At first, Xie Qingcheng wasn't paying much attention to the book, but when he heard what He Yu said, he looked over the page again. He discovered that there was a box in the very corner of the copy-paper-sized page labeled with the words "Group Chat for Gays," in which his own name appeared with great frequency.
Xie Qingcheng had an ominous feeling about this.
Sure enough, as the two of them read through this section, it turned out to be written by a whole group of little bottoms who were deep in a heated discussion about the "ideal tops" from the surrounding colleges and universities. In short, there were too many bottoms, not enough tops, and all of them were looking to get laid.
The first mention of Xie Qingcheng's name was written in ballpoint pen. The handwriting was faded and somewhat aged. The writer wrote, "There's a new professor at the neighboring medical school named Xie Qingcheng. He's extremely hot and has a very cold and alpha-like aura. I really want him to fuck me."
In the comments below, people began to mock him for being such a slut.
But shortly thereafter, a new comment entered the fray. That's when the atmosphere began to turn a little absurd. "Holy fuck! The older students upstairs should really stop laughing. If you ever get to read this guestbook again, you guys need to head over to the medical school and see him for yourself. He really is so fucking handsome he'd make all you bottoms wet. His legs are soooo long and he's got broad shoulders and a narrow waist; he's so tall and his whole body is as straight as a javelin pole. It nearly fucking kills me whenever he wears a suit and tie. After meeting him, I had wet dreams about him for three nights in a row…"
The comments that followed were even more outrageously uninhibited.
"I want Gege to take care of me sooo bad."
"I hear that Professor Xie's divorced. Maybe he's like us."
"My god, are you for real? If he's like us, then I'd be willing to stay single my whole life if he rails me just once."
After reading this section, He Yu fell silent for a long time. He really couldn't bear it anymore.
He'd be an idiot if he gave up his chance to mock Xie Qingcheng for this. The jokes had practically written themselves!
And so, He Yu grinned. "Doctor Xie, who could have thought you're the ideal top for all the bottoms. Seeing as they all want you to fuck them, why don't you take one for the team and choose a concubine?"
Xie Qingcheng's face twisted into an extremely ugly expression as he tried to flip the page.
He Yu pressed down on the paper, stopping him. "I haven't finished reading."
"I'm turning the page."
"Wait a while longer."
"I'm turning it."
He Yu insisted with a mocking smile, "Just a little while."
Feeling humiliated, Xie Qingcheng forcibly turned the page. He Yu's laughter was particularly cruel as he continued reading, searching for any more mentions of Xie Qingcheng later in the book.
However, he'd only flipped through a few pages when his laughter died.
Because He Yu saw his own name.
It was written in the same style as the "Group Chat for Gays" from previous pages. Evidently, Xie Qingcheng had noticed as well, and the two of them began to read together once more.
"Why were all the earlier pages filled with bottoms chatting with each other? Anyway, this is the tops' chat. Anyone have any recommendations for pretty boys at school?"
After a bunch of random names, He Yu's name appeared.
"Oh, He Yu. It seems like he's nice to everyone, but really? He's extremely snooty and so standoffish. Not to mention, he looks way too delicate and refined. He may be tall, but his skin is as pale as a girl's. Though, I've seen him play basketball before, and he's pretty strong. I'm sure it'd feel great to fuck him."
"OP, have you gone mad? That's the young master of the He family."
"It's exactly that kind of status that makes him more fuckable!! He really turns me on."
"Don't you guys know that not only is He Yu good at playing basketball, but he's also really good at beating people up? Yeah, he's nice on the eyes, but haven't you guys seen that swimmer's body of his when he takes off his clothes at the school's swimming pool? He'd kill you with a single blow."
"But I still want him…"
Xie Qingcheng turned to the ashen-faced He Yu when he was done reading. "Amazing. In the future, you should bring a self-defense flashlight when you go out at night. Worst-case scenario, you can give me a call if you're really too scared. Seeing as we're old acquaintances, I can even walk you home."
"Turn the page," said He Yu.
"I haven't seen enough yet."
He Yu fell silent.
A depressed gloom settled over He Yu for a long while. In the end, it seemed that he no longer felt like wasting his energy arguing with Xie Qingcheng; he simply tore those two pages out of the notebook and set them on fire with a lighter.
After reducing the pages to ashes, he even went so far as to pull out a tissue to wipe the fingers that had touched them clean, his face devoid of emotion while he worked.
Xie Qingcheng simply continued perusing the notebook silently as the stoic-faced He Yu stood nearby.
For a long time, the only sounds in the cave were the echoes of the rain splashing down outside.
