WC ⋆ Chapter 9

Jiang Yishen stood at the doorway, staring down the peephole in a silent standoff. A gust of cold wind swept through the hallway, raising goosebumps across his skin.

He had absolutely no idea how he had ended up locked outside. After kissing Qi Lin he had been in a daze, opened the door to throw out the trash, and only after tossing the bag did he discover he couldn't get back in.

He was so frantic he nearly jumped out of his skin. He sent Qi Lin a message playing up his misery, and received the reply: "Just go downstairs and buy something to wear. If we pry the lock open I'll have to contact the landlord, which is a real hassle."

Jiang Yishen stared at those cold words and felt like an abandoned infant left heartlessly outside. Shivering, he trudged downstairs to find a clothing shop.

He was wearing nothing but a thin hoodie. He hadn't even made it to the building entrance before the wind hit him, and then he received a WeChat transfer from Qi Lin along with a message: "You have your phone with you, right? I'll reimburse you."

Jiang Yishen fumed: "If I didn't have my phone, what would I have used to message you?"

Their first sober kiss after their long separation had been thrown into complete chaos by this blunder. Jiang Yishen didn't even bother browsing. He grabbed a short black puffer jacket with a gaudy oversized floral embroidery on the back.

Wearing that big flower on his back, he took a detour through the alleyway to check on the little cats. The small black cat rubbed affectionately against his legs, and Jiang Yishen fed it a bit of food, coming away with fur all over his trousers.

He brushed himself clean and took the subway back to school. The campus on the second day of the new year was still lively, with various New Year's events going on in full swing. In the Teaching Building, many departments' end-of-semester exams were also in full heat, people coming and going, everyone busy.

Jiang Yishen walked into the dormitory under the gaze of several roommates. The most stunned of all was Fan Zi.

Fan Zi was sitting cross-legged on his chair playing games, his desk still covered in unfinished course review notes. He stared at Jiang Yishen and stammered for a long time, looking for all the world like he had just seen the Buddha himself.

"Why are you staring at me?" Jiang Yishen gave him a baffled glance and went about taking off and hanging up his jacket.

Fan Zi's eyes were glued to that big flower. He couldn't hold it in any longer and finally said in a low voice: "I don't believe Qi Lin owns anything this ugly."

"This isn't Qi Lin's clothes," Jiang Yishen said, tidying up his desk as he spoke. The desk still looked exactly as it had on December 31st, cluttered with a pile of things.

"No, but you, last night, took a drunk Qi Lin away with you, and today you come back in different clothes. So you're telling me these clothes aren't his, then whose are they?" Fan Zi lowered his voice, but his tone was extremely indignant.

Jiang Yishen paused in his movements. He thought for a moment about how to explain this, and in the end chose to tell the truth: "Qi Lin took the key with him. I accidentally locked myself outside and had no choice but to go downstairs and buy something new."

"You…" Fan Zi slammed on the brakes. "You got kicked out!"

"Bullshit!" Jiang Yishen couldn't take it anymore. "I locked myself outside on my own. That was an active action, not something that happened to me passively."

Fan Zi stared at him without a word, looking as though he had already filled in the full story in his head, probably something along the lines of a melodramatic tortured romance, possibly including drunken confessions and mutual suffering.

"Are you done?" Jiang Yishen pointed at him. "The exam is the day after tomorrow. How much have you reviewed? You've been on this same page for a whole week, and you're still on this same page!"

He had hit Fan Zi's sore spot. Fan Zi stopped playing games altogether and slapped the desk: "You're talking nonsense with your eyes wide open. I only started reviewing this page yesterday, okay? If Xu Baili hadn't called us out for drinks last night, I'd have finished this whole chapter already!"

Jiang Yishen scratched his ear, remembering that he had miscounted the looping days as a week. Fan Zi had actually just given him an idea, though. Once the exam the day after tomorrow arrived, he could go into the exam hall first, memorize the paper, go back and review properly, then use the single-day loop to sit the exam again.

"How far have you reviewed?" Fan Zi snuck a peek at his desk.

Jiang Yishen stacked his books in a neat pile and said stubbornly: "I've been through all the key points."

"Then do you want to go out tonight?" Fan Zi rocked on his stool, held up his textbook, and laid out a plan against the table of contents: "Finish reviewing the first three chapters today, review the last three chapters tomorrow, go through practice questions the day after, then fill in the gaps in the evening, and the exam is the day after that. Perfect timing."

Jiang Yishen had no interest in going out with him. Qi Lin was coming back tomorrow, and he still had to move over there. Relying entirely on physical intimacy to break the loop was too absurd. They needed to find a way to identify the root cause.

Not to mention he hadn't reviewed at all and couldn't genuinely pin his hopes on the loop on exam day. After all, he understood a few basic laws of time travel: if every good thing could just fall into your lap, what kind of world would that be?

Fan Zi's perfectly crafted study plan was naturally impossible to carry out. By evening it had already been revised to "review three chapters tomorrow, review three chapters the day after, no need to fill in gaps," and then he slipped off campus, disappearing to who knows where to enjoy himself.

The third day of the new year arrived as promised. Jiang Yishen's biological clock drove him awake naturally at nine in the morning. When he picked up his phone, he saw that Qi Lin had sent him a few messages, each just a few flat, cool words.

