In the year 2007, in Qin City.
Although he was in a shabby little hotel, and the pillow and quilt smelled of mold and dampness the moment he buried his head in them, it didn’t stop him from sleeping soundly until the first light of dawn. He pushed open the door, took his bank card to an ATM to withdraw 300 yuan, then pulled out a map of Qin City. Chewing on a freshly steamed hot bun, he made his way toward Xu Shijin’s home address.
Yesterday in the school infirmary, he had not only seen Yu Xiaoyu’s address but had also stored the addresses of the entire class using his photographic memory. He had marked them on the Qin City map as best he could, and of course, he wouldn’t miss a key person like Xu Shijin.
Xu Shijin’s home was on Zhonghe Road. Ji Xun had gotten up early, and after a leisurely stroll, he arrived just around seven o’clock. He still had time to observe the surroundings. He saw that the buildings in this area were new and tall, and the people coming and going were mostly young and middle-aged. It was likely a new residential district built by the government in recent years.
Seeing this, Ji Xun had a few guesses about Xu Shijin’s family environment, including her parents.
They were most likely a middle-class, white-collar family with some savings and decent jobs. This seemed to align with some of Xu Shijin’s actions at school. Although she was ordinary, she would use various methods to fight back when someone truly bullied her, not appearing timid at all.
Ji Xun walked into the residential complex where Xu Shijin’s parents lived. He remembered they lived in Building C. Before he could even start looking, a chattering crowd gathered in a large circle pointed him to the location of Building C.
He squeezed into the crowd and first looked up at the building—Building C. Then he looked into the center of the circle formed by the crowd. An elderly-looking couple sat in front of the building’s main entrance, holding a white banner. On the stark white background were a few large, blood-red words:
“A debt of blood must be paid, give us back our daughter’s life!”
“What’s going on?” Ji Xun quickly asked an auntie standing next to him. When the situation was unclear, asking the uncles and aunties at the scene was always the right move.
He hadn’t asked the wrong person. The auntie immediately told him, “Those two in front have been causing a scene a few times recently. They’re looking for the people on the 15th floor, saying the 15th-floor’s daughter killed their daughter at school.”
On the school’s contact list, Xu Shijin’s home was indeed on the 15th floor.
Without a doubt, the elderly-looking couple before him were Zhen Huan’s parents.
“Didn’t the police say it was an accidental drowning?” Ji Xun asked doubtfully. “Are they here for extortion?”
“That’s hard to say.” The auntie’s face instantly became mysterious. With an expression as if she were revealing a huge secret, she lowered her voice and said, “I saw the couple from the 15th floor secretly give them money last time…”
An uncle nearby joined the conversation. He confirmed the auntie’s claim, “I saw it too. If they had a clear conscience, why give them money? Was the money burning a hole in their pocket?”
“Exactly,” the auntie added. “Their daughter is 17, still a minor, right? Isn’t there a rule now that the police have to protect the identity of juvenile offenders? Maybe the case was solved long ago, but they just didn’t tell us. We haven’t seen the 15th-floor’s daughter for two days. They told us she ran away from home, but it’s possible she was arrested by the police!”
“Why aren’t the people from the 15th floor coming down yet?” the uncle said again.
“This couple can really make a scene—crying, shouting, tearing, and fighting. The couple from the 15th floor has been tormented enough, maybe they don’t dare to come down…”
There was more gossip about the 15th-floor family, but Ji Xun found it getting more and more absurd and lost patience with listening. He temporarily treated his ears as mere decorations and focused on observing the two people in front.
Xu Shijin’s parents from the 15th floor hadn’t come down. No matter what tricks this couple had up their sleeves, they couldn’t use them for the time being. They just sat there with stiff faces, like two grieving stone statues.
As Ji Xun watched, his gaze suddenly sharpened.
Next to Zhen Huan’s mother was a plastic bag. Inside, he saw some long, pale-yellow paper boxes. Looking closely, he realized they were hotel paper boxes for disposable toiletries, with the words “Jinya Hotel” printed on them.
Why would this couple carry these items with them? Did they stay in a hotel last night, just like him? But why stay in a hotel when they had a perfectly good home?
