Ye Meng had intended to send him a message saying she had just landed. But seeing it was 3 AM, she worried about waking him up for no good reason. During her moment of hesitation, Tai Mingxiao had already driven the car around, lowering the window to call out to her: “Come on, I’ll take you home first.”
The car skillfully merged onto the elevated highway. Sitting in the car, Ye Meng admired the colorful and dazzling night cityscape, deciding to call him tomorrow morning instead.
Tai Mingxiao turned down the radio volume and asked, “Why do I feel like you’ve changed a lot since you came back this time?”
Ye Meng pulled her gaze from the window and unconsciously asked, “Have I?”
“Yes.” Tai Mingxiao nodded, sincerely expressing his inner curiosity, “Why did you suddenly decide to get married?”
Ye Meng and Tai Mingxiao were close enough to share everything, so she briefly outlined the situation, “Gou Kai came to find me, and he happened to witness it. Then he learned I was coming back, felt insecure, and wanted to break up with me. I didn’t want to break up, so I asked if he was willing to take a gamble with me. Then… we got our marriage certificate.”
Tai Mingxiao wasn’t surprised; it seemed like something she would do. “Makes sense. A woman like you who gets so busy with work that you forget your own family—I’m afraid your partner might feel neglected for a couple of days, and by the time you go back, he might have had a child with someone else.” But Tai Mingxiao, who was used to seeing Ye Meng’s commanding attention in front of clients, truly couldn’t imagine what she was like in a relationship. As he exited the elevated highway, he asked another question: “Seems like this man has a big influence on you. How did you meet?”
“We met at the hospital.”
Tai Mingxiao raised an eyebrow: “A white-robed angel?”
Ye Meng laughed, saying mysteriously: “A black-robed angel.”
Seeing her cherishing expression, Tai Mingxiao laughed too, half-jokingly saying: “Someone who doesn’t know might think you married the King of Hell.”
“Pretty much, anyway he’s a bit of a troublesome little King of Hell.” Ye Meng sighed helplessly.
“Come on, I can see you’re enjoying it,” Tai Mingxiao saw through her immediately, laughing and accusing her of pretending to complain while being quite pleased. “Bring him out to meet us sometime. At least let me see what my buddy lost out to.”
“Hmm, we’ll see. He might not be willing.”
“How could he not be willing? You bring him, and I’ll take full responsibility, introducing him to our old Beijing cultural heritage. I guarantee he’ll want to stay.” Tai Mingxiao patted his chest with the swagger of a local boss.
Ye Meng just smiled without saying anything.
Ye Meng finished her shower a little after 4 AM. The edge of the sky was already showing a hint of dawn’s gray-white light. Someone was already up downstairs, with pots and pans clanging cheerfully as they made breakfast behind the window. Afraid of waking Li Juyi, she only posted one message in her friend circle before sleeping.
【Meng: Just landed, nice song, good night.】
Li Juyi hadn’t slept well all night; almost every two hours, a nerve in his brain automatically pulled him awake. Until he opened his eyes again at 6 AM and immediately saw Ye Meng’s friend circle post.
After that, he couldn’t sleep at all. Annoyed, he forcibly dragged Ping’an, who was sound asleep in the small courtyard, out for a walk. Ping’an had performed exceptionally well last night, firing three shots in quick succession, and now his legs were still weak. He walked in a daze, being led along with a dejected expression, seeming somewhat ready to give up on life.
At 6 AM in Jiangnan, the daylight was faintly bright, the pine mist hazy. The tranquil river surface was like a mirror shrouded in mist, reflecting the surrounding lush, undulating green mountains—not completely clear, but permeated with the stillness of an ink painting. Yet the streets and alleys were already gradually setting up various breakfast stalls: soy milk and fried dough sticks, mixed grain pancakes, glutinous rice balls… mixed with the clamor and the hawkers’ calls, exuding the smoke and fire atmosphere of the small town.
Li Juyi wore a knee-length black windbreaker with a black fisherman’s hat on his head, sitting brazenly on a bench by Lake Ningsui. He preferred to sleep naked, with nothing underneath. When he first came out, he had casually thrown on a pair of sweatpants and riding boots, with the zipper pulled up, exposing his lean collarbone. His upper body was bare except for the windbreaker on the outside. Anyway, people could see whatever they wanted.
He tossed the half-eaten pancake to Ping’an, “Eat up, I’ve decided to fast today. This is your last supper.”