Summer rainstorms didn't last long, however, so by the time their cell phones read eight o'clock, this boundless thunderstorm had already weakened into a lightly pattering rain shower. Xie Qingcheng lifted a pale and slender hand to close the notebook, but just before the book was completely shut, something a bit strange at the corner of a page caught his eye.
Xie Qingcheng's hands froze. He made the hurricane lamp brighter and locked his gaze on that spot, his expression attentive yet grave…
A few seconds later, He Yu heard Xie Qingcheng's voice float over, his tone so chilly it sounded a little peculiar.
"He Yu, come take a look at this."
It was a line of writing squeezed into a very unremarkable corner of the notebook.
"WZL will be murdered soon."
These words were written with a fountain pen in a crooked scrawl; it looked as though someone wrote it with their left hand. However, what made this message so intriguing was that the person had signed her name at the end.
It was a name that no one could've expected to see here—
"Jiang. Lan. Pei."
Thunder boomed outside, but within the cave, they could have heard a pin drop.
"Wasn't Jiang Lanpei locked up in a psychiatric hospital for twenty years?" He Yu finally broke the silence in a quiet voice.
Xie Qingcheng frowned in contemplation. "Though she did get a key in the end and had plenty of opportunities to come and go as she pleased…"
"But she was probably limited to the grounds of Cheng Kang Psychiatric Hospital." He Yu continued Xie Qingcheng's train of thought. "Do you think she could have left and returned without a single soul noticing? And run off to this cave on Neverland Island at Huzhou University and leave a message like this in such an unremarkable tree hollow book?"
Of course, it was impossible.
"Plus, this writing looks very new, like it was only left within the past few days." Xie Qingcheng examined those red words written in the book under the searchlight's illumination. "And who's this WZL…"
The two of them pondered over this old worn-out notebook for a very long time.
He Yu suddenly said, "I just remembered a rumor I overheard a few days ago on campus!"
"What was it?"
"Some students feel that although Jiang Lanpei is terrifying, she's also quite a tragic figure—the type that spawns legends. Plus, when she died, she was wearing the kind of red dress that's associated with vengeful spirits. Those students made up a saying that if you have a grudge against someone, you can picture how that person will die and write it down on a piece of paper. Then, you write down Jiang Lanpei's name using a red pen, and her ghost will kill your enemy for you."
He Yu paused and added, "But your enemy must be a man; it won't work if they're female."
"Why is that?"
"Because the newspapers published a story about what Jiang Lanpei went through, so the students who made up this rumor thought that Jiang Lanpei's resentment would only target men."
He Yu took another look at the writing in the notebook.
"Say, do you think someone might have come to this island recently and remembered the rumor about Jiang Lanpei's murderous ghost when they were flipping through this book and reading the messages people left before? Maybe that person happened to loathe this WZL guy just like the author of the previous message, so they were struck with the idea of changing this simple rant into a proper curse?"
Shaking his head, Xie Qingcheng pulled out his phone and casually took a photo for documentation. Then, he said, "I'll bring this book to the public security bureau later. I keep feeling that there's a certain link between Jiang Lanpei and your Huzhou University."
The light in He Yu's eyes flickered as he said softly, "I agree."
"Oh?"
"The school uniform."
Xie Qingcheng sighed, and his eyes hardened. "So, we're on the same page. I suppose the Department of Public Security's thinking along the same lines too—I've seen plainclothes officers at your school the past few days. Some of them are even veteran officers who used to work with my parents. They seem to be investigating something."
The day Jiang Lanpei murdered Liang Jicheng, there was a seemingly unremarkable detail that was extremely odd: why did Jiang Lanpei go through the trouble of taking off Xie Xue's Huzhou University uniform and putting it on Liang Jicheng's dead body before dismembering and mutilating the corpse?
"Mentally ill people rarely act without reason, especially when it's something this highly purposeful and unusual," said Xie Qingcheng. "The way I see it, the investigation of Jiang Lanpei's case will implicate certain people at your school sooner or later."
He Yu raised a hand and smiled. "I definitely won't be included among those people."
Xie Qingcheng made no reply.
"I might not even have been born yet when she got locked up."
Exasperated, Xie Qingcheng said, "This isn't something either of us should worry about. I'll hand the book over to the police after we get out of here—let's leave it to them to figure it out."
He Yu hummed in response. Since they were talking about Cheng Kang Psychiatric Hospital, he suddenly had a thought. "Oh yeah."
"What?"
"I've been wondering recently, how we would be doing now if Xie Xue had actually been murdered when we rushed over there that day?"
Xie Qingcheng fixed his black pupils on He Yu indifferently. "Why can't you think about something good for once?"
"I wish her more good than anyone else."
In his annoyance, Xie Qingcheng didn't catch the meaning behind He Yu's words. He only irritably tossed out a careless reply. "Me too."
