Ye Meng went upstairs with a somewhat unhappy demeanor. The “click-clack” sound of her pretentious high heels was familiar to Li Jin Yu. Whenever she got tired of walking, she would make a show of stomping in her high heels, wanting him to carry her.
Tai Ming Xiao was completely clueless, but he didn’t care whether Ye Meng was happy or not. His heart had already eagerly flown to Jiu Men Ridge. He excitedly turned and called for the two young men to get in the car. Li Jin Yu leaned against his million-yuan vehicle, unhurriedly raised the cigarette butt in his hand, and said, “After I finish this.”
Only when the light suddenly came on upstairs did Li Jin Yu put out his cigarette. He got up lazily, opened the car door, and while fastening his seatbelt, casually asked: “What’s wrong with her?”
Tai Ming Xiao: “What?”
“The pretty lady doesn’t look very happy,” Li Jin Yu said with a frivolous expression, tilting his chin toward the upstairs window. “What did you say to her?”
Tai Ming Xiao was the same age as Ye Meng, and Gou Kai was two years older than all of them. Among them, Li Jin Yu was the youngest—oh, now there was also Zhou Yu. Thinking of this, Li Jin Yu glanced back at the boy sitting silently in the back seat.
Tai Ming Xiao adjusted the rearview mirror to check his appearance, with the solemnity of someone about to perform on stage. While looking at himself, he said: “I don’t know. Women all have those few days, you know. I just told her we’re going racing. Don’t know which nerve I stepped on.”
…
Racing was already a thing of the last century for Li Jin Yu. Since his brother’s fatal car accident, he had rarely touched a car. It wasn’t exactly PTSD; he was simply tired of activities that required adrenaline to numb himself.
So no matter how enthusiastically Tai Ming Xiao invited him, Li Jin Yu sat preciously in the tire chair at the club, smoking a cigarette with his legs crossed, like a reformed playboy: “I’m not interested.”
Tai Ming Xiao had thought his return meant he had put the past behind him and was ready for a fresh start. But he was overthinking it—that wasn’t the case at all. So why had he come back? And he vaguely felt that the Sweet Simple Naive who returned this time seemed like a different person. Not that the change was dramatic—his way of speaking and his demeanor were still the same. But before, even though he wasn’t loved by the Li family and Li Ling Bai neglected him, he at least seemed like a child with a home. Now, Li Jin Yu seemed completely uninhibited, giving the impression of being alone and unattached.
But Tai Ming Xiao didn’t push him, after all, when Li Si Yang had his accident, Li Jin Yu had witnessed the whole thing miserably. So he patted his shoulder reassuringly and said, “Then I’ll go.”
Just outside the club was the steep winding road of Jiu Men Ridge. That mysterious mountain stood like a king among the surrounding hills. While the smaller mountains clustered around it as vassals, it stood alone as a solitary peak. The winding asphalt road resembled a spiral staircase, ascending directly to the summit. The mountaintop was shrouded in misty fog, like a fairy’s flowing sleeve.
All the city’s thrills happened here, with these young people venting their inner passions, but Li Jin Yu had long grown tired of such a lifestyle.
“I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing,” Li Chen said, looking at the road and listening to the wild, unrestrained screams of those young people. “I feel like you’ve changed.”
Li Jin Yu remained leaning in his chair, legs crossed, smiling as he tapped off some ash, neither confirming nor denying his words.
“Changed for the worse,” Li Chen added with certainty.
Li Jin Yu took a drag of his cigarette, smiled, and shook his head: “I’ve always been like this. I just don’t bother pretending anymore.”
Suddenly, the roar of accelerating engines echoed through the mountains, signaling the beginning of the night’s thrills. Li Jin Yu was intimately familiar with this sound. He instinctively looked down at his watch—if they were fast, eight minutes to the summit, with Tai Ming Xiao about thirty seconds behind. If someone was in the passenger seat, they might even share a kiss.
In an instant, two sports cars, identical except for their color, raced up the mountain like unleashed beasts, roaring toward the summit. Their endless enthusiasm for this battle wasn’t just for the momentary thrill. Men’s pleasures can be quite mundane. The club had an unwritten rule—a small flag was permanently placed at the summit of Jiu Men Ridge, bearing the name of the record holder.
