Ji Xun’s lingering sleepiness was completely obliterated by those few sentences. He knew perfectly well that Huo Ranyin was flirting insincerely, yet his mind went blank for a moment, mainly because he couldn’t immediately come up with a better or wittier retort than what Huo Ranyin had said.
So silence followed silence, and the words he hadn’t prepared completely missed their chance to be spoken.
Time flowed on in this silent stillness.
Finally, Ji Xun heard Huo Ranyin’s shallow and steady breathing beside him. The other man was asleep.
Ah ha.
No need to think at all, was there? You fell asleep quite naturally, didn’t you? Those words were clearly insincere.
Thinking this, he quietly shifted his stiff body on the bed and silently opened his eyes, looking at the person on his left.
Huo Ranyin’s sleeping posture was disciplined.
He lay flat, his jacket removed and serving as a blanket. The police station had heating in the winter, so he wasn’t cold. Both his hands were placed on his abdomen… no, they weren’t.
Only when Ji Xun looked closely did he realize that one hand was on his abdomen, but the other was discreetly pulled back and rested near his waist—the position of his firearm.
A man who refused to lower his guard even in sleep.
Ji Xun thought that, from this perspective, it must indeed take a certain amount of effort for Huo Ranyin to fall asleep next to someone else.
Then he looked at Huo Ranyin’s face.
The sparse, cold moonlight flowed over his cheek, casting a jade-like luster on his skin. There was a touch of red near his earlobe. Ji Xun initially thought it was a natural warm tone to his skin, but upon closer inspection, he realized it was the light from the aromatherapy candle burning on the floor between them.
His gaze shifted from initial caution to blatant, uninhibited staring.
He even propped himself up on the bed and sat up, reaching a hand out toward Huo Ranyin.
However, waking up a sleeping person in the middle of the night was truly mean. After reaching out for a long time, Ji Xun reluctantly pulled his hand back, settling down again.
He took a quiet breath in the night.
Although he knew it was false, and at most, their relationship was a one-night stand for mutual release and shared pleasure… even false happiness was still happiness. Not much time had passed, and both his body and mind could still recall the peak sensation of that night.
He reluctantly opened his eyes again, pushing those wandering thoughts aside. He looked at the window. At the edge of the sky outside, a faint line of grey-white dawn was faintly visible.
Had a whole night just passed like that?
The great darkness of the night had mercifully spared him, yet he had failed to embrace sleep. Huo Ranyin, that beautiful ghost, lurked beside him, grinning with a sneer and malice, coveting him fiercely.
If they shared a bed night after night…
Ji Xun lifted both hands and placed them behind his head, quite concerned:
In perhaps less than half a month, wouldn’t he be completely drained?
By seven o’clock the next morning, just as the sister unit began their day, Ji Xun was woken up by a pat from Huo Ranyin.
Yawning relentlessly and looking dispirited, he first shuffled forward, sporting increasingly prominent dark circles, trailing behind the refreshed Huo Ranyin. As soon as they exited the police station, the last bit of spine seemed to be pulled out of him. His jaw went slack, and he slumped weakly onto Huo Ranyin’s shoulder, moving forward precariously with Huo Ranyin’s support.
Huo Ranyin: “How long did you actually sleep yesterday?”
“An hour… or half an hour?” Ji Xun managed to answer. “I don’t remember. I just feel like I closed my eyes and immediately opened them again.”
Huo Ranyin stopped and turned around.
Ji Xun nearly stumbled when he was shaken like that.
Fortunately, a pair of hands, steady as steel, quickly held him. Huo Ranyin’s eyes scanned Ji Xun up and down like a searchlight. After a moment, as if he could see through Ji Xun’s mind and heart and confirmed his genuine fatigue, he finally seemed satisfied. He then flashed a triumphant smile, as if he had seen through Ji Xun’s wandering thoughts of the previous night:
“A few words from me kept you up all night? I see. I’ll get you a room so you can catch up on sleep. I’ll go to Liucheng University myself. Although you suggested this line of inquiry, the action isn’t complicated. It’s fine if you don’t come along.”
It was genuinely a great idea.
Timely sleep would help Ji Xun pull himself back from the brink of sudden death, but the triumphant smile on Huo Ranyin’s face provoked him. That inexplicable male competitive instinct was instantly triggered. He immediately stood straight:
“Hmph. If you have the guts, let’s go get a room together.”
