Shasha had eaten a good chunk of the rouge off Lingjing's cheek, and her own lips were flushed crimson. The two girls fled to the washroom, and when they came out Lingjing had scrubbed off all her makeup and put her hair back into a clean ponytail; in her princess dress she looked startlingly pretty.
Before long Mama Ye, who worked at this very hospital, brought dinner over, and the three of them ate in the ward.
The nurses brought Tsukiike Kaoru her dinner as well; she had no family or friends here, but word had reached the hospital that her family was a very powerful clan back in Japan, so naturally no one dared neglect her.
True, a special nurse had supposedly been assigned to her, but the hospital was desperately short-staffed. Kaoru was quiet by nature and could handle things like the toilet on her own, and though the bill probably already carried a steep nursing fee, the nurses were forever being called off to help elsewhere, and only came when meals were handed out or when she needed something and pressed the call button.
Hospital food was nutritious but, inevitably, awful. Watching Kaoru take her meal in tiny, tiny bites, and with Lingjing taking the lead, the three of them set aside a portion of the food Mama Ye had made and carried it over to her—Lingjing had heard about what she'd been through, and so she felt a measure of sympathy for this girl who looked so pitiful and who had been beaten up along with Jiaming.
This time the thanks Kaoru gave was not "arigatou" but the English "thank you." Lingjing was a good student and had a year and a half of English behind her, so she promptly tried out "not at all" and "my name is Ye Lingjing" on her, attempting some simple conversation. The two of them exchanged a few sentences over the meal, and in English Kaoru fished out all three of their names—though "Gu Jiaming" she repeated over and over, several times.
After dinner the two girls started on their homework in the ward. A while later Jiaming asked about the recitation contest, and Lingjing's voice, sweet and soft, rose through the ward:
"…Nowadays I wheel my chair slowly around this garden, and I often have the feeling that I've been out here playing alone for much too long.
One day I was sorting through my old photo albums and came across a picture of me taken in this garden a decade and more ago—that young man sitting in a wheelchair, an old cypress behind him, and further off that ancient altar. So I went into the garden to look for that tree.
By the background in the photo I found it quickly enough, and by the shape of its trunk and branches I was certain it was the one. But it had died, and a vine as thick as a rice bowl was coiled around it. One day I ran into an old woman in the garden.
‘Oh my,’ she said, ‘are you still here?’
She asked me, ‘And how is your mother?’
‘Who are you?’
‘You don't remember me, but I remember you. Once your mother came here looking for you, and she asked me whether I'd seen a child in a wheelchair…’
Suddenly I felt that I had run off to this world to play alone for far, far too long.
One night I was sitting alone under the streetlamp by the altar reading, when all at once from that pitch-black altar came wave after wave of suona music; all around stood towering ancient trees, and the square altar, covering several hundred square meters, lay open and empty, facing the vast sky alone.
I could not see the man playing the suona; only the sound itself, crooning and crying out in the star-scarce night sky, by turns sorrowful and joyous, by turns tender and bleak—perhaps none of those words is enough to describe it.
Wide awake, I heard it ringing in the past, ringing in the present, ringing in the future, swirling and drifting, never scattering through all eternity.
"There will surely come a day when I hear the call telling me to go back. …" (I and the Temple of Earth)
The girl's voice was lovely and heartfelt, and reciting a piece like I and the Temple of Earth would undoubtedly win her a prize—but to Jiaming's ear it was honestly a bit mawkish. Naturally, he said nothing of the sort.
Around nine in the evening the two girls went home with Mama Ye when her shift ended. The nurse looked in a few times, but most of the time it was just the two of them lying quietly in the ward. Jiaming would read in bed for a while; Kaoru lay on her sickbed staring at the ceiling, and sometimes her gaze drifted over to him, and once Jiaming noticed, she would move it back to the ceiling.
A little past ten, Jiaming got out of bed and switched off the light—Kaoru did nothing but stare into space anyway, so he doubted she'd have any objection. But not long after, he heard her say, "Gu… Jiaming…"
"Hm?"
"Thank you."
"Keep my secret, and I'll thank you too," Jiaming said in Japanese.
The next day was Saturday, and the two girls came early, bringing Jiaming piping-hot century egg and lean pork congee. Kaoru naturally got a bowl as well, and Lingjing couldn't resist another round of English with her—she had always known that to learn English well, you had to talk to someone who spoke it.
With only a year or so of grounding she was still raring to chat, and whenever she hit something she couldn't say, she had Kaoru write it out on paper, then flipped through an English dictionary at her side until she roughly understood the sentence.
And when she herself had something she couldn't say, she hunted up a pile of words in the dictionary and cobbled them together, and the Japanese girl would guess roughly what she meant, straighten out the grammar, and write the correct sentence down for her.
Kaoru was probably bored as well, so she sat there chatting in English and writing sentences with Lingjing. Half a morning later the two of them had plainly become friends. Shasha wandered over to look now and then, but the tadpole scribbles on the paper made her dizzy and bleary-eyed, so she beat a hasty retreat to Jiaming's bedside to gossip and brag.
A little past ten, Mama Ye came by to tell them the police would come again in the afternoon to take statements and that Jiaming should get his story straight. As it happened, he had already spilled every one of his fabricated lies about that day on the spot, and the police had largely believed them; this visit was merely routine business. A little after two, a policewoman pushed the door open, and the instant Jiaming saw her, his gaze turned sharp as a blade.
Something was off. The person who had just walked in looked deeply suspicious to Jiaming.
Her peaked cap was pulled a little low. This woman was too young—she looked like a high schooler at most, though some women are simply born with baby faces; still, from her bearing Jiaming was certain this one was probably still a student. The handgun at her side sat a touch awkwardly, and… her uniform didn't quite fit. Which made no sense at all…
When things are off, there's a demon behind it. Jiaming himself made a regular habit of playing the innocent and playing the harmless fool to catch his enemies off guard, so the first thought to flash through his mind was that someone had come to sound him out—or had sent a girl assassin to finish him off. Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at the fork on the little cabinet beside him, then over at Kaoru in the other bed, and saw the same doubt in her eyes, only not as deep as his own.
"Ahem, so you're Gu Jiaming." The policewoman put on a deliberately seasoned tone. First she swept everything on the little cabinet—fork included—into a drawer, then set her statement notebook down on top. At that, Jiaming was all the more certain of his judgment.
"My name is Mu Zhenzhen, and I'm here to take your statement." The policewoman gave her badge a token wave; naturally, no one could make out the photo or the name on it.
Glancing at Lingjing and Shasha, still in the ward, Jiaming's thoughts raced. He had gone to no small trouble to keep his skills hidden from Shasha; if it really came to blows, everything he'd kept buried would be laid bare.
Or else—hand the whole business over to this Japanese girl?
Over twenty thousand hits and not even a thousand votes… this book can't be that pathetic, can it? Please, everyone, help a brother out—don't let Xiangjiao look too bad…