– Arrived.

– It started.

– I bought a ticket for tonight.

Attached was a screenshot of the flight information. Jiang Yishen rolled over, and his elbow bumped into something fuzzy. He pulled out the plush toy that had been squashed underneath him. It was a small cactus-shaped stuffed doll, a gift Qi Lin had given him before.

He tucked the little cactus casually against his chest, then opened the flight tracker. The plane took off at eight-thirty in the evening and arrived at eleven.

He scrolled through the interface, looked over the flight information, and couldn't help calling Qi Lin.

The phone rang for over twenty seconds before it was picked up. The other end was not as noisy as he had imagined. On the contrary, it was very quiet, with a faint echo audible.

"What is it?" Qi Lin asked.

Through the receiver, Qi Lin's voice took on a distant quality. Jiang Yishen heard the sound of him moving around, waited a moment, then said: "Your flight is in the evening?"

"Yes."

"That's pretty late," Jiang Yishen said. "If there's a delay, can you guarantee you'll arrive before midnight?"

Qi Lin let out a sigh. "This is the earliest flight I could find. I'm already worried I might not even make the plane."

Hearing that, Jiang Yishen sat up in bed and asked patiently: "Isn't the wedding at noon? Why can't you leave in the evening?"

"It's not just the wedding. I have some other things in the evening, and by the time I've dealt with everything it'll be past six." Qi Lin's tone remained undisturbed, stating something already decided and impossible to change.

Jiang Yishen listened and felt a sourness creep in: "What do you have to take care of over there? You never mentioned any of this to me."

He stopped himself mid-sentence. In that moment he felt with sharp clarity the cruelty of the phrase "drifting apart." It had descended without a sound, and by the time you came back to your senses, each other's lives had long since been emptied of the other, filled up instead with things that had nothing to do with the other person.

"Sorry, it came up suddenly," Qi Lin said. Then, seeming to sense that his words had been too blunt, he added: "I didn't have time to tell you."

Jiang Yishen was not comforted. He had simply, at last, confirmed one thing clearly. The only reason they were able to appear in each other's lives again was this sudden loop, and nothing more. Outside of it, the two of them had no overlap in their days at all.

"Xiao Qi?" Another person's voice came through the receiver, saying something else, which Jiang Yishen couldn't make out.

Qi Lin just answered with a few "mm-hm"s. Once that person had left, he spoke to Jiang Yishen again: "It'll be very late by the time I get back. I probably won't be able to make it home. Come pick me up at the airport."

Jiang Yishen said nothing.

Qi Lin assumed he was unhappy about the late flight and added: "I'll treat you to a late-night snack."

"What do you have to do over there?" Jiang Yishen suddenly asked.

He was met with an unsurprising silence. A vague irritation rose in him without reason, and he pressed further: "Am I not allowed to know? If it were any other friend, you still wouldn't say?"

Those words carried a pointed edge, implying that Qi Lin was treating him differently, bluntly foregrounding the identity of ex-boyfriend, putting Qi Lin in an awkward position.

Jiang Yishen had no desire to argue with Qi Lin over the phone, but it was always like this. In the conflicts between them, Qi Lin was always the one who said less. Sometimes Jiang Yishen would rather Qi Lin fight with him, because at least that would prove the feelings weren't fake.

"I wouldn't tell any other friend either."

Jiang Yishen sat on the bed as if a basin of cold water had been dumped over his head, jolting him a few degrees more awake.

Half a year ago, he wouldn't have pressed the question further. Back then he valued his dignity above everything else. At certain moments it was enough to hint at something and leave it there, because pushing further would only make both of them miserable.

But the second half of the year had already been miserable enough. Right now he didn't want to hold back even a little. He squeezed the innocent plush cactus and said in a flat tone: "You're doing it again. You don't care about me at all."

"I…" Qi Lin was stunned, completely unprepared to hear those words.

Jiang Yishen calmly dug up old grievances: "Yesterday when I left your place, I wasn't wearing a coat. You didn't even ask if I was cold."

"You…" Qi Lin went back and forth for a while before saying, "Didn't I send you a transfer? That was my apology."

"I don't need an apology, and I'm not short on money," Jiang Yishen said.

Qi Lin went quiet. Through the receiver came only the sound of his slightly quickened breathing.

Jiang Yishen continued: "Of course you have no obligation to care whether I'm cold now, so I'm just venting a little. But the loop is something that concerns both of us. You pushed your flight this late because of something else, and I don't even have the right to ask what the reason is?"

He had also wanted to say "and it's even a budget airline, you're scrambling for time to go do something even on a budget airline, what could possibly be that important," but saying it out loud felt too venomous, not quite in keeping with the image he was trying to project right now.

Saying all of this was just because he felt lousy inside. He wasn't expecting an answer. He listened to the silent call and let out a sigh, not quite disappointed, just tired and drained.

He was about to say something else to soften it a little, when he heard Qi Lin speak. His voice was very low, and a little halting: "It's not that I was deliberately not telling you. I was just a bit embarrassed to say it. I need to go to a temple here. The last time I came, I ran into an old man, and I just remembered that I made a wish with him. A very extreme wish. It might be connected to the loop."

—

#