Huo Ranyin raised an eyebrow, conveying, “Are you sure?” with his expression.
Ji Xun got a new burst of inspiration for flirting: “Yes. Let’s get a couples’ hotel room and sleep in the same bed under the same blanket. Then we’ll really find out if we can sleep next to each other.”
Huo Ranyin paused for a moment, then ambiguously scanned Ji Xun up and down, especially focusing on his waist. As if suddenly realizing something, he took out the car key and tossed it to Ji Xun: “Alright then. If you can successfully drive the car to the couples’ hotel, we’ll go in and verify.”
“…” Ji Xun, who found standing up a struggle, felt that signing up for a gym membership was truly an imminent necessity.
Liucheng University was the only 985 institution in Liucheng, with a strong academic atmosphere. When Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin arrived, it was still early, but students were already everywhere, studying and exercising.
They planned to find the dormitory matron from that year to ask about the situation, but the matron had gone to hand over work first. The students remaining in the dorm, however, were very interested in the topic and actively gathered around to gossip.
In the ten years since the rape case that led to the suicide, the story circulating in the school had evolved into a completely different version.
“Are you talking about the Guaranteed Admission Dorm?”
“Guaranteed Admission Dorm?”
“Yeah! Because all the female students in that dorm were r*ped, they all got waived from exams and guaranteed admission to grad school. So they called it the Guaranteed Admission Dorm.”
“Wait, wasn’t only one girl raped? And she ended up jumping off the Experimental Building B.”
“That must be because her mental fortitude wasn’t strong enough. If only one was r*ped, how did the others in the dorm get guaranteed admission?”
“Come on, the school hushed it up! Why else would every school have these guaranteed admission rumors? Like the school in my hometown, where a teacher was hacked to death right in the classroom. Guess what?”
“What?”
“Guaranteed admission too. All the students who witnessed the scene in the classroom got guaranteed admission to grad school. It was a huge move. Poor relative of mine, he skipped class and was sleeping in the dorm that day and missed it. That’s the one time you shouldn’t be late!”
The topic lingered on the subject of guaranteed admission for a while, like a bullet that should have pierced straight through but instead began to dance a jitterbug in the air.
Once the surrounding students had exhausted their fantasies about guaranteed admission situations across the country, Ji Xun cleared his throat, guiding the conversation back to the main point:
“Who was it that r*ped them back then?”
“A migrant worker!” This time, the students said in unison.
“A migrant worker?” Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin exchanged surprised glances, confused as to why the rumor had taken this turn.
“Yes, a migrant worker! In 2007, our school was building a new staff dormitory, right behind Female Dormitory 3. They just put up a fence around it. Something was bound to happen!” The students said emphatically, pointing to the staff dormitory for the two to see.
Ji Xun looked from a distance. Indeed, a building could be seen behind the dorms, newer and prettier than the student dormitories, clearly built recently. Song Tingfeng’s dorm was the closest to the fence.
Just then, the students surrounding Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin suddenly scattered like birds. The matron had returned.
The dorm matron was a plump, round-faced woman with a short, stout figure like a winter melon. She looked kind, but when Ji Xun brought up the Song Tingfeng case again, the matron’s face darkened.
Her description of the case was no different from the file the two had seen at the police station, but she held considerable resentment toward Cheng Xiang:
“The school repeatedly stressed that boys are not allowed in the girls’ dorms. Cheng Xiang refused to listen. She even conspired to bring Mo Nai in. Bringing him in repeatedly, going back and forth, well, of course, something happened! Guaranteed admission, hmpf. The school was blackmailed by them!”
“Such young girls, why are they so shameless, hmpf—”
According to the matron, Cheng Xiang was lively and somewhat irresponsible, with many boyfriends. The matron often caught her missing the 11 p.m. curfew.
Cheng Xiang came from a good family and was very pretty—a department beauty. Her academic performance was very average, often teetering on the edge of failing. She was very popular with the opposite sex, so she could always find a top student boyfriend to tutor her before exams.
The matron wasn’t entirely sure why she dated Mo Nai, but Mo Nai was good-looking, and Cheng Xiang’s non-exam period boyfriends were always the handsome type, so she likely went for his looks.
The matron was very clear about why she broke up with Mo Nai; she witnessed the whole thing.
