Chapter 42

There were around ten extortion videos involving the two middle schoolers. The short ones were two or three minutes. The long ones ran close to half an hour.

Fei Bolin picked one with a clear picture first. He processed the middle schoolers' voices in the video, adjusted the contrast, put a light mosaic over the two older students' faces, and added subtitles to every line where they threatened them for money. Then he logged into the IP processor he'd bought online not long ago, changed the computer's IP, and used the method he'd just learned this past month to plant a simple trojan in the video. After that, he uploaded two clips to the School forum and to Weibo, which had only gotten popular in the last two years, and set both to post on a two-hour delay.

Once he finished all that, he checked the time and looked to the side—Wen Fu should've just about finished half his milk tea.

And sure enough, just like he'd expected, Wen Fu was leaning back in his chair, happily drinking his way through the halfway point when he suddenly felt Fei Bolin's gaze on him.

At that moment, he was looking at the cartoon on the screen, while Fei Bolin was looking at him.

Wen Fu paused slightly mid-sip. The two of them fell into a weird silence for two seconds.

Then Wen Fu abruptly whipped his head to the other side and, before anyone could react, sucked down the entire remaining half cup of milk tea and pearls in one go.

Fei Bolin: '...'

After an especially loud gulp, Wen Fu swallowed the milk tea in his mouth, turned back around, and revealed cheeks stuffed full of pearls and coconut jelly.

Chew chew chew.

Fei Bolin: '....................'

Chew chew chew chew chew chew chew.

Wen Fu's face didn't change at all. Only his cheeks were starting to ache.

Two minutes later, Fei Bolin hauled a still-chewing Wen Fu out of the internet cafe and headed home.

Once winter break started, Aunt Wu had it a lot easier too. In past years, Fei Bolin always ran the shop by himself, coming and going alone. Now his biggest pleasure was discussing their next meal with Wen Fu.

Since it was vacation and the New Year was getting close, the kids nearby and in the Residential Complex all had more pocket money than usual. This was the one month of the year when Lin's Convenience Store had the best business.

In theory, he was supposed to be studying while minding the shop, but Fei Bolin barely got a chance to even open his book all evening. Every time one customer left after paying, there was still a whole line behind them.

The scanner on the counter kept beeping nonstop. Snacks kept piling up on the checkout surface whenever customers paid, and Wen Fu didn't have room to do homework anymore either, so he just stayed pressed up beside Fei Bolin and watched people come and go buying things.

He'd already finished two servings of fried skewers and grilled sausage by himself today, and with those two cups of milk tea from the afternoon on top of that, he wasn't getting hungry as fast as usual.

He was just sitting there dryly off to the side. He didn't say a word himself, but Fei Bolin kept glancing over and somehow managed to read both good behavior and something pitiful off Wen Fu.

Forget it.

Fei Bolin thought, Wen Fu was sitting here with him for hours without making a sound. His family circumstances were bad. There wasn't even a TV at home for him to watch, or a computer for him to play on. He didn't even have a place to do homework. So in the one area where Wen Fu could at least be satisfied—food and drink—was Fei Bolin really supposed to skimp on him too?

Anyway, he'd already eaten that much junk today. He might as well let Wen Fu eat his fill.

During a gap when there was nobody at the register, Fei Bolin went to the shelves and scanned a whole pile of milk drinks and snacks for Wen Fu. Pretty much all sweet stuff—chocolate, cream puffs, sandwich cookies. He deliberately picked the things he didn't remember ever giving Wen Fu before. Whatever Wen Fu hadn't eaten, he grabbed.

At the end, he casually snagged Wen Fu a box of Jule Milk too, so he wouldn't choke eating dry snacks.

Wen Fu was staring blankly at the stream of people coming and going, zoning out while digesting all the junk food in his stomach.

Right in the middle of digesting, a woven basket was suddenly stuffed into his arms.

The tag on the basket hadn't even been pulled off yet. Fei Bolin had grabbed it straight from the store stock, and now it was filled with snacks.

Wen Fu looked up at Fei Bolin.

