That day, I was eating with Xie Xue in the dining room of Shanghai University. Seeing the chicken congee on his plate, he suddenly realized that it had been several days since he last saw He Yu. Not to mention that he had not encountered any news from him when he was browsing the states of his WeChat.
He frowned slightly when he remembered He Yu's strange behaviour that day.
Xie Qingcheng was an extremely rational person, but he was not completely heartless. Not to mention that he had promised He Jiwei that he would help him keep an eye on He Yu.
And so, once Xie Xue took his food tray and sat down at the table in front of him, he asked him how He Yu had been recently.
Who would have thought that in response to his brother's question, Xie Xue would suddenly open his eyes and say: "Hey? Don't you know? He asked for permission to be absent and went to Hangshi to film a drama. Didn't he tell you?
Xie Qingcheng's chopsticks stopped, "Aren't you studying choreography, scripts and direction?"
"Oh, it's only for a while. He will help the production by replacing another actor and playing a minor supporting role. They noticed him when he was buying breakfast next to the front door of the school, and he is also somewhat interested in the project. In addition, frankly speaking, with its appearance it is difficult to say which side of the camera it will work on in the future. He is also a very motivated person, so he definitely wouldn't waste the opportunity to gain some experience.
"... But why so suddenly?"
"Well, it's due to a temporary situation. The actor originally scheduled for the fifth male role had an accident. The original actor was in fact from acting class, but the boy ended up having a bicycle collision with a rental car at the door of the school before joining the production and ended up giving himself a big blow, with a big wound to his face and a lot of stitches. The production team had to quickly find someone to replace their role and ended up finding He Yu... "
Hearing her say this, Xie Qingcheng vaguely remembered the phone call that He Yu received that day at home; it seemed that this was what she had been talking about at the time.
Xie Xue continued wandering: "But there is one thing that I find a little strange. I've seen the script for this drama before. It's a horrendous little web drama. With his tastes, he should have underestimated such a script, but suddenly he agreed, out of nowhere. Although it won't take you long, you will only be out for 10 days to film your role, I still have no idea what you are thinking... He seemed to be in a very bad mood even when he asked me for a leave of absence, and when I talked to him, he continued to ignore me."
Upon hearing this, Xie Qingcheng's expression gradually acquired a touch of gravity.
He thought about the bandage that had been superficially wrapped around He Yu's wrist that day, the hospital's bag of medicines...
"Has anything wrong happened to He Yu recently?"
"Of course not!" For some reason, since the autumn trip, Xie Xue's mood seemed to have improved by leaps and bounds; it seemed to emit almost an aura of peach flowers in full bloom. He tried his tablespoon of ice cream, and it was only after a while that he began to hesitate and doubt, "I don't know either ... but I don't think anything has happened..."
Xie Qingcheng then looked thoughtfully at Xie Xue, with his eyes bright and surprisingly in a good mood.
She felt that in the last few days, she had been exceptionally happy, and since she returned from the fall trip, she constantly had her head tilted as she wrote on her cell phone and answered a lot of messages. And who knew who he would be talking to.
The same thing happened with your WeChat statuses. In the past, his publications were all of the type "a new xx restaurant opened on xx street, is there any little friends who would like to try it with me?", but recently, suddenly and inexplicably they became much more artistic and refined in their nature. The things he published were excerpts from youth literature that Xie Qingcheng could not understand no matter how much he narrowed his eyes, or strange photographs such as a stretch of water from the lake or two leaves of a tree. Late at night, he even published an image of a shadow projected on a wall, with diffuse lighting, it was difficult to know whose shadow was, maybe it was his own, along with the words, "Hehe, little white furry. "
At that time, Xie Qingcheng had even commented and asked him: "Who is this 'little white hairy man'?"
Much later, Xie Xue finally replied: "A nice puppy."
Xie Qingcheng said: "Stop publishing such useless things in your states. Hurry up and go to bed.
Xie Xue responded with a tongue emoji outside. Then, some time later, Xie Qingcheng discovered that he had also changed his profile picture to a swan looking in the opposite direction.
Recalling all these details, Xie Qingcheng asked: "So, what about you? Has anything good happened to you recently?
With his cheeks red, Xie Xue raised his face and continued to bite his spoon, carefully keeping the secret incident that happened during the autumn trip at the bottom of his heart, "No, nothing has happened to me either."
