body pressing down on Jiang Yishen’s legs. His instinct told him this was a very dangerous position. Even though he felt that the string of crying faces in Jiang Yishen’s diary wasn’t entirely his own fault, he still decided to take the diplomatic route first: “Which day do you want an explanation for?”

“Every day,” Jiang Yishen said. “We’ll talk tonight.”

Qi Lin’s heart lurched at that. He hesitated and asked, “I’ll be exhausted to death.”

“No you won’t,” Jiang Yishen said with unusual certainty.

Things had settled into a rhythm lately. The two of them had established an ironclad rule for the loop: they had to be in bed before midnight, to avoid getting so caught up in things that they ended up kissing halfway through.

There was still a whole afternoon before nighttime, and they each had their own things to take care of.

Jiang Yishen naturally had to go home and keep his dad company. He still had quite a lot he wanted to say to Jiang Changpeng. After a night’s sleep, Dad should have calmed down — it was time for a heart-to-heart talk.

Qi Lin had his own plans too. That morning the rumor incident had blown up, and Fan Zi and several informants who knew the inside story couldn’t sit still anymore; they wanted to meet and discuss the revenge plan in detail.

This meeting should have included Jiang Yishen by rights, but priorities were priorities. No matter how serious the Yu Jiaming matter was, it wasn’t as serious as coming out to his father. Qi Lin had no choice but to go alone.

Faced with the mud that had been slung at him out of nowhere, Jiang Yishen seemed not to care much, but Qi Lin was deeply unhappy — not only because he himself had been cast as a sugar daddy keeping a college student, but because the act of spreading rumors was intolerable in and of itself.

This time it just so happened that Jiang Yishen had a good reputation and a forceful personality with the outside world, and he had never hidden his sexual orientation, so people who heard the rumor just laughed it off. But what if it were someone else?

What if it were someone who was normally quiet and reserved, introverted and soft-spoken?

Fan Zi’s secrecy work was nothing short of an art form. Their agreed meeting spot was a dessert shop. Qi Lin circled around following the navigation for ten loops, and even when his coordinates overlapped with the destination he still couldn’t find the place. He had to ask a passerby, who told him the shop was directly below him in the vertical direction — he needed to take a longer detour to get there.

When he arrived, Fan Zi had already ordered three small cakes. Sitting beside him was a girl with her hair in a low ponytail, who was probably An Yufeng, the person Fan Zi had been in contact with online all along.

Fan Zi said to An Yufeng, “This is our direct superior, Comrade.”

An Yufeng stuffed the last bite of cake into her mouth and extended her hand to Qi Lin with great solemnity: “Greetings, Comrade.”

Qi Lin was baffled, but shook her hand anyway: “Hello.”

“What do you think of the place I picked? Pretty hidden, right?” Fan Zi was actually rather pleased with himself about this, showing Qi Lin around the interior of the shop. “Did you notice all the camera blind spots on the road outside the entrance on your way here?”

Qi Lin glanced at An Yufeng, wondering if he had heard wrong: “Our plan is just to ruin the external liaison department’s reputation, not to kill them, right?”

“Don’t use such blunt words!” Fan Zi stopped him. “This shop has surveillance cameras inside.”

Qi Lin was speechless: “Then what’s the point of there being no cameras outside the shop?”

“What shop these days doesn’t have cameras inside?” Fan Zi shot back.

The conversation kept veering off track. Qi Lin cut his losses in time and steered it back: “What’s the agenda for our meeting today?”

“Oh, the agenda is quite full,” An Yufeng said, wiping the corner of her mouth. She snapped her fingers and launched into her report briskly: “First, I’ve completed the task of sowing discord. Second, I’ve heard some other gossip.”

Qi Lin sat up straight to show he was interested.

“He Jian and that, that who, the one who’s been making trouble for you guys…”

“Yu Jiaming.”

“Oh right, Yu Jiaming — those two have a deep-seated grudge,” An Yufeng said, her way of speaking simple and direct, pleasant to listen to. “They were middle school classmates. He Jian used to bully him. Yu Jiaming hates them to death — apparently he still remembers the names of every single person who bullied him back then.”

