Caught Red-Handed

Xie Qingcheng hadn't been reading very closely, but He Yu's remark made him look again. There in the outermost corner of one of the notebook's A4-sized pages was a small box, labeled 'Male Beauty Exchange Group' — and his own name appeared inside it with some frequency.

'...' Xie Qingcheng had a bad feeling about this.

Sure enough, as the two of them read through it together — Christ, it was nothing but a swarm of bottoms.

A gaggle of bottoms chattering away about which nearby university campuses had the most desirable tops on the market. In plain terms: a lot of desperately single people looking to get laid.

The first mention of Xie Qingcheng's name was written in ballpoint pen, the ink faded — it had some age to it. The writer said a new professor had just arrived at the neighboring Medical University, name of Xie Qingcheng, incredibly handsome, dominant energy, cold and aloof, and they very much wanted him to take them to bed.

Below that, people started mocking the writer for being such a shameless flirt.

But before long a new entry joined in, and the tone shifted entirely: 'Holy shit! Upperclassmen up there, stop laughing — if anyone gets a chance to see this guestbook again, go check out the Medical University yourself. Genuinely so hot it should be illegal, legs for days, broad shoulders, narrow waist, the whole man stands like a javelin. Put him in a suit and tie and I swear to god it's my undoing — after I ran into him I had three straight nights of dreams about nothing else...'

After that it only got more unhinged.

'I just want gege to be gentle with me.'

'Heard Professor Xie got divorced. Maybe he's one of us.'

'Oh god, really? If he's one of us, I could die happy after just one night with him.'

He Yu finished reading that passage and held his silence for a long moment. Then he couldn't hold it anymore —

If he let pride stop him from ribbing Xie Qingcheng over this, he'd have to be an idiot. This was gift-wrapped material.

So He Yu laughed. 'Well, Doctor Xie. Didn't see that coming. You're apparently the most coveted top in the bottom community, and they're all begging you to do them. Why not do a good deed and pick someone?'

Xie Qingcheng's expression turned thunderous. He reached out to flip the page.

He Yu pressed the book flat. 'I'm not finished.'

'Turning it.'

'Just a moment.'

'Turning it.'

He Yu, still grinning: 'One more second.'

Xie Qingcheng, dignity in ruins, wrenched the page over. He Yu laughed with the gleeful malice of someone who had absolutely earned this, then kept reading, curious whether Xie Qingcheng had his own dedicated section further on.

He'd only turned a few pages when the laughter died.

Because He Yu saw his own name.

Still in the same 'Male Beauty Exchange Group.' Xie Qingcheng had clearly noticed too; they read on together —

'How come it's been all bottoms so far? This is the tops' exchange. Anyone care to recommend a pretty boy from your school?'

A string of miscellaneous names followed.

Then He Yu's name appeared.

'He Yu — he seems polite with everyone, but there's old money in every inch of him, and he keeps this wall up no matter who he's talking to. And his looks — delicate, refined, even though he's tall, skin as fair as a girl's. I've seen him play basketball and the strength is unreal. He'd be incredible in bed, I just know it.'

'The person above has lost their mind? That's young master He.'

'That's exactly what makes it better!! Honestly, my heart—'

'...Do you people not know that He Yu is as good at hitting people as he is at hitting three-pointers? Delicate, sure, but have none of you seen him at the school pool with his shirt off? The man has a swimmer's build... one punch from him and you might actually die.'

'And yet I still want him...'

Xie Qingcheng finished reading and turned to He Yu, whose face had gone the color of a storm cloud. 'Impressive. You should start carrying a safety flashlight when you go out at night. If you get scared, you're welcome to call me — seeing as we know each other, I can even walk you home.'

He Yu: 'Turn the page.'

Xie Qingcheng reached out and pressed the notebook flat. Utterly serene: 'I haven't had my fill yet.'

'...'

He Yu brooded for a good while. In the end he apparently decided it wasn't worth wasting energy wrestling with Xie Qingcheng. He tore those two pages clean out of the Utopia Guestbook and lit them with his lighter.

When the flame died down, he took out a tissue and, expression blank, wiped each finger that had touched the pages.

He Yu sat there radiating the cold disdain of a young lord, and Xie Qingcheng stopped talking to him entirely, turning the notebook's pages on his own at a leisurely pace.

For a long time the Neverland Cave held no voices. Outside, the rain roared on.

Summer rain comes hard and leaves fast. By the time the phone showed eight o'clock, the thunderstorm had tapered to a quiet drizzle. Xie Qingcheng raised one pale, slender hand and moved to close the Utopia Guestbook — and then, in the instant before the covers met, something snagged at him. His eyes snapped back to a corner he'd passed over without thinking.