Mo Nai had initially pretended to be a work-study student at Liucheng University to date Cheng Xiang. After two months, he was exposed as not being a student at all, but merely an employee at a shouzhuabing (hand-grabbed pancake) stall. Cheng Xiang got angry, and the two confronted each other at the dorm entrance, causing a huge scene.
Mo Nai was unwilling to break up and kept looking for Cheng Xiang to beg for forgiveness every few days.
“Later, they seemed to get back together for a bit, then broke up again? Sigh, the matters of these young girls are too messy. You should ask her yourself. Here, these are the contact details they left when they graduated.”
Cheng Xiang went to work in the capital after getting guaranteed admission, while the other roommate, Yu Yu, went to study abroad and has not returned since.
“Let’s go to the capital,” Huo Ranyin said after they left the dorm building.
“From here to the capital…” Ji Xun mentally calculated the time. “Driving there?”
“Of course, we’ll take the high-speed rail,” Huo Ranyin said.
“Going through security will be a hassle.”
“I prepared the necessary documents beforehand.”
They made a simple decision and headed toward the high-speed rail station. The next train to the capital was in an hour and a half. Since the time wasn’t long, the two decided to wait at the station. While sitting on the waiting bench, Ji Xun kept nodding off, but he couldn’t actually fall asleep, merely repeating the cycle of fatigue—startle—startle—fatigue.
He opened his eyes for a long time, stood up, walked around the high-speed rail station, and finally came back with a sugar-coated hawthorn skewer (tanghulu).
A layer of crystal-clear syrup coated the red hawthorns.
Ji Xun extended his tongue and licked it: “Want one?”
“…” Huo Ranyin silently refused.
He didn’t understand why Ji Xun, a grown man, could eat food typically enjoyed by children—like tanghulu and cotton candy—in public without any reservation.
But waiting was boring, so he started observing Ji Xun eating the tanghulu.
He watched Ji Xun bite into one, frown, then relax his brow after a moment. Then he bit another, frowned again, and then relaxed his brow after a moment… he looked like he was struggling to swallow poison. Huo Ranyin finally couldn’t help but ask: “Does it taste bad?”
“Extremely sour.”
“…Then why eat it?”
“For every spoonful of porridge and every meal, one should consider how hard it was to obtain; for every thread and every fiber, one should constantly remember the difficulty of securing resources.”*
“…”
Huo Ranyin reached out to Ji Xun.
Ji Xun was distracted, and Huo Ranyin took the tanghulu from his hand.
Then Huo Ranyin ate one hawthorn.
The hawthorn was a bit large, and the golden syrup smeared the corner of Huo Ranyin’s mouth. Huo Ranyin ate it without changing his expression, finally swallowing it with a knotted brow.
It was visibly apparent that Huo Ranyin was genuinely suffering. Unlike Ji Xun, who only looked like he was suffering on the surface.
Ji Xun hesitated, then spoke: “…That.”
“What?”
“I bought it precisely because it’s sour enough to be refreshing.”
The person sitting next to him fell silent. Before the silence could intensify, Ji Xun quickly took back his tanghulu, casually wiping the syrup from Huo Ranyin’s mouth with his thumb.
Ji Xun licked the sugar off his finger, shook the tanghulu, and said to Huo Ranyin:
“Thank you very much, but next time, please don’t force yourself for my sake.”
After this small interlude, time seemed to speed up. It was suddenly time for their train to board. Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin got up to queue, but just as they were following the crowd onto the train, Huo Ranyin received a phone call.
The call was from Tan Mingjiu, who gave Huo Ranyin some news.
The Liucheng officers remaining in Jiuxia County had tracked down a package Mo Nai sent to his aunt at a courier station.
The package was a SF Express same-day delivery. Mo Nai had sent the package from Chuncheng in the morning, and the package had just arrived at the Jiuxia County courier station—it was fortunate that the remaining officers were thoughtful and had stationed personnel at the courier station. Otherwise, this hot lead would have been needlessly delayed.
There was another piece of good news:
Considering that Mo Nai was now far from Ning City and outside their jurisdiction, the joint enforcement mission had been canceled. They were free to go back on holiday!
Author’s Note:
For every spoonful of porridge and every meal, one should consider how hard it was to obtain; for every thread and every fiber, one should constantly remember the difficulty of securing resources. – Zhuzi Family Maxims (《朱子家訓》)