Ji Xun’s gaze shifted to their clothes. It was autumn, and under the elbow of Zhen Huan’s mother’s coat was a sizable patch of black soot. What was that…?
He thought for a moment, then circled to the other side of the crowd to look at Zhen Huan’s father. He saw the same marks on the father. The marks on the father were much more numerous than on the mother, suggesting that the man was less careful than the woman and had gotten more soot on himself.
There was also a large gray patch on Zhen Huan’s father’s back. The water stains on it hadn’t dried completely, and you could still see the residue of black soot, but it had been scrubbed, so it wasn’t very obvious.
They had realized their clothes were dirty and had tried to scrub them, yet they were still wearing them… Was it because, for some reason, they couldn’t get a change of clothes? That black soot wasn’t dirt from the ground or paint or ink. It looked more like… the stubborn soot from a gas stove?
Ji Xun thought of a possibility, but this theory had a problem: how could soot from a gas stove get all over the couple, and in such large patches? It wasn’t like they were still using an old earthen stove that happened to be clogged, forcing the man to crawl inside to clear it, right?
Ji Xun’s mind raced. He turned to the uncle, “Uncle, got a smoke? Can I have one?”
The uncle glanced at him, “Go on, what’s a kid like you doing smoking?”
Ji Xun chuckled softly, “I’m not going to smoke it. Uncle, you give me a cigarette, and I’ll show you a good show.”
The uncle gave Ji Xun a curious look. Perhaps intrigued by the “good show,” he actually took out his cigarette pack, gave one to Ji Xun, and Ji Xun also got the lighter from him. Then, he squeezed through the crowd and approached the couple. He offered the cigarette to Zhen Huan’s father while flicking the lighter open with a click:
“Uncle, let me light that for you…”
Zhen Huan’s mother’s expression changed. She seemed to snap back to life, as if from a deep trance. She slapped Ji Xun’s hand away and yelled, “You brat, get that fire away from here—”
Zhen Huan’s mother didn’t finish her sentence, but she snatched the cigarette from her husband’s hand and crumpled it into a ball.
Ji Xun watched them thoughtfully for a moment, until he was repeatedly shooed away by Zhen Huan’s mother and retreated back into the crowd.
“Where’s the good show?” the uncle sidled up and asked.
“The good show is,” Ji Xun snapped his fingers, “they’re sensitive to fire, they’re not staying at home, and they have soot on them. There was probably a fire at their house.”
The uncle’s face showed shock, mixed with confusion, which then turned into admiration. In short, his face displayed a complex array of emotions.
However, Ji Xun had already distanced himself from the crowd. He planned to go to Zhen Huan’s house to verify his theory. But Zhen Huan was in Class A, and he didn’t have her home address. That wasn’t a major problem. He took out his phone, dialed 114, got the front desk number for the Jinya Hotel from the operator, and was transferred to the front desk. Pretending to be a guest, he asked for the hotel’s location.
Once he was near the Jinya Hotel, Ji Xun wandered through a few nearby residential complexes, asking the grandpas and grandmas out for a walk. It didn’t take much effort to find the specific location of the fire.
Kangquan Homes, Building 2, Room 202.
The old-fashioned building was plastered with strange little advertisements. Ji Xun went up one flight of stairs and found Zhen Huan’s home. It was an L-shaped structure with three apartments per floor, with the middle unit’s kitchen facing the corridor. Now, the entire second-floor corridor was charred black from a fire.
The kitchen window that opened onto the corridor had security bars outside. There should have been a curtain inside, but it had been completely burned away, leaving only a bare rod hanging below the ceiling. Ji Xun was not a firefighter and couldn’t determine the fire’s point of origin at a glance, but he could see that the window, which was left open, was likely open when the incident occurred—the left side of the open windowsill was much blacker than the right.
He peered inside through the open window, past the equally blackened security bars.
The kitchen in this apartment layout was very small. A door separated the kitchen from the living space. The door was closed and still retained its shape, so perhaps the damage inside wasn’t as severe as in the kitchen.
The kitchen counter was cluttered with various items, all charred black. The owner had not cleaned up yet. Judging by the state of things, this family was definitely not neat, nor did they know how to organize. Dishes were tossed randomly in the sink, and the windowsill was covered with the remnants of spice containers and oil bottles.
