Early the next morning, Ling He and Yan Xiaodao both seemed to have slept perfectly well. They had shared a bed without incident and looked refreshed. Immortal Mao, by contrast, wore an exhausted expression of helplessness. Two enormous dark circles ruined her long oval face, as though a single sleepless night had knocked her straight out of the immortal realm and back into mortality.
Miss Mao had worried far too much. She had spent the entire night with her ears pricked for movement, only to hear those two restrained and stupid men snoring softly in alternating rhythm. Nothing had happened.
The three of them ate breakfast at a little restaurant beside the hotel. Yan Xiaodao called to the server, “Another bowl of fermented-rice steamed egg, and one basket of crab-roe soup dumplings!”
Yan Xiaodao set the freshly served egg custard and soup dumplings in front of Ling He. “Eat more. Young people need to build themselves up.”
Ling He’s fighting spirit surged instantly. “Build myself up for what? Do I look weak?”
Yan Xiaodao’s face betrayed none of his real intention as he smiled faintly and said, “Not weak at all; you’re in your prime.”
“…” Ling He’s body was perfectly vigorous this morning, but his conscience was less steady. Hearing Yan Xiaodao say that, the rims of his ears actually flushed with fine red threads that joined into a visible tide of color. Had Yan Xiaodao seen something? Heard something? Impossible. Ling He had not made a sound last night. He had clenched his teeth and buried every secret, shameful breath behind the bathroom door. Few people were better at disguising and suppressing their true feelings.
Yan Xiaodao had neither seen nor heard anything.
But he knew that Ling He had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night and stayed inside the bathroom for a full half hour before creeping back out. Every deliberately softened footstep had practically announced guilty embarrassment. Young Master, did you really spend half the night in there with diarrhea?
I’m five years older than you, Mr. Ling. I’ve lived a little. I’ve actually done the deed. You’re already twenty-three this year, and Lord Blade lost his innocence at sixteen with no regrets. What haven’t I seen? Yan Xiaodao sighed. The faint light in the corner of his eyes rested on Ling He’s sculpturally beautiful yet composed profile, and all his guesses made him ache for the man again.
Ling He…
Ever since his foot had been injured, since Mr. Ling abducted and confined him and then took him south to investigate the old case, Yan Xiaodao had been given the chance to know this man all over again. Ling He had never before been so simple, direct, and transparent in front of him. Transparent enough to rival Liang Youhui, almost. Not that Ling He was remotely innocent or foolish.
Mao Zhixiu had said Ling He carried psychological barriers around certain things, perhaps even worse physical ones, and had never had any romantic experience at all. Yan Xiaodao felt he could more or less guess why.
He saw many things differently now. Looking back, he remembered barging in late at night on nothing but one-sided desire, pouncing like a starving wolf to force kisses and demand sex, only to be met with cold looks and rejection. Then, driven half mad by Mai Yunliang’s case, he had gotten violent with Ling He and tried to force himself on him again. Finally, Ling He had dragged his injured feet before him and pleaded painfully, willing to trade his own body if Yan would switch loyalties. Ling He must have survived years of hardship. Yan Xiaodao’s ignorance and stupidity had merely added another sharp seasoning to the nightmares and wounds of Ling He’s youth.
To wave the banner of love while failing to cherish the other person at all was truly fucking awful.
Back then, he had understood Ling He far too little. If everything could happen again, he would protect what they had in a better way and never let it deteriorate into blades drawn and mutual destruction. But feelings seemed to be one of those things that, once lost to the past, were terribly difficult to recover.
……
At the hour when students rushed to morning classes, the flow of bicycles across campus suddenly became a flood released through opened gates. A dark mass poured from the dormitory district toward teaching buildings scattered in every direction. Crabapple trees along the roads shed petals like rain, and countless blossoms clung softly to rolling tires.
Chen Jin burst out of the dormitory building with his schoolbag slung casually over one shoulder. He mounted his bicycle and wove skillfully through gaps in the crowd, stopping halfway beside a breakfast stand on the sidewalk. “Two tea eggs, six buns.”
He had gone back to the dormitory to sleep the night before, while Qi Yanxuan remained at his parents’ home.
That morning Xiao Xuan had texted him, saying he would wait in the classroom. Chen Jin already regretted what he had done. He knew he had gone crazy again the night before and behaved like a complete bastard, so he deliberately bought breakfast for two. Once they met, he would coax Xiao Xuan properly and make it up to him.
The campus gates stood open and unguarded, so unfamiliar faces came and went all the time without attracting attention. Mao Zhixiu parked outside the dormitory and leaned out the window to ask a passing student, “Hey, is this Building 28? Do the civil-engineering students live here?”