'...'

Xie Qingcheng's hand stopped. He turned the lantern up, his expression sharpening into focused stillness, and fixed his gaze on that corner —

A few seconds later, He Yu heard a voice at his back, Xie Qingcheng's voice, so level it had gone strange.

'He Yu. Come look at this.'

.

It was tucked in an unremarkable corner: a single line of text.

'WZL will be killed soon.'

The line was written in fountain pen, the characters tilted and uneven — as though written with the left hand. But what made it impossible to look away was this: at the end of the sentence, the writer had left her name.

A name no one could possibly have expected —

'Jiang. Lan. Pei.'

Distant thunder rolled outside. Inside, the silence was absolute.

'...'

'Hasn't Jiang Lanpei been locked up in a psychiatric hospital for twenty years?' He Yu was the first to break the quiet, his voice low.

Xie Qingcheng frowned, thinking. '...She did eventually get a key — there were opportunities for her to come and go freely...'

'But presumably only within Chengkang Psychiatric Hospital.' He Yu finished the thought for him. 'You think she could slip out and back in without anyone noticing? And make it all the way to the Neverland Cave on Huzhou University's campus to leave one line in a guestbook nobody pays attention to?'

The answer was obviously no.

'And this ink looks recent — like it was written within the past few days.' Xie Qingcheng held the lantern close and studied the red writing carefully. 'Who is this WZL...'

They both stared at the battered little notebook for a long time, thinking.

He Yu said suddenly: 'I remember hearing something going around campus the last few days. A rumor.'

'What kind?'

'Some students thought Jiang Lanpei was terrifying but also tragic — a genuinely legendary figure, and the fact that she died in a red dress, which is what vengeful spirits are said to favor, made the whole thing feel fated. So they invented a story: if you hate someone enough to want them dead, you write out the manner of their death on a piece of paper, then sign Jiang Lanpei's name in red ink, and the ghost of Jiang Lanpei will carry out the killing for you.'

He Yu paused, then continued: 'But the target has to be male. Women don't qualify.'

'Why?'

'Because the newspapers covered Jiang Lanpei's story in detail, and the students who invented the Jiang Lanpei Ghost Revenge Legend concluded that her hatred was directed exclusively at men.'

He Yu looked at the line in the notebook again.

'Do you think it's possible that someone came to this island recently, flipped through the Utopia Guestbook, read the earlier entries, and remembered the Jiang Lanpei Ghost Revenge Legend — and, just like whoever had written those entries before them, happened to despise this man called WZL — so on impulse they took what had been pure venting and turned it into a proper curse?'

Xie Qingcheng shook his head, took out his phone and snapped a casual photo for the record, then said: 'I'll bring this notebook to the Police Force when we get back. I've always felt Jiang Lanpei and Huzhou University are connected in ways that haven't been untangled yet.'

A faint shift crossed He Yu's eyes. Quietly: 'I think so too.'

'Oh?'

He Yu said: 'The school uniform.'

Xie Qingcheng let out a slow breath, his gaze settling into something heavy. 'So you reached the same place I did. I'd guess the Police Force has a similar theory — I've spotted plainclothes officers on your campus these past few days, a few of them old detectives who worked with my parents. They seem to be looking into something.'

On the day Jiang Lanpei killed Liang Jicheng, there had been one detail — easy to overlook, but strange.

— Why had Jiang Lanpei gone to the trouble of stripping the Huzhou University staff uniform from Xie Xue and dressing the already-dead body of Liang Jicheng in it, before carrying out the dismemberment and desecration?

'The actions of any psychiatric patient usually have a cause behind them, especially deliberate, targeted behavior like this,' Xie Qingcheng said. 'The way I see it, the Jiang Lanpei case will eventually lead back to certain people at your university.'

He Yu raised a hand, a slight smile. 'Certain people definitely doesn't include me.'

'...'

'She was locked up the year I might not even have been born yet.'

Xie Qingcheng looked vaguely pained. He said: 'This isn't something either of us needs to manage. Once we're out, hand the notebook to the police and let them follow the thread.'

He Yu made a sound of agreement. On the subject of Chengkang Psychiatric Hospital, a question surfaced; he turned to Xie Qingcheng. 'Actually.'

'What?'

'I've been turning something over these past few days. If we'd arrived that night and Xie Xue had already been killed — where would we be right now?'

Xie Qingcheng slid his dark eyes toward him without expression. 'You could try thinking about something pleasant for once.'