Xie Qingcheng crossed his arms as he assimilated his body language and the details of his embarrassed expression without words, his gaze gradually became acutely perceptive.
"Oh, of course, brother." Feeling a little shy under the fixed gaze of Xie Qingcheng, Xie Xue tried to change the subject: "I brought some special cakes from the autumn trip for you and He Yu. Are you busy this weekend?
"Not why?"
"I... Uh, there is a conference at school, so I can't go away, but the cakes spoil quickly, so if you don't have classes, can you take a trip to Hangshi and see He Yu for me? That way, you can also bring him the cakes.
Xie Qingcheng frowned slightly. He felt as if Xie Xue was hiding something from him, but he didn't question her anymore.
"Okay," he agreed. To begin with, I was quite worried about He Yu's condition, so it was a convenient reason to visit the production team and check his mental state.
.
Dusk, the same day.
Outside the ruins of Cheng Kang Psychiatric Hospital.
The area was surrounded by white and yellow police tape. When the wind blew, the police tape trembled when the dust rose over the field of burned earth beyond. Recently, many people had come from the city; some were here to mourn the death of the victims, while others were here only because of the novelty and to join the emotion.
Among the crowd, there was a discreet man wearing glasses with a paste frame. Tight in the middle of the group of people, he looked at the charred terrain of Cheng Kang Psychiatric Hospital, an expression full of hesitation and conflicting terror in his slightly protruding eyeballs.
"... Yes, they are all dead. Not a single superior is alive.
"Could it really be that Jiang Lanpei's vengeful spirit is coming for their lives?"
"That woman was wearing a red dress when she died; I heard that these types of ghosts are the most powerful, so it is not surprising that it seems that the fire was going against Liang Jicheng's accomplices on purpose."
"Aiya, you're going to scare me to death!"
Hearing the talk around him, the man in glasses began to tremble louder. On such a hot day, his whole body was covered with sweat, his back almost completely soaked.
Swallowing his saliva, he became...
I needed to go home.
His parents had already been living apart for a long time; he lived with his father, who was also part of the "organization." But among the shared assets of his parents, in the old residence where he lived when he was still a child, there was a safe, inside which there was a pile of old, dusty papers, with the corners eaten away by moths.
Those were Jiang Lanpei's real record.
His father had once told him that if something ever happened to him, he should hand these papers over to the police and then turn himself in. That it would be nice even if I went to jail, because at least I would be able to stay alive.
He was a coward, and following his father's example, he had only gotten into the organization very superficially. The day the police arrived at his house to investigate, he was too scared to say something and even vomited in terror. But now that he had returned to his senses ... while looking at the list of dead published in the newspaper, he knew that this issue was not at all so simple.
I didn't want to die... He didn't want to be killed. He was terrified, urgently hoping to recover the items from the safe and run to the police department.
In the past, I had been afraid of the police sirens. He woke up to fear every time he heard the sound of police cars in their nightmares, trembling like straw. But now he finally realized that, in retrospect, only the police could save him.
Thinking about this, he started running the moment he joined the small group of villas, in the community that could have been considered elegant twenty years ago. He was petrified, terrified that "those people" caught up with him, terrified that Jiang Lanpei's ghost caught up with him.
Furious tongues of fire, crimson waves of a ghostly dress.
"Ah ah!!!"
The more he thought about it, the more terrified he became, and as he ran, he could not help but start screaming, about to urinate when his glasses almost slip from the greasy bridge of his nose.
He made his way to the garden of the old house and immediately went through the doors.
He was too afraid, so much so that he didn't even wonder why the fence of this old house that had been deserted for more than a decade would be open, why the main doors would only be half-closed...
The man in the glasses was so disoriented that his head was like a pot of congee, gasping as he rushed down the stairs to the basement. The rotten floor boards looked like a corpse after corpse of the dead patients at ChengKang Psychiatric Hospital, throwing low and deep sighs under their feet. He was about to suffer a mental collapse, his lips trembled uncontrollably.
Help me...
Help me...
At one fell swoop, he went through the basement door and hurried to the safe.
He remembered the access code. Although his father was a disgusting lewd, which is why his determined mother constantly despised him when he was younger and for which they divorced later, the password was still unexpectedly his mother's birthday.