Feeling like he'd delivered the proper amount of care and comfort to a cat, and a little proud of himself in a vaguely guardian-like way, Fei Bolin said, 'Eat.'

Wen Fu had no idea what was going on.

Then, still with no idea what was going on, he lowered his head and started eating.

Pretty soon more customers came to check out again. After Fei Bolin went back behind the register, he'd work for a bit, then turn around to look at Wen Fu.

And every single time he looked back, Wen Fu had a different snack in hand. A cookie in one hand, a cream puff in the other, crunching away loudly, like he'd gone dizzy from too many choices.

He stayed busy until around eleven-thirty, when there were finally hardly any customers left. Fei Bolin rolled his shoulders and neck, then suddenly realized the crunching behind him had stopped at some point. He turned around and saw Wen Fu holding the last pack of Wangzai cream puffs. In the basket was one chocolate bar with a single bite taken out of it.

'You don't like it?' Fei Bolin dragged his chair over beside Wen Fu and leaned in close to warm himself by the heater with him.

Wen Fu shook his head. There were still cookie and cream puff crumbs by his mouth. In a quiet, serious voice, he said, 'It's too good.'

He picked up the pack of cream puffs and the chocolate. 'Saving it for you.'

The chocolate was crispy rice chocolate. Wen Fu had never had it before. Tonight, after the first bite, he'd pressed his lips together and savored it for a long time. He wanted a second bite, but couldn't bear to. So he carefully set it at the bottom of the basket and waited for Fei Bolin to finish being busy so Fei Bolin could eat it.

Fei Bolin didn't actually like snacks. The taste of convenience-store food always made him think of that night he hid behind the shelves and forced himself to eat until he threw up. It was something he had no desire to remember again.

And because he didn't like them himself, he usually forgot to bring Wen Fu extra snacks too. Somewhere in his subconscious, he always seemed to assume—or maybe hope—that Wen Fu was the same as him, that he didn't care for this stuff either.

He looked at the chocolate Wen Fu was offering him for a moment, then reached out, broke off a tiny corner, and put it in his mouth. 'This much is enough for me.'

Wen Fu nodded, pulled his hand back, and swallowed the whole long rest of the bar in one bite.

Then the two of them shared a bag of cream puffs together, though Fei Bolin only ate one.

On the short walk home after closing up, Wen Fu still wore his backpack properly on both shoulders. Around the fifteenth, the moon in the sky was still perfectly round, and the white skate shoes he'd been wearing for a month were still spotless under the moonlight.

To get from Lin's Convenience Store to the building entrance, they had to go down a flight of stairs and turn right. At the lower left and right sides of the stairs stood two tall sycamore trees, and beside them was a dim streetlamp.

As they passed by, a gust of night wind blew a dry sycamore leaf onto Wen Fu's shoe.

Wen Fu stopped. First he took off his backpack and hugged it to his chest so the bottom wouldn't scrape the ground. Then he crouched down, reached out, and pinched the fallen leaf off his shoe, and with great seriousness wiped away the invisible bit of dust the leaf had supposedly left behind.

That was why Wen Fu's sneakers stayed so clean for so long.

Fei Bolin stood quietly on the step below and waited patiently for him to finish all that. The night was long anyway. They had plenty of time. No need to rush these two minutes.

The wind on a winter night cut to the bone, but Fei Bolin had bundled Wen Fu up layer after layer every day until there wasn't a single part of him that wasn't warm. He didn't need to hurry inside anymore just to escape the cold.

He finished wiping slowly, stood up slowly, then slowly caught up to Fei Bolin. Without saying a word, the two of them kept walking home in perfect tacit understanding.

When they ate a late-night meal at home, Fei Bolin deliberately cooked Wen Fu a slightly smaller bowl, so his stomach wouldn't feel bad after a whole day of eating too many different things.

The two of them sat around the little dining table in the living room, not across from each other but side by side on adjacent edges, heads lowered as they ate steaming hot minced-topping noodles.