'I want her to be okay more than anyone.'

Xie Qingcheng was vaguely irritated, missing the weight behind what He Yu had just said; he batted it aside with a careless line: 'So do I.'

'But if something had happened to her —'

'Then as long as I was still alive, I'd live exactly the way I do now.'

— It wasn't as though he hadn't lived through something like it before.

That time, there had been no turning point. No chance to pull anything back.

He had stood there watching his parents' cold bodies lying in the pouring rain, police tape going up in yellow and white behind him, a siren arriving too late and tearing straight through him. A truck cab burning hard, flames tearing at the sky — and in that light he saw that what remained of his mother was only half a body. Her eyes were wide open, staring blankly toward where he stood. One hand, severed and flung clear by the wheels, lay at the toe of his shoe.

He had believed, then, that he couldn't go on living.

But nineteen years had passed.

He Yu had no idea what he was thinking. He listened, and for a long time said nothing. He watched Xie Qingcheng's face with an unreadable look, then laughed — very softly, very cold. 'Xie Qingcheng, you really are something. Composed every minute of every day. Losing it is just a matter of one minute for you, and then it's done.'

Xie Qingcheng said: 'A person can't live inside grief forever. Even a tragedy that seems completely impossible to bear in the moment will be slowly absorbed, with time. Better to stop wasting those hours drowning in pain. Get yourself together, do what needs doing, and stop more tragedies from happening.'

'...Ah.' He Yu said it quietly. 'The most clear-eyed man alive.'

With that, he found he had no desire to stay in the cave with Xie Qingcheng any longer. The rain outside had eased off, and he walked out alone.

He Yu wandered to clear his head. Then, at precisely midnight, he noticed movement on the far shore.

The Upperclassman, conscientious professional that he was, had completed his shift to the minute and paddled the duck boat back.

The moment he spotted He Yu he lit up, waving frantically from the rocking boat: 'Well?! Pretty punctual, right?! Boss, did you confess? Did it work?'

And immediately craned his neck to peer past He Yu's shoulder.

'Hey? Where's the lucky lady?'

Confess what, exactly?

There was one clear-eyed man on that island, and He Yu was supposed to confess to him?

He Yu gave the idiot on the boat his most pleasant smile. 'That doesn't really seem like something the Upperclassman needs to ask about.'

'Look at you, still shy — haha, I get it, I get it.' The other man waggled his eyebrows at He Yu with an abundance of insinuation, then thrust out his phone displaying an Alipay QR code.

'Final payment.'

He Yu rolled his eyes without moving a muscle, produced his own phone — still showing zero bars — and swiped across it with a cold face. '...Unlock the signal blocker first.'

The Upperclassman killed the blocker, then perked right back up: 'Did you see the message I sent you? On the other phone.'

'What message?'

He Yu took out the second phone and looked.

'Boss, there's a first-aid kit in the cave on the island — second tray down, a few boxes of condoms. Help yourself, and remember to send me a red envelope when you're done...'

The Upperclassman leaned in with the look of a born gossip:

'Special extended-duration ones, too. Guaranteed to leave the lady's legs like jelly.'

'...' He Yu smiled mildly. 'Going forward, maybe don't keep that kind of thing in a first-aid kit. A bit unconscionable, don't you think, Upperclassman?'

The Upperclassman could tell the young capitalist was not pleased.

He blinked, and the penny dropped — they hadn't gone through with it.

He couldn't help but feel a certain awe for the beauty who had yet to make an appearance.

He'd assumed the beauty hadn't followed He Yu over because she was new to being favored and still too overcome to move.

Turned out this beauty was a cold fish who couldn't be bought with money or status.

Young master He, what rotten luck — why'd he have to set his sights on such a difficult target? Tsk, tsk. Money down the drain... money down the drain...

The Upperclassman wisely said no more about it. Once he'd collected the payment, he read the room, called a friend to bring another kayak over from the warehouse, and the two of them left — leaving the duck boat on the bank for He Yu.

He Yu finished cleaning up the scene and was heading back to the Neverland Cave to fetch Xie Qingcheng when he turned around and stopped cold.

The man was already there — standing in the moonlit trees, hands tucked in his trouser pockets, shoulder resting against one of the cypresses, watching He Yu without any expression at all. No telling how long he'd been standing in the shade, listening.

He Yu: '...'

Xie Qingcheng lit a cigarette, unhurried, regarding him the way one regards a suspect in an interview room. 'I'll give you one chance to explain yourself.'

He blew a slow ring of pale blue smoke. 'Go ahead.'