Now that she thought about it, her mother also liked to curl her hair and wear red dresses when she was younger. Hong Kong fashion was popular at the time, since many pretty women liked to dress like Hong Kong celebrities in the newspapers; the most popular trend was those undulating red dresses.
The fingers of the man in the glasses trembled as he turned the dial, over and over again. One-click, two-click...
The door of the safe opened.
He put his hand in and...!
A few seconds later, he suddenly had a spasm as if he had been electrocuted, almost convulsing.
He's gone!!
That pile of papers!! They were gone!
Impossible... How could this be...
In the midst of the overwhelming disappointment and the greatest sense of horror, he suddenly felt something warm landing on his forehead with a dull noise.
All the bones of his body seemed to be about to turn and escape, but they were still trapped inside his flesh and could only remain inside him desperately.
Plaf.
Again.
Another drop of something hot fell, this time landing on his lip.
It smelled metallic.
The man's eyes suddenly opened. Hyperventilating, with all its contorted features, slowly looked up...
He saw a woman.
A woman who had died on the stairs, with a gun still in her hand. He had been shot in the head and the blood was spilt all over the ground. The explosion had destroyed his eyes, but his face was still barely recognizable, his eyeballs stared in his direction.
The woman seemed to have committed suicide, but the man in glasses knew for sure that he had not done so.
Because, that was his...
"Mom..." The man with glasses shouted involuntarily, either in extreme horror or extreme pain, "Mom!" MOM!!!! OH,!! AHHHHH !!!! "
His mother no longer lived here... His mother hadn't come back here for more than ten years...
Did she also know these files? Did you also want to take these files to protect your child?
The man in the glasses collapsed and immediately fell to the ground. His face was a mess of tears, snot, sweat and blood, and beastly screams came out of his mouth. In the end, even he didn't know why he was crying.
And then, he heard the sound of steps coming after him. It was the sound of high heels.
Tic, tic, tic.
Using a special high-tech anti-recognition cover. The man with glasses didn't even have the opportunity to turn his head when he felt something hard pressing against the back of his neck.
A woman's voice laughed softly behind him: "Throw, lose, throw the handkerchief, put it gently behind the child, don't tell him..."
That person brought him a yellowish file envelope from somewhere behind him and held it before his eyes.
A warm breath touched the temples of the man with the glasses. The newcomer gently asked: "Are you looking for this?"
"...You..."
The man in the glasses did not dare to turn around; his teeth were chattering as he trembled.
"Your mother too."
"......"
"Your old man was a cowardly hamster; he was too disloyal to the boss and even hid this kind of thing at home." The woman sighed in her ear, elegant as an orchid. "I really shouldn't have... thought the boss didn't know it"
"You...who the hell are you..."
The woman smiled. "Does a traitor still dare to look for answers?"
"......"
"Save your questions to hell."
These were the last words the man with glasses heard.
A few seconds later.
BANG!!
A shot lifted the dust from the basement.
The woman stayed away from the dirty mess of blackened blood on the ground and cleaned the scene with an air of indifference. Then, he looked down, read Jiang Lanpei's file alone for a while and left this old and abandoned building without looking back...
Mini-theatre:
Xie Qingcheng's WeChat states: Brother Xie usually does not publish in his states, and even when he does, they are publications of his work, without any personal text. It does not set a time limit on its states, everything is visible.
He Yu's WeChat states: he publishes very rarely, and even when he does, they are just photos or simple lines of text. He Yu likes to publish black and white photos, and once received a comment from Xie Qingcheng: Are you unable to publish something with colours? Because of this, He Yu blocked Xie Qingcheng for a month before unlocking him only in consideration for Xie Xue. The states of Chief He are only visible for three days.
Xie Xue's WeChat states: Publish quite often, usually when you go out to eat or have fun. In the past, she also published photos of herself, but after Xie Qingcheng forced her to delete them, she finally learned to block her gege when she published flirtatious photos with bare legs. The states of Xue-mei are visible for six months.
Chen Man's WeChat states: once every few days, he publishes more than He Yu but less than Xie Xue. Usually, about his life, he sometimes republishes things related to work. Their states are visible for six months.
1)-WeChat is a similar application to WhatsApp. The "moments" of that application mentioned in the novel would be equivalent to the WhatsApp states.
Translator's note:
Sorry, yesterday I had to take care of a family member and it was impossible for me to update. đ„