Halfway through eating, Fei Bolin remembered something and took out his phone to open the class group chat.

Sure enough, the group had been blowing up for a long time. They were all talking about that video in a post on the School forum that afternoon.

Fei Bolin left Q/Q, then opened the School forum. The entire front page was refreshing by the second, and the hot topics were all about that video too.

Then he switched back to the class group and scrolled through the chat history.

[@It's One Not Zero: Did you guys see it??? That video!

@Counterclockwise: Which one?

@It's One Not Zero: The one on the forum this afternoon! Those two upperclassmen. You can't see their faces clearly, but their voices sound super familiar. I think they might be two P.E. students from the senior-year General Class.

@ONE PIECE: Holy shit? They've harassed you before too? [knife]

@It's One Not Zero: No, I just dealt with them a few times before when I went to register equipment.

@It's One Not Zero: Su Haoran, can you focus on the point? The point is that in that video they're bullying people, right? They're extorting money, right?

@Knowing Autumn From One Leaf: I saw it too! And it felt like the people getting extorted were way younger than them. Those two were both speaking with their heads down.

@It's One Not Zero: I got the feeling the ones being bullied were pretty short too...

@It's One Not Zero: Fuck! No way they were extorting middle schoolers, right?

@ONE PIECE: Damn, my niece is in middle school this year too, just not in Jin City.

@ONE PIECE: If my niece got extorted like that out there, I'd fly back just to drag those people out and beat them senseless.

@Knowing Autumn From One Leaf: You've got pretty high seniority in your family, huh.

@It's One Not Zero: There's a big age gap in his parents' generation. He's only three years older than his niece.

@Knowing Autumn From One Leaf: @It's One Not Zero, how do you know his family situation that well?

@ONE PIECE: Ningning knows me best [shy]

@Knowing Autumn From One Leaf: No flirting in public spaces.

@It's One Not Zero: We're not flirting. He's in heat by himself.

@It's One Not Zero: No, seriously... can you not get sidetracked? Did any of you save that video?

@Counterclockwise: Can't save it. People on the forum said that after you open it and finish watching, weird music starts playing and you can't pause it no matter what. You have to take the battery out of your phone and put it back in to reboot it, so nobody wants to open it a second time.

@Knowing Autumn From One Leaf: I saw people reposting that video on Weibo too!

@It's One Not Zero: Which Weibo? Sina Weibo or Tencent Weibo?

@Knowing Autumn From One Leaf: Sina, Sina! And the original uploader is some blank-profile burner account!

@It's One Not Zero: Of course they'd use a burner. And don't go digging into the account either. The person getting bullied uploaded it anonymously so those two upperclassmen couldn't find them.

@Knowing Autumn From One Leaf: If this blows up, will the School do anything about it?

@It's One Not Zero: Hard to say. Those two got into No.1 High School through connections in the first place, and who knows what kind of family background they have. If it doesn't get big enough for the whole country to notice, it's probably shaky. But at least they'll behave for a while, I guess.

@ONE PIECE: I'm thinking...

@It's One Not Zero: ?

@Knowing Autumn From One Leaf: ?

@Counterclockwise: ?

@Lin: ?

@It's One Not Zero: Spit it out already.

@ONE PIECE: Sigh, I just think that if the person getting bullied dared to upload the video anonymously, doesn't that mean these two usually bully and extort a lot more than just one person? That's why the bullies are so sure that once it's anonymous, they won't be able to tell who did it.

@It's One Not Zero: Oh, right. If these two only ever targeted one person, then whether the video was anonymous or not wouldn't matter much. At least to those two assholes, it'd be basically obvious who the target was.]

At that point, Fei Bolin stopped scrolling.

Su Haoran wasn't wrong, but he'd only guessed half of it right.

Based on what the two middle schoolers had told him, those senior-year guys really weren't just bullying them.

The two middle schoolers' pocket money put together wasn't even enough to cover the senior P.E. students' snacks, so besides these two kids, those two often extorted other students from the middle school division too.

And beyond that, it wasn't just those two senior P.E. students who liked picking on out-of-town boarding middle schoolers.