It had started with a bet between Li Jin Yu and Li Chen. Back then, the eighteen or nineteen-year-old youth was competitive and determined to make his mark. Li Chen was eight years older and a professional driver, and never let him win. But Li Chen knew exactly where his advantage lay—had he waited just two years, the name on that flag would likely have changed. Later, the young man left. This rule persisted to this day, with challengers coming every so often, yet the record remained unbroken. Li Chen’s name remained on that small flag.
Li Chen’s record was seven minutes and fifty-six seconds. Li Jin Yu’s fastest record at age twenty was eight minutes and two seconds. He was the only person in recent years to come within ten seconds of the record.
“Want to try again?” Li Chen found himself somewhat expectant.
The precious young master valued his life too much. “Forget it, not interested.” Li Jin Yu stretched his neck, put out his cigarette, and stood up: “I’m going to the car factory.”
“The old car factory?” Li Chen stood up suspiciously, following him. “What are you going there for?”
“To check the surveillance.”
Li Chen followed him out, leaving the youngsters behind. The two walked side by side into the night breeze toward the car factory. “You’re not also investigating that Singaporean Chinese collector case, are you?”
“Mm, just curious,” Li Jin Yu said.
Li Jin Yu wasn’t someone with a particularly strong curiosity. Coming back and heading straight there without any pretense showed his intentions were too direct. Li Chen understood him somewhat. So as Li Jin Yu sprawled in the chair in the security room, casually flipping through the past month’s surveillance footage like a lord, Li Chen questioned him intermittently.
“Where have you been these past few years?”
Li Jin Yu leaned casually in the chair, so casually that he looked like he was watching an extremely boring movie. He was peeling peanuts he had brought from Li Chen’s club, lazily tossing them into his mouth, his gaze wandering over the computer screen.
Yet he still managed to answer Li Chen’s questions one by one.
“At my grandmother’s.”
He had never had issues multitasking. Li Chen leaned against the security room door and nodded somewhat unexpectedly: “What were you doing?”
Li Jin Yu stared at the motionless surveillance footage and absent-mindedly tapped the keyboard’s progress bar: “Wasting time.”
Li Chen folded his arms and peered inside: “Has this footage moved at all since we’ve been watching?”
“No,” Li Jin Yu answered honestly.
The security room could retain about two months of surveillance footage. Since hardly anyone came here, the images were almost static. Finding any clues in such a long period would be more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.
But Li Jin Yu didn’t think so. He looked down at his phone: “Sometimes when something static begins to move, it becomes deadly.”
When he looked up again, Li Jin Yu’s gaze suddenly tightened, gradually fixing on something, as if he had discovered something. He stared at the screen for a while, and the next second, he grabbed the phone on the table and started checking something.
Li Chen curiously moved closer. “Found something?”
Li Jin Yu didn’t hear him, looking at his phone while rewinding the footage back and forth, checking twice to confirm he wasn’t mistaken. Then he casually took screenshots of the screen to show Li Chen, but the two images looked almost identical to Li Chen, with no discernible differences. Unless one was particularly sensitive to visual details or had a memory palace like Li Jin Yu, it would be difficult to spot any differences.
For Li Chen, this was his most headache-inducing game—spot the difference.
Li Jin Yu teased him: “If you can’t see the difference between two trees, brother, maybe you could pass the level if I replaced them with two beautiful women.”
Li Chen stared at the phone and chuckled: “…Am I that kind of person?”
Li Jin Yu laughed lightly. He was different from most people. When he looked at surveillance footage, his brain automatically created images. The two pictures would automatically overlap, and the differences would be particularly obvious, even if it was just an ant appearing in the bushes.
“The surveillance has been edited,” he turned off the security room computer and leaned back in his chair, as if just stating something trivial.
Li Chen felt goosebumps rising, the hair on his back standing on end in respect. Being late at night in a remote suburban area, the car factory where he had spent so many years suddenly felt strange and terrifying. He didn’t even dare to look back, feeling a cold breeze behind him, as if claws were waiting ominously for him to fall into their trap.
Li Jin Yu stood up, leaning against the edge of the table, hands in his pockets, his voice still as casual and composed as ever: “The surveillance footage from the 17th has been replaced with footage from the 10th, which is a week before the incident. Even though there aren’t many people here and the surveillance footage doesn’t change much, you can still see some differences each day based on the weather, wind speed, and the angle of shadows from the sunlight. See that tree? I just glanced at the surveillance from the 17th and 10th, and in terms of the movement of the leaves and the angle of the shadows, they’re almost identical, which means it’s the same video. Moreover, I just checked, and the wind speed in Beijing on the 17th was very low, nowhere near what’s shown in the footage.”