Qi Lin already knew about this. When he had turned into a ghost and spied on Yu Jiaming, he had even seen with his own eyes the sticky notes posted on his desk — those were probably the names of the people who had bullied him in school back then.

“When I first heard that part, I actually thought Yu Jiaming had his pitiable side too,” Fan Zi said with a cold laugh.

An Yufeng had a smooth, unhurried way of telling a story. She took a sip of her milk tea and continued: “Well, Yu Jiaming was bullied for two years, right up until the middle school entrance exam ended it. But the starting point of it all was that he spread a rumor in class that some boy’s family picked up trash.”

“What?”

“What follows is secondhand information I heard — my Minister told me. Back when he was still working in the external liaison department with He Jian, they went on a team-building outing, and He Jian said it himself.” An Yufeng said, “That boy was pretty withdrawn, sat by the teacher’s desk, and no one really included him. Yu Jiaming didn’t have any friends at the time either. He thought the others were isolating that boy, so he went along with spreading the rumor about him, trying to fit in a little.”

Qi Lin was genuinely shocked this time. A lot of things get lodged in the mind first and form fixed stereotypes, and when those are broken it can be hard to accept.

The impression Yu Jiaming had given him was of someone dark and unusually jealous, so when he learned that this person had once been bullied, his first reaction had been “so that’s how it is.”

It was as if he had taken it for granted that Yu Jiaming’s unpleasant character had been shaped by a twisted upbringing — turning him from a flat “bad person” into a complex figure with a past and an inner history.

Now he suddenly learned that Yu Jiaming was not as innocent as he had thought. Bullying was certainly a wrong behavior born of a lack of proper guidance, but a rotten root can’t be pulled out — Yu Jiaming was no good either.

“…Is the information reliable?” Qi Lin didn’t want to be one-sidedly misled again.

An Yufeng rubbed her chin and added carefully: “Based on our investigation, the withdrawn boy He Jian mentioned is, in all likelihood, He Jian himself. He probably found a way to successfully integrate into the class later on, and then led his classmates in retaliating against Yu Jiaming.”

Qi Lin was momentarily at a loss for words, his feelings complicated.

“Don’t go soft on him,” Fan Zi said, immediately speaking up when he noticed Qi Lin’s expression. “Whatever happened between those two is their business. We shouldn’t show mercy to either of them. He deserves his bad luck.”

“I know, I just feel a bit…” Qi Lin let out a long breath, gently prodding the blueberry on top of his cake with his fork, feeling a slight tightness in his throat.

An Yufeng snapped her fingers twice more, pulling his attention back: “The reason I’m telling you all this is to arrive at a conclusion — our next step can begin to be implemented, and the success rate looks pretty high.”

Qi Lin looked at her bright, gleaming eyes and nodded in agreement: “Okay, I’ll take care of it after it ferments for a few more days.”

Their next step was very simple: let He Jian and Yu Jiaming go at each other like dogs, and blow the whole thing up themselves.

Fight fire with fire[[1]] — when a report targeting the external liaison department appeared, whether the report succeeded or not was no longer the only thing that mattered. Its greatest significance was in pushing the internal contradictions to explode.

The story of the junior student pretending to be rich getting exposed had been common knowledge since last year. Now that word had suddenly gotten out that there was money to be skimmed in the external liaison department, from Yu Jiaming’s perspective, He Jian was perfectly capable of being the one who had proactively reported it upward — after all, this junior student had always been under his own supervision, and He Jian crying thief was the fastest way to wash away suspicion from himself.

From He Jian’s perspective, Yu Jiaming could just as easily be the one who had filed the report, for the same reason — nothing more than crossing the bridge and burning it behind him[[2]].

Blinded by their old grievances, neither of them would ever have the chance to sit down and talk things through openly. Neither would calmly think that the other reporting would actually serve no purpose at all — that they were bound together in the same boat[[3]]. They would only feel that the person who had stabbed them in the back before had struck again.

There were far too many uncontrollable factors in this plan, and Qi Lin had been constantly thinking of ways to adjust and optimize it. But now that he knew the history between these two, making the goal happen suddenly didn’t seem so difficult after all.