That was why Fei Bolin had censored those two guys' faces.

If two cockroaches show up in your house, there's already a whole nest hiding in the dark.

Once the video spread and blew up, the school leadership wouldn't be able to make out the perpetrators' faces or identify specific people, so they'd investigate everyone with similar profiles instead. Then they could wipe out the whole nest, not just catch those two roaches and call it handled.

And this way, even if something happened later, he could avoid retaliation from those two on the grounds of violating their portrait rights.

While Fei Bolin was thinking all this through, he didn't notice at all that the minced-topping noodles in front of him were quietly being picked away by Wen Fu and relocated into his own bowl.

By the time he noticed, Wen Fu had already slurped down the last bite and was leaning back with one hand on his stomach, letting out a silent little sigh of satisfaction.

Fei Bolin: '...'

For the first time, he truly understood what it meant to guard against thieves all day and all night, only to get robbed by your own house cat.

He cleared away the bowls and chopsticks and got up to go to the kitchen. 'If you want to read, read for a bit. If not, rest for half an hour before you go shower.'

That was what he said, but while he was washing dishes, Fei Bolin kept feeling vaguely uneasy.

Sure enough, when he came out of the kitchen, he saw Wen Fu sprawled on the sofa, lying flat on his back with his eyes closed and whimpering softly.

This was the first time in all this while that Wen Fu had ever eaten himself into indigestion.

Actually, Fei Bolin had realized a long time ago that even though Wen Fu could eat a lot, his stomach wasn't really some bottomless pit that could never be filled. It was just that he'd had too few chances to eat his fill growing up, so he'd gotten used to wolfing food down the second he saw it to feel safe. Over time, Wen Fu's first reaction to food stopped being 'Do I want this?' or 'Can I eat this?' and became just burying his head and eating first.

This time, food had finally taught him a lesson.

Fei Bolin shook his head and sighed, then went to the medicine box to look for digestive tablets.

After finding them, he crouched down in front of the sofa. He didn't explain what they were. He just stuffed two tablets straight into Wen Fu's mouth.

As long as it was going into his mouth, Wen Fu never hesitated, no matter how stuffed he was.

The moment Fei Bolin fed him, Wen Fu curled his tongue around them and started chewing.

He finished chewing the two tablets quickly, then lifted his head slightly and looked over. 'Boge?'

Fei Bolin was rubbing his palms warm, getting ready to massage Wen Fu's stomach. 'Hm?'

'Any more?'

'...'

Fei Bolin's face darkened. 'That's medicine.'

Wen Fu: 'Oh.'

But he kept staring at him anyway.

Fei Bolin: '...'

Wen Fu: '...'

Fei Bolin: '...'

A vein throbbed at Fei Bolin's temple. 'No more!'

'...Okay.'

Only then did Wen Fu lie back down.

A cat with a full belly and no will to live.

After warming his palms, Fei Bolin lifted Wen Fu's thermal top and slid his hand in through the hem, touching his waist first.

Wen Fu's stomach and waist were both narrow, and his skin felt a little cool compared to Fei Bolin's hands, freshly warmed from rubbing. When Fei Bolin pressed his palm to Wen Fu's abdomen, a strange flicker passed through him.

There was a trace of awkwardness on his face. Even as he found himself weird, he spread his thumb and little finger and, without thinking, measured Wen Fu's ribcage with his hand.

Such a slim frame. One hand could wrap around it from the side.

The moment Fei Bolin realized what he was doing, he snapped awake like from a dream. His fingertips under Wen Fu's shirt trembled in sudden panic, and a strange feeling rose up in him.

Why had he done that just now?

He must've zoned out.

It was just a waist. Who didn't have one? What was he subconsciously measuring for?

He shook his head, feeling more and more like the version of himself from one minute ago had been completely inexplicable. At the same time, he properly set his palm on Wen Fu's stomach and started massaging it clockwise. Hearing Wen Fu whimper, he said under his breath, 'I never should've let you eat those extra few bites of noodles.'