The wooden kitchen cabinet doors had been completely burned away. The gas tank was in a corner, undamaged, which was undoubtedly the luckiest aspect of this fire.
There didn’t seem to be anything else of note inside. He retracted his gaze and looked at the corridor again. The apartments to the left and right each had a shoe cabinet placed outside. The one on the left, tucked into the entryway, looked fine. The one on the right was in a sorry state, almost half of it burned away. One could imagine that the shoes originally inside probably didn’t survive either.
Ji Xun had already pieced together the series of unfortunate events that had befallen Zhen Huan’s parents the day before:
They came home from a long day of work to find their house had burned down, resulting in heavy losses. The fire destroyed the kitchen and damaged their neighbor’s property and the public corridor, meaning they would have to pay for repairs. So, after a night in a hotel, Zhen Huan’s parents decided to go and block Xu Shijin’s parents’ door to shift their losses.
Ji Xun walked around the corridor twice, examining the fire-damaged apartment again and again. Suddenly, he noticed a small piece of white paper under the crack of Zhen Huan’s parents’ door.
Curious, he squatted down, pinched the corner of the white paper, and pulled it out. He then realized it wasn’t just paper but a white envelope. The envelope was not sealed. He opened it and found a cassette tape inside.
At noon, Ji Xun found the kid he had met yesterday, Zhou Zhaonan, at Qin University Affiliated High School.
Finding the kid was a bit of a hassle. He had to pretend to be his older brother, peeking into his classroom after school. Guided by the resentful glares of the same bad students, he managed to grab the person with the schoolbag before they could and took him to a small restaurant outside the school.
The small restaurant was quite popular. Because Ji Xun had already charmed the owner before they entered, they managed to secure a corner table in the crowded little shop.
“What do you want to eat?” Ji Xun asked. Having been treated generously by his three roommates the previous night, he was feeling much more magnanimous today. He placed the menu directly in front of the kid. “Order whatever you want, it’s my treat.”
The person across from him looked up, his gaze piercing through his hanging hair, carrying a hint of speechlessness.
“You’re not my brother, and don’t call me ‘kid’.”
The kid’s face had been quite a sight yesterday, but after a night’s rest, it looked much better. At least now one could see that his skin was fair and his features were delicate—which was precisely why the bruises and scrapes on his face appeared all the more exaggerated and frightening.
“Don’t scratch your face when the scabs form, it’ll be a pity if they leave a scar,” Ji Xun couldn’t help but advise. Then he asked, “So what should I call you?”
“Classmate.”
“Alright, Classmate Zhou.” Ji Xun readily complied.
The person across from him seemed to pause for a moment, glanced at him, and simply said, “A bowl of noodles.”
Ji Xun didn’t mind. He also ordered a bowl of noodles for himself, then took out the cassette tape he had acquired from Zhen Huan’s parents’ house and waved it in front of Classmate Zhou. “Look what I found.”
He then briefly told Classmate Zhou about the series of events that had transpired that morning.
As he was telling the story, their noodles arrived. It was much warmer in the restaurant than outside. Ji Xun took off his jacket and asked, “Do you have a Walkman?”
For studying English, most students had such devices. As expected, Classmate Zhou had one. He opened his schoolbag and took out a Walkman and a pair of headphones.
“You’ve got everything.” Ji Xun praised, inserted the tape into the Walkman, plugged in the headphones, put them in his ears, and began to listen.
The origin of this tape was strange. It had clearly been slipped under the door between the time Zhen Huan’s parents left their home last night and when he arrived at the scene this morning. Why was such an anonymous item placed there at this exact time?
Connecting this to Zhen Huan’s parents’ initial reaction after the fire, Ji Xun had a vague feeling that this tape was probably also related to Zhen Huan and Xu Shijin… He prepared himself to listen to a secret.
But then…
Ji Xun was silent for a long time. Classmate Zhou asked, “What’s wrong?”
Ji Xun suddenly grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair and threw it over his head. The bright orange jacket instantly enveloped his head and face, leaving only a thin crack for his embarrassed, teeth-gritting voice to escape:
“Don’t ask. It’s not for kids… Damn it!”