"But if something really happened to her—"
"Then I'd go on living just as I am now, just so long as I'm not dead myself."
It wasn't as though Xie Qingcheng hadn't experienced something similar before.
That one time when the devastating incident had occurred, there wasn't even a chance for him to turn back or get a shot at redemption.
In the middle of a downpour, he'd seen the ice-cold bodies of his parents sprawled across the ground. Behind him was the yellow- and white-striped police tape that cordoned off the area. The belated wail of piercing sirens filled his ears. The front end of a truck was engulfed in violent flames. In the light of the towering fire, he could see that only half of his mother's body was intact. Her wide eyes stared vacantly at him. A hand, severed by the truck's wheel, lay near the toe of his shoe.
Back then, he'd thought that there was no way for him to continue living.
But nineteen years had already passed since then.
He Yu didn't know what Xie Qingcheng was thinking about. But when he heard the older man's response, he fell silent for a while. He gazed at Xie Qingcheng with an unreadable expression in his eyes, and then gave him a very light, icy smile. "As expected of you, Xie Qingcheng. You live every moment of your life with such a cool head that you would only ever lose control for a minute at a time."
"People can't live their whole lives in grief, " said Xie Qingcheng. "When tragedy strikes, even if it's impossible for you to accept it immediately, you'll still be able to slowly digest what happened in the end. Rather than wallowing in your pain and refusing to move on, it's better to not waste this time and instead pull yourself together to do the things that need to be done, in order to prevent more tragedies from happening."
"Ah," He Yu said softly. "A stone-cold pragmatist indeed."
Mood heavy, he didn't want to remain in this cave with Xie Qingcheng any longer. Since the rain had let up some, he walked outside alone.
He Yu spent some time calming himself down until the stroke of midnight, when he saw some signs of activity on the opposite shore. It turned out that his conscientious, money-seeking club member had wrapped up his responsibilities and was paddling the duck boat to return to Neverland Island right on time.
He became quite animated the moment he saw He Yu, standing up and waving frantically from the swaying boat. "How was it? I'm very punctual, aren't I? Was He-laoban's declaration of love successful?"
He peered impatiently behind He Yu as he spoke.
"Huh? Where's the lovely lady?"
What declaration of love?
The only person on the island was a stone-cold pragmatist; to whom was he supposed to declare love?
He Yu responded to the dumbfuck on the boat with a smile. "I don't
believe xuezhang should be nosy about that."
"Look at you, you're shy. Ha ha ha, I get it, I get it." He winked at He Yu with a suggestive expression, then pulled up the Alipay QR code on his phone.
"The rest of the payment."
He Yu rolled his eyes and took out his phone. It still had no signal. He unlocked it with an icy expression. "Please turn off the signal jammer first."
The senior club member did as he was told, then asked with great excitement, "Did you see the message I sent you? On the other phone."
"What message?"
He Yu fished out his other phone and looked at it.
"He-laoban, there's a first aid kit inside the cave on the island. It has boxes of condoms in the second compartment. If you need them, you can check inside the kit, and remember to send me a red packet afterward…"
His accomplice silently edged over with a nosy expression on his face.
"It's even the kind with the special delay lubricant, guaranteed to wear your lady out."
He Yu smiled slightly. "Don't put these kinds of things in the first aid kit anymore. It's terribly immoral, don't you think, Xuezhang?"
He finally picked up on the bourgeoisie member's poor mood. After a brief moment of shock, he suddenly realized that this was because He Yu didn't get any!
The senior club member couldn't help but feel immense admiration for that unknown 180-centimeter beauty.
Originally, he'd thought that the reason the beautiful woman didn't come to the shore with He Yu was because she had been left so weak after receiving his affections for the first time that she couldn't rise.
But now, it seemed that the towering beauty was, in fact, a cold mistress who was unswayed by wealth and riches!
Young Master He was so tragic. How did he end up falling for someone so high-maintenance? Tsk, tsk. A waste of money… Such a waste of money…
The club member shut up. Even after receiving the last installment of his payment, he behaved professionally and called a friend to get a kayak out from the storehouse. The two of them departed first, leaving the duck boat on the shore for He Yu to use.
He Yu finished dealing with the scene of the crime and was about to go to the cave and call Xie Qingcheng over. But the moment he turned around, he froze.
That man was already standing in the moonlit forest with his hands in his pockets, leaning against a cedar tree as he gazed at He Yu with a blank expression. Who knew how long he'd been there, silently listening under the shadows of the trees?
He Yu was silent.
Xie Qingcheng lit a cigarette and, like a cop conducting an interrogation, said, "I'll give you one chance to explain."
He slowly exhaled a faint ring of gray smoke and locked eyes with He Yu. "Go ahead."