Ping’an, who had been lying on the ground with half-closed eyes trying to catch up on sleep, instantly jolted up from the ground and looked at him alertly.
Ping’an’s forehead was full of question marks: Brother? Is it that serious?
“I think,” Li Juyi looked at the willows by the lake, strong and vigorous like a youth’s waist, proudly swaying in the wind, “I’ve been trapped, I’ve been duped, I’ve been deceived.”
Ping’an whimpered angrily: When she comes back, I’ll bite her for you!
Li Juyi seemed to understand each of Ping’an’s glances. He smiled, leaning back to find a more casual sitting position, and heartlessly scratched under its chin, saying: “Just bite her to death, I don’t care at all.”
After saying this, he carelessly pulled out his phone from his pocket and looked at that friend circle post again.
Nice song, my ass. Don’t you know how to send a message? Don’t you know someone is going crazy missing you? Damn.
Is his phone broken?
He tentatively sent a message to Yang Tianwei. 【LJY: .】
Yang Tianwei replied instantly. 【Little Yang’s Fried Buns: Missing me, huh?】
…
Let’s try sending one to Grandma. 【LJY: Morning, Grandma.】
Xu Meilan replied immediately. 【YuShan123: Morning, darling. Want to come over for breakfast?】
…Apparently, this “darling” thing runs in their family, nothing special. 【LJY: Already ate, thanks, Grandma.】
This time Xu Meilan sent a voice message. “By the way, Juyi, give me your birth date and time again. I want your aunt to calculate an auspicious date. We should start planning the wedding ceremony.”
Li Juyi finally opened Ye Meng’s WeChat. With his long legs spread out, cradling Ping’an’s plump body between them, he held his phone with both hands, resting them on Ping’an’s round head. Lowering his head at the edge of Lake Ningsui—filled with sweet, fishy scent and rippling gently—the spot where they first met, he typed without hesitation—
【LJY: Are you with Gou Kai?】
…then leaned back against the bench, smoked a cigarette, and impatiently deleted it all, feeling he was being unreasonable.
【LJY: Don’t you miss me at all?】
Deleted. Too pathetic.
【LJY: I’m planning to take the civil service exam.】
Again, he deleted it all with a flurry of keystrokes. Why tell you?
Finally, he sent one message. 【LJY: Grandma says she’s planning our wedding ceremony.】
Ye Meng was awakened by a phone call. She had dragged herself to bed around 5 AM and fallen into a hazy sleep, only to be interrupted by an urgent ringing at 9 AM. As someone with a temper when woken up, she answered with an impatient “Hello,” but the other person’s single sentence jolted her fully awake in bed.
It was Tai Mingxiao on the phone, his voice unprecedentedly heavy and sharp, “Wang Xingsheng is dead.”
Ye Meng seemed frozen in bed as if all her internal organs had stopped working. It took a long time to digest these words. Her hand bewilderedly grabbed her hair as she asked: “Where was he found?”
“In an abandoned car factory in Guanshan District,” Tai Mingxiao had lost his usual joking tone, his voice rarely serious. “That car factory used to belong to a very good friend of mine, but after his brother died in a racing accident, the factory closed down. The police found large quantities of sleeping pills and insulin injections in their car, and they had both cut their wrists. They’re not ruling out a suicide pact.”
Ye Meng took a moment to process this. “Those two were involved?”
“Evidently,” Tai Mingxiao said. “But there’s a strange twist now. Wang Xingsheng is dead, but his secretary seems to still be in emergency care.”
Ye Meng hung up the phone without even checking her messages, quickly got ready, and went straight to the police station. Gou Kai had been taken in by the police for questioning because all the emails and text messages clearly showed that Wang Xingsheng’s trip to China had been at Gou Kai’s insistence.
A Singaporean Chinese coming to China to negotiate a contract, only to suddenly commit suicide with his secretary? From this angle, the case seemed a bit bizarre.
Ye Meng and Tai Mingxiao sat in the car outside the Guanshan District police station, waiting for Gou Kai to finish his statement, chatting intermittently.
“At least this proves Gou Kai isn’t that treacherous. This trip wasn’t to force you back; Wang Xingsheng was truly in China.”
Ye Meng stared at the Guanshan District police station sign and asked: “Do you believe they had a suicide pact?”