That night, Ye Meng went to bed early. Li Jin Yu didn’t contact her again. Her phone seemed to have sunk into the sea, with no news.
That day, Liang Yun An came to see her. As usual, they sat in the café below her company building. The waiter saw them and greeted them with a familiar smile: “Two lattes again?”
The café wasn’t crowded, and conversations were a quiet buzz, everyone busy with their affairs, no one paying attention to others.
Ye Meng got straight to the point: “Any progress?”
Liang Yun An nodded solemnly, his expression more serious than she had ever seen: “This time someone provided a crucial clue. After analysis by our police technical department, the car factory surveillance indeed has issues. Someone switched the surveillance video from the 17th, which is why we’ve been unable to determine when Wang Xing Sheng entered the car factory.”
Ye Meng: “Who discovered it?”
Liang Yun An initially thought it was Ye Meng and couldn’t imagine who else would trust him so much. The sealed envelope delivered to the police station was addressed specifically to Officer Liang Yun An.
“I don’t know. An anonymous tape was sent to the police station. Probably some genius who’s also following this case. It’s really impressive. Because that abandoned car factory’s surveillance hardly shows anyone—not just people, not even an ant. The footage barely moves, it’s excruciatingly monotonous. Our technical team members would fall asleep watching it. To solve the case quickly, we had ten teams check two months’ worth of security room footage back and forth. No one noticed anything.”
Ye Meng nodded: “What about Li Ling Bai?”
“She applied for bail. Li Ling Bai denies meeting Wang Xing Sheng during those days, and strangely enough, her itinerary on the 17th places her abroad. She has an alibi, so we had no choice but to release her. Our biggest mystery now is where Wang Xing Sheng went on the 17th.” Liang Yun An said, scratching his head in frustration, “I want to track down the person who anonymously sent the surveillance tape and have them check the citywide surveillance for the 17th. I refuse to believe Wang Xing Sheng could just vanish into thin air.”
Ye Meng smiled, thinking that would probably work someone to death. However, her phone suddenly rang. She looked down—the person who had seemed to vanish had resurfaced.
“It’s me.” The voice sounded like he had just woken up, drowsy and lazy.
Ye Meng responded with an “mm.”
Li Jin Yu: “Not convenient to talk?”
Ye Meng noticed that since his return to Beijing, his entire aura had strengthened. Somehow, this simple question made her feel awkward. Ye Meng signaled to Liang Yun An that she was going to take a call outside. As she walked, she cleared her throat and said: “No, it’s fine.”
Li Jin Yu, whether affected by her or not, also coughed slightly, then chuckled and said: “If it’s convenient, come to my place now. I’ll send you the location.”
This area was in the Financial Street district, yet it seemed to stand apart from the worldly clamor, and very quiet. Ye Meng followed a long alley, gradually turning deeper into the human realm. It was even quieter inside, with gray bricks, white walls, and black tiles. Branches and leaves hung over the walls, bright and verdant. In the thin morning light, they resembled boats floating on the sea surface.
She had to admit, that Li Jin Yu’s grandfather knew how to pick a location. This courtyard was quiet and secluded. Somehow, upon entering, the gentle wind in the alley wasn’t cold at all but carried a warm spring air, as if stepping into flowing warm water that gently washed away anxiety and unease. Her entire being felt calmer.
But she soon exploded.
“What did you say?” Ye Meng looked at Li Jin Yu in disbelief. “Zhou Yu is missing?”
Li Jin Yu, still drowsy, leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. Not fully awake, his alluring eyes were still closed, hands in his pockets, lazily responding with an “mm.”
Ye Meng stood at the doorway, looking at the ransacked room that resembled the aftermath of a typhoon, her eyebrows shooting up in continued disbelief: “And he took your razor? Shirts? Underwear?”
“Didn’t leave me a single one,” he emphasized with his eyes still closed.
Ye Meng’s gaze silently moved downward, glancing at his gray sweatpants.
“Not wearing any. Going commando.”
Li Jin Yu had his eyes closed, yet somehow sensed her thoughts. The next second, he opened his eyes, looking very innocent: “Don’t believe me? Want me to take them off and show you? Your precious little brother also took my three-hundred-thousand-yuan watch.”