Miss Mao did not speak loudly, but her voice was crisp and penetrating enough to cut through the noise of bicycles, traffic, and honking horns.
The moment she got her answer, she turned efficiently toward the others. “Boss Ling, this is the building. Go up and find him!”
Those two simple sentences were enough to make the hair behind Chen Jin’s ears stir. He sharply turned half his face and glanced toward the car and the people inside it.
Perhaps too many different people, including the police, had searched for him and questioned him before. Every time, they forced him to peel back the disguise he wore, forced him to remember his humiliating origins, refused to let him begin a new life. Or perhaps he had simply become a frightened bird startled by every bowstring. Chen Jin instinctively felt that someone was here to cause trouble again, to tear open the rotten wound he could not bear anyone to see.
He had once encountered Lu Qingyang on campus when the man came there on business. That bastard former welfare-home director had recognized him at a glance. Yet human trash seemed to thrive precisely because it knew how to survive inside society’s filthiest cracks. Lu Qingyang now wore suits, slicked his hair, and looked every inch the successful schemer. In front of Chen Jin, he had smiled obscenely and hypocritically, mocked him, threatened him, and said things like, “A murderer’s son actually got into the best university in the Three Rivers region,” and, “Do your professors and classmates know your real father’s pile of rotten flesh and bones made the television news? Hahaha…”
Most importantly, however, the wind had carried one word into Chen Jin’s ears: “Ling.” Boss Ling.
His childhood memories had long since blurred. Yet sometimes the past one wanted least to remember became the deepest carved into the mind, impossible to erase. Time filtered those memories until only a pile of scattered puzzle pieces remained. They could not form one complete picture, but any single fragment was enough to make him tremble with fear. One such fragment was the surname “Ling.”
Were there really that many people surnamed Ling?
No. Not enough for this to be coincidence.
Chen Jin raised his collar to hide his face, lowered his head, and suddenly pedaled hard. The two breakfasts still hung from his handlebars. He no longer cared about meeting Qi Yanxuan in class. His figure quickly vanished into the endless flood of bicycles.
Ling He and the others did not find their target in the civil-engineering dormitory.
They immediately headed for the classroom where he was supposed to be. All three were well past school age and had not entered a campus in years. Ling He and Zhixiu had barely studied in the mainland at all, while Yan Xiaodao had never had the honor of attending university. Unable to keep quiet, Mao Zhixiu asked, “Mr. Yan, what did you major in back then, being so capable and all?” Yan Xiaodao did not find it embarrassing in the slightest. “Learned a bunch of trades. Running a lathe, driving an excavator, that sort of thing. I can do all of it!”
They walked down the broad corridor of a teaching building, passing a hot-water boiler steaming white clouds and a restroom that eternally emitted something resembling biochemical poison gas. Holding their noses, they finally found the classroom.
It was one of the university’s huge cross-major required courses, Marxist Philosophy. The small auditorium was a sea of dark heads, round crowns of students everywhere, all looking down at whatever they had hidden beneath their desks. In any case, not a single one of them appeared to be contemplating the profound theories of materialist philosophy.
A middle-aged female professor in black-rimmed glasses and ear-length hair was taking attendance before class.
She looked up expressionlessly at the unexpected visitors standing in the doorway, held the microphone, and continued down the student roster.
Professor: “Chen Jin?”
From the sparsely occupied rows at the very back of the auditorium, a thin young man answered lightly, “Here.”
The students around him glanced over, but no one said anything. Everyone knew perfectly well that he was not Chen Jin. Answering attendance for a friend was far too common in university, especially in courses like Marxist Philosophy, Current Affairs, and Theory of Life, where everyone collectively sat around hatching eggs in a daze. Some dorms sent only two people to each lecture and rotated who had duty to answer “Here.”
Yan Xiaodao’s eyes were sharp. One sweep over Qi Yanxuan’s facial structure, features, shoulders, and upper body was enough for him to conclude, “That’s not him. Chen Jin didn’t come to class at all!”
Yan Xiaodao had seen the old official case photograph of the principal suspect, Chen Jiu, as well as Chen Jin’s childhood file photo. Given his ability to read and remember faces, one photograph was enough. There was no way Chen Jin could have grown into someone this gentle and harmless-looking.
The female professor once again turned toward them in slow motion: Huh? That isn’t him?
Mao Zhixiu stuck out her tongue, hooked an arm around each of the two men, and hurriedly pulled them out of sight of the classroom before escaping. The campus atmosphere simply did not suit them. The three looked as if they had wandered into the wrong garden and did not belong among anything around them.