Tai Mingxiao: “There was indeed a suicide note in the car. The content was sincere and passionate, full of remorse towards his wife and family, yet also expressing the contradiction of not wanting to return to family life—all written vividly. The handwriting was verified to be Wang Xingsheng’s. Phone search records also revealed that both Wang Xingsheng and his secretary were members of the letter circle.”
Letter circle?
Ye Meng was unfamiliar with the term.
Tai Mingxiao explained: “It’s a circle for some hardcore SM fetishes. Usually to satisfy perverse psychological and physiological pleasures. For instance, a boyfriend might call his girlfriend ‘little bitch.'”
“?” Ye Meng listened with a head full of question marks. “Where’s the pleasure in that?”
Tai Mingxiao: “That’s the fun of this circle. Some girlfriends want their boyfriends to eat them bit by bit——carving them up bloodily with a knife, then cooking, frying, boiling, sprinkling some cumin and pepper, dipping them in soy sauce and vinegar, and slowly eating them like human char siu buns.”
“…” Ye Meng’s body hair stood on end, cold sweat seeping out. “I feel sick.”
“So if you ask me whether Wang Xingsheng and his secretary had a suicide pact, it’s not impossible,” Tai Mingxiao moved the car to a different spot as another car came in. “Given this background, the police wouldn’t find anything too strange about whatever Wang Xingsheng and his secretary did.”
Ye Meng suddenly said: “Let’s go to Wang Xingsheng’s hotel.”
Tai Mingxiao was stunned. “Huh?”
“Don’t you think the relationship between Wang Xingsheng and his wife is very strange? When we went to his house yesterday, his wife’s reaction clearly showed she had known about Wang Xingsheng and his secretary for a long time, and she was completely clueless about his whereabouts, as well as indifferent. Did you notice there was a document folder in his house yesterday? If I’m not mistaken, it should be divorce papers.”
Tai Mingxiao felt something was off but still asked: “How can you be sure?”
“The folder had the Chengran Law Firm logo on it.”
“Jiang Luzhi’s firm?” Tai Mingxiao suddenly understood. “That makes sense. Their firm is most famous for divorce cases.”
“They probably registered their marriage in China and had it notarized at the Singapore Embassy, which is why they’re using a domestic law firm,” Ye Meng casually asked, “By the way, are there surveillance cameras at the car factory?”
“There used to be, but this factory has been abandoned for almost ten years. I’m not sure,” Tai Mingxiao looked out the window, seeming lost in thought. “My friend would know the exact locations of the surveillance cameras in the factory. He knows every distribution point and angle. We all loved racing since we were kids, and as soon as we turned eighteen, we immediately got our driver’s licenses. His brother hadn’t had the accident yet, and we would often steal some of their modified race cars and go wild at night. Only he could help us precisely avoid every camera so his mother wouldn’t find out. His brain worked better than anyone else in our group. Gou Kai’s impressive memory palace technique was learned from him.”
“Where is he now?”
Tai Mingxiao shook his head and said helplessly: “Don’t know. He left Beijing. As for where exactly he went, nobody knows. Because some unpleasant things happened that year.”
Ye Meng was unaware, lighting a cigarette and quietly waiting for him to continue.
Tai Mingxiao leaned back in the driver’s seat, his gaze scattered as he stared at the bushes not far away, his memories seemingly pulled back to the past: “You’ve seen that trophy in Gou Kai’s office, right? The World Memory Championship one. He participated in high school and won the championship. Then he caught people’s attention. Several old men from the Memory Association wanted to use him to promote the memory palace method among students—a rather niche learning method. To put it bluntly, they wanted to make a lot of money from desperate parents.
“So, is the memory palace a scam?”
Tai Mingxiao shook his head, “It’s not a scam. It’s just that this kind of thing is subjective. People who can use the memory palace are already quite smart. Not all students are as intelligent as him and can self-learn. This technique has a threshold, but those old men wanted to promote this method among ordinary students to make money, which was impossible. He was naive and easy to deceive back then. How could he know the treachery of human hearts? He thought he was genuinely introducing learning methods to others. Those old men made money behind his back, and then they were reported to the Education Bureau by the student’s parents. In the end, the old men were disciplined, but he also carried the stigma for several years. He was in London at the time, participating in an inter-university team competition, but when the domestic disciplinary action came down, the school forums went crazy with criticism. To avoid affecting his teammates and teachers, he withdrew from the competition.”
Ye Meng’s phone vibrated. She looked down to see the line of text, and her heart felt as if it had been scalded.
【LJY: I’m going crazy missing you.】