Qi Yanxuan slowly buried his face between the pages of his postgraduate-exam textbook, unwilling to let anyone read his distress. He felt awful. After the ugly fight the night before, he had texted Chen Jin, but Chen Jin had not replied, had not come to class, and had not come looking for him again.
Qi Yanxuan spent the entire afternoon and evening wandering aimlessly through the city in deep dejection. The Three Rivers region, perpetually shrouded in clouds and rain, had unexpectedly been granted a brilliant sunny day. Yet whether weather was beautiful depended entirely on the mood of the person living through it. Beneath the scorching sun, his disappointed heart dried cold, without a drop of tenderness left to wring from it.
With a schoolbag full of study guides on his back, Qi Yanxuan moved through the shifting light and shadow of the familiar city, hurriedly searching the places he and Chen Jin often visited. Before Chen Jin entered university, he had rented a tiny room in an old residential building on the outskirts. The red-brick complex, nearly sixty years old, was now badly decayed. Bricks were missing from the walls, and a huge character meaning “DEMOLISH” had been painted beside the entrance. The landlady answered him with open hostility. “Moved out ages ago. Doesn’t live here anymore. This place is getting torn down in a few days!”
……
At the Cloud Cave bar, red and green spotlights sprayed wildly above the dance floor, painting the ceiling with images saturated in drink, desire, and noise. The heat of the dance floor stood in sharp contrast to solitary customers sitting in the dim corners opposite. The bar’s layout resembled a taiji diagram, half bright and half dark, one side fierce flame, the other deep water.
It was, in fact, a gay bar known within the community. They had both been there before.
Qi Yanxuan’s lonely expression reflected in the liquor in his glass as he lowered his head and sent a message: 【Brother, I know why you’re upset, so don’t feel bad; I’m at Cloud Cave, will you come?】
Qi Yanxuan was a pretty young man himself, with a thinned fringe falling neatly across his forehead and naturally smoky inner-double eyelids tapering at the outer corners. Naturally, there were people who liked exactly his type. A table of rich young men in the distance had been watching him for quite some time.
The server bringing drinks thought Student Qi looked approachable and did not mind chatting without a tip. “Student, breakup? Got dumped?”
Qi Yanxuan shook his head. “No. He wouldn’t dump me.”
The young-faced server wore the worldly sophistication of someone who had already seen too much. “Nothing in love lasts forever. Everyone is just a passerby in somebody else’s fate. That’s why you ended up here, and I ended up here. Who hasn’t been dumped?”
Yet Qi Yanxuan’s delicate face held a pair of steady eyes, his expression stubborn and certain as he said, “There’s just a knot in his heart; he’s afraid I’ll find out and think his family background is humiliating, but I already know.
“I understand what he can’t get past. I know his father was once a murder suspect, and I know his father died a long time ago. He doesn’t trust me enough, and he doesn’t trust himself. He gives up too easily on things that matter far more in life.”
Qi Yanxuan had overheard his parents talking through the bedroom door. His father had accidentally let it slip once.
The server fell silent for a long while, unconsciously drinking half of Qi Yanxuan’s glass before hurriedly refilling it. “That’s a hard road, young benefactor. Take good care of yourself.”
By the time Qi Yanxuan left Cloud Cave, night had deepened and the alley had grown quiet as customers thinned out. His slender shadow stretched along the dark road, while a streetlamp illuminated his refined, scholarly face.
Qi Yanxuan looked exactly like a good student from a respectable family, self-respecting and well-behaved, especially with a schoolbag still hanging from his shoulder. Before he had even escaped the alley shadows and reached the streetlights of the main road, someone slapped the back of his schoolbag. “Hey, student~~~”
The rich young man from the bar had a pair of flirtatious peach-blossom eyes. On a man, the sideways brows and roving gaze only made him look sleazy and openly lustful. He staggered drunkenly toward Qi Yanxuan and reached out to stroke his chin. “All alone and lonely tonight, student? Big brother’s free. I’ll keep you company and make sure you forget all about going home, hehe…”
Qi Yanxuan slapped the hand away. He was not weak-tempered in front of strangers. “Who asked you to keep me company?!”
He turned to leave, but the man yanked away his schoolbag. Inside were the study guides and exercise books he had spent months working through, and they were extremely important to him. Qi Yanxuan turned back to fight for the bag. As they struggled, two of the rich young man’s companions emerged from the darkness, pinned Qi Yanxuan against the wall from both sides, and grinned as their distorted faces reflected in his frightened eyes. Then they pressed in and tried to force kisses on him.
Another figure strode quickly out beneath the alley’s flickering light, looking even more lonely and isolated, but by no means weak or easy to bully.
Chen Jin had searched through the bar and then followed the route outside. The moment he saw them, an unusual savagery erupted across his face. Whatever else was true, he still cared about Xiao Xuan and about what they had together.
Chen Jin’s eyes instantly went blood-red. In that moment, even he did not know he could become like that. He grabbed an iron hook lying beside somebody’s door and swung it. Blood sprayed from one man’s shoulder.
Howls of pain, brawling, a group attack, counterattacks, chasing one another. Several people dissolved into a fight inside the alley. Blood appeared on Chen Jin’s brow and arm, yet he showed neither fear nor mercy. Perhaps the violent factor running through his blood could never be wiped away, as though branded into the center of his brow at birth. Or perhaps it came from years of self-abandonment and deliberate recklessness. Somewhere in his own subconscious, even he believed this was exactly the sort of thing he would do.
Mr. Ling stepped leisurely out of the hidden car only after choosing a suitably safe moment. There was no need to rush. Let that foolish boy eat a few punches and learn something first.
As usual, Yan Xiaodao naturally adopted the manner of an older brother. “Nothing serious. I’ll deal with it.”
Ling He caught Xiaodao’s wrist. His expressive eyes said everything: I’ll go. You rest in the car.
Yan Xiaodao was deeply unaccustomed to sitting safely inside a car while somebody else rolled up his sleeves and joined a street brawl. That simply was not Yan Xiaodao. Ling He carefully chose his words, considering how to say it without damaging Xiaodao’s pride. “You think that little of my fighting ability?”
Mr. Ling was hardly bad in a fight. And unlike others, he never needed to roll up his sleeves and square his shoulders, nor did he risk damaging that beautiful face. His movements remained composed and elegant, the body of a walking fashion model.
Smack! A strike flashed from the shadows, and Bodyguard Number One, who had been helping the rich young man prey on Qi Yanxuan, was seized by the wrist and flung seven or eight meters away.
Then came a sharp hiss. Mr. Playboy himself was grabbed by the belt at the small of his back. His drunken complaint barely left his mouth before a kick struck the hollow behind his knees and forced him into a deep kneel directly in front of Qi Yanxuan.
The playboy turned his head, and the alcohol instantly cleared from his brain. Wasn’t this the beautiful “merman” he had tried to fish up for a taste at that riverside restaurant the other day?
He had not even gotten the fish into his mouth before the fish slapped him senseless…
Bodyguard Number Two received a vicious slap from a bony hand. The motion barely seemed to swing at all, yet it came so quickly the eye could not follow. Then that same hand pinched a vital point at the man’s throat for several seconds, leaving him dizzy and weak-kneed enough to slide to the ground. Bodyguard Number One tried to charge back in, only for a long leg to land with a thud in the three rolls of fat across his abdomen. He flew backward again and landed sitting in a rotten vegetable basket beside the door.
Ling He’s fighting style was very different from Xiaodao’s, each with its own strengths and perfectly suited to the man using it. Xiaodao came from street fighting and knife work, all broad, decisive movements and the sweeping bearing of the jianghu. Ling He had trained under Western combat coaches, learning karate and fencing. His eyes were sharp, his fingers hard, and his body extraordinarily quick. Even in a group fight he somehow looked elegant, untouched by so much as a falling leaf.
Inside the car, Yan Xiaodao gradually leaned his face out without realizing it. He stared at Ling He’s tall, straight figure in pale clothes and fell briefly into a dazed sort of fascination.
Blood streaked Chen Jin’s face, flowing down from the middle of his brow bone and from the corner of one eye, making half his face look faintly savage. He turned and roared at Qi Yanxuan. “It’s this late and you’re not back at school. You come wandering into bars and provoking people like this? Why the hell are you acting like a slut?!”
Qi Yanxuan flinched against the wall. “…Brother, I’m sorry.”
That one apology softened Chen Jin again. He stopped scolding, seized Xiao Xuan by the wrist, and said, “Come home with me.”
“Stop right there.” Under the streetlamp, Mr. Ling’s blade-cold shadow blocked Chen Jin’s path.
Chen Jin turned and saw Ling He. His expression changed again.
Mr. Ling plainly had very little idea how to deal with a wild boy from the bottom of society like Chen Jin. The two simply stared at one another with equally cold, arrogant eyes. So what exactly was supposed to happen next?
Yan Xiaodao stepped forward from behind Ling He, his silhouette beneath the streetlamp broad and solid. In the sympathetic tone of a jianghu big brother looking after younger men, he said, “Your face and arm are both cut up. If you go back to school looking like this, how are you going to explain it? You’ll only end up wasting time answering questions from your class adviser and the dorm supervisor. Get in the car, Student Chen, Student Qi. I’ll take you two to the hospital first and get those wounds dressed. …Come on. Come with me.”